Depictions of Children in

the Apocryphal Infancy

Gospels

Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses

41(3) 388400
The Author(s) / Le(s) auteur(s), 2012
Reprints and permission/
Reproduction et permission:
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DOI: 10.1177/0008429812441338
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Tony Burke
York University, Toronto

Abstract: The apocryphal infancy gospels (such as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the
Protoevangelium of James) seem at first look to be ideal sources for the study of children
and childhood in Early Christianity. They all feature depictions of Jesus as an infant and/or
a child; some tell similar tales of other eminent Christian figures, such as Mary of
Nazareth and John the Baptist. Few of these texts, however, can be considered early
texts (i.e., 2nd3rd centuries) and even those we can confidently date to this period are
of limited value for the study of children. One text remains useful for this endeavor: the
Infancy Gospel of Thomas. And in recent years, several scholars have looked seriously at
the gospel for what it can tell us about the experiences of children in antiquity. Yet, even
this text must be approached with caution for it has more to say about how adults of the
time wanted children to be than what they truly were.
Resume : Les evangiles de lenfance apocryphes (comme lEvangile de lenfance selon
Thomas et le Protevangile de Jacques) semblent a` premie`re vue comme des sources
ideales pour letude des enfants et lenfance au debut du christianisme. Ils ont tous des
representations de Jesus comme un bebe et / ou un enfant, certains racontent des
histoires similaires des autres eminentes figures chretiennes, comme Marie de Nazareth
et Jean le Baptiste. Peu de ces textes, cependant, peuvent etre consideres tot (par
exemple, 23e sie`cles) et meme ceux que nous pouvons en toute confiance dater a` cette
periode sont dune valeur limitee pour letude des enfants. Un texte reste utile pour
cette tache : lEvangile de lenfance selon Thomas. Et ces dernie`res annees, plusieurs
chercheurs se sont penches serieusement sur levangile pour ce quil peut nous dire au
sujet des experiences des enfants dans lantiquite. 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: tburke@yorku.ca

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aborde avec prudence car il a plus a` dire sur les attentes des adultes de lepoque aux
enfants que ce quils etaient vraiment.
Keywords
Children, Jesus, Infancy Gospel of Thomas, apocryphal/non-canonical gospels, biography
Mots cles
Les enfants, Jesus, lEvangile de lenfance selon Thomas, les Evangiles apocryphes /
Non-canoniques, biographie

The study of children and childhood in Christianity is a relatively new endeavor. It was
only a little over a decade ago that the first major works appeared examining Early
Christian families (Moxnes, 1997; Osiek and Balch, 1997), followed a few years later
by studies focusing entirely on children (Bunge, 2000; but note also Curries 1993 diss.).
These naturally built on earlier work on the family in antiquity by classicists (including
Rawson, 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 of
Early Christianity to apply the methodology developed in these cognate areas to the texts
and artifacts important to our field. To some extent we are still determining what sources
are useful for this study and how best to use them. Indeed, the New Testament itself says
little about children, and what it does say is often in metaphor. We find ourselves at times
in a similar position to feminist biblical theologians, reading our subject into the silences of
our sources.
But outside the New Testament we find texts that feature children prominently. There
exist numerous apocryphal texts created, at least in part, to fill in biographical information
about Jesus and other NT figures absent in the gospel record. All the NT tells us about
Jesus early years is found in a handful of tales from the gospels of Matthew and Luke
including his birth (Matt 1:1825; Luke 2:120), circumcision and presentation (Luke
2:2140), the flight to Egypt as an infant and his return to Nazareth (Matt 2:123), and the
story of the twelve-year-old Jesus amazing the doctors in the Temple (Luke 2:4152).
Nothing is said of the childhood of other NT figures, aside from the birth of John the Baptist (Luke 1:5780). Various apocryphal texts, on the other hand, tell us about Marys birth
and childhood, and offer new stories of Jesus and John the Baptist; we even have glimpses
of other charactersJudas, Thomas, the thieves at the crossinteracting with Jesus when
all are children. The Christian Apocrypha, then, present us with an embarrassment of
riches when it comes to stories of children, but the question remains as to how to use these
stories. Their protagonists are more superhuman than human; their activities more supernatural than natural; and the goals of the texts are to indicate these differences to the readers. What, then, can we expect to learn about real children and views of childhood in
antiquity from such tales? Despite the claims of some recent studies of this material, in
the end all they reveal to us, at best, is what adults thought about children, particularly
how they sought to portray their protagonists as transcending the negative qualities often
associated 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 Jesus
in the Temple (Luke 2:4152), are found in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (IGT). Since
this is our earliest non-canonical infancy gospel (an unsuitable literary category but one
that has become standard), it has received more attention from scholars than other collections of childhood tales. Nevertheless, these other collections contain some fascinating,
and at times alarming, stories that could be drawn upon by scholars interested in depictions of children in Early Christianity.
First, however, more should be said about the childhood tales from IGT. Our only text
that 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 the
various sources for IGT, see Burke, 2010: 127177; or more briefly Chartrand-Burke,
2008: 126130). Thus it would be difficult for the investigator to understand what an
Early Christian would read or hear when encountering the text. It is important, then, to
recover the original (or at least an early) form of IGT if we seek to use the text for understanding Early Christian depictions of children. That said, the IGT tradition also provides
insights 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 version 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: 140157).
After a prologue attributing the text to Thomas, Greek A begins with the five-year-old
Jesus 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 of
Annas the scribe witnesses this miracle and accuses Jesus of violating the Sabbath; in
response, 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 are
struck blind by Jesus (ch. 5). In the next story, Jesus encounters a teacher named Zacchaeus who seeks to educate the boy; instead, Jesus teaches him the arcane qualities of
the letter Alpha (ch. 6), and humbles the teacher (ch. 7). After restoring those he cursed
to health (ch. 8), Jesus resurrects a boy who fell from a roof (ch. 9) and heals a mans 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 the
age of eight, he stretches a beam to help his father Joseph construct a bed (ch. 13). Then
Joseph 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 then
saves his brother James from a snake bite (ch. 16), and resurrects first a boy (ch. 17) and
then a fallen housebuilder (ch. 18). The text concludes with an expanded story of the
twelve-year-old Jesus in the Temple (ch. 19). Along with Greek A, Tischendorf also published a Latin version of the text (1876: 164180), which includes a group of stories that
take place during Jesus sojourn in Egypt. In these tales Jesus makes a salted fish come
alive (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 Greek
A, eliminating chapters 12 and 1419 (Tischendorf, 1876: 158163). 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 not
contain chapters 17 and 18, and placed chapter 10 between chapters 16 and 19 (all four
recensions have been newly-edited in Burke, 2010; Greek S is also found in Aasgard,
2009: 219241).1 And finally, scholars have determined that the earliest form of IGT, which
lacked chapters 1, 10, 17 and 18, is reflected in a number of translations of the text into Syriac, Georgian, Ethiopic, and a second Latin version. All of this manuscript evidence makes
IGT a challenging text to study. Anyone interested in doing so must look beyond Tischendorfs Greek A text and take seriously the evidence of both Greek S and the early
translations.
Additional childhood stories weave in and out of the IGT manuscript tradition. One
Greek manuscript (Paris, A. F. gr. 239) features an episode of Jesus in a dyers shop, the
Ethiopic tradition includes a brief story of Jesus riding a sunbeam and a less miraculous
account of Jesus helping his father with carpentry (from Greek A, ch. 13), and the version
of Greek A from which the Slavonic tradition was translated (traceable to ca. 10/11th century) contained a story of Jesus tearing down and rebuilding a pagan temple, and a tale of
Jesus healing a mans eye. Other manuscripts in the Slavonic tradition contain a few other
storiesone in which Jesus transforms mischievous children into swine, another adapted
from a Ukrainian popular legend where he encounters a blacksmith, and the aforementioned stories of Jesus and the Dyer and Jesus Rides a Sunbeam (for a discussion
of these tales, see Rosn, 1997: 44). And an Arabic translation of the Syriac tradition contains 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 childhood traditions, often alongside additional tales of Jesus as a child. The Arabic Infancy
Gospel (Arab. Gos. Inf.), dating perhaps from the eighth or ninth century, includes several
of 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 helps
Joseph build a throne for a king (ch. 39), and a pair of stories in which Jesus first is made
king by some boys at play and then heals a boy bitten by a snake (chs 4142; English
trans. in Cowper, 1874: 170215).2 The gospel also contains a number of stories of healings occasioned by touching the infant Jesus swaddling clothes, or the use of his bath
water. Many of these same infancy and childhood tales occur in what is likely the immediate 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 origin
known as the Vision of Theophilus (Mingana, 1931). And the much-neglected Armenian
Infancy Gospel, believed to be a translation of a sixth-century Syriac original, contains a
further 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) alongside new stories of Jesus playing with, healing, and cursing those around him (text available in Terian, 2008). In the West, IGT was incorporated into the Gospel of PseudoMatthew (Ps.-Matt.), where the stories are placed after a few tales of the infant Jesus
en route to, and in, Egypt (chs 1824), and joined by three additional stories set in Palestine: an encounter, at eight years old, with some lions at the Jordan River (ch. 35) where
he also parts the waters (ch. 36), and another story of the healing of a rich man in Capernaum (ch. 40; English trans. in Cowper, 1874: 2783). 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 analysis
and publication.
Several additional sources preserve isolated stories of Jesus as a boy. The young Jesus
appears in a Life of John the Baptist from the fourth century. Here Jesus, at around seven
years of age, and his mother Mary are miraculously whisked to the aid of John in the desert after the death of his mother Elizabeth. There they bury Elizabeth and stay seven days
to show John how to live in the desert (Mingana, 1927: 242245). Hippolytus (Refutation
of all Heresies 5.26.2930) reports a story told by Justin the Gnostic, of the angel Baruch
visiting the twelve-year-old shepherd boy Jesus (excerpted in Cullmann, 1991: 454); and
the Spirit unites with a young Jesus in Pistis Sophia 61 (Cullmann, 1991: 455). And
last, the History of Joseph the Carpenter (4/5th-century Egypt) contains a chapter in
which the dying Joseph recalls some episodes from Jesus youth that are reminiscent
of the stories encountered in IGT 5, 9, and 10 (ch. 17; trans. in Ehrman and Plee,
2011: 157193, or Cowper, 1874: 99127).
Scholars interested in stories of Jesus childhood certainly have plenty of material from
which to draw. They might look also at the childhood of Maryfound principally in the
Protoevangelium of James (Prot. Jas.), but incorporated into Ps.-Matt., Arab. Gos. Inf.,
and other texts described aboveand of John the Baptist (in the aforementioned Life
of John the Baptist). But the material is not without its challenges. One cannot work
on these texts simply by drawing upon translations offered by the standard Christian
Apocrypha collections; often these collections derive their texts from outdated editions
and their introductions poorly reflect advances in current scholarship. The interpretation
of apocryphal literature must incorporate the results of ongoing text-critical studies if we
are to understand these texts appropriately. This is particularly difficult when using them
as sources for children and childhood in the Early Christian context, as there are few texts
or 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 Christian
Apocrypha, were considered the ravings of heretics. They were often declared Gnostic
and dismissed as irrelevant for the study of the social history of Early Christianity, for
if Gnostics had such contempt for the world that they even refused to bear children, then
what could their bizarre, esoteric, and highly symbolic literature possibly tell us about the
lives and experiences of real Christians? But cooler heads have prevailed more recently so
that not all apocryphal texts are labeled Gnosticindeed, many are quite orthodox in
their Christologyand even previous scholarly caricatures of Gnostics are being questioned. Apocryphal Christian texts, therefore, are now taken seriously as sources for Early
Christianity. 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 reconstructing the life of children in Early Christianity.
First, many of the stories were composed outside of our time period. Ideally, we want
texts we can date from the first to the third centuries and, despite some scholars best

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efforts to date some apocryphal texts to the first century (see particularly the work
associated with the Bauer school, especially Koester, 1990), very few truly can be dated
that early (for a recent response to such positions, see Craig Evans, 2006). It must be cautioned, however, that later texts can contain earlier traditions, but arguments for such positions are notoriously speculative. Problematic too, is the fact that apocryphal texts are
more prey than NT texts to changes (both expansions and deletions) over the course of
their transmission. Therefore, every argument we make about this literature depends
entirely on the ability of text critics to establish the original form (or at least an early
form) of the text, and this may well be impossible to accomplish. It is also apparent that
the childhood stories may derive from common folkloric tales composed for other figures
and transferred to Jesus. The goal of such transference is to show that Jesus is capable of
the same feats as other illustrious figures who performed such feats in their youth or adulthood; there is no attempt made in these cases to convey the nuances of life for children in
antiquity, Christian or otherwise, but only to drop Jesus into a story that is governed
entirely by stock literary motifs and stereotypical structures. Even other, non-divine children 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 to
establish or legitimate the locations of holy sites; so, we should take little from the Lifes
portrayal of the young John, particularly since the tales of Johns childhood here are
extraordinary (he lives alone in the desert, where he is provided for by angels and the
ghosts of his deceased parents) and tell us nothing about ordinary children. Similarly, the
stories of Mary in Prot. Jas. are intended to show how special Mary was and ultimately to
bolster doctrinal arguments for the Immaculate Conception and Marys perpetual
virginity.
That leaves us principally with one text: the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. IGT can be
firmly dated to the second century (see Burke, 2010: 201205), and text criticism on the
text in recent years has brought us closer than ever to its elusive original form (see
Burke, 2010; Voicu, 1998). And though IGT too seeks to portray Jesus as some kind
of divine figure (its precise Christology is unclear), its stories contain a large amount
of verisimilitude. Incidental details of childrens lives and experiences pepper these stories
in ways we do not see in other texts. For example, the townspeoples efforts to tame the
young wonderworker show us something of the social expectations placed on children
and their parents. Indeed, the teacher Zacchaeus list of the reasons for educating the
young Jesus tells us much about such expectations: Come, give him over, brother, so that
he may be taught letters, and so that he may know all knowledge, learn to love those his
own 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 snapshots
of the young Jesus doing things a normal child would do at his age: making birds out of
clay (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 Apocryphas tales of childhood, IGT appears to have the most utility for the study of Early Christian children. It is the earliest known collection of childhood 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 manuscript
witnesses, 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 recognize

this value in IGT and have taken it seriously as a source for understanding the lives of
children in antiquity.

3. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas and Childhood

Until fairly recently IGT was confused with the Gospel of Thomas associated with
Gnostics by early church writers. Only after the true Gospel of Thomas was discovered
in 1945 was IGT free to be examined more appropriately. But only a handful of scholars
have done so; most scholars either continue, without basis, to consider IGT Gnostic or
simply ignore the text completely as frivolous and unsophisticated. Those who have
sought to place the text in its appropriate literary and socio-historical contexts have found
in it much that adds to our knowledge of children or at least attitudes toward children and
childhood in Early Christianity.
The bulk of the credit for this change in attitude towards IGT should go to Ronald
Hock. In his study of IGT and Prot. Jas. (Hock, 1995), he showed effectively that IGT
has more literary sophistication than previous scholars had thought, particularly in its use
of the h0qopoii/a, or speech-in-character, in chapter 7s lament of Zacchaeus (Hock,
1995: 9495). 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 this
genre regularly fill in the details of the early lives of their protagonists using stories that
foreshadow their adult careers. On the proclivities of ancient biography, Hock wrote:
Although biographies of individuals, which were decisively shaped according to the prescriptions of rhetorical handbooks, dealt with ancestry, birth, childhood, and adulthood, they
were not about changes and development in their subjects fortunes and personalities, but
about 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 characterize
the plot of IGT as a development in Jesus character from cursing to blessing, and directed
them toward looking for other guiding themes or Christological motives behind the texts
composition.
My own work on IGT (Chartrand-Burke, 2001; revised as Burke, 2010; with summaries in Chartrand-Burke, 2008, and Burke, 2009) builds on Hocks insights in an attempt
to understand why Jesus is portrayed as such a miscreant in the text. If ancient biographies
depict their protagonists as young versions of their adult counterparts, I reasoned that the
author of IGT must think the adult Jesus was just as likely to curse as bless. Such a view of
the powerful yet irascible holy man is common in antiquity, particularly in Jewish literature (e.g., representations of Elijah and Elisha from 1 and 2 Kings; Moses in Artapanus
frg. 3; Honi the Circledrawer in Josephus, Ant. 14.2224); Christian portrayals of such
a figure are plentiful in the canonical and apocryphal Acts (see the deaths of Ananias and
Sapphira in Acts 5:111; the blinding of Elymas in Acts 13:611; and cursing stories in
the Acts of Paul 4 and 5, Acts of Peter 2 and 32, Acts of Thomas 8 and 51, etc.; see further,
Burke, 2010: 276281). What, then, of the maturity displayed by the young Jesus in the

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text? This is attributable to the pervasive tendency to portray childrenwhether heroes in

biographies, or normal children in epitaphsas wise beyond their years; such a depiction is called the puer senex.4 For the most part, childhood was treated with disdain by
ancient writers. Children, like women, lacked the virtue of reason, which was
required to participate in the rational world of the Roman citizen. Childlike qualities
thus 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 surprise
that children, or illustrious figures as children, are praised for or depicted as acting
like adults. The Jesus of IGT, therefore, is based on an ideal: the child who is not
a child.
The prominence in IGT of the theme of teaching has caught the attention of some of
those interested in the text. IGT features three encounters with schoolteachers (chs 68,
14, and 15) and finishes with Lukes story of Jesus with the doctors in the Temple (ch.
19). Clearly, teaching is of central importance in this text. Recognizing this, Lucie Paulissen offered an in-depth analysis of the letter speculation section of chapter 6 (6:4) that
once again illustrates that IGT has some literary sophistication. She sees the goal of the
text as to reveal progressively Jesus divine nature, and the teaching stories are instrumental in this:
Les trois passages, qui abordent lalpha et les lettres sous diffrents aspects, montrent
galement diffrentes facettes de Jsus. Le premier pisode traite de la ta/cij de Jsus,
cest--dire sa place, son rang hirarchique, au sein de la Trinit et lagencement des trois
parties de celle-ci. Sa du/namij, est illustre au ch. 14, lorsque lenfant en fait usage pour
maudire le deuxime matre, et tout au long de la narration pour oprer des miracles. Enfin,
le dernier pisode dvoile linspiration divine de lenfant, sa capacit de voir au-del du trac
des lettres et dinterprter celles-ci. (Paulissen, 2003: 169)

Chris Frilingos also focuses on IGTs interest in education. He sees IGT as an example of
thinking with children (2009: 34 n. 28) as a way to demonstrate Early Christianitys
uneasy 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, in
remembrance, perhaps, of the authors and audiences own experiences of corporal punishment in the classroom (see similarly, Burke, 2010: 288).5 Jesus frustrates conventional methods of teaching and discipline (Frilingos, 2009: 42), returns the violence of
one teacher (ch. 14:2), and uses violence of his own to teach the townspeople of his divinity (e.g., the slaying of the boy in the marketplace in ch. 4). In the end, Jesus and the
Christianity of IGTs time are connected to the culture of the day (whether GrecoRoman or Jewish) but not subordinate to it: Unruly and violent, the child Jesus fashions
new 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 IGTs young Jesus as a symbolic declaration of Christological or cultural identity is countered by Reidar Aasgaards
bold argument that what we have in IGT is Christianitys first childrens 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 his
monograph on IGT, The Childhood of Jesus: Decoding the Apocryphal Infancy Gospel
of Thomas, he applies methodology from his earlier work to this text, looking at such
topics as Jesus gender socialization (moving from boyhood in his mothers social sphere
to manhood in his fathers), IGTs portrayal of Jesus not as an adult in the body of a boy
but as a fairly true-to-life portrait of a late antiquity childwith the physical and mental
traits, 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 to
Frilingos, he sees the activities of Jesus in the text as a reflection of a low- to middleclass testing out of social and cultural boundaries, 2009: 84). He also quite effectively
sketches out IGTs narrative world: a rural, village world of moderate size populated with
residents of various ages (adults and children) and economic backgrounds (rich and poor
and in-between) (2009: 68). Where Aasgaard perhaps goes too far in his assertions is in
his equating of this narrative, fictive world with the world of the author. The world
depicted in IGT, he writes, is neither that of the historical Jesus nor of some particular
group of believers, but that of early Christian rural common people In my view, the
Infancy Gospel of Thomas is an unadorned, yet precious gem handed down to us from
the heritage of the first rural Christians (2009: 190191). But Aasgaards most contentious argument is his claim that the text was written specifically for children, as Christianitys first childrens story (2009: 213). If so, this would make IGT particularly
important for the study of children in Early Christianity because it would give us a rare
example of childrens culture, albeit childrens culture as mediated through, and created
by, adults. Ultimately, however, this is a difficult argument to swallow. For one, we have
no evidence for texts written for children in antiquity. Aasgaard cites some examples of
adult texts that were read to childrenAesops fables, myths from Homer and Virgil, stories from Genesisand some references to fairy tales and rhymes that were told to children, 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 credibility
that a text in which the young protagonist maims or slays other children, disobeys his parents, and defies his teachers would be considered edifying subject matter for children by
parents of that time. Aasgaard admits this point may be problematic, but counters that the
cursing Jesus is objectionable only to our modern taste (2009: 213). Yet, the anachronism, it seems, is in assuming that parentchild interaction with books (including the modern childrens 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 usually
dismissed as frivolous and crude, and taking it seriously as a reflection of Early Christian
thought. 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 text
for the entertainment of children. Nevertheless, scholars willing to use infancy gospels for
the 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 appear
in art and literature it is rarely in depictions that can be considered reflections of typical

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life experiences. Narratives are fanciful and the children who appear in them usually serve
adult interestseither as props for the unfolding of the protagonists story or as a representation of an adult in the form of a childand as such, are not truly children at all.
Memoirs, which rarely include childhood anecdotes, tend to view their subjects early life
negatively and through the lens of adulthood. Legal texts occasionally mention children in
their rulings, but the texts uphold outdated institutions or prescribe ideals, and tend to discuss extraordinary cases (see Kraemer, 1989: 6566; Rawson, 1991: 2527). Funerary
images and inscriptions created specifically to commemorate children often praise the
prematurely deceased for their adult-like qualities and represent them visually in adultlike ways (see further, Burke, 2010: 261268). Christian sources fall prey also to the same
problems; indeed, they may be more difficult to use given that they are composed not only
by a male, adult elite, but also by a celibate, male adult elite with arguably even less of an
interest in children than their Jewish and Greco-Roman counterparts. As in feminist biblical interpretation, sources for children must be approached with a hermeneutic of
suspicion.
As plentiful as the apocryphal childhood stories are, they tell us very little about real
children in Early Christianity. Even those texts that we can confidently date to our time
period (IGT and Prot. Jas.) present their subjects in idealized waysnot as typical children but as children the way adults want them to be: mature, often serious, and wise
beyond their years. Or, perhaps better: as the type of child the authors expect their protagonist to have been, or assume they must have been, if their text is to compete against
other texts written in praise of their own heroes. At best, these texts show us something
of childrens lives through the attempts of peripheral characters to have the youthful protagonist conform to their societys expectations for childrene.g., to be educated, obedient to parents, respectful of elders, gentle to peers, etc. Only in juxtaposition to abnormal
children 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 all
the gospels known sources (both Greek and non-Greek), and a discussion of views of children
and childhood reflected in the text.
2. Cowpers English translation of the gospel is based on the manuscript published by Henry Sike
in 1697. This manuscript also incorporates much of IGT, though it is believed presently that
these stories are a later addition to the text (see Genequand, 1997: 207210).
3. There is a wealth of literature that traces the lives of children in antiquityin both the
Greco-Roman and Jewish contextsexamining such topics as family organization (e.g., the role
of the pater familias, rates of divorce and remarriage, the number of children and slaves in the
household), infant mortality and infanticide, wetnursing and childminding, play, discipline, education, apprenticeship, and a childs responsibility to her/his parents in adulthood (see the extensive summary in Burke, 2010: 225243). Children in Christian families would live in homes and
communities variously blending the Jewish, Greco-Roman, and other regional experiences; but
they would have to deal particularly with marginalization and possible persecution due to the
families refusal to participate in state-sanctioned worship, and perhaps face limitations on their
career mobility; nevertheless, they might see some benefit from the fictive kinship of their larger

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Christian family (see ibid., 243247). IGT reflects our knowledge of childhood in antiquity in
the 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 townspeoples concerns about Jesus precocious behavior
(see further, Burke, 2010: 284288; and more extensively in Aasgaard, 2009: 53102).
4. For a discussion of these representations see Burke (2010: 250268). The sources include
extraordinary figures such as those represented in the biographies of statesmen (e.g., in the works
of Plutarch, Nepos, and the Scriptores Historiae Augustae), emperors (Alexander, Augustus),
divine men (Apollonius, Pythagoras), philosophers (Plato, Demonax, Heraclitus), and a range
of Jewish figures (Solomon, Daniel, Josephus)all of whom are awarded childhood tales to
demonstrate their maturity. But not to be ignored are depictions of ordinary children, represented
in funerary art and inscriptions as the orator, cultic devotee, or soldier they would have been had
they not died so young, or credited, as in the case of the deceased two-and-a-half-year-old
Roman boy Kritis, with the intelligence of someone of gray wisdom (Burke, 2010: 265).
5. For more on childrens experience in the ancient classroom, see the summary of the literature in
Burke (2010: 236238).

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