Parental Undersight: The Holy Family in Irenaeus and John Chrysostom

All great literature describes conflict: tradition against innovation, gods against humans, men against women, a woman against herself. While no one would mistake the Infancy Gospel for great literature, the conflict is easy to spot: everyone who meets the boy Jesus hates him.Footnote ¹⁴ An adult neighbor tattles on Jesus in the opening scene (Inf. Gos. Thom. 2:3).Footnote ¹⁵ The discord intensifies in what follows. As Kristi Upson-Saia smartly puts it, the five-year-old Jesus is a “holy terror.”Footnote ¹⁶ He disrupts the quiet life of his household and village, defying parents and teachers, even harming other children. Friends and neighbors of the holy family plead with Joseph to leave the town: “[because of your son] we have been deprived of our children” (Inf. Gos. Thom. 4:2). Exasperated and bitter, the father turns on his son: “Why do you do such things? They suffer and hate us” (Inf. Gos. Thom. 5:1). The dismal portrait of Jesus is routinely cited by scholars as the reason why the Infancy Gospel was left out of the Christian New Testament. Ancient Christians could not bear to hear such awful tales about a savior “who seldom acts in a Christian way!”Footnote ¹⁷

The popularity of the stories suggests otherwise. The Infancy Gospel is preserved in multiple Greek manuscripts and across a diverse set of versions.Footnote ¹⁸ We may add to this the deafening silence of early Christian writings: scandal at a “naughty” Jesus is not to be found among early Christian commentators. While mentions of childhood stories are rare, the few scraps of comment are nonetheless intriguing. In this section I will discuss writings by Irenaeus and John Chrysostom that include comment on the Lukan “Finding of Jesus” and allusions to other childhood stories (perhaps with the Infancy Gospel in mind). Since both sets of sources involve more than just the “Finding of Jesus” pericope, I frame this discussion with a more detailed look at the Lukan infancy narrative as a whole. As we shall see, the urgent questions concern not behavior but knowledge: how much did others know about the child Jesus, and how much did the child know about himself?

The parents of the “Finding of Jesus” are hard to reconcile with the Mary and Joseph of the Lukan “Christmas” story. Elsewhere the Third Gospel portrays Mary and Joseph as thoughtful recipients of information about the child. Prior to the “Finding of Jesus,” Mary is present for several predictions of her son's future greatness, from the visitation of Gabriel and other angels to prophecies from relatives and strangers.Footnote ¹⁹ Commentators have taken notice of the incongruity between Luke 2:41–52 and earlier passages. “Such a failure is surprising,” Raymond Brown observes dryly, “after the annunciation to Mary in 1:26–38, after the predictions of Simeon in 2:21–40.”Footnote ²⁰ Some, like Brown, have cautiously accepted the hypothesis of a pre-Lucan source for 2:41–52.Footnote ²¹ Inconsistency proceeds from clumsy editing. This is what happens when an episode about clueless parents is spliced into a story that already describes a multitude of the heavenly host in the skies above Bethlehem. Yet this “solution” runs headlong into the obstacle of Lukan redaction. As Brown himself concludes, “If there was a pre-Lukan story, one must recognize that Luke has thoroughly rewritten it.”Footnote ²² Why would Luke throw his back into revising the story and not “fix” the obtuseness of Mary and Joseph? Whatever the reason, one is left with a perplexing narrative arc. In one chapter, Mary sings the Magnificat; in the next, she is bewildered by her son's robust sense of vocation.

The confusion of the parents is thus confusing. In and of itself this state of affairs may not impress readers. Jesus is commonly misunderstood and underappreciated by friends and family alike across the canonical Gospels. Still, the multiple references to parental unknowing in the span of eleven verses invite scrutiny. Even the coda of the pericope, which, at first glance, may seem to lean towards resolution, recalls the incompetence of Mary and Joseph. Jesus returns home to Nazareth “and was obedient to them” (Luke 2:51). Commentators have typically greeted this verse with relief, pointing out that Jesus, like a good boy, fulfills the commandments.Footnote ²³ We may wonder instead why Jesus would submit to these interfering adults who interrupt his service to God?

How did ancient Christians interpret the problem of parental ignorance? Irenaeus, in the late second-century Adversus haereses, affords a glimpse of one early approach. It found in the tale of parental ignorance a message about an “unknowable” God. The interpretation belonged to the “Marcosians,” opponents that Irenaeus attacks, first, for their use of “apocryphal” stories and, then, for their use of an approved source, the Gospel of Luke.Footnote ²⁴ In the midst of an attack on the disciples of Valentinus, Irenaeus picks out Marcus for criticism. Irenaeus accuses his followers, the Marcosians, of creating a number of “apocryphal and spurious writings” (ἀποκρύφων καὶ νόθων γραφν) to mislead others.Footnote ²⁵ Irenaeus gives an example:

This story about Jesus and the alpha privative (expressing negation in Greek) closely resembles an episode in the Infancy Gospel, one of at least three “schoolhouse” scenes that belong to the childhood tradition.Footnote ²⁷ At the same time, the Marcosians found support in the “acceptable” Gospel of Luke: “For example, the answer he gave to his Mother when he was twelve years old: Did you not know that I must be about my Father's business? [Luke 2:49] They assert that he announced to them the Father whom they did not know.”Footnote ²⁸ The scorn of Irenaeus for the Marcosians comes through in the biting sarcasm at the chapter's end. The Marcosians posit an unknowable God, and “still they announce him!”Footnote ²⁹

The theology of the unknowable God, however loathsome and illogical to Irenaeus, made sense to some ancient Christians. The Marcosian interpretation of Jesus's question to his parents both acknowledges and attempts to solve the problem of Mary's selective memory in the Lukan infancy narrative. The truth of the unknowable one, the Marcosians maintained, remained hidden to Mary. She was lost in the darkness of a malformed world, until the teaching of the twelve-year-old Jesus brought enlightenment.

From the standpoint of Irenaeus, no text was safe from the elaborate myths of the Marcosians and like-minded groups.Footnote ³⁰ Consulting the “correct” books did not in and of itself protect against error; clear understanding required the right blend of tradition and gospel.Footnote ³¹ Two centuries later, the notion of a closed canon would exercise greater authority. Some later patristic testimony to the Infancy Gospel—or, at least, to the kind of stories found in the Infancy Gospel—indicates that contradictions to canonical reports worked against extracanonical sources.

John Chrysostom, writing in the late fourth century, ascribes preeminence to the canonical Gospels. They are the benchmark against which all other traditions should be measured. And yet John does not simply wave off childhood stories because of their “extracanonicity.”Footnote ³² In line with other ancient commentators, he objects to childhood miracles on the conviction that Jesus's powers were made manifest only as an adult, since the Gospel of John records the water-to-wine miracle in the wedding at Cana as the “first of his signs” (John 2:11).Footnote ³³ He insists that the “childhood deeds” (παιδικά) attributed to Jesus are “false, and merely products of the imagination of those who bring them to our attention. If he had worked miracles beginning from his early youth, neither would John have been ignorant [ἠγνόησεν] of him, nor would the rest of the crowd have needed a teacher to reveal him.”Footnote ³⁴

John Chrysostom, contends Reidar Aasgaard, rejects the Infancy Gospel for being “historically untruthful,” not for being “heretical.”Footnote ³⁵ But the problem is neither heresy nor history. The problem is knowledge. The notion of childhood traditions violated John Chrysostom's sense of coherence, or what we may be tempted to call “plausible deniability.” “I myself did not know him,” declares John the Baptist (John 1:31). If Jesus had performed wonders as a child or adolescent, John and the masses would have known about it long before his dunking in the Jordan. Miracles speak for themselves.Footnote ³⁶ In a later homily, John Chrysostom again appeals to plausible deniability: “If, I repeat, he who within a short time, because of the number of his miracles, became so famous that his name was quite plain to all, had worked wonders from the first, with much more reason he would not have remained hidden in this longer period.”Footnote ³⁷ The sheer quantity of miracles let loose a flood of reports about the adult Jesus, and the same would have happened if he had performed wonders as a boy. John Chrysostom's next step is to address the lone canonical childhood story, the “Finding of Jesus.” His first move is to stress the limited scope of the incident: “For as a child he did nothing except that one thing of which Luke bore witness, that he sat, when he was twelve years old, hearing the teachers, and, through his questions, he appeared to them to be amazing.” A single event, no matter how “amazing,” need not have raised the profile of Jesus.

But John Chrysostom's case for the absence of childhood miracles threatens to fall apart in the next section, on Mary. If Jesus's childhood was not extraordinary, we might ask, along with John's rhetorical interlocutor: “Then how did his mother become aware of the greatness of her son?” John's response outlines a progressive scheme of awareness. First, John points out, Mary was given access to an unmatched, if inchoate, mode of knowing, one uniquely hers as mother: “The conception itself, and all the events connected with the nativity, implanted in her the suspicion [ἐνέθηκε τὴν ὑπόνοιαν] of her child's greatness.” Now Mary kept this “suspicion” entirely to herself throughout Jesus's early years. Bearing in mind the Gospel of John's account of the “first sign,” John Chrysostom insists that Mary did not have the “confidence” (θαρρέω) to ask her son for a miracle during the latent period of Jesus's childhood. “Before this,” he goes on to say, “he lived as one of many”: there was thus no way for Mary to know that the young Jesus, ordinary in all respects, had it in him. Whatever insight Mary had, it was partial and submerged, “implanted” at the same time as conception. Mary waited to act on this instinct until “she had heard that John had come for his sake. . . and that he had disciples.” Only then, at Cana, did she dare to nudge Jesus into performing.

The figure of Mary tests the limits of plausible deniability—a problem that still bedevils commentary. In our day, Raymond Brown could appeal to source criticism to explain Mary's strange forgetfulness.Footnote ³⁸ John Chrysostom did not have recourse to source criticism, and hence had to confront head-on the puzzle within the framework of miracles and knowledge. Even if the young Jesus did not perform any miracles in front of her, Mary must have sensed something, if only because of the unusual nature of her pregnancy—“the nativity and all that,” to paraphrase. The challenge pushes John Chrysostom to specify two ideas, somewhat in tension with each other: one, that Mary had an inkling of Jesus's greatness—call it “mother's intuition”—and, two, that she refrained from acting on her hunch because, having taken the full measure of her son's modest abilities, she could not quite believe it herself. In so doing John Chrysostom separates Mary's interior life from observable behavior. He restricts Mary's perception of the growing Jesus to a gut feeling, rough and unsure. In support John points to the record of the evangelist: “But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart” (Luke 2:19).

At the same time, John Chrysostom does not blame Mary. His view of the correspondence of miracles and knowledge offers a way of explaining the point of the ordinariness of Jesus's childhood. In this section he dabbles in counterfactual storytelling, suggesting that childhood miracles would have attracted the wrong kind of publicity and sent the young Jesus too soon to the cross.Footnote ³⁹ Everything happens in its appointed season: the celebrity of the mature Jesus was the product of miracles, and the cross was the result of Jesus's celebrity. Thus it comes as no surprise that Mary regarded Jesus as an typical boy, “one of many.” The less others knew about Jesus, the more control Jesus exerted over his own fate. In a different homily John Chrysostom describes a youthful smokescreen: “For while at twelve years old he showed himself [ἐξέφηνεν ἑαυτόν], he was quickly overshadowed [συνεσκίασε] again.”Footnote ⁴⁰ In the temple, for an instant, Jesus revealed himself. He taught “things that the Jews had never seen nor heard” but only for a flash; then the savior once more reduced himself to ordinariness.Footnote ⁴¹ John's correlation of miracles and knowledge remains intact, as does his view of Mary. Of course Mary wished to know the truth about her son, to see him for all that he was and all that he would become. But she could not, and that is the way Jesus wanted it.

Between the Truth and the Whole Truth: The Holy Family in the Infancy Gospel

So far we have illustrated some of the ways that ambiguity about Jesus's childhood served and continues to serve as the cue for interpretation. This gap in the biography of Jesus remains fascinating, I suspect, because it reminds readers of what they do not know about Jesus. They may feel that they know the truth, but do they know the whole truth? They find themselves under the same cloud of ignorance that hangs over the characters inhabiting the narrative landscape.Footnote ⁴² No one recalls anything exceptional about his childhood and adolescence. If they know the “rest of the story,” they keep it to themselves.

Questions about what Mary and Joseph did and did not know about their child attracted Irenaeus, the Marcosians, and John Chrysostom to the Gospel of Luke. Is it credible to think that Jesus lived his first three decades in obscurity—that even his family simply shrugged off the angelic fireworks in Bethlehem, going on as if nothing extraordinary had happened? Yes, it is credible, according to John Chrysostom. It took the Baptist's declaration at the Jordan to make the name of Jesus widely known. Those that lived closest to him, including and especially Mary, saw an ordinary life. His low profile was due largely to the absence of childhood wonders, which stemmed from Jesus's own secrecy about himself. Suddenly, at the age of thirty, things changed: Jesus performed the miracle at Cana, and his reputation exploded. In the event deniability was no longer plausible. Before this, prior to Cana, there was nothing.

To this network of interpretation of the childhood of Jesus, I now add the Infancy Gospel. The Infancy Gospel extends the ambiguity of the Lukan childhood story, and by so doing, offers a compelling interpretation of the familial strain on display. If the goal is to understand how some ancient Christians interpreted the Lukan pericope, then the Infancy Gospel should not be discounted on the basis of “extracanonicity.”Footnote ⁴³ Uncertainty in biblical narrative has sparked the imagination of readers for centuries, and some of the earliest interpretations may yet be seen in so-called “apocryphal” literature.Footnote ⁴⁴

Against the background of other early Christian interpretations, we can see that the Infancy Gospel implies a distinctive theory in its portrayal of household dysfunction: Mary and Joseph do not understand their child because he is hard to understand—ambiguous in speech, deed, and identity. What is more, the narrative pursuit of this theory in the Infancy Gospel represents the opposite of John Chrysostom's approach. If his sermons try to close the door to thinking with the childhood of Jesus, then the Infancy Gospel lets the door swing wide open. In the Infancy Gospel readers learn why Mary and Joseph (not to mention all of the neighbors) are so confused by the child Jesus.

The Lukan infancy narrative sets the agenda for the Infancy Gospel not only by what it leaves out—that is, gaps in the childhood of Jesus—but also by what it puts in, specifically, the “Finding of Jesus.”Footnote ⁴⁵ I am of course not the first to suggest that it was the Lukan pericope that inspired the Infancy Gospel. Raymond Brown observes:

Brown's good point about the “kindred material” of Luke 2:41–52 and the Infancy Gospel nevertheless skirts around the problem of unknowing in the “Finding of Jesus.” Rather than projecting adult activities back into the childhood of Jesus, the Infancy Gospel gathers together stories that create a context for understanding the dysfunction of the pericope of the “Finding of Jesus.” The tales about Jesus from the age of five onward anticipate the family crisis in the temple when he is twelve.

This “anticipatory” model will shape the following treatment of the Infancy Gospel. To illustrate, recall Mary's question to her son: “Child, why have you done this to us?” (Luke 2:48). Her question is not, as the Marcosians had it, meant to imply an unknowable deity. Nor is it, as John Chrysostom believed, the by-product of an economy of deniability, put in motion by the absence of childhood wonders, Mary's lack of confidence, and Jesus's self-veiling. Rather than solving the riddle of the “Finding of Jesus,” the Infancy Gospel shows the events that led to Mary's heartbreaking question. In so doing, the Infancy Gospel turns on its head the “miracle equals knowledge” logic of Chrysostom: What if Jesus had performed miracles as a child and yet the meaning of these signs (and that of the boy himself) had remained opaque to those closest to him? What would these wonders have looked like?

Fathers and Sons

The Infancy Gospel begins with a story of Jesus at play. “The child Jesus was five years old and, after a rain, he was playing at the ford of a rushing stream” (Inf. Gos. Thom. 2:1). The idyllic scene is unlike anything in the Gospels of the New Testament.Footnote ⁴⁷ In those books every word and deed is swollen with portent, and there is not time for play. By contrast, in the Infancy Gospel, Jesus plays, like any other five-year-old.

Charm gives way to demonstrations of unusual power. The river is silty, and Jesus miraculously makes the water pure. No one else in the text sees this marvel; the reader alone is invited to picture the scene, and, in the light of unfolding events, to recognize the allusion to the biblical myths of creation. Next, Jesus shapes twelve sparrows from the dirt. An onlooker, offended, goes and confronts Joseph: “Behold your boy is at the ford of the stream and has taken mud and fashioned twelve birds with it, and so has violated the Sabbath” (Inf. Gos. Thom. 2:3). When Joseph scolds his son—“Why do you do this on the Sabbath?” (Inf. Gos. Thom. 2:4)—Jesus responds with a second miracle. The boy claps his hands, and the clay sparrows turn into real birds and fly away.

This brief episode has at least three noteworthy aspects. First, it relates the stories of the Infancy Gospel to the Jewish Scriptures. Second, it shows the power of the child. Jesus's miracle of creation repeats, playfully, the creation of Adam. Third, we see that Joseph does not understand his son. From the start, then, the Infancy Gospel uncouples not only miracle and knowledge but also nearness and knowledge. Should not the people closest to Jesus know him the best? Joseph may live with Jesus, but he does not or cannot grasp the whole truth.

At the same time, we should bear in mind the humor of the scene. When Jesus is accused of violating the Sabbath in the canonical Gospels, the atmosphere is tense.Footnote ⁴⁸ In the Infancy Gospel a burst of comedy changes the climate. The Infancy Gospel not only shows Jesus at play, it is also a playful account. Most will chuckle when Jesus, like any other child, tries to cover up his mistake. The story is told with a wink and a nod, adding a ludic “second accent” to the serious portrait of Jesus in the Synoptic tradition. Daniel Boyarin has recently traced a “second accent” alongside the serious “first accent” of Hellenistic philosophical traditions.Footnote ⁴⁹ This intellectual legacy was both embraced and interrogated in surprisingly similar ways by Greek-speaking satirists (such as Lucian) and the compilers of the Talmud. “Menippean satire,” a rather amorphous style dedicated to the combination of incongruous elements, of first and second accents, is the name that Boyarin gives to this form of inquiry.Footnote ⁵⁰ In the broadest sense, the Infancy Gospel acts as a Menippean satire of the Synoptic depiction that it absorbs and extends. Similar to the examples that Boyarin adduces, the Infancy Gospel develops a “seriocomic” (spoudogeloion) tone and purpose.Footnote ⁵¹ In the rough play of the child Jesus, inherited practices and claims of knowledge come under scrutiny.

Along with comedy, the Infancy Gospel adds uncertainty to the Synoptic tradition, a sense of confusion that grows not in spite of, but because of Jesus's childhood acts of power. In the following scene, the son of Annas, a scribe (i.e., a religious expert) drains the water that Jesus had gathered into pools. Jesus lashes out: “Behold now even you shall dry up like a tree, and you will never produce leaves nor root nor fruit” (Inf. Gos. Thom. 3:2). Immediately the son of Annas withers, and Jesus returns home. Next a boy runs past Jesus, “bumping into his shoulder” (Inf. Gos. Thom. 4:1). In response, Jesus curses the child to death, leading to the moment noted earlier: the boy's parents beg Joseph either to take his family and leave, or, at least, “teach [Jesus] to bless and not to curse; for we have been deprived of our children” (Inf. Gos. Thom. 4:2). Joseph's second rebuke of Jesus is more urgent, even desperate: “Why do you do such things? They suffer and hate us.” Jesus does not yield: “Since you know wise words, you are not ignorant of where your words come from” (Inf. Gos. Thom. 5:1). When Joseph, detecting sassiness in these words, grabs Jesus by the ear, the boy sounds an ominous warning: “Let it suffice for you to seek and find me, and not also to torment me by having a natural ignorance [φυσικὴν ἄγνοιαν]. You do not see with light why I am yours. Behold! Do not upset me. For I am yours and have been put in your hands” (Inf. Gos. Thom. 5:3).

What is the meaning of all this? Some have suggested that the child's hostility captures the irascibility of the ideal holy figure, a compelling theory in light of biblical narratives about Elijah and Elisha, and stories of cursing in the Book of Acts.Footnote ⁵² The conflict also raises the problem of epistemology. When Joseph questions his son, we see a father trying to act on what he knows—biblical precepts about the day of rest and honoring one's parents. Meanwhile, Jesus's childlike reenactment of Genesis, while telegraphed to the reader, is missed entirely by the father. The contrast of what the reader sees, on the one hand, and what Joseph fails to see, on the other, seems crucial to the Infancy Gospel.Footnote ⁵³ It must be by design that Joseph, at the beginning of the Infancy Gospel, asks the same question that Mary will ask at the end, “Why do you do such things?”Footnote ⁵⁴ Joseph and Mary do not understand the boy, nor does anyone else.

If we neglect the back and forth of knowing and not knowing, the early stories of the Infancy Gospel can seem all too predicable: the fight between the “son of Annas” and the son of Joseph “is meant to foreshadow Jesus's later meeting with the High Priest himself.”Footnote ⁵⁵ This is likely at least part of the purpose. It is, at any rate, inevitable that readers of the canonical Gospels would connect the dots in this way. Yet, to reduce events in the Infancy Gospel to mere childhood prototypes of adult episodes does not do justice to the narrative.

Let us consider a different episode from the Gospel of Luke as a comparison rather than as a kind of foreshadowing: the story of Zechariah, priest and father of John the Baptist (Luke 1:5–80). Here again the strain is between fathers and sons, and the conflict turns on the axis of epistemology. When the angel Gabriel announces the pregnancy of John the Baptist, Zechariah scoffs at the plan: “How will I know [γνώσομαι] that this is so? For I am an old man, and my wife is getting on in years” (Luke 1:18). “I am Gabriel,” the angel replies, “I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news. But now, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time, you will become mute, unable to speak, until the day these things occur” (Luke 1:19–20). The angel Gabriel curses Zechariah, leaving him mute, and the people are left to wonder why. Once the child is born, Zechariah expresses conviction and belief by writing down the name of the boy, John—the name commanded by Gabriel. The curse is lifted and Zechariah is again able to speak. The conversion flags the surpassing glory of divine vision, vastly superior to the hesitation of Zechariah.Footnote ⁵⁶ He suffers for a lack of imagination, believing that his advanced age makes becoming a father impossible. Even so, Zechariah and the readers learn from his suffering.Footnote ⁵⁷

We might speculate that the Infancy Gospel pursues the same goal: to magnify divine knowledge at the expense of feebleminded humans. All the same, even when the promise and proof of divine power is apparent to readers, the blindness of characters remains unsettling. By contrast, the reason for Zechariah's punishment is unmistakable: how dare a mortal question the designs of God! The Infancy Gospel goes a step further, giving with one hand while taking away with the other. Readers may know more about Jesus than Joseph does—they have seen the child playfully mimic the creation of the world—and yet be left, like his parents, in the dark about the larger purpose, if any, of Jesus's curses and declarations.

Adults and Children

Following the initial set of stories, the Infancy Gospel introduces the first of three “schoolhouse” scenes.Footnote ⁵⁸ Like the earlier episodes, the schoolhouse tales continue to examine the ignorance of characters in the narrative. Jesus steamrolls the teacher, Zacchaeus, in a zero-sum game of wits. The pupil shines while his adversary is reduced to tears. From the start, Jesus rejects the teacher's authority: “But you, a man of the law, do not know the law [τὸν νόμον οὐκ οδες]” (Inf. Gos. Thom. 6:2). When the lesson itself commences, Zacchaeus strikes his pupil on the head, prompting Jesus to reiterate his superior grasp of the subject matter. The student claims to “know” (οδα) the letters “more accurately and better” than the teacher and asserts that the lesson itself lacks “insight” (σύνεσις [Inf. Gos. Thom. 6:3]). Jesus proceeds to illustrate his point, describing the pleasing appearance of the letter alpha, “how it has sharp lines and a middle stroke, which you see pointing, standing with legs apart, meeting, spreading, drawn aside, elevated, dancing in chorus. . .” (Inf. Gos. Thom. 6:3). The teacher is vanquished: “Woe is me! I am at a loss, wretch that I am” (7:1). In the lengthy lamentation that follows, the teacher concedes: “I understand [ἐπίσταμαι] neither the beginning nor the end. . .. The child is a great thing—either a god or an angel or what I should say I do not know [οὐκ οδα]” (Inf. Gos. Thom. 7:3–4).Footnote ⁵⁹

This first schoolhouse scene recalls earlier chapters of the Infancy Gospel: the multiple references to what the child Jesus knows and the teacher does not bridge back to the boy's earlier criticism of his father's “natural ignorance.” Along the same lines, we note that Zacchaeus not only admits defeat but also fails to comprehend Jesus's purpose: “What kind of belly bore him?” he asks. “What kind of womb nourished him? I do not know” (Inf. Gos. Thom. 7:2). Readers know to whom the belly and womb belong; they also know that the parents are no less confused than Zacchaeus. The child's deeds and, in this case, his words seem only to drive a wedge between himself and others.

Without guidance from the characters, the audience must on their own contemplate the riddle of the child's intentions. The Infancy Gospel invites reflection on differences in knowing: the difference between what Jesus knows and others do not; the difference between what the audience knows and the characters do not; and the difference between what the audience knows and what it does not. In this way the Infancy Gospel conforms to Meir Sternberg's analysis of the poetics of biblical narrative. Biblical narrative, he contends, trades on the gap between the truth and the whole truth.Footnote ⁶⁰ Stories throughout the Tanakh belong to an encompassing “drama of knowledge.” Caught up in narrative gaps and ambiguity—in surprises and suspense—the audience labors to bridge gaps in light of the principle of God's uncontested and supreme mastery of cosmic affairs. In the process, readers become aware of “the gulf separating human from divine vision.” So too the Infancy Gospel, as we have seen, takes delight in jolting turnabouts: the son corrects his father; the student teaches his teacher. Moreover, the Infancy Gospel also involves the audience in the drama, sometimes confirming assumptions but just as often confounding expectations. The extratextual audience, like the characters in the text, faces the dilemma of interpretation. It is a kind of parallel play that teaches about epistemological boundaries.

While the meaning of Jesus's words and deeds remains a disquieting riddle, the contest between Jesus and the teacher is at least mildly reassuring. The defeat of Zacchaeus would likely have brought to ancient readers the comfort of the familiar. He is the first in a long line of self-aggrandizing experts with whom Jesus similarly debates in the Synoptic tradition. The next development takes us a bit further down this predictable path. Jesus announces, in response evidently to the teacher's admission of ignorance, that the curses have been withdrawn: “‘I've come from above so that I might rescue those who are below.’. . . When the child stopped speaking, all those who had fallen under the curse were instantly saved” (Inf. Gos. Thom. 8:3). At the midpoint of the text, Jesus saves those he has cursed. The Infancy Gospel seems to restore balance.

But the very next story disrupts the equilibrium. “A few days later Jesus was playing on the roof of a house with other children. . . [when] one of the children playing with him fell off the roof and died” (Inf. Gos. Thom. 9:1). The other children flee, and Jesus is left alone. The parents arrive and point the finger at Jesus: “You knocked down our child” (Inf. Gos. Thom. 9:2). Jesus denies the accusation. Since he has hitherto been the cause of suffering and fear throughout the land, the accusation is perhaps unsurprising. Then, suddenly, the misdeeds of the past give way to a present miracle. Jesus calls out to the dead boy, “Zeno! Arise and tell me: Did I throw you down?” When Zeno declares, “No, Lord, you didn't push me, you raised me,” the grateful parents “praised God and worshipped the child Jesus” (Inf. Gos. Thom. 9:3).

The guilt or innocence of Jesus in this episode is less significant than the fact of the question itself. To be sure, the hero of the Infancy Gospel now brings salvation instead of suffering. Yet, for a moment that lasts at least the length of the interval between the accusation of the parents and the raising of their dead child, there is a hesitation, a turning of the screw. To call this interlude suspenseful does not overstate the situation. As Sternberg puts it: “In art as in life, suspense derives from incomplete knowledge about a conflict (or some other contingency) looming in the future.”Footnote ⁶¹ If we are not shocked by the accusation of murder, it is because we remember all too well the curses of the child Jesus. What we do not know is whether Zeno fell by accident or was pushed (as the parents suggest), and whether or not Jesus will be exonerated.Footnote ⁶² Readers may hope that the death of Zeno plays a role in some larger plan. But what is the method in the madness?

Again a Lukan episode supplies an instructive comparison.Footnote ⁶³ The story of Eutychus in the Book of Acts takes place late at night in the city of Troas. As Paul and his companions talk, a “youth” (νεανίας), Eutychus, sits on a window ledge, three floors above the discussion. “Overcome by sleep, he fell to the ground three floors below and was picked up dead” (Acts 20:9). Paul takes Eutychus into his arms and restores him to life. Whatever the story in Acts shares with the Infancy Gospel’s tale about Zeno, an important difference stands out: there can be no doubt that the fall of Eutychus is an accident. There may be suspense about whether Paul will deign to intercede on Eutychus's behalf, but there is nothing ambiguous about who or what is to blame for the fall.

The Zeno story, by contrast, immediately raises a series of questions about cause and effect. So too it summons the specter of uncertainty about the motives of the child Jesus. Why, for example, do the other children flee the scene? From whom are they running—the adults or Jesus? With the culprit left unnamed, the testimony of the resuscitated Zeno betrays a degree of desperation. It is as though the storyteller recognizes that the reader, aware of past injuries, may be reluctant to accept Jesus's denial. Even in the supernatural denouement we do not learn who or what led to Zeno's tumble. The whole truth of what happened on the rooftop lies beyond our grasp.

In other ways the stories of Eutychus and Zeno are in sync. The fall of Eutychus belongs to the domain of hyperbole—a laugh at the expense of a long-winded Paul, garrulous to the point of putting his audience to sleep. So too we may wonder how seriously we are to take the Zeno story. “Jesus was playing with other children” (Inf. Gos. Thom. 9:1): the setting of the episode is childhood amusement, and Jesus's defense against the accusation of Zeno's parents is grimly playful in its own way. As with the clay sparrows, Jesus somewhat mischievously brings what is dead (or inanimate) to life in order to escape punishment. Moreover, if Jesus has the power to raise Zeno, he must also possess the power—like a child with a doll—to make Zeno say whatever is convenient.Footnote ⁶⁴ Perhaps the Zeno episode is more proof of what Boyarin calls a “second accent,” a send-up of the sober miracles of the Synoptic tradition? Like the baffled, defeated teacher Zacchaeus, the reader remains doubtful, not knowing whether to laugh or cry.

Mother and Child Reunion?

Meanwhile, neither the parents of Zeno nor the crowds in the Infancy Gospel seem to harbor any suspicions about the child. From this point forward, the wonders of Jesus lead (mostly) to reconciliation and harmony. Jesus catches spilled water in his cloak to give to his mother (Inf. Gos. Thom. 10:1–2), and helps his father with a carpentry project by stretching a piece of wood to match it up with another board (12:1–2). Joseph exults: “I am blessed, for God has given this child to me” (Inf. Gos. Thom. 12:2). The villagers also witness miracles. When a young man splits open his foot chopping wood and dies Jesus pushes his way through the onlookers, a hometown hero, to heal and restore the victim to life (Inf. Gos. Thom. 16:1–2). Hope overcomes the fear of the “first half” stories, and the crowds ring out: “For he saved many souls from death. And he will continue to save all the days of his life” (Inf. Gos. Thom. 16:3).

The transition of neighbors and parents from contempt and fear to admiration of the child Jesus has been at the center of important questions in recent studies of the Infancy Gospel.Footnote ⁶⁵ Is the change in the behavior of Jesus or in the perception of those around him? The single blip in the convivial mood of the second half of the Infancy Gospel suggests the latter. A brutal schoolhouse episode leaves the teacher dead (Inf. Gos. Thom. 13:1–2) but in the very next chapter, a different tutor wisely yields the floor to the pupil, and Jesus, standing at a lectern with a book on it, utters “awe-inspiring words” to an appreciative crowd.Footnote ⁶⁶ The teacher lavishes praise on Jesus—“he is full of much grace and wisdom”—and thus earns a reward: “Because you spoke rightly and testified rightly,” announces Jesus, “on account of you the one struck down shall be saved” (Inf. Gos. Thom. 14:4). In light of this splendid act of restoration, Tony Burke rightly suggests that the “real transformation in the narrative is made in those around Jesus, not Jesus himself. . .. In [the Infancy Gospel] this means that people should respond to Jesus not with incredulity or violence, but with belief and praise. . . it is Jesus's teachers, neighbors, and parents who have a lesson to learn here.”Footnote ⁶⁷ So too Reidar Aasgaard argues, “Audiences—both individuals and groups—gradually realized the greatness of Jesus.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Aasgaard applies this conclusion with equal force to the “increasing insight” of the parents of Jesus. In the first half of the gospel, Jesus drives his parents up the wall. In the second half, by contrast, father and son together assemble furniture like a well-oiled machine.

This proposal about “increasing insight” circles back to the problem with which we began: Mary and Joseph's failure to understand Jesus. While the second half of the Infancy Gospel is brightly optimistic, some shadows of doubt linger. When Joseph returns to collect Jesus from the third teacher, he finds a crowd gathered around the classroom. He assumes that Jesus has acted out once again: “And Joseph quickly ran to the classroom, suspecting that this teacher too was no longer unacquainted [with the boy's powers] and was suffering” (Inf. Gos. Thom. 14:3). As it turns out, Joseph's worry proves to be unwarranted, as teacher and crowd praise the child. But the father's anxiety is a reminder that the son remains an unknown quantity.

Moreover, if we lay too much stress on the cheerful atmosphere of the second half of the Infancy Gospel, we risk overlooking the domestic trouble that persists in the concluding chapter, a retelling of the canonical “Finding of Jesus.” As in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus remains in Jerusalem without his parents’ consent: “And his parents did not know” (Inf. Gos. Thom. 17:1). When Mary and Joseph arrive at the temple, Jesus's role is accentuated: more than ask questions, as in Luke, Jesus also “explained [ἐπιλύων] the main points of the law and the riddles and the parables of the prophets” (Inf. Gos. Thom. 17:2). But Jesus's virtuoso performance does little to lessen the parents’ confusion. The Infancy Gospel even amplifies Mary's worry, adding another term to Luke's “great anxiety”: “Child, what have you done to us? See, we have been looking for you in great anxiety and distress [ὀδυνώμενοι λυπούμενοι ἐζητομέν σε]” (Inf. Gos. Thom. 17:3).Footnote ⁶⁹ As in the canonical version, the reply of Jesus about “the things of my father” hangs in the air, leaving matters unresolved (Inf. Gos. Thom. 17:3).

At this point, the Infancy Gospel separates itself from the canonical source by eliminating the Lukan verse: “But they did not understand what he said to them” (Luke 2:50). In its place the Infancy Gospel inserts a benediction from the “scribes and the Pharisees” in the temple: “Blessed are you, because the Lord God has blessed the fruit of your womb” (Inf. Gos. Thom. 17:4).Footnote ⁷⁰ Reidar Aasgaard takes this difference as a sign of the purpose of the Infancy Gospel: to show the “growing insight” of the parents into the mission of their child.Footnote ⁷¹ The “omission” of Luke 2:50 from the extracanonical version is not unimportant, but I do not think that the absence alone can support the weight of Aasgaard's proposal. Rather than parental understanding, the reader of the Infancy Gospel is left with a doublet of unyielding interrogatives. The twelve-year-old asks his parents: “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know. . . ?” (Inf. Gos. Thom. 17:3). No, Mary and Joseph did not know. The question-and-question format implies precisely the opposite of “growing insight.”

The parents remain mystified by this child, and the reader may feel the same way. But now, at least, the reader understands why Mary and Joseph do not understand their son. The Infancy Gospel shows what has triggered Mary's otherwise inexplicable amnesia of the “nativity and all that.” Mary knows the blessings and curses, the good and the bad that her strange child can do, and the combination has left her, like the reader, at a loss. Mary's own reproach of Jesus becomes in context a moment of sincere and reflective probing, a knowing question about not knowing: “Child, what have you done to us?” It also forms an inclusio to the father's earlier interrogation of his five-year-old son: “Why do you do such things?” (Inf. Gos. Thom. 2:4), and “Why do you say such things?” (Inf. Gos. Thom. 5:1). The result, I submit, is a complex and sympathetic rendering of the parents in the “Finding of Jesus.” As the Infancy Gospel tells it, Mary and Joseph arrive at the temple, hearts filled with anxiety, minds filled with questions about Jesus's disruptive childhood. They hope for the best and fear the worst.