Jesus Once Was a Little Child

I've been asked to help teach a Primary class today. I've never taught in Primary before, so this should be a good learning experience for me, especially since the topic of the class this week is Jesus Christ Was a Child Like Me. Teaching that lesson to a group of children ought to help me get a new perspective on Jesus Christ.

The trouble is that the scriptures don't really say much about Jesus' childhood. Most of what we "know" about it comes from reading in-between the lines, such as we know that Joseph was a carpenter, so we guess that Jesus might have learned some carpentry. We even have a picture of Jesus and Joseph cutting some wood, but we don't actually know if that kind of thing ever happened.

Another thing we don't know for sure is wether Jesus was born perfect or whether He learned to be perfect within his first few years of life. We no that He had no sin, but we also know that children below the age of accountability aren't held accountable for any sins they might commit, basically because at that age they don't know any better. We also know that "And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man." (Luke 2: 52)

To increase in something means to get more of it, meaning that you have more of it after you increased in it than you did before. Or, put another way, you had less of it before you increase in it, and more afterward. Does this mean that Jesus had less wisdom and less favor with God early in His life than later? That would suggest that Jesus was not born with infinite wisdom and that young Jesus might have done things that His Heavenly Father might have wished He hadn't. Of course, it might also mean that I'm reading WAY too much into that short verse.

We know that by the age of twelve, Jesus had a good understanding of His identity as the Son of God, and a good understanding of the scriptures, because He was found teaching teachers in the temple. (Luke 2: 46) And, I just realized, the verse that tells us that came before the verse that says that Jesus "increased in wisdom and stature," etcetera. So, He may have been born with great wisdom, and gradually accumulated more.

But while it's interesting to learn about Jesus' childhood, what does it really teach us? In Primary, the lesson manual and a few of the songs speculate that Jesus was probably a really good kid. He probably listened to His earthly parents, played nicely, did His chores, etcetera, and the lesson and songs encourage the Primary children to follow that example, and I don't want to step on the manual's toes or anything, but do we really know that Jesus was a good kid? I'm not sure that we do. We know that He was a good man - a perfect man, in fact - but I'm thinking that if there was ever a time in Jesus' life where He made a mistake and had to learn from it, just as everyone else does, His childhood would have been the perfect time for that.

Then again, since we don't know much about Jesus' childhood, I don't know that He wasn't perfect even then. He might have been. We don't know. But while we don't know if Jesus was perfect during His childhood, we can be pretty sure that He was probably a good child, and He'd probably like the Primary kids I'm going to help teach to try to be good, too. So, that's what I'm going to teach them. Try to be the kind of kid that Jesus would like you to be and that He Himself probably was.

Still, I have to include the word "probably," because we don't know. Jesus once was a little child, and that's pretty much all we know about that.