I also believe that having a child-prodigy in the family would have influenced Jesus’s brothers much earlier in life.
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I know, right? I think people go from “sinless” to “perfect” and then impose lots of ideas of what they think perfect means, not realizing that they have left humanity far behind in the process.
The hypostatic union has definitely provided a lot of food for thought.
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I was thinking along the same lines. A couple of instructing incidents from the gospels are Mark 3 and Matthew 12, where Jesus’ mother and brothers come looking for him, and Jesus ends by looking at the disciples at his feet and saying that they are his mother and brothers and sisters. Mark includes the interesting tidbit about the crowds around Jesus being so large that he and his disciples were not even able to get a meal in edgewise. "When his family heard this they went out to restrain him, for they said, ‘He is out of his mind.’ " And, as you alluded, John 7 tells us that Jesus’ brothers did not believe in him during his earthly ministry.
Perhaps their difficulty was that they knew Jesus so intimately that he was, well, their brother, not the Christ. Nevertheless, they did believe in the end that Jesus is Lord, despite the fact that they knew him so well for all of his life. This certainly says something about his sinless character.
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I saw this on a friend’s frig, and now found it among Google images. Wish I could read the artist’s signature between the two horses. It would be fun to see more of his or her stuff.
addendum: the only thing missing is Pilate’s parents on their donkey with a bumper sticker that says “my kid can beat up your kid”
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[quote=“Jay313, post:10, topic:36637”]
Perhaps their difficulty was that they knew Jesus so intimately that he was, well, their brother, not the Christ. [/quote]
The confusion of Jesus’ family is that they did not have the after-sight of thousands of years to glean the scriptures with Holy Spirit’s guidance into Jesus’ true character. It wasn’t until after the Resurrection that they understood.
@Mervin_Bitikofer Another Bumper sticker that is appropriate: “My Son is Perfect!” That is a truism for any mother!
When we consider how Jesus was “inerrant” we must determine whether the time in question is before his Baptism or after! When the dove descended upon him, he was “gifted” with the presence of the Father for his mission. Nothing before that time could be positively considered “inerrant”.
Much as King David could not function as a King or a Levite as a priest until they were fully annointed into their position. This is certainly the case of the “Messiah” (Anointed One in Hebrew) In addition, a Priest, Rabbi or social “Leader” could not be acknowledged until they reached the mature age of 30 – the “age of counsel giving” in Israel and most ANE cultures. Jesus was Baptised and began his ministry after turning 30. With a lifespan of 50-60 years or so, this is “middle age”.
The second issue is the category of his knowledge . At any time he speaks of things only a normal person need to know, like the common cosmology of the day (or the relative size of a seed) then no “supernatural” knowledge is needed and subject to the “fallacies” of the ancient world versus our own scientific knowledge.
But if it concerns his mission, plan, and foreknowledge or insight of what people are thinking or saying then he “…does what the Father tells me…” In that Jesus is entirely inerrant.
I have never had much problem with these issues as I have always found this is fairly simple if you keep these two principles in mind.
It is also the same principle which guides our thought on interpreting Genesis and Revelation.
Ray 
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The following is from another Topic that has the same issues as this topic with Jesus.
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which purports to relate Jesus’ childhood, depicts him making clay birds and bringing them to life, instructing his teachers, cursing a misbehaving boy whose body immediately withers, and striking the boy’s parents blind when they complain to Mary and Joseph. This is the kind of account that people dream up when they think of Jesus as fully God but not fully man. The canonical gospels are models of restraint in comparison.
Yes, and I don’t know whether to put this comment here or there, but consider how Hebrews 2:17 plays into the Adam/Christ comparison. If Christ, the second Adam, “had to be made like his brothers and sisters in every respect” to represent us before God (Heb. 2:17), shouldn’t the first Adam bear at least some resemblance to us in order to represent us before God? How does the specially created Adam fit that bill?
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I believe it was you who pointed out elsewhere how we also seem to get “perfect” out of “very good” in Genesis! Must be a connection there… perhaps it’s just easier if one is prone to “black and white” thinking. Good things to consider.
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But how could any sane person even propose such a gospel (good news??) that has Jesus, as ‘fully God’, doing such despicable things? Fortunately the early church fathers made sure that the Thomas ‘gospel’ was NOT declared canonical, but even its very existence gives some credence to the canard spread by Harris, Dawkins et al that ALL people of Faith must be a little kooky.
[quote=“Jay313, post:14, topic:36637”]
If Christ, the second Adam, “had to be made like his brothers and sisters in every respect” to represent us before God (Heb. 2:17),
Jay, you bring up a point that has bothered me ever since I was capable of thinking on my own: If Jesus was fully human he must have had a human father. Certainly his fellow Nazarene townspeople must have thought so. I do not consider his Virgin Birth an impossibility for God, but why is it such an important dogma that I should not consider myself truly Catholic unless I profess it to be 100% true. (Perhaps you saw the video debate where Dawkins backed the head of the Vatican Observatory into a corner with that question.) How many Protestant denominations allow one the freedom of believing it is possible but not necessary? @Christy ?
Al Leo
None that hold to the Nicene Creed, which would be the vast majority, I think.
Like you, I don’t understand the virgin birth, but I accept it on faith and on the authority of the Bible. We accept all kinds of truths on authority. For instance, I believe everything that Christy says, because she is a moderator. 
I think you’ll agree that being fully human involves a great deal more than biology. Jesus could have descended from heaven a fully formed man, but he didn’t. He was born as we are, grew up and learned as we do, earned his bread by the sweat of his brow like all descendants of Adam, suffered pain and grief and loss as we do, but all the while, though surrounded by sinfulness just as we are, he did not sin. Christ’s full humanity is not, in my mind, a biological issue; his full humanity is revealed by the fact that he completely identified with us by becoming us. As Paul said in Philippians 2:
5 You should have the same attitude toward one another that Christ Jesus had,
6 who though he existed in the form of God
did not regard equality with God
as something to be grasped,
7 but emptied himself
by taking on the form of a slave,
by looking like other men,
and by sharing in human nature.
8 He humbled himself,
by becoming obedient to the point of death
—even death on a cross!
9 As a result God highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
10 so that at the name of Jesus
every knee will bow
—in heaven and on earth and under the earth—
11 and every tongue confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord
to the glory of God the Father.
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Wait a minute @Jay313
Why can’t God have constructed the perfect human chromosomal match to Mary’s egg?
Certainly Creationists can certainly agree that if God can make an adult out of dust, then he can make a “divine sperm” out of anything.
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I’m surprised that someone somewhere has not advocated that since Jesus is the new Adam, he had the same genetic code and Y chromosome that Adam had. Perhaps they have, as I am not willing to check.
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Very good response, Jay. (I clicked ‘like’.) And I certainly do agree that being fully human involves a great deal more than biology. In fact it is foundation stone of my world view: Hundreds of generations of Homo sapiens lived on this earth before any became fully human, and this probably occurred without any species-changing mutation. Science may never learn how brain circuitry can be organized so that it becomes a Mind that is aware of, and desires to know, its Creator. That event (if it was a GLF) added a spiritual component to what otherwise would have been just a material creature. The Universe had a new feature: the Noosphere.
I believe that Adam was the first Homo sapiens who was potentially capable of overcoming the ‘dark side’ of his evolutionary heritage, and his failure to do so has been interpreted as Original Sin. Paul rightly considered Jesus as the Second Adam, because it was God’s will that Jesus would completely rise above his evolutionary heritage, live a sinless life, and become, not just a faulty Image of God, but God who has taken human form.
I readily admit that this “theology” will not appeal to the majority of Christians today. However, it may be more compatible to youngsters today who otherwise may be deceived by the ‘intellectual’ arguments of the New Atheists.
Al Leo
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Ah. Finally, someone has explained it. Haha. As I said, Jesus could have descended from heaven a fully formed man, if that’s how God wished to do it. I think it is pointless to wonder or worry about the biological “how” of the virgin birth, or any other act of God. I would include in that statement the manner in which God guided evolution. We really have no idea of the limits or the exercise of divine power. But, that’s just me …
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Jesus was always correct but occasionally misquoted. “G”
Bill, that statement will give Biblical inerrantists a headache . Do you think that is what he told his teachers when they graded his papers?
My wife, in preparing to teach our adult Sunday School raised an interesting point (from the teacher’s manual) that caught me by surprise even though I feel it shouldn’t have. It suggested that there would/could still be plenty of conflict in a “pre-fallen” or “non-fallen” world, but that isn’t the same thing as sin. Sin is one way in which you might respond to conflict, but not necessarily inherent in conflict itself. So when we imagine a sinless world (whether it be a past or future one or both), do we imagine one in which there is not even so much as a disagreement? One uniformity of all opinion?
Even though I don’t adhere to YEC habits of thinking, I guess I still had in the back of my mind un-examined visions of some sort of “conflict-free” paradise! But it would seem my mindset has been conditioned by the YEC conception that a paradise would be a perfect world (and my assumption that “perfect” implies “conflict-free” has its own set of problems and probably says a lot about me), and not what the Scriptures actually say of creation: “good” and “very good”.
In any case, I think the same things carry over into our discussion about Jesus. While we can find Scriptures to show that Jesus was “without sin”, it would seem that many of us still want to equate that with perfection on our own terms (which usually includes all sorts of notions of physical and intellectual perfection – and that despite Scriptural warnings to the contrary!) If I’m not mistaken it seems that C.S. Lewis may have gone a bit down this road, didn’t he? I seem to remember reading that he would expect no less than a “perfect in-every-way specimen” of humanity in the Christ. And while I can theologically get on board with that, the problem it seems to me (even with Lewis!) is that our own notions of what perfection must include are going to be necessarily error-prone. In short, I think non-perfect creatures are going to be incapable of being judges of the perfect, and I think all we can do is note things like … if Jesus wasn’t the best-looking (most “kingly”), “highest scorer on every test we tend to throw at people” kind of person – (and yes, despite the fact that he does walk on water, Scriptures don’t support the notion that he was impressive to everybody in our ordinary sorts of every-day ways); then all we can do is shrug our shoulders and think that it is our own notions of perfection that must be faulty, and let’s fix our eyes back on Christ again in the faith that his actual perfection is the kind we should want instead.
[edits made…]
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Jesus fully man / fully God without sin - was tempted but didn’t sin is our sinless representative before God may have given wrong answers, or didn’t know answers, or was confused over the age of earth he created when he spoke it into existence…because his humanity grew in wisdom and stature …therefore…he made wrong errors.
Is that the argument?
I would think his boyhood experience in the temple when left behind answers your question.
If we say he got things wrong…like us…does that imply his nature was imperfect so we either go Catholic with the Immaculate Mary who didn’t pass sin onto Jesus or we have to say his model of learning with regards to humanity was without error.
Arguing from silence is like punching the air.