From a young age, Jesus seemed to develop differently than what was commonly expected from society. While we don’t know much about Jesus’s childhood, at least not in the official biblical canon, we have one story of a young Jesus in the temple.[1] This pre-teen Jesus makes many decisions that are seen as odd and illogical by his parents, causing them to worry about him as many parents of autistic kids do before they grow to understand how we process information differently. A term common in the autistic community is “social imagination” that describes how autistic people process information from their own perspective and can find it difficult to simply guess how another person feels if that person doesn’t tell them. For Jesus, there was nothing incorrect about simply staying behind to chat with the scholars in the temple. It was obvious to Jesus that he would be in the temple so he assumed it would be obvious to his parents as well. Once he was in the temple, he engaged in scholarly debate and discussion far above his age level.
While autistic adults are often infantilized and seen as younger than they are, the truth is that autistic people simply don’t present the concept of age in the same way that allistic people do. For Jesus, this meant being seen as older as a child, being unusually advanced in religious conversation and feeling most at home in discussions with adults. However, as he grew up, he would proceed to tell people to be like children in order to enter the kingdom of God.[2] The way he processed age was seemingly backwards from how the society around him did. He was never more grown-up as a child or more childish as an adult but rather defied the traditional concept of age development that was common for his society. Just as many autistic kids can be seen as “old souls” but dismissed as childish when they become adults, Jesus flipped the age expectation on its head when teaching about the kingdom of heaven.
[1] Luke 2:41-52. [2]Matthew 18:1-5.
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