Jesus started His ministry at the age of.......?

[WhiteWings]

Hi! You really thought typing 30 was all you had to do?  :laughing7:

Luke 3:23  And Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of age, being (as was supposed) the son of Joseph, which was the son of Heli,

The common view is, I think, that 'about 30' means 30 plus a few months.
Jesus was baptized at 30. Fasted 40 days. And did some traveling before He really started.

Let first look at kings and rulers. When you read in the 5th year of king David. How many years did king David rule.
IMO it could be 3 years and 2 days. Perhaps 4 years and 1 day.
The point is as I understand it Jews just look at the year. If a king started at 31 December 2008 he is in his second year at 1 Januari 2009. (At 1 January 2010 the king is in his 3rd year)

Back tho Jesus. Does the above also apply to people?
Does 30 mean really the age of 30 or the year He turns 30? Makes a difference of half a year in case of Jesus.

Then when exactly does your age start to could. At birth? I would say to with my western look on things.
But recently I've read the clock starts counting at conception because life starts at that point. So someone gets born 9 months old. Of course this also has its impact on the real age of Jesus.

To clarify: I'm not claiming the Bible is in error but that we perhaps look wrong at the concept of ages mentioned in the Bible.....


Thoughts please?

[Nathan]

It's all part of Jesus fulfilling the law, to me anyway . . . in order for one to become active in a priestly ministry, one had to wait until one turned 30 years old.  I'm sure there's much more symbolism beneath the surface of that.  But I'm not so sure that the age of one begins at conception due to the fact that age is a measure of life "without" the womb, not the measure of life in general. 

When a baby is born, they are born either prematurely, on time, or late . .but the plumbline is not the conception, but the birth.

Jesus life was not why he came so other than the reference to the experience that took place when he was 12, whatever transpired was irrelevant to the purpose of his coming.  He grew in stature and knowledge of the Scriptures . . . even though the spirit in him was what inspired the Word, he himself being flesh, still needed to expose that inspired word to his carnal mind so that again, he could fulfill the laws of nature and God. 

It is said also that when he was 12, the reason he went to the temple is because that's what 12-year-old boys who are expected to become priests do.  And it is at that time where they are leaving their childhood on a quest to adulthood that the church decides whether or not they are priestly material.  And even though he baffled the priests with his knowledge of the Word, he was not chosen to further his life in the church ministry.

Now, none of that is noted in Scripture so how much truth there is to that is up to the reader.  I thought it was interesting if it were to be true.  For me personally, with 12 being the number of government . . . I see it as God giving notice to the religious that change of spiritual government was coming.

[Cardinal]

 :cloud9: I can't remember the exact details now, but it seems to me I remember reading one time that the Jews count age from conception. Blessings...

[Nathan]

:cloud9: I can't remember the exact details now, but it seems to me I remember reading one time that the Jews count age from conception. Blessings...

see . .that's what I said!!

Okay . . .maybe not.

I've never really heard of it.  Maybe that's why Luke says "around" 30 . . .he couldn't make heads or tails of it either :laughing7:

[fire walker]

:cloud9: I can't remember the exact details now, but it seems to me I remember reading one time that the Jews count age from conception. Blessings...

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I don't know about that because no one ever told me about the Hebrew culture, I believe their calender is not lined up with the calender like say what we use here in America and many other Nations today,their day I have heard is measured from rising sun to the next rising sun.

I did hear that China at least in their old world culture counted the age of a person  as starting with conception, there may be other cultures who do this or have done this as well, I don't know. There are also some peoples who never keep record of age, when one of the old men or women are asked their age they don't know what is meant by age on a year to year basis. Some other cultures kept age by the moon and so could reach an age of many moons.

Also interesting is all the varied calenders
that have been used and some still are used in various places in the world, while there are other cultures that didn't know keeping a calender or dates , many, especially Nomadic peoples lived by the signs of the seasons for when to move from place to place and so possibly counted their age by how many moves in their time they were.

During Jesus days on Earth I don't really know if the way of measuring time then was exactly to the letter in the same incruments of time as what the Hebrew calender is measured today,  beings he is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginner and finisher, the calanders of the ages ultimately won't matter outside of measured time, the fullness of time is going to be met with or without calenders in the finish anyway. 


Peace,
Fire Walker   

[AJ]

There are some folks who believe that Jesus was 24....not 12 when he was at the temple.


http://www.lo-ammi.org/forum/showthread.php?t=39

The following is a quote from them:



So Jesus was born before 4 BC and in AD 6. Is this a mistake? No, not necessarily, because in the way it was originally portrayed we are actually looking at two quite specific births.

Both gospels are correct. We are looking at Jesus' physical birth, and we are looking at Jesus' community birth. These were defined at the time as the first and second births, and they applied specifically to people of particular groups and certainly to dynastic heirs.

Second births for boys were performed by way of a ritual of rebirth. It was very physical: they were wrapped in swaddling clothes and born again from their mother's womb. It was a physical ceremony. Second births for boys took place at the age of twelve.

Therefore, we know that Jesus was twelve in AD 6. Unfortunately, the latter-day transcribers of Luke completely missed the significance of this, and it was their endeavour to somehow tie in this event about swaddling clothes and being born then, that led to this mention of the nonsense about the stable.

So if Jesus was twelve in AD 6, this means that he was born in 7 BC, which ties in perfectly well with the Matthew account that he was born during the latter reign of King Herod.

But we now discover what appears to be another anomaly, because Luke says later in the gospel that when Jesus was twelve years old, his parents, Mary and Joseph, took him to Jerusalem for the day. They then left the city to walk home for a full day's journey with their friends before they realised that Jesus was not in their party. They then returned to Jerusalem to find him at the temple, discussing his father's business with the doctors. Well, what sort of parents can wander for a whole day in the desert, without knowing their twelve-year-old son is not there?

The fact is that the whole point of the passage has been missed. There was a wealth of difference between a twelve-year-old son and a son in his twelfth year. When a son, on completing his initial twelve years-that is to say, when he was actually on his thirteenth birthday-was initiated into the community at the ceremony of his second birth, he was regarded as commencing his first year. It was the original root of the modern bar mitzvah.

His next initiation, the initiation of manhood in the community, took place in his ninth year, when he was twenty-one; the root of the age-twenty-one privilege. Various degrees followed, and the next major test was in his twelfth year (at the end of his twelfth year) at the age of twenty-four, on his twenty-fourth birthday. When Jesus remained at the temple in his twelfth year, he was actually twenty-four.

.

[WhiteWings]

The fact is that the whole point of the passage has been missed. There was a wealth of difference between a twelve-year-old son and a son in his twelfth year.

Gonna look into that part :Book: