Children in the New Testament World

Abstract

At the turn of the 20th century, Clarence Herbert Woolston penned the words to the now famous children’s song, “Jesus Loves the Little Children” (published in Gospel Message 1-2-3 Combined, edited by J. Lincoln Hall, Adam Geibel, and C. Austin Miles [Philadelphia: Hall-Mack Company, 1915], p. 355). Woolston’s song is reflective both of the American Sunday School movement of the 19th and 20th centuries and the growing trend in popular biblical studies to read Jesus as a friend of children. However, a few early monographs not excepting, children did not receive sustained attention in New Testament scholarship until the 21st century. This is distinct from studies and application of the metaphorical use of “children” and “child” as rhetorical or metaphorical images in New Testament texts, especially the Epistles, which is considered in a separate entry (“Child Metaphors in the New Testament,” forthcoming). With the advent of the interdisciplinary fields of childhood studies and child theology in the 1980s and 1990s, the stage was set to study more closely both Jesus’s relationship with children as portrayed in the New Testament texts and the child characters, Jesus included, therein. In terms of sheer demographics, children are estimated to have made up roughly two-thirds of ancient agrarian societies, such as the 1st-century Mediterranean. As such, when the feminist principle of reclaiming characters from the “shadows” of the text is employed, the imprint of children can be seen across the New Testament. This widespread presence of children in 1st-century Judea and Galilee has also been confirmed by social science and archaeological investigations. Moreover, such investigations have revealed that the character and nature of childhood, or more properly, childhoods in these contexts, was radically different than many of the 21st-century assumptions. Most notably, the assumptions that the Jesus movement was solely positive for children, or that such positivity was unique, have been called into question. To this end, the study of children in the New Testament seeks to bring to light both the presence and lives of child characters in these texts and the children among their original audiences while avoiding anachronistic and supercessionist assumptions. What has resulted is a more nuanced reading both of the experience and character of childhoods in the 1st-century world and, as a result, of the New Testament texts.