The Pulpit Commentary - Luke 2:39-52
The childhood and the waiting-time. Before the age of twelve, nothing is told. In modern biographies, all kinds of traits, incidents, forecasts of the man in the child, are mentioned. The Apocryphal Gospels fall in with this custom. God's thoughts are not our thoughts. The child-life of "the Lord's Christ" is thoroughly simple. A bright-eyed boy, learning to read the Scriptures at his mother's knee, running out and in to shop and cottage, and joining sometimes in the innocent pastimes of... read more
The Pulpit Commentary - Luke 2:39
And when they had performed all things according to the Law of the Lord. Another note, which tells us of the rigid obedience which Mary and Joseph paid to the Law of Israel, under which they lived. Marcion, the famous Gnostic heretic (second century), who adopted this Gospel of St. Luke, to the exclusion of the other three, as the authoritative Gospel for his sect, omitted, however, all these passages of St. Luke's narrative in which the old Mosaic Law was spoken of with reverence. They... read more