The Disciples Were Teenagers (Here's 7 Reasons Why)

What if every painting, every stained glass window, and every Sunday school lesson got it wrong? You and I were taught that the 12 disciples were grown men with weathered faces and long beards in their 30s and 40s. But historical evidence and biblical text point somewhere entirely different. Today, we're gonna do a deep dive into Jewish tradition and the culture of Jesus' day to uncover seven reasons why I believe the disciples could have actually been teenagers the day Jesus said, come follow me, and why this should encourage us in our own walk with Christ regardless of our age and stage in life. Welcome back to Get Into the Word. My name is Robbie Gallaty. Today, we're gonna start with the one disciple we actually know a lot about. His name is Peter. We know Peter was married from Mark 1, verse 30, which mentions his mother-in-law. We also know Peter was the de facto spokesman for the group, self-appointed at times with a foot-shaped mouth like many of us, but a spokesman nonetheless. We also know that Peter had governance over his own boat and fishing enterprise, which tells us he wasn't a novice fisherman. He was an accomplished, established man who owned a trade enterprise. Put all of these pieces together,

and Peter looks like the oldest disciple in the group, which raises the obvious question. If Peter is the oldest, how old was everyone else? Now, I want you to follow me here. If you've never heard this for the first time, I remember when I did. It really caught me off guard, but I'm gonna give you seven reasons that I believe the rest of the 12 men were actually teenagers. Some scholars agree with this as well. They were young men when Jesus called them. Reason number one, the title Jesus called them by. Jesus had two Greek words that he used to describe his disciples. In Matthew chapter 10, verse 42, he calls them mikros, which is translated in English as little ones, and John 13, 33, he calls them technion, which is the English translation of little children. In both places, the word functions as a synonym for disciple, just a sidebar here. Nobody is referring to me as a little one or a little disciple in my 40s. The point is, this is not incidental. A rabbi calling his students little ones or little children is choosing language that fits young men, not seasoned adults twice his own age. Reason number two, training. Here's where the Jewish educational system matters.

So let me take you back 2,000 years. The Mishnah Tractate of Vote chapter five lays out the ancient pedagogical ladder or the ancient ladder for rising up as a young Jewish boy. Scripture study begins at the ripe age of five. Mishnah study begins at 10 years old. At 13, a boy takes on the Torah's commandments. We know this as a bar mitzvah today, and he is basically taking responsibility for the law himself. At 15, if and only if a rabbi chooses to keep tutoring him, he continues informal rabbinical training. At the age of 18, he is supposed to be married, and at the age of 30, get this, he was qualified to teach others formally. For the overwhelming majority of Jewish boys, formal education ended at the age of 15. Then you went to work for the family, usually taking on what the dad did. Only a small, get this, elite few were invited to keep studying under a rabbi all the way to the age of 30. Here's the implication. The disciples were already working men when Jesus found them. Some were fishermen, tax collectors. That tells us they have already been passed over for advanced rabbinical training. They didn't make the cut for the elite track or the team,

which means they were put on the normal track, the one that ended at the age of 15. Now, those two, I realize, are not convincing. The next few will, I promise. Reason number three, traveling. A teenager is far more likely to drop everything and chase continuing education to follow a man who is penniless, broke, and anonymous at 30 years old, leaving an established trade in your 30s to wander around the countryside with a rabbi who would have been culturally unknown was scandalous. Most young Jewish men, get this, who did pursue a rabbi started to travel at the early age of 15 or 16. That was when formal schooling would have ended for everyone else. We see this in the disciples' own awareness of what they gave up. After a hard teaching, if you remember, in Mark chapter 10, verse 28, Peter says to the Lord, Jesus, look, we have left everything and followed you. Jesus answers in verses 29 through 31, that no one who has left their home or their brothers, their sisters, mother, father, children, fields, profession, for his sake and the gospel, will fail to receive back to them a hundred times over with persecutions in this age and the age to come. That's not the language of men with grown families and children and marriages with established homes. That's the language of men who left behind very little

because they didn't have much built yet. Reason number four, marital status in the Jewish community. And this one's the most convincing. Marriage was customary and it was arranged by the parents for the child at the age of 18, if you were a boy. Bachelorhood past that age was frowned upon. It wasn't normal and it wasn't respectable. Out of the 12 disciples, only one disciple explicitly identified himself as being married. It was Peter, Matthew chapter 8, 14 through 15. We see it there. If the other 11 were unmarried adult men in their 20s or 30s, that would be a glaring, coming close, cultural aberration. And the Pharisees, the Sadducees and the scribes were already building a list of attacks against Jesus and his followers. They would have just hopped on the train. An unmarried bachelor in his late 20s following an itinerant rabbi would have been exactly the kind of ammunition they would have used to critique and attack Jesus. We don't see any accusation anywhere on this topic. The simplest explanation is that the rest of the 12 outside of Peter were still too young to be married. Reason number five is my favorite one, the temple tax. Exodus 30, 13 through 14 requires the temple tax every year at Passover from every male who is 20 years old and up.

In the Gospels, we only have one record of two men paying that tax, Peter and Jesus. In Matthew 17, 27, Jesus instructs Peter, when they're asked, does your teacher pay taxes? He says, Peter, go to the sea, cast a hook. Take the first fish that comes out. And when you open its mouth, you'll find a shekel. Take that shekel and give it to them for taxes for you, me, and the rest of the disciples. Is that what he says? No, he doesn't say that. He says, give the tax for you and for me. Notice what's missing. There's no mention of the tax being paid for the other 11. The most reasonable explanation is that they were all underage and exempt from taxes. So we've got the title Jesus used for them, the educational system that they came out of, the travel patterns of young rabbinical students, the marital status of the men, and then finally, the temple tax up to this point. That's five reasons, but there are two more, and these come from outside of Scripture. You learn these from church history and really the disciples' own behavior that is recorded in the Gospels. Reason number six, longevity. Early church tradition tells us that these men had remarkably long ministries after Jesus' death and resurrection.

Combine that with the dating of John and Paul or even Peter's letters, and you realize that John and Peter, for example, they were continuing to minister decades after the resurrection. And you get men who were still alive and still writing well into old age, which was an anomaly back then. That fits far better with disciples who started as young men and who were not already established and grew up older as they aged. Men who started as teenagers. Reason number seven is the most comical, and that is immaturity. There's the behavior of the disciples that we have to consider. The disciples were constantly, remember the Gospels, they were constantly arguing over who's the greatest. They lived three years with Judas Iscariot and never one time recognized that he was a thief, a betrayer, and working for Satan. He was a pawn of Satan. They repeatedly failed to grasp deep theological truths. Jesus explained them over and over and over. They panicked in fear, not once but twice, during storms on the Sea of Galilee, a body of water that many of them have fished their whole life. Not to mention, and in Matthew 20, 20, it's not James or John who approached Jesus

about the seeding arrangement. at the coming kingdom's arrival, it's their mother. Now, you and I both know, grown men don't need their mamas to negotiate their career on their behalf. So if you add all of these things up and the pattern that they portray, it fits that these were young men. It's more natural to accept this than to say they were seasoned, mature adults. Now, why is this important? Now, here's where I need to be honest with you. We cannot say definitively that these boys were young men. We can't say all the disciples were teenagers. I remember when I ran this by a group of New Testament scholars, the consensus response was, yes, they were young men, but they weren't adolescents. Now, you gotta understand, part of the confusion in our modern definition of adolescence, which actually didn't exist back then, is different than what it meant back then to today. David Black, who is a New Testament professor at Southeastern Seminary, addresses this concept in his book called The Myth of Adolescence. Here's what he said. In the Jewish culture, a boy became a man at 13 at his bar mitzvah. Bar means son of, like Bartimaeus, son of Timaeus,

and mitzvah or mitzvahot means the commandments or commandment. At that point in the boy's life, he assumed a responsibility for keeping God's commandments himself. The boy entered the process of maturity. That's why Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13, 11, when I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, though, I put aside childish things. There was no extended adolescence buffering childhood from adulthood the way we think of it today. So why does any of this matter? Why is this even being an issue to discuss today? Because the greatest disservice we have done to the apostles across 2,000 years of church history is to make them more than they are. We drown them with glamorization. We memorialize them, we idolize them. Now, don't misunderstand me. These men deserve respect, even reverence, for their faithfulness to God. But hear me, they were no different than you and me. They were ordinary, hardworking men who answered an invitation from a Galilean rabbi that ended up with them changing the entire world. And the only thing special about them was the one who called them and the spirit who lived within them.

Friends, remember this. Jesus bypassed all of the theological institutions of Jerusalem to choose those 12. He bypassed the wealthy cities of Jericho and Sidon. He bypassed the intellectual credentials of the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the scribes. And he went and called 12 ordinary men, quite possibly young men, quite possibly teenagers, to follow him. And he's still extending the same invitation to us today, to ordinary, average men and women like you and me. It's worth considering. Some of the ripest candidates for discipleship aren't the polished and the credentialed. They aren't the intellectual and the scholars. They're the young, the moldable, the shapeable, the teachable, the available ones, the ones with a whole future of disciple-making still ahead of them. I hope this video encouraged you. If you know someone who would benefit from the teaching, go ahead and share it with them. Like and subscribe to the channel. Oh, by the way, hit the hype button because it puts the video out to others so they may see it. It really helps us in the channel. And until next time, get into the word until the word gets into you.