The earliest extant stories about Jesus’ childhood are found in a mid-second century text called the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (hereafter IGT).Footnote 1IGT has long puzzled scholars for its mixed depictions of Jesus’ boyhood antics. Amidst descriptions of Jesus’ philanthropic deeds (such as healing a man's ax wound, raising playmates from the dead, and healing his brother's viper bite) and his marvelous—though not particularly beneficent—feats (for example, bringing a clay pigeon to life), we find stories of an enfant terrible. The boy Jesus is impassioned, unruly, enraged. He curses and he kills. In the opening scene, for instance, Jesus has just diverted water from a stream in order to create a pool in which to play. When another boy interrupts Jesus’ fun by dispersing the pool with a willow branch, Jesus becomes enraged. He curses the boy and the boy immediately “withered” and died (IGT 3.3).Footnote 2 In the next scene, a child running past Jesus knocks into him. Jesus again becomes bitterly angry and curses the boy, “and at once he died” (IGT 4.1). After the parents of the child complain to Joseph, Jesus retaliates by striking them blind (IGT 5.1). Later in the narrative, when Jesus’ teacher becomes exasperated by the boy's arrogance and disobedience in the classroom, he strikes the boy on the head. Enraged by the physical abuse, Jesus curses his teacher, who immediately dies (IGT 13[14].2). In these scenes, Jesus appears to be a mercurial young boy whose anger is triggered by the slightest nuisance or insult and who seeks harsh vengeance on those who annoy or offend him.
Such seemingly unbecoming portrayals of the boy Jesus have caused a good deal of consternation among contemporary commentators. Since we know that the individual episodes of the text circulated independently before a redactor assembled them into the text we call IGT, scholars are left wondering why the second century compiler would have included these stories in his collection and why later Christians would have continued to copy and read them. Commentator Oscar Cullmann simply condemns the redactor as “lacking good taste, restraint and discretion.”Footnote 3 Most other scholars, though, argue that ancient readers must have viewed Jesus’ temper to be somehow understandable or justified. The stories that alarm readers with modern sensibilities, they reason, must have had a different effect within the ancient readerly context. Much of the scholarship on this text, therefore, seeks to explain how ancient readers would have interpreted these stories in a way that was consonant with their high estimation of Jesus.
In this essay, I argue instead that stories of a short-tempered and vengeful young Jesus would have been equally alarming and offensive to an ancient audience. By situating these stories within contemporaneous discussions of anger, I aim to demonstrate that Jesus’ behavior would have been characterized as self-indulgent, ignoble, unmanly, and a threat to the community. Moreover, given the rhetorical and apologetic contexts of the second century, I suggest that these stories plausibly originated from opponents of Christianity who wished to malign its central figure. Yet, I wish also to show how IGT's compiler was able to domesticate seemingly embarrassing portrayals of Jesus’ youth by incorporating them into his collection, providing new intertexts through which readers could interpret and understand Jesus’ behavior. Moreover, later editors continued to redact the scenes with the same domesticating goal in mind. Although ancient and modern readers might remain somewhat ambivalent about the young Jesus’ behavior in these scenes—as elements of the original stories continue to peek through—the editing process smoothed the edges enough so as to make Jesus’ behavior palatable for Christian readers.
I. Scholarly Attempts at Explaining Jesus’ Behavior
As noted above, scholars have persistently sought to identify ways that ancient readers would have made sense of the boy Jesus’ anger and volatility. In this section, I outline the most widely circulated theories. While some of these theories are plausible, I find most logically flawed. Moreover, as I show in subsequent sections, these theories do not address what I believe to be the most immediate associations an ancient reader would make when encountering stories of an enraged boy.
Several scholars maintain that the stories of IGT followed traditional literary depictions of child gods and heroes who possessed extraordinary power, wisdom, and talents at a young age. Jesus’ vivification of the clay sparrows, for instance, resembles the Egyptian high priest Neneferkaptah's act of enlivening a wax model of a boat.Footnote 4 Additionally, Jesus’ precociousness in IGT's schoolroom scenes is akin to the extraordinary intellect of Krishna and the Buddha at an early age.Footnote 5 Finally, Jesus’ childhood wonders have been compared with those of Heracles, who strangled snakes in his crib and killed his teacher who reprimanded him.Footnote 6 Just as Jesus’ remarkable talents are comparable to other child gods and heroes, so too are his abuses of power since these young wonderworkers also sometimes failed to judiciously employ their abilities.Footnote 7 Some scholars argue that, given ancient readers’ exposure to stories of other young troublemakers, they would have come to expect not only profound intelligence and power in the boy Jesus, but also the same impish behavior exhibited by other child deities and wonderworkers of the Mediterranean world.
Some have critiqued the above parallels as somewhat far afield from the myths and literature that would be most available to or appreciated by early Christian readers. Tony Burke has argued that more plausible exemplars on which Jesus’ behavior might have been modeled were the “irascible Holy Men” of Jewish tradition.Footnote 8 Burke writes:
Like Elijah and Elisha, IGT's Jesus purifies water, resuscitates the dead, and displays prophetic knowledge. And like the two prophets, he also curses those who would oppose him, and murders those who would simply annoy him. . . . The irascible qualities of the holy man's personality excited alarm in those around him, but the divine authority behind the saint's power to curse apparently was not questioned.Footnote 9
Burke concludes that while Jesus’ cursing certainly would have been startling to early Christian readers, those readers would have considered this perfectly appropriate behavior for one of God's prophets.
Other scholars, such as Walter Bauer and Stephen Gero, maintain that IGT's Jesus was not modeled after anyone other than Jesus himself. That is, Jesus’ childhood deeds found in IGT presaged stories of Jesus’ adult life.Footnote 10 For instance, the schoolroom scene in which the boy Jesus stuns the crowds with his ability to expound upon the Law (IGT 14[15].2) corresponds to an episode in the Gospel of Luke wherein Jesus likewise transfixes the crowd at the synagogue (Luke 4:16–22). Similarly, the resurrection story in IGT 17 foreshadows the resurrection of Jairus's daughter found in Mark 5:22–42 and Luke 8:41–56.Footnote 11 From this perspective, some suppose, the story of the “withered” playmate, when paired with the familiar story of the withered fig tree (Mark 11:12–14, 19–25; Matthew 21:18–22), becomes far less scandalous through association. Bauer and others argue that by inventing parallel scenes in Jesus’ youth, the authors intended to demonstrate that Jesus possessed his powers throughout his lifetime. Were this their central intent, the manner in which Jesus enacted his power would seem to matter little.Footnote 12
Most recently Reidar Aasgaard has proposed that the stories were directed primarily at children as “an important means of exerting social control.”Footnote 13 Once they heard the harsh punishments Jesus issued to the unruly and disobedient children in the narrative, Aasgaard argues, young readers would be inclined to behave properly. The text thus served to inculcate values “such as loyalty and obedience to parents and accommodation to honor codes.”Footnote 14 From Aasgaard's perspective, the disciplinary function of the stories offset the less than flattering depiction of the boy Jesus’ character.
While some scholars argue that stories of an angry and volatile young Jesus would not be troubling to ancient readers given the plethora of mischievous deities and heroes found in Greco-Roman and Jewish history, other scholars concede that these stories might have indeed been shocking, but that the shocking nature of the stories was an essential element of demonstrating Jesus’ comprehensive power or of keeping IGT's young audience in line. Although these are plausible theories, I am not convinced that they entirely capture the experience of early Christian readers. First, although precedent certainly existed for Greco-Roman deities and heroes to possess temperamental natures and to behave badly, early Christians were critical of these figures for these very reasons. Second-century Christian apologist Athenagoras, for instance, urged his pagan adversaries to stop criticizing Christianity long enough to examine their own beliefs and behaviors. He ridiculed pagans for submitting to deities who exhibit passions that are not fitting of “immortal, immoveable, and unalterable” divinity. Athenagoras concludes: “we must regard such assertions [about the gods] as nonsensical and ridiculous; for there is neither anger, nor desire and appetite . . . in gods.”Footnote 15 A little more than a century later, Christian apologist Arnobius of Sicca similarly condemns pagan gods who “boil with rage and are shaken by emotion . . . [proving that] they should not be thought to partake in divinity.”Footnote 16 The argument that the boy Jesus’ behavior is excusable given pagan precedent seems tenuous when we acknowledge that early Christians writing around the time of IGT's compilation found their emotional states and behavior unseemly and loathsome.
Second, while I agree that some of Jesus’ boyhood deeds in IGT could be paired with stories of Jesus’ adult deeds found in other early Christian gospels, the pairing alone is insufficient to indicate readers’ level of comfort with the coupled stories. To conclude that the story of the withered up child becomes less appalling through its association with the withered fig tree, one must first demonstrate that the fig tree story was unproblematic to readers. On the contrary, commentators regularly call the story “odd,” “startling,” and “difficult” because it is the only “negative” miracle in which Jesus curses rather than blesses and because “Jesus’ anger seems so much out of character [since elsewhere] he refuses to curse even his worst enemies.”Footnote 17 I will discuss this passage at greater length below, but for now it is enough to recognize that we cannot simply assume that the story was not troubling to ancient readers because it could be paired with another story that was included in a canonical gospel.
Moreover, I find scholars’ use of the pairings to be inconsistent. They argue that the IGT stories of the boy Jesus’ healings served to foreshadow similar healings in his adult life, but the stories of an irate and vengeful boy Jesus served to foreshadow merely the abstracted power of the adult Jesus, power that is here emptied of its corollary content. As such they unevenly apply the “predictive principle” of Jesus’ childhood deeds.Footnote 18 To argue that the cursing and killing scenes were merely illustrations of the divine child's omnipotence, readers must ignore the details, namely the manner in which Jesus exhibited power. As I discuss below, it is unreasonable to think that ancient readers would have overlooked the fact that Jesus’ power proceeded from irrational fits of anger and resulted in unjust and uneven retribution.
Finally, the above theories fail to account for the reactions to the boy Jesus’ behavior from characters within the narrative. Over and over again, characters in the narrative condemn Jesus for his petulance and for the severity of his retribution. The parents of the stricken children criticize Joseph for being unable to control his son and the community as a whole asks the Holy Family to move out of the village to restore peace and to preserve their well-being (IGT 3.3, 4.2). Even Joseph pleads with his son to control himself, asking: “Why do you say such things? Those people suffer and hate us” (IGT 5.1).Footnote 19 Although the reactions of characters within the story might not mirror the reactions of every ancient reader, they impel us to explore the possibility that Jesus’ rage and violent behavior may have been distressing to early Christian readers.
II. Reading IGT Alongside Contemporaneous Discussions of Anger
If we want to understand how ancient readers would have evaluated Jesus’ anger, cursing, and killing, it makes sense to read IGT alongside contemporaneous discussions of anger. We know of twenty-seven ancient texts that theorize anger or offer advice on how noble men ought to control their anger.Footnote 20 Sadly, only a handful of these treatises remain extant, but from the sheer number alone, we are led to believe that anger and anger management occupied the minds of Greeks and Romans across the Mediterranean. Moreover, from the treatises that survived, as well as from references to lost treatises, it is clear that there was near universal agreement that anger was an ignoble—and even dangerous—emotion that ought to be suppressed if not eradicated altogether. Only one writer, the fourth-century BCE philosopher Aristotle, regarded anger to be a useful emotion. He contended that it was anger that inspirited men in times of war and it was anger that spurred men to action when they witnessed a wrongdoing.Footnote 21 Aristotle's views, however, were not persuasive to the majority of those thinking and writing about anger in the first and second centuries CE, around the time IGT was composed.Footnote 22 Stoic philosopher Seneca snidely retorts that, by Aristotle's reasoning, drunkenness must also be considered a virtue since it, like anger, “makes men forward and bold and many are better swordsmen when they are drunk.”Footnote 23 All other writers of the period—philosophers, moralists, and physicians—agree with Seneca, disparaging anger as a sign of an individual's imperfection, lowliness, or illness.
Philosophers Seneca and Plutarch maintain that men's nobility and virtue are confirmed through their emotional states. Men who fly into a rage and who seek vengeance when slighted are no better than slaves because they are “captive” to their anger.Footnote 24 In fact, Seneca likens the contorted and deranged facial expressions of angry men to the branding slaves commonly received on their foreheads: both are bodily signs that point to men's respective captivities.Footnote 25 On the contrary, men who possess full control over their passions prove themselves not only to be truly free, but also to be superior to commoners.Footnote 26 These noble men do not become enraged because they do not perceive slights by lesser men to be injurious; to do so would be to accept that lesser men had power over him. Rather, “the distance which separates him from his inferiors is so great that no baneful force can extend its power all the way to him.”Footnote 27
Seneca, Plutarch, and second-century physician, Galen of Pergamum, further agree that anger is most abhorrent in men who act as judges and who dispense justice because it clouds their reason. (It is important to remember that both Galen and Seneca were advising men with great power: Galen was an advisor to several Roman Emperors and Seneca's treatise on anger was addressed to his brother, Novatus, a provincial governor.Footnote 28) Anger, they reason, hinders a man's ability to fittingly appraise a situation because offenses perceived “through a mist of rage appear greater than they are.”Footnote 29 Anger also limits a man's ability to arrive at a just course of action. When angry, a man's sole intent is to seek revenge rather than to reform.Footnote 30 He is thus capable of “terrible” and “ridiculous” behavior. Describing anger's assault on good judgment, Seneca writes,
Anger now rushes farther than it should, now halts sooner than it ought. For it indulges its own impulses, is capricious in judgment, refuses to listen to evidence, grants no room for intercession, maintains whatever position it has seized, and is never willing to surrender its judgment even if it is wrong. [On the contrary,] reason grants a hearing to both sides, then seeks to postpone action, in order that it may have time to sift out the truth. But anger is in a hurry. Reason wants its judgment to be just; anger wants its judgment to seem just.Footnote 31
Finally, they agreed, nowhere was the terrible effect of an angry judge felt more than when a man had power over life or death.Footnote 32
On the contrary, the calm man who administers justice without anger thinks rationally, acts prudently, and thus “is all the better able to work reform.”Footnote 33 Moreover, as Seneca points out, it is through mercy (clementia) that a man's nobility and power are made most evident. Merciful acts demonstrate his mastery over his passions: “In a position of unlimited power, this is in the truest sense self-control . . . not to be perverted by any low desire, or by hastiness of nature, or by . . . testing by experiment what license one may employ against fellow citizens, but rather to dull the edge of supreme power.”Footnote 34 Merciful acts also elucidate the scope of a man's power. The powerful man need not dole out cruel punishments to display his power because no one “doubts his ability to give it.”Footnote 35 Indeed, any man—powerful or powerless—can find opportunities to harm another. The unique power of a sovereign is not to take life, but rather to preserve life: “Life . . . is never granted except to an inferior. To save life is the peculiar privilege of exalted station, which is never more admired than when it demonstrates the same power as the gods.”Footnote 36
Although Romans did not believe that every crime or unjust act should be forgiven and that there were appropriate times to issue severe punishments,Footnote 37 clemency was perceived to be an important aspect of communal order and stability. In the words of Classicist Melissa Barden Dowling, clemency was “inherently a public attribute and not a private quality.”Footnote 38 When a powerful man violated the terms of clemency expected by a community and instead pronounced unreasonable judgments out of anger, he disrupted the delicate social contract that held the community together. Rather than having an ordering and “tranquilizing effect” over the community, his unfair, arbitrary, and unjust abuses of power became the source of unrest, disorder, and fear.Footnote 39 In fact, Historian Michael McCarthy has suggested that the wide-ranging consensus among philosophers and moralists that noble men in power ought to manage their anger was likely a social intervention at a time when political and military leaders were becoming increasingly violent “under the cover of human justice.”Footnote 40
From these discussions, we understand that displays of anger were perceived as commentaries on men's character and status, on noble men's ability to sensibly wield power, and on the proper balance of social hierarchies and communal order. While noble and virtuous men were framed as paragons of anger management, the lower orders of society—children, women, the infirm, barbarians, and naturally weak men—were upheld as counterexamples to the ideal.Footnote 41 References to the anger of children were common since, throughout the ancient Mediterranean, young people were understood to be “ignorant, capricious, foolish, and quarrelsome.”Footnote 42 Having not yet developed the ability to reason, they were presumed to be driven wholly by their passions and thus to be especially susceptible to anger.Footnote 43 In fact, the young were thought to be so quick-tempered that when they merely perceived themselves to be slighted—whether true or not—they become angry. And when angered, they eagerly sought to enact vengeance on whom- or whatever hurt them. Seneca provides a comical example of this typically childish behavior:
[When children] fall down, [they] want to pummel the earth . . . [they] often do not even know why they are angry—they are merely angry, without any reason and without being wronged, though not without an impression of being wronged and not without some desire of exacting punishment. And so they deceive themselves with imaginary blows.Footnote 44
Since they lack the experience and reason to properly assess the true nature and degree of an injury, their reactions do not correspond appropriately to the gravity of the offense. For instance, Seneca remarks that children “shed no more tears over lost parents than over lost nuts.”Footnote 45
Some degree of youthful impetuosity was allowed since it was presumed that children would grow tired of, and eventually despise, rash thinking and behavior when allowed to moderately indulge in it.Footnote 46 But it was the duty of parents, slaves, and teachers to wean children as quickly as possible from their childish ways so that, in time, they might gain control over the tides of their emotions and become reasoning and self-controlled citizens.Footnote 47 The worst fate of all would be never to outgrow temperament and behavior that was excusable only in one's youth.Footnote 48 Such behavior was regarded disgraceful—warranting the shameful moniker, νήπιε (“childish”)Footnote 49—but physicians like Galen considered it also to be a symptom of a more serious condition. After witnessing a man who was unable to get into his house “bite the key, kick the door, blaspheme, glare wildly like a madman, and all but foam at the mouth like a wild boar,” Galen concluded that anger was not only childish, but also an “illness of the body” and a “madness” of the soul.Footnote 50 Overall, our sources agree that anger was a passion exhibited by the lowly, the young, and the sick.
While there was wide consensus against anger among non-Christians, what do we find when we turn to Jewish and Christian sources? From references to God's anger and to the anger of Jewish patriarchs in the Hebrew Bible we might assume that anger—and even violent acts issuing from anger—were not problematic to Jews and Christians up to the first century.Footnote 51 In first-century Christian literature, we continue to find a few references to Jesus’ anger, but now we also find explicit admonitions against anger by Jesus (Matthew 5:21–22) and “Paul” (Ephesians 4:31), denoting perhaps a newfound ambivalence about anger that coincides with the proliferation of treatises against anger penned by non-Christian moralists.Footnote 52 From the second-century, references to anger in scripture became an embarrassment. As Michael McCarthy has convincingly shown in his analysis of patristic commentaries, early Christians began to be “deeply uneasy with [biblical] references to their God's wrath and used a range of strategies to minimize the potential harm, scandal, or misunderstanding that such biblical passages might engender.”Footnote 53 Some patristic writers claimed that depictions of God's anger were merely the result of the biblical authors’ anthropomorphisms and should not be taken literally, while others argued that God was only “faking” anger in order to scare straight his followers. Even when patristic authors allowed that God experienced anger, they redefined anger to be, for instance, God's abhorrence of evil and wrongdoing or God's punishment for immorality. They insisted that any mention of God's anger referred not to his emotional state since God was not liable to such base, human affections and passions.Footnote 54 As Christian commentators downplayed God's anger through their commentaries, early Christian scribes tended to excise or alter references to Jesus’ anger as they copied early Christian sources. (I will discuss this latter point in more detail below). In sum, we find early Christian opinions against anger coalescing with the tendencies of their non-Christian neighbors around or shortly after the first century CE.
Reading IGT with these trends in mind, we can gauge with more confidence how ancient readers would have assessed Jesus’ emotions and behavior. In the scenes depicting Jesus’ beneficence, the boy exhibits a laudable pairing of clemency and power. He demonstrates an extraordinary ability not only to preserve but to give life and his salvific acts create order and stability in the community. He acts like a noble sovereign and he does so at an unusually young age. It is abundantly clear that the originators of these stories held Jesus in high esteem and told tales of his childhood that reflected their esteem.
In other scenes, however, Jesus’ behavior would likely have been considered base and “childish.” Jesus is portrayed as an easily annoyed and short-tempered boy whose mischief upsets the proper order and well-being of the community. Let us take a closer look at a handful of these scenes.
When the child was five years old, after a rain, he was playing at the ford of a rushing stream. And he gathered the flowing waters into pools . . . taking a willow branch, [the son of Annas the High Priest] destroyed the pools and drained out the water which Jesus had gathered together. When the child Jesus saw what he had done, he became angry (γινόμενον ἠγανάκτησεν) and said to him, “Wicked, impious and foolish! What harm did the waters and pools do to you? Look! Now you too shall dry up like a tree and you shall never produce leaves nor roots nor fruit.” And at once that child completely withered away (IGT 2.1, 3.1–3).Footnote 55
Then, after a few days, Jesus was walking in the village with Joseph and a child, running, struck Jesus upon the shoulder. Jesus became furious (ὀργισθεὶς) and said to him, ‘You won't continue your journey.’ And all of a sudden [the child] fell down and died (IGT 4.1–2, Gd).Footnote 56
Jesus’ behavior in these episodes is said to strike fear into the community who long for him to move away; they appeal to Joseph, “‘because you have such a child, you cannot live with us in the village unless you teach him to bless and not curse because he is killing our children!’” (IGT 4.2). When Joseph chastens Jesus for causing such chaos in the village and when he disciplines the boy by tugging on his ear, Jesus becomes even more furious (ἠγανάκτησε [Ga]; ὀργισθεὶς ἠγανάκτησε [Gd]) and warns his father: “Don't make me upset (μή με λύπει)” (IGT 5.3, Ga).Footnote 57 In this enraged state, Jesus next seeks vengeance on the parents of the smitten boy for bad-mouthing him and immediately they become blind (IGT 5.1). Upon witnessing this new manifestation of his anger, the community again became “very afraid and disturbed.” (IGT 5.2 [Ga]).Footnote 58
Finally, Jesus’ anger is unleashed against the teachers who attempt to teach him grammar and to curb his wild behavior (IGT 6.2f, 14.2). Far from the ideal student, Jesus refused to follow their instructions and, when one teacher punished Jesus for his defiance, “the child [Jesus] became angry and cursed him (τὸ δὲ παιδίoν ἠγανάκτησε καὶ κατηράσατο αὐτὸν). At once the teacher lost consciousness and fell upon his face” (IGT 14.2, Ga).Footnote 59 Concerned about the boy's temper and volatility, at this point Joseph instructs Mary “not to let him out the door because those who make him angry end up dead (ἀποθνῄσκουσιν οἱ παροργίζοντες αὐτόν)” (IGT 14.3).
According to the prevailing notions of anger at the time these stories were composed, this Jesus, whether man or god, is an ignoble figure. He is enslaved to his own anger. He becomes irate at seemingly trivial offenses. The lowliest of the low—other children—have power over him as they prove they can upset him with the slightest provocation. In response, he acts rashly and quickly, without taking time to patiently reflect on the nature of the offense nor on how to respond so that he might dispense justice or initiate reform. His curses appear unjust and wildly disproportionate to the offenses. Finally, his behavior persistently inspires fear and unrest among the community. Although Jesus indeed possesses power, he does not employ it well, making him the most reprehensible kind of sovereign.
III. Confirming this Interpretation of Jesus’ Anger
It is difficult to ignore the fact that the episodes discussed above frame Jesus’ rash behavior in terms closely associated with contemporaneous critiques of anger. Given such a characterization, our initial impression might be that—at least in some scenes of IGT—Jesus is indeed being cast in a bad light, but how do we verify this initial impression and how do we make sense of such a characterization within an early Christian text? In this section, I argue that our initial impression is confirmed by further situating IGT among rhetorical conventions of the time and among the apologetic practices of early Christians.
A. Rhetorical Conventions
I do not presume that every ancient reader encountered the stories told in IGT in precisely the same way, but, as Stanley Fish puts it, if individuals in a group “share a system of rules that each of them has somehow internalized, understanding will, in some sense, be uniform . . . And insofar as these rules are constraints on [meaning] production . . . they will make [the reader's] response, to some extent, predictable and normative.”Footnote 60 Given that ancient readers would have been familiar with, if not formally trained in, the set of conventions on how to tell childhood stories (παιδικὰ πράγματα), we ought to be sensitive to the rhetorical codes embedded in IGT, codes that would have directed many readers and listeners to regular, predictable modes of meaning making.Footnote 61 So let us take a look at how childhood anecdotes were typically utilized.
Orators and writers capitalized on the “slippery age” (lubricum aetatis) of youth to sharpen their rhetorical points and amplify their emotional appeals.Footnote 62 Whether they wrote biographies or delivered political, funerary, or court speeches, writers and speakers used childhood stories to comment upon the character of the men they epitomized.Footnote 63 In encomia, they wished to demonstrate their subjects’ noble character in all phases of their life, including their childhood. Against the norm, they argued, these men were able to overcome common childhood passions and to demonstrate self-mastery and wisdom at an unusually young age.Footnote 64 Moreover, while most children needed to undergo rigorous discipline and education in order to become reasoning and controlled adults, these admirable men exhibited a noble character naturally, distinguishing them from their peers at an early age and foreshadowing the extraordinary virtue they would likewise exhibit in adulthood. These were “not ordinary citizens.”Footnote 65 Conversely, in invective, speakers and writers depicted their subjects as being exceedingly carried away by the passions of youth.Footnote 66 Although, as noted above, a lack of self-restraint was expected in a child's youth, orators and biographers wished to stress that their subjects possessed an exceptionally weak character that was evident from their incomparably wicked behavior as a child and from their resistance to training and discipline.
While any childhood anecdote could employ these guiding principles, orators and writers were drawn to a handful of often used topics (τόποι).Footnote 67 The most common were stories related to the subjects’ intelligence and schooling. Biographers who desired to eulogize their subjects emphasized first and foremost their subjects’ eagerness for learning, their above-average intelligence, and the ease with which they advanced in school.Footnote 68 Conversely, biographers emphasized the dim-wittedness and defiance of those they attempted to criticize. The young Commodus presents a model of a naturally wicked character that resisted discipline even from the Empire's most renowned teachers:
Marcus tried to educate Commodus by his own teaching and by that of the greatest and best of men. In Greek literature he had Onesicrates as his teacher; in Latin, Antisius Capella; his instructor in rhetoric was Ateius Sanctus. However, teachers in all these studies profited him not in the least—such is the power . . . of natural character . . . . For even from his earliest years, he was base and dishonorable, and cruel and lewd, defiled of mouth, moreover, and debauched.Footnote 69
Additionally, biographers regularly discussed their subjects’ geniality with and popularity among boyhood friends. The young Alexander, for instance, is portrayed organizing his playmates into battle ranks while he played the general, clearly foreshadowing his leadership abilities and his victories over Mediterranean enemies as an adult.Footnote 70 Conversely, stories of boys who regularly quarreled with playmates were paired with stories of similarly contentious behavior as adults to imply that these men had never and would never grow up and proving that they were naturally “childish” in their temperament and behavior.
For our analysis, it is important to discern that young boys were not praised for merely possessing extraordinary abilities, talents, and power. Rather, as first century rhetorician and educator Quintilian argues, character was gauged by how virtuously and prudently they employed their natural gifts and made use of their power and privilege: “since [privileges] are sources of strength, they are the surest test of character for good or evil.”Footnote 71 The young men who used their strengths for the benefit of others were esteemed while those who looked only to their own advantage or who misused their power were loathed. Take again the young Commodus: “In the twelfth year of his life, at Centumcellae, he gave a forecast to his cruelty. For when it happened that his bath was drawn too cool, he ordered the man who was responsible to be thrown into the furnace.”Footnote 72 With regard to boys like these, Quintilian concludes, “their natural advantages were nullified by their vices.”Footnote 73
Orators and writers culled childhood anecdotes and paired them with comparable anecdotes from one's adult life to prove the consistent and unchanging character of their subjects. Suetonius, for instance, tells his readers that Tiberius's “cruel and cold-blooded character was not completely hidden even in his boyhood. His teacher of rhetoric, Theodorus of Gadara, seems first to have had the insight to detect it . . . . But it grew still more noticeable after he became emperor.”Footnote 74 Although children in general were thought to grow out of their childhood irrationality and anger, biographers did not frame their material according to their subjects’ maturation and development. Rather they found evidence of their subjects’ youthful nobility or ignobility consonant with the nobility or ignobility they wished to spotlight in adulthood.
To serve their rhetorical purposes, speakers and writers were even inclined to invent fitting childhood stories.Footnote 75 Roman historian Suetonius, for instance, reports that there survived “different and widely varying accounts” of Roman Emperor Vitellius's birth and youth: some claimed that Vitellius came from an ancient and noble family, while others insisted that he was born—possibly illegitimately—into a family of humble means. These conflicting portrayals, Suetonius surmised, were the product of differing rhetorical motivations: each portrait “came respectively from the flatterers and detractors of the emperor.”Footnote 76
We return to IGT to find a mixed use of these biographical conventions. There are most certainly episodes that employ encomiastic techniques, obviously intent on extolling Jesus’ extraordinary character and virtue.Footnote 77 But in the scenes discussed above we find a Jesus who cannot get along well with his companions and who is resistant to discipline and instruction. The use of tropes of invective seem to confirm my suspicion that these stories were indeed intended to be scandalous and thus likely composed by opponents wishing to undermine Christianity by smearing its central figure. In order to sully Jesus’ reputation, the author(s) followed the rhetorical custom of the day: they told tales of his exceedingly impassioned, unruly, and misanthropic youth.
B. Apologetic Context
The apologetic context of the second century lends further credence to this theory, as well as explains why the compiler of IGT would include both favorable and unfavorable anecdotes in his collection of παιδικὰ πράγματα. In the second century, Christians came under heavy attack. Polemical criticisms of Christians were multi-pronged: pagans faulted Christians for not worshipping the pantheon of gods (making the community vulnerable to the gods’ retaliatory punishments), for moral depravity (interpreting the Eucharist as cannibalism, the “love feast” and “holy kiss” as orgies and “kisses” exchanged between “brothers” and “sisters, as incest), and for the base and lowly character of Jesus and his followers.Footnote 78 Especially pertinent to our discussion, we know that at least some opponents leveled accusations against Jesus’ harsh temperament. Anti-Christian writer Celsus criticized Jesus because “he made use of threats and reviled men on light grounds.”Footnote 79 Celsus raises this point specifically to argue that Jesus was a poor rhetor who did not possess the ability to speak persuasively and so had to resort to the use of threats, which, Celsus concludes, “would not be the case with a God, or even a prudent man.”Footnote 80
We also know that Christianity's opponents attempted to undermine Jesus’ character and authority by circulating rumors about his early life, namely, his illegitimate conception. They argued that Joseph could not claim paternity not—as some Christians asserted—because of God's miraculous intervention, but because Mary had conceived Jesus illicitly with the soldier, Panthera. The theory of miraculous conception, Christian opponents’ alleged, was merely a ploy to cover up the secret affair.Footnote 81 From the perspective of Christian apologists, this slander was invented to subvert Jesus’ legitimacy as a religious leader.Footnote 82
I propose that certain episodes of IGT provide us a glimpse into other attacks on Jesus’ character and that these stories about the impious boy Jesus were likewise composed by opponents of Christianity wishing to malign Jesus and, by extension, to discredit the religious movement claiming him as its leader. In fact, it might be that, per convention, these malicious stories about Jesus’ youth were originally paired with stories about his adult behavior. As noted earlier, some of these unflattering scenes recorded in IGT correspond with stories about the adult Jesus. While some scholars have argued the canonical parallels impel us to believe that ancient readers would not be alarmed by Jesus’ cursing in IGT, I suggest that ancient readers would have been not only alarmed by the episode in IGT, but by the canonical parallel as well, and even more alarmed by a paired reading of both. Let us take for example the accounts of the boy Jesus cursing his playmate (IGT 3) and the adult Jesus cursing a fig tree (Mark 11:12–14, 20–21; Matthew 21:18–19). These two stories share similar themes, as well as very similar vocabulary of cursing (καταράομαι) and withering (ἐξηραμμένην). When read or heard together—with views of ignoble anger and the rhetorical trope of life-long character in mind—an ancient reader would plausibly reach the conclusion that the shameful behavior Jesus exhibited as a boy lingered into his adulthood, demonstrating that he was naturally short-tempered, prone to irrational vengeance, and thus an inherently wicked man.Footnote 83
Early Christian apologists answered by composing apologetic treatises that responded directly to the attacks leveled against them. But this was not their only mode of response. Early Christian writers also absorbed their opponents’ attacks into their own narratives to give Jesus an opportunity to answer the charges or, with evidence to the contrary, to prove them groundless. Scot McKnight and Joseph Modica have shown how this strategy was employed by the authors of the canonical gospels in order to respond to accusations about Jesus as a glutton and drunkard, as Law-breaker, as demon-possessed, as blasphemer, as false prophet, and as an illegitimate child.Footnote 84 By preserving the criticism within their own compositions, the gospel authors created a narrative opportunity to counter criticisms and, ultimately, to regain control over Jesus’ image.
Another mode of defense was to explain or modify existing narratives to ensure that the stories would not be misread and used against Christians by their adversaries. As noted above, Patristic interpreters explicated (so as to minimize or erase) God's apparent anger in biblical passages. Additionally, as Wayne Kannaday has detailed, scribes labored to defend the character of Jesus by amending the texts they copied so they could not be used as fodder to fuel their opponents’ attacks.Footnote 85 Most importantly for our purposes, we find that scribes sanitized depictions of Jesus’ anger that they found in the sources they copied. For instance, when Matthew and Luke encountered Jesus’ anger in Mark 3:5—wherein Jesus looks around at those in the synagogue “with anger” (μετ’ ὀργῆς)—and in Mark 10:14—wherein Jesus becomes “aggravated” (ἠγανάκτησεν) with his disciples—both authors independently removed any indication of Jesus’ anger from their version of the stories.Footnote 86 It is important to acknowledge that later scribes who copied Mark did not excise Jesus’ “aggravation” and “anger” from Mark 10:14, yet the editorial impulse to smooth over Jesus’ anger is evident in scribal changes to Mark 1:40–42.Footnote 87 In this passage, a leper requests healing from Jesus who then becomes angry (οργισθεις) with the leper. Bart Ehrman and Wayne Kannaday have argued that later scribes, uncomfortable with this depiction, changed οργισθεις to σπλαγχνισθεις (compassion), until the latter became the dominant reading.Footnote 88 Ehrman notes that these editorial moves to eradicate Jesus’ anger coincided precisely with the period in which Jesus’ character became a focus of opponents’ attacks and, therefore, an issue for Christian apologists. Thus, he concludes, we should consider scribal changes such as these to be part of early Christian apologetic activity.Footnote 89
Given what we know of the apologetic context and strategies in use at this time, I am inclined to believe that the Christian editor of IGT incorporated the unflattering stories of the young Jesus into his collection in order to answer rumors about Jesus’ unruly youth and ultimately soften the image of Jesus. As I argue in the next section, in the hands of IGT's editor and later scribes, even these stories could be salvaged as a positive site for imagining the figure of Jesus.
IV. Domesticating Tales of a Holy Terror
How precisely did the compiler of IGT protect the image of Jesus in his collection? In this section, I aim to show that he offered readers new intertexts to shift the meaning they gleaned from the stories, that he sequenced the stories to present a narrative of maturation, and that he forefronted other characters who could absorb some of the blame for Jesus’ behavior. Additionally, I will show that the compiler's editorial impulses were matched by the work of later scribes who further mitigated Jesus’ anger and vengeful behavior as they copied IGT.
A. Intertextuality
As Roland Barthes has aptly shown, the meaning we derive from texts is always dependent on their intertexts: “texts generate their meaning out of their relation to [other] literary and cultural” commonplaces.Footnote 90 If ancient readers/hearers were to encounter the derogatory scenes of IGT on their own, they would have to identify for themselves an appropriate intertext in order to discern their meaning. Given the deep correspondences of structure and content with biographical invective, readers would be led to employ these intertexts to make sense of Jesus’ behavior. Thus the episodes’ derogatory meaning would be created in the space between IGT's childhood stories and the rhetorical conventions to which they relate and refer. By placing scenes that disparage the young Jesus alongside complimentary stories, the editor of IGT introduced new intertexts, which subverted the scenes’ relation to rhetorical invective. Repositioning the stories alongside these new intertexts, the potential set of meanings readers can glean from the stories inevitably shifted and the compiler was able to encourage new readings of once embarrassing stories.Footnote 91
We can see how intertextuality functions to shape meaning—and, specifically, to allay readers’ discomfort—in the canonical story of the withered fig tree (Mark 11:12–14, 19–25; Matthew 21:18–22). Commentators of these pericopes regularly remark on the dissonance between Jesus’ character in this episode and the rest of the stories in each gospel. Douglas Hare, for instance, writes: “the reported incident appears to be an act of unjustified petulance on Jesus’ part. We find it difficult to believe that the Jesus we know from the Sermon on the Mount would be so bad-tempered as to curse a tree” that failed to produce figs out of season.Footnote 92 Commentators, therefore, make sense of the puzzling passage through one of two types of intertextuality. On the one hand, they interpret Jesus’ actions in this passage through the characterization of him found in the larger narrative. Ezra Gould reasons: “The act appears wanton and petulant, but what we know of Jesus warrants us in setting aside this appearance.”Footnote 93 On the other hand, they argue that the story is a parabolic illustration of the cleansing of the Temple, which the fig tree incident brackets.Footnote 94 Either way, when they encounter a characterization of Jesus that disrupts the characterization prevalent in the rest of the text, they search for a coherent and comfortable reading by interpreting the incident through surrounding passages.Footnote 95
Let me offer two examples of how intertextual pairings function to mitigate the more unflattering episodes in IGT. Readers first encounter several scenes in which the unruly young Jesus curses and kills his playmates whenever they annoy him. After already causing so much trouble in the community, when soon thereafter a boy named Zeno accidentally falls off a roof and dies, the boy's parents immediately accuse Jesus of pushing him (IGT 9.2). Much to their surprise (and perhaps also to the surprise of readers), Jesus denies the accusation and then resurrects the boy, who verifies that his death was indeed an accident. Chris Frilingos astutely observes that this scene “manipulates the expectations created by Jesus’ earlier random acts of violence . . . Narrative somersaults, such as the one embedded in the Zeno scene, throw the audience off balance by complicating the relationship between Jesus and others in the narrative.”Footnote 96 Readers who, like the parents of the dead boy and the crowds within the narrative, had expected Jesus to be the culprit, are now left unsettled and less sure that their judgments of Jesus’ behavior in the earlier scenes were appropriate.
Readers are encouraged to further re-evaluate Jesus’ abuse and violence when they read the three classroom episodes. These scenes provide readers with additional intertexts that press them to excuse Jesus’ seemingly rash and violent behavior. In each of the three classroom scenes Jesus is cast explicitly or implicitly as the teacher. Jesus frames himself as the teacher when he says to his first instructor: “I am your master and you happen to be my student” and “I wish to teach you rather than be taught by you” (IGT 6.2).Footnote 97 Additionally, in all three scenes, Jesus reverses the teacher-student roles by trumping his teachers’ wisdom until each teacher ultimately exhibits the deference and submission of a student. When two of the teachers attempt to beat Jesus back into the submissive role, Jesus proves that he is truly the more superior one in the room through his even harsher beatings, beatings that lead to the death of one of the teachers (IGT 13[14].2). Ancient readers familiar with the tradition of corporal punishment in the classroom could conceivably read Jesus’ demeanor and behavior in these scenes as part and parcel of traditional pedagogy. It was widely agreed that violence—as well as the fear of violence—were appropriate means by which a teacher motivated and corrected his students. As historian Stanley Bonner has noted, “most parents readily accepted such methods as a means of deterring boys from counter-attractions” and some even brought their children to school in order that teachers might quite literally knock some sense into them and whip them into shape.Footnote 98 (In fact, the terms for “education” in Latin and Hebrew [disciplina and mûsar] also mean “punishment.”Footnote 99) Even Seneca, who thought that a teacher ought to channel students’ good behavior through virtuous means, acknowledged that there were students whose depraved nature would respond only to a teacher's angry tirade, physical abuse, and public humiliation.Footnote 100 Of course the assumption was that the noble and virtuous teacher would never actually experience anger, since instruction and punishment doled out in the state of anger would be irrational. He could, however, feign anger for the sake of his students’ correction. Following Epicurus and Philodemus, Seneca concludes: in order “to arouse the sluggish minds of our hearers . . . sometimes we must strike fear into the hearts of those with whom reason is of no avail.”Footnote 101 Jesus’ curses and blows in the classroom scenes, thus, could be interpreted by ancient readers—especially those who themselves experienced educational abuse—as instructive discipline issued from the hands of a master teacher.Footnote 102
After reading the schoolroom scenes and understanding Jesus’ anger according to pedagogical theory and custom, readers are left to reconsider the behavior exhibited by Jesus in the earlier scenes of the narrative. Because paired with the classroom intertexts, Jesus’ earlier anger and acts of violence—which initially might have been read as evidence of his youthful irascibility or natural vice—can now be interpreted more positively within the frame of instructional discipline, as the necessary means by which Jesus educates his “students,” young and old alike. Behavior that at first appears strange or even cruel becomes excusable and even obligatory as readers progressing through the narrative begin to see the boy Jesus as a teacher.
Additionally, when stories of Jesus’ childhood malevolence are paired with stories of a calm, wise, and beneficent young Jesus, a new theme surfaces as the organizing principle for this collection of stories: Jesus’ extraordinary power. (Thus, I suggest, contemporary commentators who argue that the theme of Jesus’ power is more important than the manner in which he exhibits his power are reading the narrative precisely as the redactor may have hoped.) The boy's seemingly rash and unjust use of his power is filtered through his beneficent acts until all that remains is the power itself. In fact, readers are coached to interpret Jesus’ acts in this way by the reactions of the parents, teachers, and crowds from within the narrative. While the characters in the story at first voice their concern over the manner in which Jesus exhibits his power, over the course of the narrative the crowds draw attention to the sheer scope of the boy's power. For instance, when Jesus smites his young playmates and blinded the parents who complained, the crowd declared: “Every word he says, whether good or bad, has become a deed” (IGT 5.2, emphasis added).Footnote 103 Similarly, even when Jesus is insulting and abusive to his teachers, the crowd diverts attention away from his surly disposition as they eulogize his extraordinary knowledge: “This child is barely five years old and yet what words he says! Such words we have never known spoken from anyone—neither a teacher of the law nor a Pharisee—as from this child” (IGT 6.2c).Footnote 104 Through such crowd reactions, the text's audience is encouraged to interpret all of Jesus’ acts as evidence of his extraordinary power, knowledge, and ultimately, his divine origin rather than attending to the contradictory quality of the acts themselves.Footnote 105
B. Sequencing the Stories
Some scholars have noted that the episodes of IGT were arranged to illustrate Jesus’ gradual maturity over time.Footnote 106 It might be that the editor staged the stories he had to work with to create the impression that Jesus was indeed growing up, gaining more control over his powers, and learning to use them more and more judiciously. This idea is also found in the concluding declaration: “And Jesus continued to excel in wisdom and in years and in grace before God and men” (IGT 19.5). According to standard views of childhood development, it would not have been unusual to understand that Jesus matured. It would have been unconventional, however, to describe a person's progress toward maturity in a biography, since biographies favored more absolute declarations of praise or blame based on consistent behavior over the course of one's lifetime. That is, even when biographers and rhetoricians note a boy's maturity, it is nearly always an indication that the subject's character has developed in degree rather than transformed in kind.Footnote 107 For instance a very similar remark is made in Luke 2:52 directly after the twelve-year old Jesus displays astonishing wisdom in the Jerusalem Temple: “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in divine and human favor.” Here, the indication of Jesus’ maturation is not meant to signal that Jesus changed from bad to good, but that he grew to be ever more good. The redactor of IGT, however, broke with generic conventions in order to frame the deprecating stories about Jesus’ youth as part of his process of maturation. Again, while this went against custom, he could do so by building upon common understandings of childhood development.
C. Shifting the Blame
We can also read reversals of behavior—from Jesus’ cursing at the beginning of the narrative to blessing at the end at the narrative—as wholly dependent on the crowds’ recognition of his abilities and identity. Tony Burke writes: “Whenever Jesus demonstrates his abilities, he faces incredulity, even violence, instead of acceptance . . . IGT's Jesus responds in kind, chastising those who oppose him. But once Jesus’ neighbours and family begin to see that Jesus is more than mortal, his actions change.”Footnote 108 Since we know that the responses of the crowds were editorial additions, we are left to wonder if the redactor intentionally linked the crowd's reactions to Jesus’ behavior in an effort to shift the blame for Jesus’ behavior away from Jesus and onto his community, onto those who misunderstand his power and purpose and thus require discipline.Footnote 109
It appears that the editor additionally sought to shift blame for Jesus’ bad behavior onto his father. In several scenes, the parents of Jesus’ afflicted playmates fault Joseph for failing to control his son. For instance, the parents of the “withered” boy indict Joseph, saying “Such a child you have! Look what he is doing to us. Teach him to bless and not to curse” (IGT 3.3).Footnote 110 Similarly, other parents suggest that because Joseph failed to parent properly, his son was disrupting the entire community: “‘Because you have such a child, you cannot live with us in the village unless you teach him to bless and not curse because he is killing our children!’” (IGT 4.2). According to the pedagogical experts of the time, it would be quite appropriate to blame Joseph for Jesus’ actions. Cicero, Quintilian, and Ps-Plutarch stressed the importance of parental involvement in their children's education. Parents (along with nurses and pedagogues) were the earliest sources of their children's opiniones, acting as instructors, nurturers, and models of virtue.Footnote 111 Fathers in particular were to take seriously their role in childrearing. In the early Imperial period a literary tradition developed in which fathers wrote educational treatises dedicated to their sons, some of which were structured as dialogues between the pair. Although these texts covered a wide range of topics, they characteristically aimed to instill social values (mos maiorum), to encourage ethical conduct, and to cultivate their child's intellectual acumen, all of which were expected to “establish the supporting framework” of their sons’ moral and academic development into adulthood.Footnote 112 While not every father felt obliged to draft such treatises, many took other measures to guide their children's moral and intellectual development, such as rousing their children “from sleep in order that they may start early upon their pursuits; even on holidays [the good father] does not permit them to be idle.”Footnote 113
Fathers needed to take seriously their role as educator since they were often held responsible for the bad behavior of their children. Fathers who exhibited an inordinate love of gambling, who possessed extravagant tastes, who indulged their desires, who threw lavish parties (filled with debaucherous activities), and who were cruel to slaves were blamed for passing on these vices to their children.Footnote 114 Even virtuous and well-intending fathers could be criticized for raising horrible children. Ps.-Plutarch, Seneca, and Quintilian complain that parents who indulge, “mollycoddle” (mollis educatio), or inflate their sons’ egos “ruin their character . . . [and] sap all the vigor from their mind and body.”Footnote 115 The Christian Shepherd of Hermas likewise warns Hermas that his affection for his children hinders his ability to administer proper discipline; thereby “ruining” his household.Footnote 116 So responsible were fathers for their children's discipline and instruction that they could be put on trial for improper oversight and they could lose custody of their children if they were proven to be a bad influence.Footnote 117IGT's depiction of Joseph's responsibility for Jesus’ unruly behavior, therefore, seems a contextually plausible way for the editor to explain Jesus’ bad behavior without having to blame the boy himself.
D. Authorial Attribution and Redaction by Later Scribes
By introducing new intertexts, sequencing scenes, and shifting the blame to others, IGT's editor controlled—to some extent—the meaning readers gleaned from this collection of childhood stories. Later scribes made additional changes to further manage the image of the young Jesus.Footnote 118 Although the earliest manuscript cycles are anonymous, at a certain moment, scribes copying the collection attributed authorship to the apostle Thomas.Footnote 119 Literary theorists have alerted us to the fact that readers filter their interpretation of texts through their pre-existing ideas about the author. As Michel Foucault notes, the author's name promotes classification that, in turn, assists meaning making:
a name permits one to group together a certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast them to others . . . the fact that several texts have been placed under the same name indicates that there has been established among them a relationship of homogeneity, filiation.Footnote 120
In the case of IGT, the author's name imposes a presumed unity between this text and other Christian texts ostensibly authored by Thomas or, more generally, other apostolic literature that aimed to valorize Jesus.Footnote 121 Readers, therefore, are primed to interpret the stories in the collection in ways that are sympathetic to the Christian cause. Even when the reader encounters unexpected scenes (such as, stories that, taken alone, would be understood to be critical of Jesus) or incompatible scenes (such as stories critical of Jesus alongside stories that praise Jesus), readers’ presumptions about the author's stance prompt them to find a way to resolve difficult material and “neutralize the contradictions.”Footnote 122
Scribes also smoothed out the wording of the text to present a more consistent and pleasant portrait of Jesus’ character. This redaction, however, is somewhat difficult to trace because IGT's manuscript tradition is quite complex. In addition to being a composite text, IGT was continually in flux as later scribes added, eliminated, and edited material in the text.Footnote 123 This process of revision resulted in multiple recensions and versions whose relation to one another is hotly debated. Many (though not all) believe that it has become impossible to fix the Urtext, making the precise sequence of scribal changes equally difficult to discern.Footnote 124 Despite this uncertainty, differences in the extant manuscripts provide evidence of scribal changes made in an attempt to soften Jesus’ image.
First, Jesus’ volatility and anger seems to have been downplayed over time. Some recensions do not include any mention of Jesus’ anger that preceded his smiting of his playmates. For instance, when his playmate drained the pool in which Jesus was playing, Ga and Gd note that Jesus became angry (γινόμενον ἠγανάκτησεν; ἠγανάκτει), while Gs and Gb omit any mention of Jesus’ emotional state (IGT 3.2; compare IGT 5.3 in which the same pattern of changes occur).Footnote 125 Similarly, when the boy rushes past Jesus, knocking into him, the Jesus of Gd becomes enraged (ὀργισθεὶς), but his emotional state is reduced in Ga to his becoming irritated (πικρανθεὶς) and is left out altogether from Gs and Gb (IGT 4.1).Footnote 126 What results are scenes in which Jesus curses his playmates out of, what now appears to be, a calmer and more rational state—now, one might presume, with therapeutic intentions in mind—rather than out of volatility and anger. Finally, when Jesus is struck by one of his teachers, rather than “becoming angry” (Gs), recension Gd notes that “Jesus took the blow calmly” (IGT 6.2). Since, as discussed above, we gather that, over time, scribes copying canonical texts tended to omit or diminish God's anger, we might assume that scribes copying IGT had a similar tendency of downplaying the anger of God's son.
Additionally, in some editions of the text, the children cursed by Jesus are made out to be more deserving of his wrath. For example, the boy who dispersed Jesus’ pool is labeled “impious,” “foolish,” and even “a Sodomite” (Ga, Gd, Gb), while the other boy is said not to have merely bumped into Jesus as he ran past, but to have intentionally thrown a rock at Jesus’ shoulder (in Gb) or to have punched Jesus in the chest (in the Ethiopic version).Footnote 127 Given these circumstances, Jesus’ anger and “punishment” seems all the more justified. In fact, his recourse might even be viewed as the only pedagogically effective way to reign in his malevolent playmates or as benefitting the community since Jesus removed these rabble rousers from the village.
Finally, it seems that scribes also accentuated Jesus’ character by inserting additional compliments and additional stories of his beneficence. For example, the first teacher takes Jesus as a student because he is a “wise child” with a “good mind” (Ga, Gd). This replaces earlier rationale of his needing discipline because he was “rude” and “impudent” (IGT 6.2).Footnote 128 Additionally, some recensions and versions further bolster Jesus’ magnanimous relation to his community by including two additional healing stories.Footnote 129
It was not only editors of IGT that seemed intent on preserving Jesus’ virtue and authority over time. In the fourth century text, History of Joseph the Carpenter (hereafter HJC), we find a lingering concern to address rumors about the terrible behavior of the young Jesus.Footnote 130 This text is a eulogistic biography of Joseph ostensibly composed at the time of Joseph's death by none other than Jesus himself. As Jesus describes the life of Joseph, however, we get glimpses into his own upbringing. At one point Jesus claims: “I passed all my time without fault. I called Mary my mother, and Joseph father, and in all they said, I was obedient to them; nor did I ever resist them, but submitted to them . . . nor did I provoke their anger any day, nor return any harsh word or answer to them” (HJC 11).Footnote 131 As Siegfried Morenz observes, the text “specially stresses the meekness of the child Jesus,” possibly, I would add, to counteract depictions of his petulance and irascibility in earlier traditions.Footnote 132 Even while the text claims that Jesus was the perfect child, it suggests that he may have been misperceived to be troublesome by those around him, including Joseph. In an especially poignant scene in which Joseph is lying on his death bed preparing to die and reminiscing about his son's life, Joseph seeks Jesus’ forgiveness for misunderstanding Jesus’ behavior when he was a boy.
I remember also that day when the boy was killed by the bite of a serpent. Now his family wished to deliver you to Herod . . . saying that you had killed him, but you raised him from the dead and restored him to them. Then I came and took you by the ear, and said, “My son, be prudent.” But you rebuked me, “Are you not my father [only] according to the flesh? I will teach you who I am.” Now, therefore, O, my Lord and God, do not be angry with me, nor condemn me because of that moment. I am your servant . . . but you are my Lord, my God and Savior; most certainly the Son of God.Footnote 133
Here Joseph conflates two stories that are distinct in IGT and in so doing no trace of an enfant terrible is detectable and only Joseph's behavior requires forgiveness. So it seems even two centuries later Christians continued to offer responses within their narratives to rumors of Jesus’ unruly youth.
The editing of IGT and the later literary composition of HJC evidence a persistent anxiety around the boy Jesus’ anger and violence and regular attempts to ameliorate his image. Through various strategies of compilation and redaction, readers are able to interpret Jesus’ behavior as either someone else's fault, as justifiable responses to the provocation of others, as a mode of discipline appropriate for a teacher, or as demonstrations of his extraordinary power. While the scribes were largely successful in managing Jesus’ reputation, hints of the stories’ polemical intent lurk menacingly just below the surface. Textual associations with rhetorical conventions and prevalent notions of the impropriety of anger continue to reverberate in the text, which is likely why readers of the text remain ambivalent about its depictions of Jesus.
V. Conclusion
When scholars analyze the stories of Jesus’ childhood that circulated in the first and second centuries, they regularly argue that early Christians were interested in Jesus’ youth out of mere curiosity. These Christians, they reason, encountered a lack of information about the early years of Jesus’ life and wished simply to fill in the gaps.Footnote 134 Most scholars, thus, conclude that extant childhood stories of Jesus are “folkloric” supplements to earlier traditions and as such relatively trivial, especially when compared to the presumably more sophisticated and meaningful accounts recorded in the canonical biographies of Jesus.Footnote 135 Regarded as mere speculation, scholars have promptly dismissed these childhood stories as offering little help to those wishing to reconstruct the historical Jesus or to better understand the theological and Christological concerns of early Christian communities. When we read IGT alongside contemporaneous analyses of anger, however, we detect echoes of these discussions. Moreover, we find strong associations with rhetorical and apologetic strategies. These associations should give us pause and persuade us to reassess both the level of sophistication, as well as the socio-historical importance, of IGT. As I hope to have demonstrated, IGT provides us with valuable insights into the ways early Christians engaged broader cultural discussions of emotion and of the behavior of a sovereign, as well as into the rhetorical processes by which Christians and their opponents laid claim to Jesus’ young life and battled to control his public image. I conclude, with François Bovon, that apocryphal sources such as IGT “are more than a source of entertainment; they express the fears, hopes, and creeds of movement[s] in early Christianity.”Footnote 136
This study of IGT further contributes to the scholarly discussion on early Christian identity formation. In recent decades, it has become the aim of many scholars to investigate how early Christians defined themselves over against “other” Christians, Jews, and pagans. Scholars have found that, despite the fact that early Christians regularly asserted impermeable boundaries and incontrovertible difference between themselves and “others,” their repeated efforts to construct difference “hints at the instability of these same boundaries.”Footnote 137 In fact, as Andrew Jacobs (informed by Mikhail Bakhtin) observes: “‘Self’ can only ever emerge from the dialogic imagination as the strange and contingent interaction with the ‘other’”: at times, knowledge of the self—or construction of the self—relies on identifying an aspect of difference that separates one from an “other,” while at other times, one co-opts and internalizes the “other” in order to assert difference based on one's power or control.Footnote 138 I submit that the collection of childhood stories of Jesus in IGT serves as an illuminating example of one such way in which early Christians constructed their understanding of their leader (and ultimately of themselves) in relation to their fiercest opponents: IGT is a polyvocal collection of stories that absorbed and internalized, even as it amended, the claims of Christianity's enemies. Through our study of this text, we are provided a glimpse into the process by which early Christians drew an image of Jesus from the cacophony of voices surrounding them.Footnote 139
