We have all seen pictures of Jesus teaching the disciples – adult males about the same age as Jesus himself.  But is this representation of the disciples accurate, or could the disciples have been significantly younger?

We should always remember that only one part of Jesus’ calling and training of disciples was unique – the calling.  In Judaism of the first century many rabbis or teachers taught students and trained them to be rabbis like themselves. The major difference was that young men wanting to be taught in this way usually sought out a teacher.  Jesus, on the other hand, directly called his students himself – something he stressed in his teaching (John 15:16).   

But apart from this aspect of “student selection” Jesus’ role as a rabbi or teacher was not unusual for its time and it is worth remembering that most students selected by rabbis were younger – commonly in their later teens.  It is perfectly possible, therefore, that a number of Jesus’ disciples were younger than we usually presume and there is some biblical indication that this might have been the case. 

The apostle John is known to have lived till very late in the first century, but while we presume he was perhaps younger than the others we should remember that the other disciples seem to have been martyred earlier in the century – very possibly well before they would normally have died.

Also, consider the interesting story regarding the occasion Jesus and his disciples went to Capernaum and the collectors of the two-drachma temple tax came to Peter and asked, “Doesn’t your teacher pay the temple tax?” Jesus then told Peter to catch a fish – which miraculously had a four-drachma coin in its mouth – and to pay the tax for Jesus and for himself (Matthew 17:24-27).   It might seem odd that Jesus only provided the tax money for Peter and himself and not for the other disciples – until we realize that the tax only had to be paid by those aged 20 and above.

So it is possible that Peter alone of the disciples was older – a possibility which may throw light on the fact that Peter seems always to be the one who speaks for the other disciples Acts 2:14-36, etc.), why he is the only disciple said to be married at the time of Christs’ ministry (Matthew 8:14-17, etc.) and why he was given such a  prominent role in the period of the very early Church (Galatians 2:9).   

If many of the disciples were in fact younger than we often think, this would have had no bearing on their ability to act as witnesses of the resurrection. Jewish law accepted the witness of young men down to the age of bar mitzvah which usually was in the early teens.
Ultimately, the age of the disciples does not matter or we would have been told what age they were. On the other hand, recognizing the possibility of the relative youth of most of Jesus’ chosen followers can help us understand some things that might otherwise seem unclear in the New Testament.

But returning to how young Jews became students of a rabbi, it is helpful to remember that young men did not simply turn up at a rabbi’s door and expect to be taught.  There were relatively few rabbis and many young men.  Those who sought out a rabbi to follow were examined and tested by the older teacher and only a select few were chosen. Being selected to follow a rabbi and to continue his teaching was viewed as an exceptional honor in that society – perhaps indicating why we are told many of the disciples Jesus chose dropped everything they were doing and followed him immediately (Matthew 4:18-22).  

Maybe there is a lesson in this for us today.  Whatever the age of Jesus’ disciples at their calling, it is certain that the opportunity would have been regarded as a great honor and privilege – to be one of so few selected from so many.  Perhaps, in terms of our own lives and calling, that is something we need to remind ourselves of more often.  

​In many ways, gratitude is the most important of all the good character traits. It is the most indispensable trait to both happiness and goodness. One can neither be a happy person nor a good person without gratitude. The less gratitude one has, the more one sees oneself as a victim; and nothing is more likely to produce a bad person or a bad group than defining oneself or one’s group as a victim. Victims, having been hurt, too often believe they have a license to hurt others. As for happiness, if you think of all the people you know, you will not be able to name one who is ungrateful and happy. The two are mutually exclusive.
 
From The Rational Bible: Exodus by Dennis Prager.

​You may have known people who were offended at the concept Christians teach – that an individual’s mind must be “opened” to see the truth. To many it sounds almost insulting that they would not be “intelligent enough” to fully understand Christian belief. Nevertheless, the Bible does teach that no matter how intelligent we may be, we cannot understand spiritual things unless God “opens our mind.” 

The ancient biblical writers did not talk about opening the “mind,” of course, as that is a modern concept. Instead, writers in both the Old Testament and New Testament used the expression to “open the eyes,” meaning the same thing. In fact, antiquated as it might seem, the concept works well because our eyes are already open and yet need to be “opened” – just as people’s minds can be functional, yet may need to be opened spiritually, too. That is why Jesus said: “I praise you, Father… because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children” (Matthew 11:25; see also Matthew 13:13-14). 

That is why the work of the coming Messiah was foretold in just these terms by the prophet Isaiah: “Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped” (Isaiah 35:5); “… to open eyes that are blind … to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness” (Isaiah 42:7).  When Christ commissioned Saul – the apostle Paul – it was to do the same work: “I am sending you to them to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me” (Acts 26:17-19).

So fully perceiving and understanding spiritual things requires God’s help. We may know this, but the understanding calls for the use of wisdom in several areas of the Christian life. First, in sharing our faith we cannot expect people to understand the truth of God’s word unless God is opening their minds to see it. That is something to remember at all times. Trying to “help” or force people to understand spiritual realities cannot work unless God is already calling them. 

Second, we should remember that people’s eyes are not usually “opened” all the way at one moment in time. God is gracious in revealing to us what we can handle before helping us to move to the next level of understanding and responsibility. We should always remember to have the same patience with those we aspire to help in the knowledge of the truth.

Finally, we must constantly remind ourselves that the fact spiritual eyes are opened slowly and not all at once is something we must apply to ourselves daily. It is always easy to presume – at every stage along the way – that we know or understand “most things.”  But the truth is, the further we progress along the road of Christian growth, the more we become aware that we still have so much more to learn, so much more to understand.  That is why David prayed – as we should, too – “Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law” (Psalm 119:18). It’s a prayer we never outgrow.

* Reproduced from the February, 2015 blog post on our sister site TacticalChristianity.org

In 1 Corinthians 13 the apostle Paul famously defines love for us – he tells us a number of things that love is, and he also tells us a number of things that love is not. In fact, he tells us sixteen things about love and exactly half of them (bolded below) tell us what love is, and half (italicized below) tell us what love is not.  Take a look at his list:

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails …” (1 Corinthians 13:4-8, emphases added).

Now why did Paul do this?  Why did he not simply list all the good things that love is rather than listing positive and negative aspects of what love is and is not?  Some have guessed that Paul was applying his description of love to the Corinthian church to which his letter was sent –  to what the Christians there were getting right and what they were not.  But 1 Corinthians 13 clearly has wider application that just any one church group, and the previous chapter shows that Paul has the whole church in mind as the context of what he is saying (1 Corinthians 12:27-31).

So what was Paul’s point in giving us this “split vision” of the characteristics of love in this, his fullest description of the greatest spiritual quality?   One simple answer is found in the rabbinic teaching style of Paul’s day and, in fact, throughout much of the Bible.  Positive and negative expressions of important teachings and commandments were frequently put in juxtaposition in this way.  We only have to look at the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:1-17) themselves to see the same kind of positive (“You shall …”) and negative (“You shall not …”) expressions. 

The same method is found throughout the teaching of Jesus and is particularly clear in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) –  as when Jesus taught “…when you pray do not … But when you pray …” (6:5-6); “when you fast do not …  But when you fast …” (6:16-17); etc.   Paul also uses this same method on several occasions –  for example, when he speaks of the Spirit of God which “… does not make us timid, but gives us power, love and self-discipline” (2 Timothy 1:7).

But the fact that this was a common teaching technique of Paul’s day does not mean there is no lesson to be learned from his use of both positive and negative methods of expression in his description of love. We must always remember that Paul’s discussion of the qualities of love, and the whole of the chapter in which it is found, is given in the context of spiritual gifts.  The love he speaks about is spiritual rather than physical love, and Paul’s list reminds us that this kind of love is not like human love. If we look closely we see that his list shows that spiritual love is not about the feelings involved in relationships, but about the actions that take place in them.  Not a single one of the qualities of love that Paul gives is about our feelings for someone. 

Paul’s description of love is actually a powerful corrective to the idea that spiritual love is an amorphous feeling that somehow guides us into being “nice” or “good” people through an elevated form of “liking” or “feeling good” about others. In fact, some of the things Paul says – such as the fact that this kind of love “is not easily angered” and “keeps no record of wrongs” – indicate that it may be applied to people with whom we do not feel much affinity just as much as to people we do like.
 
Part of our inability to recognize the dynamic and much more powerful nature of the spiritual love Paul talks about lies in the fact that in English the word “love” often simply means “like.”  We say we love pizza, or we love the color blue, or we love a person because our concept of love involves our feelings toward something or someone.  But Paul’s use of love, as we see so clearly in his list of its qualities, has nothing to do with feelings toward anyone –  only our actions toward them.  This is something we must always remember. No matter how warmly we feel about anyone, if it is a feeling, it is physical love.  To love with spiritual love is to act toward others– just as God acted when he “… so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son… ” (John 3:16, emphases added).

So Paul’s list of the various qualities of love teaches us that spiritual love is entirely about how we behave and how we treat others. By stressing the negatives that spiritual love protects us from just as much as he stresses the positive aspects of love, Paul shows us that real love produces loving actions and precludes unloving actions.  The great “love list” of 1 Corinthians 13 shows us in a concrete way what spiritual love is and what it is not.