th the
reading (Luke iv. 16-19), and perhaps the writing, of the Hebrew language.
Of his school experience we know nothing beyond the fact that he grew in
"wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man" (Luke ii. 52),--a
sufficient contradiction of the repulsive legends of the apocryphal
gospels.

66. The physical growth incident to Jesus' development from boyhood to
manhood is a familiar thought. The intellectual unfolding which belongs to
this development is readily recognized. Not so commonly acknowledged, but
none the less clearly essential to the gospel picture, is the gradual
unfolding of the child's moral life under circumstances and stimulus
similar to those with which other children meet (Heb. iv. 15). The man
Jesus was known as the carpenter (Matt. xiii. 55). The learning of such a
trade would contribute much to the boy's mastery of his own powers. Far
more discipline would come from his fellowship with brothers and sisters
who did not understand his ways nor appreciate the deepest realities of
his life. Without robbing boyhood days of their naturalness and reality,
we may be sure that long before Jesus knew how and why he differed from
his fellows he felt more or less clearly that they were not like him. The
resulting sense of isolation was a school for self-mastery, lest isolation
foster any such pride or unloveliness as that with which later legend
dared to stain the picture of the Lord's youth. Four brothers of Jesus
are named by Mark (vi. 3),--James, and Joses, and Judas, and Simon,--the
gospel adds also that he had sisters living at a later time in Nazareth.
They were all subject with him to the same home influences, and apparently
were not unresponsive to them. The similarity of thought and feeling
between the sermon on the mount and the Epistle of James is not readily
explained by the influence of master over disciple, since the days of
James's discipleship began after the resurrection of Jesus. In any case
there is no reason to think that the companions of Jesus' home were
uncommonly irritating or in any way irreligious, only Jesus was not
altogether like them (John vii. 5), and the fact of difference was a moral
discipline, which among other things led to that moral growth by which
innocence passed into positive goodness. If the home was such a school of
discipline, its neighbors, less earnest and less favored with spiritual
training, furnished more abundant occasion for self-mastery and growth.