Who are my brothers and mother? Notes

---

z1.  Implicit here is the understanding that Jesus had reached the age at which he could make some decisions as a man without first consulting his earthly father or others. This age threshold evidently coincided with the onset of puberty, and may not have been a fixed at a particular number.
According to Jews for Jesus,

The bar/bat mitzvah is not found in the Bible. Bar mitzvah is of medieval origin, though the term itself is found in the Talmud, while bat mitzvah did not exist until the 20th century...
The bar mitzvah ... takes place at thirteen years of age, and the only mention of someone of that age in the Tanakh [Old Testament] is in Genesis 17:25:

And Ishmael his [Abraham’s] son was thirteen years old when he was circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin.

The web article continues,

The fact that the age of twelve is specifically noted may suggest that it was a transition age even in the first-century, though any evidence comes from the later period of the Talmud. At least, twelve could be considered an age when a young man evidenced wisdom and piety. Josephus (Antiquities X.4.1) says of King Amon:

And when he was twelve years old, he gave demonstrations of his religious and righteous behavior; for he brought the people to a sober way of living, and exhorted them to leave off the opinion they had of their idols, because they were not gods, but to worship their own God. And by repeating on the actions of his progenitors, he prudently corrected what they did wrong, like a very elderly man, and like one abundantly able to understand what was fit to be done …

Josephus likewise speaks of Samuel (Antiquities V.10.4):

Now when Samuel was twelve years old, he began to prophesy: and once when he was asleep, God called to him by his name …

R.E. Brown, in his The Birth of the Messiah, writes:

The general talmudic principle is that a child reaches manhood at the thirteenth birthday. Yet it was recognized that a child could understand the significance of the commandments and be bound by them before that, e.g., the age of making vows was sometimes set at twelve... The age of discrimination was thought to be between twelve and thirteen... We do not know whether in Jesus' time such later talmudic ideas were already applicable; but a fortiori the much later custom of the Bar Mitzvah was not. We do not know whether at age twelve Jesus would have been obliged to go to Jerusalem, and nothing in the story indicates that Luke thought of an obligation. It is an example of Jesus' exemplifying "Temple piety."