Article October 21, 1933 Issue

Signs of the Times

with contributions from Correspondent, Norma M. McGarry

[From a Correspondent, in the Times, London, England]

"Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man." ... Jesus became supremely good—such is the comfort of the truth emphasized by St. Luke—through traveling the road which is open to us all; he did not stumble as we do, yet the road was the same. He became good by resisting wrong, by drawing help from the Father, by repeated effort, by gradual improvement. Only thus could he increase "in favour with God."

No less pertinent is the remembrance that he "increased in wisdom." That thought too has a special value for children, but it is also of continuing significance for all, at every stage of life. Church tradition has often tried to accentuate the marvelous and supernatural claims of Jesus by representing his human equipment as that of an uneducated peasant. Such a view is flatly at variance with the gospel records. As Professor Peabody has remarked, "On almost every page of the first three Gospels there is disclosed in him the student of the Scriptures, the master in dialectic, familiar with the scholar's method of logic and rejoinder, with a mind which was disciplined, self-confident, and keen." To his contemporaries he must have seemed not merely a spiritual seer, but an intellectual master. He was welcomed as a teacher in the synagogues; unlike the great majority of his time he could read Hebrew as well as Aramaic; he could meet the skilled interpreters of rabbinic tradition on their own ground.

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