From Boy to Man in Antiquity: Jesus in the Apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas

Abstract

This article presents a survey of research on childhood in antiquity and describes briefly the position of children in late antiquity and early Christianity. Special attention is given to the relationship between childhood and gender, with a focus on boyhood. The article analyses the apocryphal infancy Gospel of Thomas, which tells the childhood story of Jesus from age five to twelve. This brief story, which consists of miracle stories and discourses, originated in Greek in the 2nd century CE and became widely popular. The article shows that its depiction of Jesus conforms to current ideas of gender, gender relations, and gender socialisation. A central claim in the article is that boys were not expected to show the same degree of self-restraint as were adult males, but that as children they were allowed to behave more emotionally and unpredictably. Rather than being literarily inferior or theologically aberrant, the infancy of Gospel of Thomas in its depiction of Jesus gives a lively and credible glimpse into the world and development of a late antiquity or early Christianity male child on his way from boyhood to male adult life. Keywords: boyhood, childhood, early Christianity, Jesus, theology, apocrypha, infancy, Infancy Gospel of Thomas, gender What was it like growing up as a boy almost two thousand years ago in the era of Greco-Roman antiquity and early Christianity? What were the basic living conditions for a young boy? What was his place and role in the family and society? What kind of prospects would he have had for his future? What ideas were associated with boyhood at that time? There are, of course, no easy answers to these questions, and we are faced with a number of challenges in trying to answer them. One problem is the limited number and fragmentary character of the sources. Another is that they usually reflect elite settings. It is also problematic to speak of one specific kind of childhood in antiquity, since children's lives would differ a great deal depending on the cultural and geographical setting. For example, growing up as a Jewish peasant boy in Palestine was quite different from a boy's life among the urban poor in Rome or in a fishermen's village of coastal Spain. It is nonetheless possible to say some fairly representative things about what it was like growing up as a boy in this period. In this article, I will survey central insights produced by research during the two last decades using the early Christian apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas as my basic text.1 Children and Childhood in Research on Antiquity During the last twenty years, research on ancient childhood has flourished. Aries (1960) has served as impetus for much of this research. His book painted a dark picture: Children in antiquity were badly treated and only valued for what they were to become. Childhood was not really recognised as a life stage with its own distinctive characteristics. As will be clear, subsequent research has distanced itself much from this view and succeeded in painting a far more nuanced picture, although Aries still has some sympathizers.2 Research of a more thorough kind than his commenced in the mid-1980s. Much of this dealt with the Roman world, with a focus on family life. Rawson (1986, 1991) includes chapters dealing especially with children. Central aspects of research were summarised by Dixon (1992). From the early 1990s the focus on children was gradually strengthened in studies by Bradley (1991), Sailer (1994), Rawson and Weaver (1994), and Eyben (1993). As early as 1989, Wiedemann had produced the first full monograph on children in early Rome, with books by Rawson (2003) and Laes (2006) being more recent scholarly studies. Less research has been done on the Greek era concerning children, although important contributions have been made by Golden (1990) and Neils and Oakley (2003). Studies of the Jewish milieu has been quite meagre, with a few exceptions, particularly Cohen (1993) on Jewish family life, Perdue (1997) and Tropper (2006). …