That the company received these teachings very well and gratefully, although not everyone understood them, is surely easy to comprehend. Even the Pharisees and scribes marveled greatly at My wisdom and asked one another where such wisdom came to Me from. For they knew Me, Joseph, Mary and all Joseph’s children, and also said to the disciples: ‘It is truly incomprehensible! His father was certainly a very capable craftsman in his sphere, an exceedingly faithful, fair and honest man, and a strict Jew who took Moses and the prophets, insofar as he knew them, entirely seriously. But no particular wisdom was ever perceptible in him, and his other four actual sons, who have worked for us several times, are as far removed from any trace of wisdom as the sun, moon and stars from the earth!
‘The good mother Mary herself, still a very pretty, industrious and very virtuous little woman, of whom surely no one can say anything unvirtuous, was indeed brought up in the temple as a girl, if we are correctly informed. But we know that upbringing and know only too well how much wisdom comes out of it, especially for girls!? And so he can have absorbed very little wisdom from his mother either!? To our knowledge he was not in any school either; on the contrary—
(said a scribe well acquainted with Joseph), ‘Joseph had complained to me more than once of his trouble with his boy Jesus and said: “I do not know what I am to do with this boy? His birth, which is said to have been very unusual, and the phenomena that at least seem to be very closely interwoven with it, from which one should have expected the divine Being Himself to manifest Himself on earth through such a child—for which several certainly extraordinary phenomena from his earliest childhood also spoke only too clearly—as well as his speeches, sometimes bordering on high wisdom, have filled me with the truly highest expectations, all the more since I descend from David in the most direct line! But precisely now that the time has come when the boy should learn something, nothing more can be done with him; there is no question of learning anything. Even if I place him with a teacher, the teacher achieves nothing with him; the boy knows and understands everything better, and if a teacher wants to treat him strictly, then it is all over!
‘“What has remained with him from his earliest youth is an incomprehensible, most unbending willpower, with which, if he thinks it necessary, he performs the most manifest miracles; but precisely because of this quality of his, nothing can be done with him as far as learning is concerned. Otherwise he is pious, willing, obedient and very well-mannered, courteous, gentle and modest like his mother; but one must not approach him with learning!”
‘Look, old Joseph complained of this to me not once but often, and it is therefore all the more certain that in his life, apart from the carpenter’s craft, he has learned nothing else, neither reading nor, still less, writing; and so the question of where such wisdom comes to him from is very excusable?’
John the Evangelist says: ‘Friends, I know it well and am entirely at home in the matter; but the time to make this known to you is still far off. Yet the time will come when you will hear it from His mouth! Until then, let His deeds and His wisdom suffice you!’ The Pharisees and scribes did press John to give them just a few hints about it, but John would not be moved to do so. But now several toll officials and overseers went about their business, since they have eaten their midday meal, and space became available at the large table.