Studies in Religion Sciences Religieuses 2012 Burke 388 400

Depictions of Children inthe Apocryphal InfancyGospels

Tony BurkeYork University, Toronto

Abstract: The apocryphal infancy gospels (such as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and theProtoevangelium of James) seem at first look to be ideal sources for the study of childrenand childhood in Early Christianity. They all feature depictions of Jesus as an infant and/ora child; some tell similar tales of other eminent Christian figures, such as Mary ofNazareth and John the Baptist. Few of these texts, however, can be considered “early”texts (i.e., 2nd–3rd centuries) and even those we can confidently date to this period areof limited value for the study of children. One text remains useful for this endeavor: theInfancy Gospel of Thomas. And in recent years, several scholars have looked seriously atthe gospel for what it can tell us about the experiences of children in antiquity. Yet, eventhis text must be approached with caution for it has more to say about how adults of thetime wanted children to be than what they truly were.

Resume : Les evangiles de l’enfance apocryphes (comme l’Evangile de l’enfance selonThomas et le Protevangile de Jacques) semblent a premiere vue comme des sourcesideales pour l’etude des enfants et l’enfance au debut du christianisme. Ils ont tous desrepresentations de Jesus comme un bebe et / ou un enfant, certains racontent deshistoires similaires des autres eminentes figures chretiennes, comme Marie de Nazarethet Jean le Baptiste. Peu de ces textes, cependant, peuvent etre consideres tot (parexemple, 2–3e siecles) et meme ceux que nous pouvons en toute confiance dater a cetteperiode sont d’une valeur limitee pour l’etude des enfants. Un texte reste utile pourcette tache : l’Evangile de l’enfance selon Thomas. Et ces dernieres annees, plusieurschercheurs se sont penches serieusement sur l’evangile pour ce qu’il peut nous dire ausujet des experiences des enfants dans l’antiquite. Pourtant, meme ce texte doit etre

Corresponding author / Adresse de correspondance :

Tony Burke, Humanities Dept., York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3

Email: [email protected]

Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses41(3) 388–400

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aborde avec prudence car il a plus a dire sur les attentes des adultes de l’epoque auxenfants que ce qu’ils etaient vraiment.

KeywordsChildren, Jesus, Infancy Gospel of Thomas, apocryphal/non-canonical gospels, biography

Mots clesLes enfants, Jesus, l’Evangile de l’enfance selon Thomas, les Evangiles apocryphes /Non-canoniques, biographie

The study of children and childhood in Christianity is a relatively new endeavor. It wasonly a little over a decade ago that the first major works appeared examining EarlyChristian families (Moxnes, 1997; Osiek and Balch, 1997), followed a few years laterby studies focusing entirely on children (Bunge, 2000; but note also Currie’s 1993 diss.).These naturally built on earlier work on the family in antiquity by classicists (includingRawson, 1986; Bradley, 1991; J.K. Evans, 1991; and Dixon, 1992) and scholars of Judaism(Cohen, 1993; Kraemer, 1989; and Perdue et al., 1997), but it has been left to scholars ofEarly Christianity to apply the methodology developed in these cognate areas to the textsand artifacts important to our field. To some extent we are still determining what sourcesare useful for this study and how best to use them. Indeed, the New Testament itself sayslittle about children, and what it does say is often in metaphor. We find ourselves at timesin a similar position to feminist biblical theologians, reading our subject into the silences ofour sources.

But outside the New Testament we find texts that feature children prominently. Thereexist numerous apocryphal texts created, at least in part, to fill in biographical informationabout Jesus and other NT figures absent in the gospel record. All the NT tells us aboutJesus’ early years is found in a handful of tales from the gospels of Matthew and Luke—including his birth (Matt 1:18–25; Luke 2:1–20), circumcision and presentation (Luke2:21–40), the flight to Egypt as an infant and his return to Nazareth (Matt 2:1–23), and thestory of the twelve-year-old Jesus amazing the doctors in the Temple (Luke 2:41–52).Nothing is said of the childhood of other NT figures, aside from the birth of John the Bap-tist (Luke 1:57–80). Various apocryphal texts, on the other hand, tell us about Mary’s birthand childhood, and offer new stories of Jesus and John the Baptist; we even have glimpsesof other characters—Judas, Thomas, the thieves at the cross—interacting with Jesus whenall are children. The Christian Apocrypha, then, present us with an embarrassment ofriches when it comes to stories of children, but the question remains as to how to use thesestories. Their protagonists are more superhuman than human; their activities more super-natural than natural; and the goals of the texts are to indicate these differences to the read-ers. What, then, can we expect to learn about real children and views of childhood inantiquity from such tales? Despite the claims of some recent studies of this material, inthe end all they reveal to us, at best, is what adults thought about children, particularlyhow they sought to portray their protagonists as transcending the negative qualities oftenassociated with children in antiquity.

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1. Tales of a Divine Childhood

The most commonly known stories of Jesus’ childhood, beyond the single story of Jesusin the Temple (Luke 2:41–52), are found in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (IGT). Sincethis is our earliest non-canonical “infancy gospel” (an unsuitable literary category but onethat has become standard), it has received more attention from scholars than other collec-tions of childhood tales. Nevertheless, these other collections contain some fascinating,and at times alarming, stories that could be drawn upon by scholars interested in depic-tions of children in Early Christianity.

First, however, more should be said about the childhood tales from IGT. Our only textthat is focused specifically on the childhood of Jesus (indeed of any figure from antiquity),IGT is difficult to work with as it comes in a number of different forms (for a survey of thevarious sources for IGT, see Burke, 2010: 127–177; or more briefly Chartrand-Burke,2008: 126–130). Thus it would be difficult for the investigator to understand what anEarly Christian would read or hear when encountering the text. It is important, then, torecover the original (or at least an early) form of IGT if we seek to use the text for under-standing Early Christian depictions of children. That said, the IGT tradition also providesinsights as to changing views of children (or perhaps only views of Jesus as a child)throughout over a millennium of transmission; and that too has scholarly value. The ver-sion of IGT most well-known to scholars is the nineteen-chapter form (named Greek A)made popular by the seminal edition of Constantin von Tischendorf (1876: 140–157).After a prologue attributing the text to Thomas, Greek A begins with the five-year-oldJesus at a ford of streams, separating the waters into pools and purifying them (ch. 2).He then takes clay from the pools and forms sparrows, which he animates. The son ofAnnas the scribe witnesses this miracle and accuses Jesus of violating the Sabbath; inresponse, Jesus curses the boy (ch. 3). He then kills another boy in the marketplace(ch. 4); for this he is reprimanded by Joseph and criticized by some villagers, who arestruck blind by Jesus (ch. 5). In the next story, Jesus encounters a teacher named Zac-chaeus who seeks to educate the boy; instead, Jesus teaches him the arcane qualities ofthe letter Alpha (ch. 6), and humbles the teacher (ch. 7). After restoring those he cursedto health (ch. 8), Jesus resurrects a boy who fell from a roof (ch. 9) and heals a man’s foot(ch. 10). Then, at six years of age, he miraculously carries water in his cloak to his mother(ch. 11), and sows a small amount of wheat which yields a great harvest (ch. 12). At theage of eight, he stretches a beam to help his father Joseph construct a bed (ch. 13). ThenJoseph takes him to another teacher who is cursed by Jesus for striking him on the head(ch. 14). A third teacher escapes harm by recognizing Jesus’ divinity (ch. 15). Jesus thensaves his brother James from a snake bite (ch. 16), and resurrects first a boy (ch. 17) andthen a fallen housebuilder (ch. 18). The text concludes with an expanded story of thetwelve-year-old Jesus in the Temple (ch. 19). Along with Greek A, Tischendorf also pub-lished a Latin version of the text (1876: 164–180), which includes a group of stories thattake place during Jesus’ sojourn in Egypt. In these tales Jesus makes a salted fish comealive (ch. 1) and, in an encounter with another teacher, utters a prophecy that comes true(ch. 2). This Latin IGT later was revealed to be a translation of another Greek recension,called Greek D (Delatte, 1927). A third recension, Greek B, essentially abbreviates GreekA, eliminating chapters 12 and 14–19 (Tischendorf, 1876: 158–163). The fourth Greek

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recension, Greek S, has been shown to be a witness to an earlier form of the text that did notcontain chapters 17 and 18, and placed chapter 10 between chapters 16 and 19 (all fourrecensions have been newly-edited in Burke, 2010; Greek S is also found in Aasgard,2009: 219–241).1 And finally, scholars have determined that the earliest form of IGT, whichlacked chapters 1, 10, 17 and 18, is reflected in a number of translations of the text into Syr-iac, Georgian, Ethiopic, and a second Latin version. All of this manuscript evidence makesIGT a challenging text to study. Anyone interested in doing so must look beyond Tischen-dorf’s Greek A text and take seriously the evidence of both Greek S and the earlytranslations.

Additional childhood stories weave in and out of the IGT manuscript tradition. OneGreek manuscript (Paris, A. F. gr. 239) features an episode of Jesus in a dyer’s shop, theEthiopic tradition includes a brief story of Jesus riding a sunbeam and a less miraculousaccount of Jesus helping his father with carpentry (from Greek A, ch. 13), and the versionof Greek A from which the Slavonic tradition was translated (traceable to ca. 10/11th cen-tury) contained a story of Jesus tearing down and rebuilding a pagan temple, and a tale ofJesus healing a man’s eye. Other manuscripts in the Slavonic tradition contain a few otherstories—one in which Jesus transforms mischievous children into swine, another adaptedfrom a Ukrainian popular legend where he encounters a blacksmith, and the aforemen-tioned stories of “Jesus and the Dyer” and “Jesus Rides a Sunbeam” (for a discussionof these tales, see Rosén, 1997: 44). And an Arabic translation of the Syriac tradition con-tains a story in which Jesus transforms his playmates into a variety of animals (Noja,1990, 1991).

Stories from IGT are also incorporated into secondary collections of infancy and child-hood traditions, often alongside additional tales of Jesus as a child. The Arabic InfancyGospel (Arab. Gos. Inf.), dating perhaps from the eighth or ninth century, includes severalof the stories noted above, including “Jesus Turns Children into Goats” (ch. 40) and“Jesus and the Dyer” (ch. 37), as well as a tale similar to IGT 13 in which Jesus helpsJoseph build a throne for a king (ch. 39), and a pair of stories in which Jesus first is madeking by some boys at play and then heals a boy bitten by a snake (chs 41–42; Englishtrans. in Cowper, 1874: 170–215).2 The gospel also contains a number of stories of heal-ings occasioned by touching the infant Jesus’ swaddling clothes, or the use of his bathwater. Many of these same infancy and childhood tales occur in what is likely the imme-diate ancestor to Arab. Gos. Inf.: the East Syriac Life of Mary (edition by Budge, 1899).Further tales of the infant Jesus in Egypt are contained in a late text of Arabic originknown as the Vision of Theophilus (Mingana, 1931). And the much-neglected ArmenianInfancy Gospel, believed to be a translation of a sixth-century Syriac original, contains afurther assortment of childhood tales, including many of those mentioned earlier (e.g.,“Jesus Rides a Sunbeam,” “Jesus and the Dyer,” and several episodes from IGT) along-side new stories of Jesus playing with, healing, and cursing those around him (text avail-able in Terian, 2008). In the West, IGT was incorporated into the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew (Ps.-Matt.), where the stories are placed after a few tales of the infant Jesusen route to, and in, Egypt (chs 18–24), and joined by three additional stories set in Pales-tine: an encounter, at eight years old, with some lions at the Jordan River (ch. 35) wherehe also parts the waters (ch. 36), and another story of the healing of a rich man in Caper-naum (ch. 40; English trans. in Cowper, 1874: 27–83). Numerous other stories,

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including “Jesus and the Sunbeam,” appear in the Ps.-Matt. manuscript tradition;unfortunately, few scholars have seen these medieval tales as they await full analysisand publication.

Several additional sources preserve isolated stories of Jesus as a boy. The young Jesusappears in a Life of John the Baptist from the fourth century. Here Jesus, at around sevenyears of age, and his mother Mary are miraculously whisked to the aid of John in the des-ert after the death of his mother Elizabeth. There they bury Elizabeth and stay seven daysto show John how to live in the desert (Mingana, 1927: 242–245). Hippolytus (Refutationof all Heresies 5.26.29–30) reports a story told by Justin the Gnostic, of the angel Baruchvisiting the twelve-year-old shepherd boy Jesus (excerpted in Cullmann, 1991: 454); andthe “Spirit” unites with a young Jesus in Pistis Sophia 61 (Cullmann, 1991: 455). Andlast, the History of Joseph the Carpenter (4/5th-century Egypt) contains a chapter inwhich the dying Joseph recalls some episodes from Jesus’ youth that are reminiscentof the stories encountered in IGT 5, 9, and 10 (ch. 17; trans. in Ehrman and Pleše,2011: 157–193, or Cowper, 1874: 99–127).

Scholars interested in stories of Jesus’ childhood certainly have plenty of material fromwhich to draw. They might look also at the childhood of Mary—found principally in theProtoevangelium of James (Prot. Jas.), but incorporated into Ps.-Matt., Arab. Gos. Inf.,and other texts described above—and of John the Baptist (in the aforementioned Lifeof John the Baptist). But the material is not without its challenges. One cannot workon these texts simply by drawing upon translations offered by the standard ChristianApocrypha collections; often these collections derive their texts from outdated editionsand their introductions poorly reflect advances in current scholarship. The interpretationof apocryphal literature must incorporate the results of ongoing text-critical studies if weare to understand these texts appropriately. This is particularly difficult when using themas sources for children and childhood in the Early Christian context, as there are few textsor tales that can be traced confidently to that time period.

2. Apocryphal Tales as Sources for Children in Early Christianity

Not so long ago, the apocryphal childhood stories, along with other texts of the ChristianApocrypha, were considered the ravings of heretics. They were often declared Gnosticand dismissed as irrelevant for the study of the social history of Early Christianity, forif Gnostics had such contempt for the world that they even refused to bear children, thenwhat could their bizarre, esoteric, and highly symbolic literature possibly tell us about thelives and experiences of real Christians? But cooler heads have prevailed more recently sothat not all apocryphal texts are labeled Gnostic—indeed, many are quite “orthodox” intheir Christology—and even previous scholarly caricatures of Gnostics are being ques-tioned. Apocryphal Christian texts, therefore, are now taken seriously as sources for EarlyChristianity. They are particularly important for the study of Early Christian children,because without them the pool of resources available to scholars is particularly shallow.Nevertheless, few of the apocryphal stories surveyed above are very useful for recon-structing the life of children in Early Christianity.

First, many of the stories were composed outside of our time period. Ideally, we wanttexts we can date from the first to the third centuries and, despite some scholars’ best




efforts to date some apocryphal texts to the first century (see particularly the workassociated with the “Bauer school,” especially Koester, 1990), very few truly can be datedthat early (for a recent response to such positions, see Craig Evans, 2006). It must be cau-tioned, however, that later texts can contain earlier traditions, but arguments for such posi-tions are notoriously speculative. Problematic too, is the fact that apocryphal texts aremore prey than NT texts to changes (both expansions and deletions) over the course oftheir transmission. Therefore, every argument we make about this literature dependsentirely on the ability of text critics to establish the “original form” (or at least an earlyform) of the text, and this may well be impossible to accomplish. It is also apparent thatthe childhood stories may derive from common folkloric tales composed for other figuresand transferred to Jesus. The goal of such transference is to show that Jesus is capable ofthe same feats as other illustrious figures who performed such feats in their youth or adult-hood; there is no attempt made in these cases to convey the nuances of life for children inantiquity, Christian or otherwise, but only to drop Jesus into a story that is governedentirely by stock literary motifs and stereotypical structures. Even other, non-divine chil-dren who appear in some of the stories are merely props for Jesus to display his mysteries.Another reason for the composition of these texts, such as the Life of John the Baptist, is toestablish or legitimate the locations of holy sites; so, we should take little from the Life’sportrayal of the young John, particularly since the tales of John’s childhood here areextraordinary (he lives alone in the desert, where he is provided for by angels and theghosts of his deceased parents) and tell us nothing about ordinary children. Similarly, thestories of Mary in Prot. Jas. are intended to show how special Mary was and ultimately tobolster doctrinal arguments for the Immaculate Conception and Mary’s perpetualvirginity.

That leaves us principally with one text: the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. IGT can befirmly dated to the second century (see Burke, 2010: 201–205), and text criticism on thetext in recent years has brought us closer than ever to its elusive “original” form (seeBurke, 2010; Voicu, 1998). And though IGT too seeks to portray Jesus as some kindof divine figure (its precise Christology is unclear), its stories contain a large amountof verisimilitude. Incidental details of children’s lives and experiences pepper these storiesin ways we do not see in other texts. For example, the townspeople’s efforts to tame theyoung wonderworker show us something of the social expectations placed on childrenand their parents. Indeed, the teacher Zacchaeus’ list of the reasons for educating theyoung Jesus tells us much about such expectations: “Come, give him over, brother, so thathe may be taught letters, and so that he may know all knowledge, learn to love those hisown age, honour old age, and revere elders, so that he may acquire a desire for children,also teaching them in return” (6:1; trans. Burke, 2010). We also see a number of snapshotsof the young Jesus doing things a normal child would do at his age: making birds out ofclay (2:2), playing on a roof (9:1), helping his mother fetch water from the well (ch. 11),and his father to plant seed (ch. 12) and make a bed (ch. 13).3

Of all the Christian Apocrypha’s tales of childhood, IGT appears to have the most util-ity for the study of Early Christian children. It is the earliest known collection of child-hood stories (indeed, it is one of the earliest non-canonical gospels), its original form(or something near to it) has been reconstructed from the available manuscriptwitnesses, and, most of all, it contains a level of verisimilitude that is absent from other

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childhood representations of Christian figures. Several scholars have come to recognizethis value in IGT and have taken it seriously as a source for understanding the lives ofchildren in antiquity.

3. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas and Childhood

Until fairly recently IGT was confused with the “Gospel of Thomas” associated withGnostics by early church writers. Only after the true Gospel of Thomas was discoveredin 1945 was IGT free to be examined more appropriately. But only a handful of scholarshave done so; most scholars either continue, without basis, to consider IGT Gnostic orsimply ignore the text completely as frivolous and unsophisticated. Those who havesought to place the text in its appropriate literary and socio-historical contexts have foundin it much that adds to our knowledge of children or at least attitudes toward children andchildhood in Early Christianity.

The bulk of the credit for this change in attitude towards IGT should go to RonaldHock. In his study of IGT and Prot. Jas. (Hock, 1995), he showed effectively that IGThas more literary sophistication than previous scholars had thought, particularly in its useof the h0qopoii/a, or “speech-in-character,” in chapter 7’s lament of Zacchaeus (Hock,1995: 94–95). Building on work by Thomas Wiedemann (1989) and Charles Talbert(1980), Hock also placed IGT in the literary genre of ancient biography. Such texts of thisgenre regularly fill in the details of the early lives of their protagonists using stories thatforeshadow their adult careers. On the proclivities of ancient biography, Hock wrote:

Although biographies of individuals, which were decisively shaped according to the pre-scriptions of rhetorical handbooks, dealt with ancestry, birth, childhood, and adulthood, theywere not about changes and development in their subjects’ fortunes and personalities, butabout their character, and that character was assumed to have been fixed from birth. (Hock,1995: 96)

This determination has relieved many scholars of the frustration of trying to characterizethe plot of IGT as a development in Jesus’ character from cursing to blessing, and directedthem toward looking for other guiding themes or Christological motives behind the text’scomposition.

My own work on IGT (Chartrand-Burke, 2001; revised as Burke, 2010; with summa-ries in Chartrand-Burke, 2008, and Burke, 2009) builds on Hock’s insights in an attemptto understand why Jesus is portrayed as such a miscreant in the text. If ancient biographiesdepict their protagonists as young versions of their adult counterparts, I reasoned that theauthor of IGT must think the adult Jesus was just as likely to curse as bless. Such a view ofthe powerful yet irascible holy man is common in antiquity, particularly in Jewish litera-ture (e.g., representations of Elijah and Elisha from 1 and 2 Kings; Moses in Artapanusfrg. 3; Honi the Circledrawer in Josephus, Ant. 14.22–24); Christian portrayals of sucha figure are plentiful in the canonical and apocryphal Acts (see the deaths of Ananias andSapphira in Acts 5:1–11; the blinding of Elymas in Acts 13:6–11; and cursing stories inthe Acts of Paul 4 and 5, Acts of Peter 2 and 32, Acts of Thomas 8 and 51, etc.; see further,Burke, 2010: 276–281). What, then, of the maturity displayed by the young Jesus in the




text? This is attributable to the pervasive tendency to portray children—whether heroes inbiographies, or “normal” children in epitaphs—as wise beyond their years; such a depic-tion is called the puer senex.4 For the most part, childhood was treated with disdain byancient writers. Children, like women, lacked the virtue of reason, which wasrequired to participate in the rational world of the Roman citizen. Childlike qualitiesthus were frowned upon: “they were ignorant, capricious, foolish, and quarrelsome.They spoke nonsense, lacked judgement, were physically frail, and easily frightened”(Burke, 2010: 248). Given such a negative valuation of childhood, it is no surprisethat children, or illustrious figures as children, are praised for or depicted as actinglike adults. The Jesus of IGT, therefore, is based on an ideal: the child who is nota child.

The prominence in IGT of the theme of teaching has caught the attention of some ofthose interested in the text. IGT features three encounters with schoolteachers (chs 6–8,14, and 15) and finishes with Luke’s story of Jesus with the doctors in the Temple (ch.19). Clearly, teaching is of central importance in this text. Recognizing this, Lucie Pau-lissen offered an in-depth analysis of the letter speculation section of chapter 6 (6:4) thatonce again illustrates that IGT has some literary sophistication. She sees the goal of thetext as to reveal progressively Jesus’ divine nature, and the teaching stories are instrumen-tal in this:

Les trois passages, qui abordent l’alpha et les lettres sous différents aspects, montrentégalement différentes facettes de Jésus. Le premier épisode traite de la ta/cij de Jésus,c’est-à-dire sa place, son rang hiérarchique, au sein de la Trinité et l’agencement des troisparties de celle-ci. Sa du/namij, est illustrée au ch. 14, lorsque l’enfant en fait usage pourmaudire le deuxième maître, et tout au long de la narration pour opérer des miracles. Enfin,le dernier épisode dévoile l’inspiration divine de l’enfant, sa capacité de voir au-delà du tracédes lettres et d’interpréter celles-ci. (Paulissen, 2003: 169)

Chris Frilingos also focuses on IGT’s interest in education. He sees IGT as an example of“thinking with children” (2009: 34 n. 28) as a way to demonstrate Early Christianity’suneasy relationship with classical education and culture (or paideia). The teaching stories,and indeed many of the other episodes in the text, associate knowledge with violence, inremembrance, perhaps, of the author’s and audience’s own experiences of corporal pun-ishment in the classroom (see similarly, Burke, 2010: 288).5 Jesus frustrates “conven-tional methods of teaching and discipline” (Frilingos, 2009: 42), returns the violence ofone teacher (ch. 14:2), and uses violence of his own to teach the townspeople of his divi-nity (e.g., the slaying of the boy in the marketplace in ch. 4). In the end, Jesus and theChristianity of IGT’s time are connected to the culture of the day (whether Greco-Roman or Jewish) but not subordinate to it: “‘Unruly’ and violent, the child Jesus fashionsnew knowledge that mimics tradition: he is almost but not quite a student of paideia,almost but not quite a student of the ‘law’” (2009: 52).

The reserve shown by Paulissen and Frilingos in seeing IGT’s young Jesus as a sym-bolic declaration of Christological or cultural identity is countered by Reidar Aasgaard’sbold argument that what we have in IGT is “Christianity’s first children’s story” (2009:213). Aasgaard has brought to the study of IGT a wider interest in children and childhood

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in Christianity (see Aasgaard, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008). In several chapters of hismonograph on IGT, The Childhood of Jesus: Decoding the Apocryphal Infancy Gospelof Thomas, he applies methodology from his earlier work to this text, looking at suchtopics as Jesus’ gender socialization (moving from boyhood in his mother’s social sphereto manhood in his father’s), IGT’s portrayal of Jesus not as an adult in the body of a boybut as “a fairly true-to-life portrait of a late antiquity child—with the physical and mentaltraits, and the doings and relationships typical of such a child” (2009: 101), and Jesus’interactions with parents and teachers as a reflection of class tensions (similar toFrilingos, he sees the activities of Jesus in the text as a reflection of a low- to middle-class “testing out of social and cultural boundaries,” 2009: 84). He also quite effectivelysketches out IGT’s narrative world: a rural, village world of moderate size populated withresidents of various ages (adults and children) and economic backgrounds (rich and poorand in-between) (2009: 68). Where Aasgaard perhaps goes too far in his assertions is inhis equating of this narrative, fictive world with the world of the author. “The worlddepicted in IGT,” he writes, “is neither that of the historical Jesus nor of some particulargroup of believers, but that of early Christian rural common people … In my view, theInfancy Gospel of Thomas is an unadorned, yet precious gem handed down to us fromthe heritage of the first rural Christians” (2009: 190–191). But Aasgaard’s most conten-tious argument is his claim that the text was written specifically for children, as “Chris-tianity’s first children’s story” (2009: 213). If so, this would make IGT particularlyimportant for the study of children in Early Christianity because it would give us a rareexample of children’s culture, albeit children’s culture as mediated through, and createdby, adults. Ultimately, however, this is a difficult argument to swallow. For one, we haveno evidence for texts written for children in antiquity. Aasgaard cites some examples ofadult texts that were read to children—Aesop’s fables, myths from Homer and Virgil, stor-ies from Genesis—and some references to fairy tales and rhymes that were told to chil-dren, but can adduce no text for which children were the “main target group” (2009:192) as he does with IGT. A second problem with his argument is that it strains credibilitythat a text in which the young protagonist maims or slays other children, disobeys his par-ents, and defies his teachers would be considered edifying subject matter for children byparents of that time. Aasgaard admits this point may be problematic, but counters that thecursing Jesus is objectionable only to “our modern taste” (2009: 213). Yet, the anachron-ism, it seems, is in assuming that parent–child interaction with books (including the mod-ern children’s book market) was the same in antiquity as it is in the best homes today.

4. Conclusions

Each of these five authors deserves some praise for choosing a difficult text, one usuallydismissed as frivolous and crude, and taking it seriously as a reflection of Early Christianthought. They should be applauded too for using the text to study children in antiquity—whether their focus is purely on literary representations of children or on the use of the textfor the entertainment of children. Nevertheless, scholars willing to use infancy gospels forthe study of children need to be cautious in the conclusions they draw from these texts.

All sources for children in antiquity are fraught with problems. Where children appearin art and literature it is rarely in depictions that can be considered reflections of typical




life experiences. Narratives are fanciful and the children who appear in them usually serveadult interests—either as props for the unfolding of the protagonist’s story or as a repre-sentation of an adult in the form of a child—and as such, are not truly children at all.Memoirs, which rarely include childhood anecdotes, tend to view their subject’s early lifenegatively and through the lens of adulthood. Legal texts occasionally mention children intheir rulings, but the texts uphold outdated institutions or prescribe ideals, and tend to dis-cuss extraordinary cases (see Kraemer, 1989: 65–66; Rawson, 1991: 25–27). Funeraryimages and inscriptions created specifically to commemorate children often praise theprematurely deceased for their adult-like qualities and represent them visually in adult-like ways (see further, Burke, 2010: 261–268). Christian sources fall prey also to the sameproblems; indeed, they may be more difficult to use given that they are composed not onlyby a male, adult elite, but also by a celibate, male adult elite with arguably even less of aninterest in children than their Jewish and Greco-Roman counterparts. As in feminist bib-lical interpretation, sources for children must be approached with a “hermeneutic ofsuspicion.”

As plentiful as the apocryphal childhood stories are, they tell us very little about realchildren in Early Christianity. Even those texts that we can confidently date to our timeperiod (IGT and Prot. Jas.) present their subjects in idealized ways—not as typical chil-dren but as children the way adults want them to be: mature, often serious, and wisebeyond their years. Or, perhaps better: as the type of child the authors expect their prota-gonist to have been, or assume they must have been, if their text is to compete againstother texts written in praise of their own heroes. At best, these texts show us somethingof children’s lives through the attempts of peripheral characters to have the youthful pro-tagonist conform to their society’s expectations for children—e.g., to be educated, obedi-ent to parents, respectful of elders, gentle to peers, etc. Only in juxtaposition to abnormalchildren and their behavior do we get a hint of what was considered normal.

Notes

1. The new editions in Burke (2010) are revised from my 2001 PhD dissertation (Chartrand-Burke,2001). The book also features an extensive overview of scholarship on IGT, a description of allthe gospel’s known sources (both Greek and non-Greek), and a discussion of views of childrenand childhood reflected in the text.

2. Cowper’s English translation of the gospel is based on the manuscript published by Henry Sikein 1697. This manuscript also incorporates much of IGT, though it is believed presently thatthese stories are a later addition to the text (see Genequand, 1997: 207–210).

3. There is a wealth of literature that traces the lives of children in antiquity—in both theGreco-Roman and Jewish contexts—examining such topics as family organization (e.g., the roleof the pater familias, rates of divorce and remarriage, the number of children and slaves in thehousehold), infant mortality and infanticide, wetnursing and childminding, play, discipline, edu-cation, apprenticeship, and a child’s responsibility to her/his parents in adulthood (see the exten-sive summary in Burke, 2010: 225–243). Children in Christian families would live in homes andcommunities variously blending the Jewish, Greco-Roman, and other regional experiences; butthey would have to deal particularly with marginalization and possible persecution due to thefamilies’ refusal to participate in state-sanctioned worship, and perhaps face limitations on theircareer mobility; nevertheless, they might see some benefit from the fictive kinship of their larger

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Christian “family” (see ibid., 243–247). IGT reflects our knowledge of childhood in antiquity inthe parents’ responsibility to educate (chs 6, 14, and 15), train (chs 11, 12, and 13), and discipline(ch. 5) their children, as well as the townspeople’s concerns about Jesus’ precocious behavior(see further, Burke, 2010: 284–288; and more extensively in Aasgaard, 2009: 53–102).

4. For a discussion of these representations see Burke (2010: 250–268). The sources includeextraordinary figures such as those represented in the biographies of statesmen (e.g., in the worksof Plutarch, Nepos, and the Scriptores Historiae Augustae), emperors (Alexander, Augustus),divine men (Apollonius, Pythagoras), philosophers (Plato, Demonax, Heraclitus), and a rangeof Jewish figures (Solomon, Daniel, Josephus)—all of whom are awarded childhood tales todemonstrate their maturity. But not to be ignored are depictions of ordinary children, representedin funerary art and inscriptions as the orator, cultic devotee, or soldier they would have been hadthey not died so young, or credited, as in the case of the deceased two-and-a-half-year-oldRoman boy Kritiès, with the intelligence of someone of gray wisdom (Burke, 2010: 265).

5. For more on children’s experience in the ancient classroom, see the summary of the literature inBurke (2010: 236–238).

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