When Children Became People: The Birth of Childhood in Early

Christianity (review)
Alison G. Salvesen

The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Volume 1, Number

2, Spring 2008, pp. 287-291 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/hcy.0.0008

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hcy/summary/v001/1.2.salvesen.html

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Book Reviews

Lucy Catlin Bull, Photo from a book of her poems titled A Childs Poems from October to
October, 18701871 (Hartford, CT.: Lockwood and Brainard, 1872). Photo courtesy of
the American Antiquarian Society.

When Children Became People:

The Birth of Childhood in Early Christianity.
O. M. Bakke. Tr. Brian McNeil.
Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 2005. 348 pp. $18.00 paper.
R E V I E W E D B Y A L I S O N G . S A LV E S E N

his very readable study on the status of children in early Christian society

has been ably translated from the Norwegian original by Brian McNeil. The
introduction offers a survey and critique of the fairly limited scholarly literature on the subject. The topics covered by the various chapters include: what
the Church Fathers considered the theological status of children to be; attitudes
in Greco-Roman society towards sexual mores (including pederasty and the
prostitution of girls), abortion, and infanticide; the ideal education of Christian
children, namely curriculum, corporal punishment, and wider social influences;
the liturgical role of children in worship (including infant baptism and reception of the Eucharist); and the perceived tension between working out ones
own salvation and caring for offspring, with the latter issue especially evident
in some accounts of martyrdom or extreme asceticism.
Bakke has taken an avowedly broad approach. This is necessary in order
to reconstruct a holistic picture of the sorts of lives children led, or more accurately, were supposed to lead (286). Bakke recognizes that the texts available
on the subject often represent a discussion of the ideal and do not necessarily
reflect reality. Most of the sources employed are Latin or Greek, and a recurring
theme of the book is the extent to which Christian attitudes towards children
were shaped by or differed from those of Greco-Roman pagan culture. Many of
the differences are due to the other strong influence on early Christian culture,
namely Judaism and its Scriptures. While educational policies seem to have
been shaped heavily by Greco-Roman norms (i.e. there was at this period no
separate Christian schooling apart from the catechumenate or initiatory education), attitudes towards sexuality and the status of the child in the Christian
community from the womb onwards seem to have been governed by Jewish
ideas. It is thus largely from Judaism that the ban on the exposure of infants,
abortion, pederasty, and homosexuality entered Christianity, though Bakke also

Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth (v.1.2) 2008 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

290

BOOK REVIEWS

gives attention to these issues among the pagan philosophical schools. Bakkes
main pointthat this merging of Jewish morality with Greco-Roman education produced the Christian notion of childhood and thereby made children
peopleis no doubt provocative.
That argument would have been strengthened by attention to a wider range
of evidence. There are some references to Coptic and Syriac literature, but these
are rather cursory, reflecting the Western bias of the scholarly literature that
Bakke draws on. A study of eastern Christian sources on childhood should
be added to those desiderata for future research in the area suggested by the
author (286). Certainly in early Syriac writers (e.g. Ephrem, the Liber Graduum,
Narsai) there is a similar debate to that in Greek and Latin between proponents
of childhood perfection and innocence unsullied by sexual desire, and those
who believe that spiritual perfection can only be attained by the asceticism of
adults. The backdrop to the Syriac debate is the status of Eden, and whether it is
to be identified with Paradise. At one extreme, Eden is the divinely preordained
state for humankind from where the child Adam fell into sexual maturity and
sin. In this case, Christians must recover their innocence through celibacy; thus
the sexless state of children, parallel to that of angels, becomes the paradigm for
all believers. At the other end of the spectrum, Adam and Eve in Eden are not
thought of as children, and neither is Eden the ideal state to which Christians
need to return. In this latter view, the aim of the Christian life is spiritual
maturity based on a moral discernment associated not with childhood but with
adult rationality and self-control. In the light of this debate, Gregory of Nyssas
treatise on children who die young, discussed by Bakke on pp. 7377, could
usefully be compared with the later Syriac verse homily on the same subject by
Jacob of Serugh (d. 520 AD), which comes to rather different conclusions on the
theological status of the deceased infants.
As well as being a decent and accessible summary of existing scholarship
on the subject, the book is highly relevant to contemporary debates in faith
circles and wider cultures concerning a number of issues, from abortion and
homosexuality to the place of children within the Church. The fact that certain
topics (chiefly education) generated a spectrum of opinion even in Antiquity,
and often reflected contemporary social practices rather than an ideal, might
give modern participants on both sides of heated polemics pause for thought
when examining the issues today.
Bakke provides summaries at the end of each chapter, but since he sets out
the evidence and discussion so clearly, they are hardly necessary, though they
may enhance the books usefulness for students and lay readers. However, the
lack of a bibliography and index is most frustrating. Aside from this criticism,

Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

291

this is a welcome monograph on a subject that deserves more attention in both

the academy and the church.
Alison G. Salvesen
Oriental Institute, Oxford