Certified (1)
The Jews therefore were marveling, saying, “How has this man become learned, having never been educated?” John 7:15
Become Learned – Remember what the home town boys said about Jesus. “Isn’t he just the carpenter’s son?” Well, something similar happened at the Feast of the Tabernacles too. But notice, if you will, exactly what the discussion not about.
These people marveled at His teaching. That’s important. They weren’t shocked or outraged. They are overwhelmingly impressed. The teaching rang true. They didn’t ask the question in order to determine where Jesus’ theology went wrong. They asked the question because His theology seems so right!
So, if Jesus’ teaching is so powerfully clear and intuitively correct, where on earth did He learn all this? That’s the question. Since it is fairly obvious to everyone that Jesus is not the disciple of a great rabbi, where did all this wonderful teaching come from? Actually, the question revolves around the implied assumption that Jesus has become a scholar. The Greek is grammata oide. You can see the word “grammar” here. In Greek, this word is about what is written. Couple that with the verb, oide, and it means, “to know completely and intuitively the written text.” Of course, that can only mean one thing in first century Israel. Jesus had an exhaustive and penetrating understanding of Scripture, the Word of God, the Old Testament.
How was this possible? Everyone knew that it took a lifetime of study to reach this point of erudition. Everyone knew that only the oldest of rabbis could come up with this kind of insight. Everyone knew that in order to teach like this, there must be a towering rabbinic figure in the background. No one questioned what Jesus said (that’s very important). They just couldn’t understand how He came to have such knowledge.
Don’t make the common mistake of thinking that Jesus was uneducated. Every Jewish man learned Torah from the time he was three. Every Jewish man dedicated himself to being a student of a rabbi. Every Jewish man sought to penetrate the depths of Scripture. Jesus was educated, but what He taught was far beyond what anyone could imagine from the mouth of one who never sat under a great scholar or spent a lifetime in the temple. Jesus didn’t teach like a student of another. He taught as one who intuitively knew the Scripture.
What does this mean for us? If the Jews recognized that what Jesus taught about the Old Testament was so authoritative and so powerful that it challenged all their presuppositions about education, do we have the same respect for Jesus’ interpretation of the Old Testament? Jesus is God commenting on God’s Word. Could there be a better source of explanation than that! If you only had the words of Jesus commenting on the Old Testament, would you still be overwhelmed with His teaching? Would you be amazed? Would you weep at its power? Or are you really just a Christian of Paul’s letters?
Topical Index: Education
