As Alvene and John Costello recently pointed out in this column, the Bible tells us very little about Jesus’s life between his birth and the start of his ministry after the arrest of John the Baptist.

We don’t know how old he was when left behind by his parents – sounds like a teenager!

The only other clue I can find about his early life is in the scepticism he met later when he preached in his home town of Nazareth.

Prior to his baptism he seems to have been quite an ordinary man. (“Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary? Are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And are not all his sisters with us?” Matt:13, 55).

Whatever he later became, I believe that Jesus was a real man.

Not like some of the Greek and Nordic gods, who came down from Olympus or Valhalla dressed like men, pretending to be men, but a human being like us, with our weaknesses as well as our virtues.

After all, he came to be baptised by John, whose baptism was of “repentance for the forgiveness of sins”. Did he feel he needed this, in spite of John’s protestations?

This was not God pretending to be a man, but one of us, who shared our joys and sorrows. In his life and teaching he showed us what God was really like, and how God meant us to be. Our brother.

John Horne, Carver URC, Windermere