Not Child's Play: Paul and Children

The Pauline letters regularly invoke children and related images. The children imagery assumed by Paul and ascribed to the communities being addressed are often ambiguous, even if generally representative of ancient sentiments about children. Children imagery appears to stand in a dialectical relationship to their (both Paul and the communities') social locations, particularly with regard to identity-constructions and negotiated positions of power. Children imagery was associated with kinship and household, and in these and other ways imbued with power and ideological interests, serving a range of social concerns related to social identity and the construction of boundaries. Some of these tendencies have remained to this day.