Entering God's Kingdom (Not) Like A Little Child

Images of the Child in Matthew, 1 Corinthians, and Thomas

Eunyung Lim

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9783110695175
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ancient Religion

What does it mean to be "like a child" in antiquity? How did early Christ-followers use a childlike condition to articulate concrete qualifications for God's kingdom? Many people today romanticize Jesus's welcoming of little children against the backdrop of the ancient world or project modern Christian conceptions of children onto biblical texts. Eschewing such a Christian exceptionalist approach to history, this book explores how the Gospel of Matthew, 1 Corinthians, and the Gospel of Thomas each associate childlikeness with God's kingdom within their socio-cultural milieus. The book investigates these three texts vis-à-vis philosophical, historical, and archaeological materials concerning ancient children and childhood, revealing that early Christ-followers deployed various aspects of children to envision ideal human qualities or bodily forms. Calling the modern reader's attention to children's intellectual incapability, asexuality, and socio-political utility in ancient intellectual thought and everyday practices, the book sheds new light on the rich and diverse theological visions that early Christ-followers pursued by means of images of children.

Chapter 1 Introduction

Ἄφετε τὰ παιδία ἔρχεσθαι πρός με, μὴ κωλύετε αὐτά,

τῶν γὰρ τοιούτων ἐστὶν ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ.

Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them,

for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.¹

Matt 19:14; Mark 10:14; Luke 18:16

1.1 Prologue

“Jesus loves the little children.” Derived from the synoptic story about children and the kingdom, this saying is well-known to the general public regardless of their individual faiths, not only as the title of a hymn written by C. Herbert Woolston (1856–1927) but also as a motto for many Christian organizations. As children serve as an effective center for public discussions on healthcare, economic crises, and global peacebuilding in our modern world, the child-loving Jesus has enabled church leaders and advocates to implement diverse initiatives to defend children’s rights and advance their well-being. Many Christian charities and NGOs feature the verses about children and the kingdom quoted in the epigraph of this chapter to promote their causes of helping children in the midst of poverty, war, and other challenges.² In light of the significance of Jesus’s sayings, a group of theologians organized the “Child Theology Movement” in the early 2000s, inspired by the passage in the Gospel of Matthew in which Jesus puts a little child in the midst of his disciples (Matt 18:1–5). These theologians endeavor to rethink “Christian doctrine and practice in light of the child and childhood,” offering consultations to ministers and academics around the world to “do theology with a child in the midst” – whether it means a “theology of childhood” or “advocacy for children.”³

Clearly, the ways in which Christians interpret Jesus’s teaching reflect not only the valuation of children in our time but also the public awareness that in so many places, children are still vulnerable, lack proper care, and are subject to abuse. As part of this contemporary Christian discourse, it does not take much effort to find on- and off-line images featuring (a white, blue-eyed) Jesus embracing or surrounded by little children. Perhaps for dramatic effect, some writers and preachers often embellish this portrait of Jesus by not only contrasting him with his disciples and their unkindness to the children but also juxtaposing Jesus’s action with the grim reality of children in his day.⁴ In today’s Christian ministry and theological discourses, such interpretations seem to be accepted quite uncritically, reaffirming Jesus’s unique attitude toward children in the ancient world.

Admittedly, the image of Jesus with the little children has inspired many Christians today, contributing to noble actions in social sectors. Yet, this interpretive tendency that relies on the historical superiority or uniqueness of Jesus does not come without a price. It extracts from the gospels the evidence that the historical Jesus loved little children much more than his contemporaries, often creating a misconception of the historical reality. As Christian interpreters rush to overemphasize Jesus’s welcoming of little children, they tend to compare Jesus’s sayings with only a small number of examples from his time that portray children and childhood negatively. In this process, it is easy to heroize Jesus for his “unprecedented” deeds against the backdrop of the ancient world, which also generates and reinforces ideas of Christian uniqueness and supersessionism. Therefore, we may face undesirable outcomes if we fail to engage thoroughly with a broad range of historical materials attesting to ancient ideas about children and childhood. More seriously, an interpretive approach of this sort may obfuscate the theological significance of Jesus’s sayings about children and the kingdom (e.g., Matt 18:1–5; 19:14; Mark 10:13–16; Luke 18:15–17). In their context, the focus of Jesus’s sayings does not lie in publicizing how much Jesus values little children. Instead, these sayings use a childlike condition as an important model for explaining concrete qualifications for entering God’s kingdom.⁵

This book was developed to advance a constructive discussion of the images of children and childhood in New Testament and early Christian studies. Rather than reconstructing the historical Jesus’s or early Christians’ attitudes toward children from the New Testament,⁶ this research calls attention to the various ways in which individual biblical texts employ portrayals of children according to their theological focus, historical context, and rhetorical situation. In particular, the present book aims to examine the meanings and functions of childlike conditions in a set of ancient writings that frequently mention children and the kingdom (or “reign”) of God together, namely, the Gospel of Matthew, 1 Corinthians, and the Gospel of Thomas. Calling attention to the fact that these texts ask readers to become (or not to be) like children, this book delves into how each of these texts uses little children to craft a social identity in the first century CE that is later labeled “Christian.”⁷ One key theological maneuver in the selected texts is that children are linked with conceptions of God’s kingdom. In the places in which God’s kingdom was envisioned and proclaimed, what did childlikeness mean to early Christ-followers? What philosophical or theological ideas and ideals did they see through little children, and how did ancient discourses and practices related to children help us articulate these concepts?

These questions will be explored in each chapter as I proceed to analyze the childlike condition that the Gospel of Matthew, 1 Corinthians, and the Gospel of Thomas each offer. These earliest “Christian” texts have been chosen on the basis of their commonality in terminology and temporal setting, as well as their values, which are representational of their literary genre. Even when we set aside a source-critical approach to their relationship,⁸ these texts present observable similarities at the outset in terms of their usage of “child” and “kingdom.” Matthew, 1 Corinthians, and Thomas not only speak frequently of “kingdom” (βασιλεία, ⲙⲛ̅ⲧⲉⲣⲟ), they also commonly use specific Greek and Coptic words that refer to young children, usually ranging in age from zero to seven years old (e.g., παιδίον, νήπιος, ⲕⲟⲩⲉⲓ ⲛϣⲏⲣⲉ? ϣⲏⲙ).⁹ Besides these frequent word occurrences, the temporal scope these texts share makes them worth investigating together. Written between the mid-first century and the early second century CE,¹⁰ they are all generally understood as works by early Christ-followers, meaning that the communities of these texts’ authors and first hearers lived when the later-termed “Christianity” was in a burgeoning stage.

Originating from the contemporaneous historical environment, Matthew, 1 Corinthians, and Thomas represent unarguably different genres of early Christian literature, as modern scholars classify them. Interestingly, they each speak of children and the kingdom more frequently than any other writings in the same genre category. Most notable is the Gospel of Matthew, which mentions “kingdom” a total of 55 times, more frequently than any other canonical gospel, while also making an overt connection between childlikeness and the kingdom of heaven. As a canonical epistle, First Corinthians refers to “kingdom” unusually more often than the other extant letters of Paul (1 Cor 4:20; 6:9, 10; 15:24, 50) while comparing the audience and Paul to little children. Although there are many non-canonical “gospels” featuring children,¹¹ the Gospel of Thomas stands out among extracanonical works dated in the first few centuries CE, as it distinctively presents babies as an ideal model for the kingdom.¹² Together with the temporal and terminological commonalities, the genre representations that Matthew, 1 Corinthians, and Thomas show make it possible to undertake a meaningful comparative study of the three texts, which are not usually discussed together due to our compartmentalized scholarship (e.g., gospel studies, Pauline studies, Christian apocrypha). The result of this study, then, may provide a broader implication for the field of early Christian studies: As the historical communities of these texts simultaneously take part in a larger philosophical phenomenon that likens adults to little children in the process of conceptualizing what God’s kingdom is, analyzing differences and similarities among these texts can help diversify our understanding of what we now call “early Christianity.”

Treating Matthew, 1 Corinthians, and Thomas as contemporaneous works and the products of the socio-cultural environments of the ancient Mediterranean, the current research pays close attention to the dynamic ways in which they speak of being or becoming like children when depicting readers’ ideal condition for entering the kingdom. Although these texts, especially the first two (Matt and 1 Cor), are likely familiar to modern readers, they may not present the identical pictures of children and people in God’s kingdom that we imagine. Therefore, how we might distinguish and elucidate the meanings and functions of children in these texts becomes an important question for this research. Moreover, this inquiry also urges us to ponder the implications of the relationship between child imagery and God’s kingdom: How do these childlike conditions relate to the variety of ethical, social, or spiritual visions that early Christ-followers aspired to achieve?

To examine the ways in which children are portrayed in terms of conceptions of God’s kingdom, two methodological approaches are utilized throughout this book. The first sets the selected writings’ portrayals of children within their socio-cultural contexts, which may not hold the same assumptions and ideas about children and childhood as our modern world. We should therefore engage in a thorough analysis of these images of children through an interdisciplinary lens, particularly by consulting historical and classical studies of children in antiquity. Second, these portrayals of children must be understood within the historical–rhetorical situation of each text. As we will see, these texts emphasize becoming (or not being) like children in order to persuade their immediate audiences of certain theological ideas. Careful attention to the cultural embeddedness and rhetorical positionality of biblical deployments of the child, thus, will lead us to a fresh understanding of these child images: Early Christ-followers take up various aspects of the child from contemporaneous discourses on childhood and use them as effective vehicles for explaining an ideal human condition in which to enter the kingdom of God. Through children’s characteristics and social situations, Matthew, 1 Corinthians, and Thomas cast young children as theological imaginaries for expressing various conceptions of a self or faith community that is worthy of God’s kingdom.

1.2 When the Little Children Came to Scholars

1.2.1 General Background

This research broadly asks how each text represents the child with regard to its notion of God’s kingdom and what assumptions about children the ancient authors and their audiences share. Understanding ancient thinking about and practices in relation to children and childhood provides the necessary context for understanding references to childlikeness and the kingdom in Jesus’s sayings and other documents of the first century CE. In particular, I emphasize this careful contextualization as a critical response to extant scholarly discussions of children in New Testament and early Christian writings.

The field of biblical and early Christian studies has witnessed a surge of interest in children since the 1990s, corresponding with the development of the study of children and childhood in antiquity.¹³ While researchers have conducted a series of meaningful studies of ancient Christian references to children over the past few decades,¹⁴ little attention has been paid to the manner in which early Christ-­followers present the idea of childlikeness, namely, using a young individual as an example or metaphor to convey certain religious concepts.¹⁵ Many studies have focused on reconstructing the social reality of children, mostly within broader projects on early Christian households and family structures.¹⁶ When childhood metaphors are discussed in New Testament scholarship, the scope of research is usually confined to parent–child relations; from the biblical construction of God as father and believers as children to the parent–child relationship between Paul and his audiences, scholars have long analyzed the theological meanings and social functions of these metaphors.¹⁷ In this research trend, first-century-CE documents that use the child as a figurative analogy (i.e., evoking childlike or infantile characteristics) have rarely received careful attention.¹⁸ Even when New Testament scholars interpret Jesus’s teaching about childlikeness or Paul’s use of childhood language, they have not considered thoroughly what this imagery of the child might evoke in an ancient socio-cultural setting. Instead, upon explaining what childlikeness means, many fall back on modern cultura...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• To My Parents
• Abstract
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Entering the Kingdom of Heaven Not Like the Sons of Earthly Kings: The Gospel of Matthew
• Chapter 3 Infants in Christ, Not Children of God’s Kingdom: 1 Corinthians
• Chapter 4 Entering the Kingdom as a Baby: The Gospel of Thomas
• Chapter 5 Conclusion
• General Index
• Index of Biblical and Early Christian References
• Index of Other Ancient Sources