Jesus growing up: what the Gospels say about his childhood

Every parent who has lost a child in a crowd for even a minute knows the feeling Mary describes in Luke 2. That scene, a boy of twelve found in the Temple after three days, is nearly all the Gospels tell us about Jesus growing up. The rest of his childhood fits into a few verses.

So this is the short, honest version: what Scripture actually says about his early years in Nazareth, where to read it, and what it leaves quiet. Painters and storytellers have filled those quiet years for centuries, and it helps to know which parts came from them.

What do we actually know about Jesus as a child?

We know where he was born, where his family fled, where he grew up, one trip he took at twelve, and one sentence that covers everything else. Only Matthew and Luke tell any of it, and they tell different parts.

Here is the whole of it, in order.

Moment	Where	Where to read it
Born in Bethlehem	Judea	Matthew 2:1; Luke 2:1-20
Named and presented in the Temple	Jerusalem	Luke 2:21-38
Flight from Herod	Egypt	Matthew 2:13-15
Settles with Mary and Joseph	Nazareth, Galilee	Matthew 2:19-23; Luke 2:39
Grows strong and wise	Nazareth	Luke 2:40
Found in the Temple at twelve	Jerusalem	Luke 2:41-51
"Increased in wisdom and stature"	Nazareth	Luke 2:52

Mark and John begin with the grown man. Mark opens at the Jordan, and John opens before creation itself. Neither says a word about the boy.

If you want the same story carried on past childhood, through Galilee and Jerusalem to the empty tomb, we have laid out the whole life of Christ in order. This page stays with the early years.

Why did the family go to Egypt?

To save his life. Matthew says an angel warned Joseph in a dream that Herod was searching for the child to kill him, and Joseph got up in the night and took Mary and the baby south.

It is easy to read past. A young mother with an infant, travelling by night out of her own country, with no idea how long she will be gone. Matthew does not say how long they stayed, only that they remained until Herod died.

When they came back, Joseph was afraid to return to Judea, where Herod's son now ruled. So the family went north. "And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene." (Matthew 2:23, KJV)

Luke tells the same homecoming more simply. After the presentation in the Temple, where the old man Simeon took the baby in his arms, the family "returned into Galilee, to their own city Nazareth" (Luke 2:39, KJV). In Luke's telling, Nazareth was home before Bethlehem ever was. Our page on the Nativity in Luke and Matthew, read in order follows the family from Gabriel's visit to this homecoming.

What was Jesus's life growing up in Nazareth like?

Ordinary, as far as the Gospels let us see. He grew up in a small hill village in Galilee, in a working family, with brothers and sisters, and he learned his father's trade.

Nazareth had no reputation to speak of. Years later, when Philip told Nathanael they had found the Messiah and that he came from Nazareth, Nathanael's first answer was, "Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?" (John 1:46, KJV). Philip did not argue. He said, come and see. If you want the village alongside the other places of his life, we have gathered every place Jesus lived, in order.

The neighbours knew the family well. When Jesus came back as a grown man to teach in the synagogue, they asked, "Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Juda, and Simon? and are not his sisters here with us?" (Mark 6:3, KJV). Matthew has them call him "the carpenter's son" (Matthew 13:55, KJV).

So we know he had four brothers and at least two sisters, that he worked with his hands, and that the village thought it knew exactly who he was. John adds a painful detail from later on: "For neither did his brethren believe in him." (John 7:5, KJV). Not at first.

And Luke gives one more glimpse that reaches back into those years. When Jesus returned to Nazareth, Luke says he "went into the synagogue on the sabbath day" as his custom was (Luke 4:16, KJV). Many readers take that habit as something learned in childhood, Sabbath after Sabbath, in that same room.

What happened when Jesus was twelve?

His family went up to Jerusalem for the Passover, as they did every year, and on the way home they realised he was not with them. They searched for three days. They found him in the Temple, among the teachers.

Luke tells it carefully. "And it came to pass, that after three days they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions." (Luke 2:46, KJV). He was listening first, then asking. The teachers were amazed at what he understood.

His mother speaks the way any mother would after three days of fear: "Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing." (Luke 2:48, KJV)

His answer is the first thing Jesus ever says in the Gospels: "How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?" (Luke 2:49, KJV). Luke adds, honestly, that Mary and Joseph did not understand what he meant.

Then comes the part that is easy to miss. He did not stay in the Temple. "And he went down with them, and came to Nazareth, and was subject unto them: but his mother kept all these sayings in her heart." (Luke 2:51, KJV). The boy who knew whose house he was in went home and obeyed his parents.

What does "increased in wisdom and stature" mean?

It means he really grew up. Luke uses one sentence to cover the years from twelve to about thirty: "And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man." (Luke 2:52, KJV)

Wisdom is the mind, stature is the body, and favour runs in both directions, toward God and toward the people around him. Earlier, Luke says the same of the small child: "And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom: and the grace of God was upon him." (Luke 2:40, KJV)

Christians have long read those two verses as a quiet statement that his childhood was a real one: learning to walk, learning words, learning a trade, growing taller year by year. The letter to the Hebrews says he was "in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin" (Hebrews 4:15, KJV), and many readers find comfort in thinking that includes being a boy and a teenager.

Then Luke is silent until the Jordan, where he notes that "Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of age" (Luke 3:23, KJV). Somewhere around eighteen years pass between those verses, and not one event from them is recorded.

How have painters imagined his boyhood?

Mostly by filling the silence. Because the Gospels give so little, artists have painted the boy in Joseph's workshop, helping with the tools, or the scene in the Temple with the teachers leaning in around him. They did the same with his birth, adding the ox, the donkey and the cave, as our guide to famous Nativity paintings and their sources explains.

Two Victorian paintings are well known for this. John Everett Millais painted Christ in the House of His Parents around 1850: a carpenter's shop with wood shavings on the floor and a small boy who has cut his hand on a nail, his mother kneeling beside him. William Holman Hunt spent years on The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple, finished in 1860. Both are imagination laid carefully over a few words of Scripture.

Some stories that people half-remember come from further away still. Writings outside the Bible from the following centuries, such as the so-called Infancy Gospel of Thomas, tell of the boy Jesus making birds out of clay that fly away. Those books were never part of Scripture, and the Gospels do not contain those stories.

It is worth holding the two apart. A painting of the carpenter's shop can be a lovely way into the passage, as long as we remember that the passage itself is one word: carpenter. The silence is part of what the Gospels chose to give us.

Keeping the early years in view

There is something steadying in how little we are told. Most of his life was spent the way most lives are spent, in one small place, in a family, at ordinary work, going to the synagogue on the Sabbath. The Gospels do not treat those years as wasted, and nothing in them suggests he was waiting for his life to start.

If the childhood leaves you wanting the rest of the story, the next question is the one a child asks at bedtime, and we have answered it in what Jesus did, act by act: the teaching, the healing, the water, the cross.

CHRIST, our coffee-table book, tells that whole life in art and Scripture, each image beside the passage it shows, in the order the Gospels tell them. It is made to sit on a table where someone can open it for five minutes and read one moment.

The book and our canvases are together in everything we make, in one place. And Luke 2 is short enough to read tonight, start to finish, before the lights go out. If you want more after that, our guide to the books about Jesus worth reading starts with the Gospels and goes on from there.

Frequently asked

How old was Jesus when he was found in the Temple?

He was twelve. Luke says that "when he was twelve years old, they went up to Jerusalem after the custom of the feast" (Luke 2:42, KJV), and that his parents found him in the Temple three days after they started searching. It is the only scene from his boyhood in the Gospels.

Did Jesus have brothers and sisters?

The Gospels name four brothers, James, Joses, Juda and Simon, and mention sisters without naming them (Mark 6:3; Matthew 13:55). Christian traditions read this differently: some take them as younger children of Mary and Joseph, others as cousins or as Joseph's children from an earlier marriage. The text gives the names and leaves the relationship to interpretation.

What did Jesus do before his ministry began?

He lived in Nazareth and worked as a carpenter. His neighbours call him "the carpenter" in Mark 6:3 and "the carpenter's son" in Matthew 13:55, and the Greek word can cover work in wood or stone. Luke says he was about thirty when he began his ministry (Luke 3:23).

Is the story of Jesus making clay birds in the Bible?

No. It comes from the so-called Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a writing from the early centuries of the church that was never accepted into the Bible. The only childhood scenes in Scripture are in Matthew 2 and Luke 2.

Passages cited: Matthew 2:1; Matthew 2:13-15; Matthew 2:19-23 (quoted: 2:23); Luke 2:1-20; Luke 2:21-38; Luke 2:39-52 (quoted: 2:39, 2:40, 2:42, 2:46, 2:48, 2:49, 2:51, 2:52); John 1:46; Mark 6:3; Matthew 13:55; John 7:5; Luke 4:16; Hebrews 4:15; Luke 3:23.