Q. Did the people who knew Jesus as a child know he was God?
A. This is one of those questions that, unfortunately, does not have a satisfying answer because the answer is maybe. “Many things about Jesus of interest to human curiosity do not figure in the Gospels” (CCC 514). We simply do not have enough canonical evidence to say definitively what people believed about the child Jesus. We can, however, conduct some educated speculation to try to arrive at some plausible conclusions.
We must first address the so-called Infancy Gospels. These are different apocryphal gospels that claim to contain stories about Jesus as a child. In these non-canonical (meaning not in the canon of Scripture approved by the Church) gospels, Jesus performs miracles as a child, in full view of his neighbors, such as making animals out of clay and bringing them to life, and striking a child dead for messing up something Jesus was working on.
While each of these are examples of something a child with supernatural powers might do, they are not something that the Son of God would do, even as a child. We know that Jesus knew who He was and what His mission was from one of the few canonical stories we have about the child Jesus, namely, when he was found in the Temple. He says to His parents, “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” (Luke 2:49). Jesus clearly knew He was the Son of God, so the idea that He would abuse His authority in such a childish way – to give life to clay, or to murder a fellow child – is simply ridiculous.
It would also be ridiculous though to assume that the people who knew Jesus as a child would not have known that there was something different about Him. To return to the Finding in the Temple, we know Jesus debated with scholars of the Law as a child, and did so in such a way that he impressed them. Clearly there would have been moments such as that, where glimpses could be seen of Jesus’s greatness, though it’s unlikely anyone would have jumped to the conclusion that He was the Son of God. It is far more likely that they would have speculated that He was, if anything, a prophet, in the same way that when Jesus was an adult those around him thought he was a prophet.
The fact that even when Jesus was an adult there were those who did not recognize Him as God is a strong argument against the idea that those who knew Jesus as a child would have recognized Him as God. If even when confronted with the testimony of their own eyes – seeing the miracles of Christ – and their own ears – hearing the Words of our Lord – they still were unable to recognize that the man Jesus was the Son of God, it’s hard to imagine that they would have recognized a child as the Son of God.
So while it is plausible that there were some people who knew Jesus as a child and believed, if not that He was God, that He was a prophet or maybe even the Messiah, it is equally as plausible that no one believed Jesus was anything special, and was just a strange child. We simply do not have enough authoritative evidence to know.
Just because we do not have much evidence about the hidden life of Jesus as a child does not mean that there is nothing to be learned from that time. “The hidden life at Nazareth allows everyone to enter into fellowship with Jesus by the most ordinary events of daily life” (CCC 1533).
In a homily given at Nazareth on the feast of the Holy Family, Pope St. Paul VI summarizes the lessons that can be learned from this unknown period in the life of our Lord: “The home of Nazareth is the school where we begin to understand the life of Jesus – the school of the Gospel. First, then, a lesson of silence. May esteem for silence, that admirable and indispensable condition of mind, revive in us… A lesson on family life. May Nazareth teach us what family life is, its communion of love, its austere and simple beauty, and its sacred and inviolable character… A lesson of work. Nazareth, home of the ‘Carpenter's Son,’ in you I would choose to understand and proclaim the severe and redeeming law of human work.”
This question was answered by Father Caleb La Rue, chancellor of the Diocese of Lincoln. Write to Ask the Register using our online form, or write to 3700 Sheridan Blvd., Suite 10, Lincoln NE 68506-6100. All questions are subject to editing. Editors decide which questions to publish. Personal questions cannot be answered. People with such questions are urged to take them to their nearest Catholic priest.
