Why does Mark's Gospel not describe the childhood of Jesus?

Answer 1

A:It is likely that none of the gospels authors really knew anything about the birth and childhood of Jesus. Raymond E. Brown (An Introduction to the New Testament) says that Luke's infancy narrative is not only massively different from Matthew's, but also in details is virtually irreconcilable with it. Some believe the gospels to be inspired, but Fr. Brown says that inspiration does not guarantee historicity or reconcilability, otherwise God should have inspired the two evangelists to give us the same record. We should perhaps look at why the authors of Matthew and Luke did provide details of the childhood of Jesus, and why Matthew says that Jesus was taken from Bethlehem to Egypt and spent his early childhood in Egypt, while Luke says that Jesus was taken from Bethlehem to Jerusalem and then to Nazareth, where he spent his early childhood, travelling to Jerusalem each year for the Passover.

Scholars now realise that Mark's Gospel was the first gospel to be written and that the Gospels of Matthew and Luke were based in large part on that gospel. Mark was clearly circulating widely among the Christian communities in the last quarter of the first century, but it seems that many Christians wanted to know more about Jesus, especially about his birth and early childhood. The two authors, traditionally regarded as the apostles Matthew and Luke, wrote nativity stories that met that need. Each knew nothing about the other's gospel, and each wrote his own version of the birth and childhood of Jesus.

The then-anonymous author of Mark did not write an account of Jesus' childhood because he simply did not realise how important this would become.