Christ Child: Cultural Memories of a Young Jesus by Stephen J. Davis (review)

In his latest book, Christ Child: Cultural Memories of a Young Jesus, Stephen Davis, a specialist of the history of ancient and medieval Christianity, uses the Paidika (a.k.a. Infancy Gospel of Thomas) as a means to import the latest insights from social and cultural memory studies on ancient Christian collections of Jesus’ childhood.

The inspiring study has three parts. The first part, “Methods and Approaches,” selectively summarizes the status quaestionis and provides insights on both the Paidika and cultural memory theory as applied in the book. The second and main part, “Graeco-Roman Sites of Memory,” focuses on Graeco-Roman recipients and explores their reception through three examples. The third part, “Christian-Jewish-Muslim Encounters,” further expands reception to Jewish-Christian identity negotiations, as well as to Muslim and Arab Christian reading and reworking of the material. The book does not attempt to explain the formation of the Paidika with insights from memory theory, but rather focuses on its reception. The general idea is to explore how readers of different contexts would have understood the stories based on the background of their lieux de mémoire.

The first part consists of a concise and erudite summary of the text history and interpretations of the Paidika. The disambiguation of the term “Paidika” recalls that “Gospel” is a modern identification giving way to misleading assumptions about genre and readership. Similarly helpful is the clarification that during the early stages of transmission, Greco-Roman households would have been the primary locations for individual and group readings, in all likelihood associated with commensality. Given the analogy to symposia, it is rather the elite circles that were the main tradents.

The second part examines three types of episodes: the miracle of the birds (Chapter Three on Paidika 2–3), Jesus’ fatal curses (Chapter Four on Paidika 3.4.13), and Jesus’ encounters with teachers (Chapter Five on Paidika 6–8.13.14.17). Each chapter investigates how these stories would have resonated with experiences and memories of the readers. This part provides stunning insights into the social worlds of antique readers. Even without a genuine interest in the Paidika, it is worthwhile reading, bringing together evidence from different types of artifact such as texts, epigrams, mosaics, pottery, and coins. By Greco-Roman standards the examined episodes would have been received as realistic depictions that might have echoed the recipients’ own experiences playing with birds, fighting with opponents, and employing the language of cursing, but also the methods of learning to read and write, especially the drill to learn letters.

One of the driving questions in Part Two is how the Paidika “would have functioned as a site of memory for reimagining the contours of Jesus’s childhood in late antiquity” (49). Although the concern is understandable, it not only runs counter to the book’s initial idea, but also to the concept of lieu de mémoire as coined by Pierre Nora. The confusing use of the term—on the one hand for the reception context(s) of the Paidika, on the other hand for the text itself—makes it difficult to follow the author’s theoretical approach.

In a similar fashion, this critique applies to the distinction between “traditional socio-historical criticism” and the “cultural memory sociologist approach” introduced in Chapter Three. The difference lies in the emphasis on reception instead of production—especially how ancient readers drew on the past as lenses for interpretation. It remains to be seen whether this distinction is convincing. How specific readers might have received certain texts—e.g. the fact that cursing was part of (social) conflict and competition—might also be investigated without the use of memory studies.

The third part, focusing on the further reception of the childhood stories and how they became an ingredient of interreligious encounters, is equally strong with regards to content but will rather match the interest of a different audience. While the first and second parts are...