his power of teaching himself, and was the occasion for an ever-brightening light to rise upon him, especially on the subject of his own destination. But in that case he would certainly have given utterance to his newly acquired knowledge; so that the position of a teacher on the part of the boy would return upon us, a position which Olshausen himself pronounces to be preposterous. At least such an indirect mode of teaching is involved as Ness subscribes to, when he supposes that Jesus, even thus early, made the first attempt to combat the prejudices which swayed in the synagogue, exposing to the doctors, by means of good-humoured questions and requests for explanation, such as are willingly permitted to a boy, the weakness of many of their dogmas. [465] But even such a position on the part of a boy of twelve, is inconsistent with the true process of human development, through which it behoved the God-Man himself to pass. Discourse of this kind from a boy must, we grant, have excited the astonishment of all the hearers; nevertheless the expression ἐξίσταντο πάντες οἱ ἀκούοντες αὐτοῦ (v. 47), looks too much like a panegyrical formula. [466] The narrative proceeds to tell us how the mother of Jesus reproached her son when she had found him thus, asking him why he had not spared his parents the anguish of their sorrowful search? To this Jesus returns an answer which forms the point of the entire narrative; he asks whether they might not have known that he was to be sought nowhere else than in the house of his Father, in the temple? (v. 48 f.) One might be inclined to understand this designation of God as τοῦ πατρὸς generally, as implying that God was the Father of all men, and only in this sense the Father of Jesus. But this interpretation is forbidden, not only by the addition of the pronoun μοῦ, the above sense requiring ἡμῶν (as in Matt. vi. 9), but still more absolutely by the circumstance that the parents of Jesus did not understand these words (v. 50), a decided indication that they must have a special meaning, which can here be no other than the mystery of the Messiahship of Jesus, who as Messiah, was υἱὸς θεοῦ in a peculiar sense. But that Jesus in his twelfth year had already the consciousness of his Messiahship, is a position which, although it may be consistently adopted from the orthodox point of view, and although it is not opposed to the regular human form of the development of Jesus, which even orthodoxy maintains, we are not here bound to examine. So also the natural explanation, which retains the above narrative as a history, though void of the miraculous, and which accordingly supposes the parents of Jesus, owing to a particular combination of circumstances, to have come even before his birth to a conviction of his Messiahship, and to have instilled this conviction into their son from his earliest childhood,—this too may make it plain how Jesus could be so clear as to his messianic