Ancient Christians wrestled with the meaning of family life. The letters of Paul and the sayings of Jesus raise fundamental questions about the worth of the household. Paul urges his unmarried followers in Corinth “to remain unmarried as I am” (1 Cor 7:8). Marriage is a distraction: “those who marry will experience distress in this life” because “the appointed time has grown short” (1 Cor 7:28–29). Paul could see the beginning of the end in his own day: “The present form of the world is passing away” (1 Cor 7:31). Society would soon vanish, along with institutions such as marriage. Would the basic social unit, the family, survive? No, said Jesus. In the Gospel of Luke, he tells his disciples, “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!” (Luke 12:51; cf. Matt 10:34). “From now on,” Jesus continues, “five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son, and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law” (Luke 12:52–53; cf. Matt 10:35–36).1 In these passages, the axe is laid at the root. They predict that the apocalypse will begin at home.2
To move forward in time to the second and third centuries of the Common Era is to find a range of Christian positions on “family values.”3 For some early Christian authors, faith and family life went hand in glove. The Pastoral Epistles of the New Testament envision the patriarchal household as the ideal. Men should be in charge; women should remain silent and focus on child-bearing (1 Tim 2:8–3:7). Their emphasis on harmony and order in the household follows the drumbeat of the Roman era. On the opposite end were Christians who rejected sex, marriage, and procreation. They told stories about charismatic and miracle-working apostles—some of them female—proclaiming a gospel of lifelong chastity. A new relationship, an ascetic “family,” comes to replace the conjugal bond. Young lovers turn away from each other and gaze instead on the face of an apostle.
For some time now, historians have documented the ways that early Christians used various notions of the family to define their religion. But the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Proto-gospel of James have been left out of the conversation. This book offers a new perspective. It claims that the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Proto-gospel of James turn the family life of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph into a laboratory for testing ideas about human understanding. What can human beings comprehend of divine affairs? What can human beings know about each other? The stories, in other words, are about relationships. How are they created? How are they maintained? How much and how little understanding travels along the lines that connect the members of a family to each other and to the deity they worship? These are the questions that readers will encounter in these stories about Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. What emerges from the accounts is a family that is both strange and familiar, unusual and ordinary.
Why did family matter to ancient Christians? And how do the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Proto-gospel of James, with their focus on the religion’s founding family, fit into the picture? These are the guiding questions of the first chapter. To answer these questions, we explore overlapping contexts. The first section turns to the historical context. Should Christians marry? Should Christians try to have children? Ancient Christians debated the meaning and value of family life at a moment when the household became a symbol for order in the Roman Empire. Family life, in other words, was deeply relevant to the broad society to which ancient Christians belonged. The stress on family life in the historical context can help to explain why the authors of the family gospels expanded storytelling about Jesus into the domestic sphere. It may also help us to understand why these stories gained traction with early Christian audiences. No less than their pagan and Jewish neighbors, ancient Christians talked and wrote about what mattered in their world.
The second section describes the literary context. If the historical context suggests the reason why stories about the holy family gained traction with early Christian readers, then the literary one can begin to tell us why the family gospels take the shape they do. A study of the Infancy Gospel and the Proto-gospel of James must consider their relation to the earliest narrative references to the family of Jesus, scattered among the first four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. What information do these accounts contain? As we shall see, when it comes to the household of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the four gospels of the New Testament leave much to the imagination. What happened behind closed doors? How much did Mary and Joseph understand of the events in which they were swept up? Did the parents of Jesus know who he was? Did they understand his significance? Gaps in the earliest literary portrayals put the imagination of Christian storytellers in motion.
But it was not only what is missing that attracted the authors of the family gospels. They also wondered, I think, about what is present, especially the strain and confusion that is evident in the single childhood story found in the earliest gospels: Luke’s story of the twelve-year-old Jesus and his parents in the temple of Jerusalem (Luke 2:41–52). This story plays a leading role in third section on the interpretive context. We look at three different interpretations of this story. Themes of familial intimacy and the limits of human understanding come to the surface, themes that likewise run through the family gospels. The Infancy Gospel and Proto-gospel of James report surprising, even shocking, details about the household of the first Christian family. But the questions they raise pop up in a number of Christian sources, from the earliest gospels to the writings of Irenaeus in the second century and those of John Chrysostom in the fourth century.
Christians, according to some ancient observers, were the enemies of “family values.” Around 177 CE, one critic described a day in the life of Christians. The report is unkind.4 It comes from the hand of Celsus, a Greek-speaking pagan, perhaps of Alexandria, who issued a rebuttal of Christian claims in his work, The True Doctrine. As part of his takedown of Christians, Celsus includes a vignette of suspicious activity:
In private houses also we see wool-workers, cobblers, laundry-workers, and the most illiterate and bucolic yokels, who would not dare to say anything at all in front of their elders and more intelligent masters. But whenever they get hold of children in private and some stupid women with them, they let out some astounding statements such as, they must not pay attention to their father and school-teachers, but must obey them; they say that these figures talk nonsense and have no understanding. . . . And if just as they are speaking they see one of the school-teachers coming, or some intelligent person, or even the father himself, the more cautious of them flee in all directions; but the more reckless urge the children to rebel.5
Christians, according to Celsus, are too dense to realize what is good for them. Plus, they are dangerous. They try to brainwash youngsters and “urge children to rebel.”
Christianity threatened the foundation of civilized society, according to Celsus. He points to unrest in the household: fathers are being wronged by early Christian “yokels,” and thus the strength of “private houses” is being weakened from within. On display, then, is the corrosive effect of Christianity. It rejected the rightful place of fathers in teaching the young how to take up their proper roles in adult society. Of what value, then, was this new-fangled religion? Very little, as could be inferred from the company that Christians kept. They wallow in the muck with “the foolish, dishonourable, and stupid” and prey on “slaves, women, and little children.”6 If their own tactics doomed Christians to irrelevance, why did they cause Celsus so much dismay? Because, as Celsus and his audience believed, if households were being infiltrated by this menace, Roman society at large was put at risk. The social web of the public Roman world was held in place by “private houses.”7
How seriously should historians take the claims of Celsus? It is unlikely that Christians urged their children to rebellion. At the same time, Celsus put his finger on a reliable aspect of the early history of the religion: it began in households. Long before Celsus, Paul’s first-century letters afford a view of a network of communities in the houses of followers of Christ. Decades before the use of the term “Christian,” a new kind of belonging was taking shape in the collection of Gentile house churches. Spend any time reading Paul’s letters, and one learns a good deal about the ancient household: the role of slaves, the importance attached to questions of inheritance and adoption,8 and the top-down “command structure” of the patriarchal household. Paul’s letters indicate that early Christian communities, while meeting in households, were nevertheless challenging assumptions about familial and societal order.9
The household gave Paul an important metaphor for describing the followers of Christ. Christians of every household are supposed to be united in the family of Christ. Paul describes himself as mother and father (1 Thess 2:7, 11–12). Even so, as Paul’s letters make clear, strife was often present. People of different statuses, who would have never mingled together in the outside world, were suddenly thrust together. It led to conflicts that Paul tried to resolve. For example, in his letter to Philemon, Paul takes on Philemon, the head of his household, over his treatment of a slave, Onesimus (Phlm 8–14). While Philemon is the first addressee, the letter is also for the “church in your house” (Phlm 2). Over this Christian “family” Paul holds a claim to authority, and he uses it to challenge Philemon’s position. Convinced of the nearness of the end, Paul used metaphor and manipulation to chip away at—but not do away altogether with—assumptions about order and hierarchy within households.10
Paul’s appropriation of familial terms hints at an alternative to the traditional household. Full-blown opposition is found later in some Christian writings of the second and third centuries. Agents of Christ are homewreckers in the so-called Apocryphal Acts, a set of five narratives modeled on the canonical book of Acts. One of them features none other than Paul: he recruits an adolescent girl, Thecla, away from a life of aristocratic matrimony. As she sits at her window, she hears a beatitude from the mouth of Paul, one that cannot be found in canonical beatitudes attributed to Jesus: “Blessed are those who have kept the flesh chaste, for they will become a temple of God.”11 Salvation in the Apocryphal Acts depends upon the renunciation of sexuality. For Thecla, the rejection of marriage and procreation is empowering in a very specific sense: no longer bound to her fiancé, she is free to take up the mantle of apostle. In the final chapter, Thecla returns home to call her mother to salvation: “For if you desire riches, the Lord will give them to you through me; if you desire your child, see, here I am!”12 Marriage lies in ruins, but family ties endure. Thecla yet hopes to persuade her mother, speaking to her as only a daughter can.13
Apostles fan out across the Mediterranean basin in the Apocryphal Acts, from Rome to India, carrying a message of celibacy: sex and marriage are evils, so too are offspring. In the Acts of Thomas, Christ himself appears as the apostle Judas Thomas (“the twin”) in the bridal chamber for a pair of royal newlyweds. He begins at once to enumerate the virtues of chastity: “Remember, my children, what my brother said to you, and to whom he commended you; Know that if you refrain from this filthy intercourse, you will become temples holy and pure, being released from afflictions and troubles, known and unknown, and you will not be involved in the cares of life and of children, whose end is destruction.”14 Warming to his theme, Christ in the Acts of Thomas spells out for the couple what they have to look forward to, should they decide instead to bring children into the world: “But if you get many children, for their sakes you become grasping and avaricious . . . and by doing this you subject yourselves to grievous punishments. For most children become unprofitable, being possessed by demons, some openly and some secretly. For they become either lunatics or half-withered or crippled or deaf or dumb or paralytics or fools. And though they be healthy, they will be again good-for-nothings, doing unprofitable and abominable works.”15
Accounts like the Acts of Thomas or rumors of such accounts would have set off alarm bells for Roman-era elites such as Celsus. The Acts of Thomas, like the other Apocryphal Acts, specifically features the breakup of aristocratic betrothals.16 Legal marriage was by and large a concern of the upper crust: as an institution, it protected the transfer of wealth between families and from one generation to the next. If well-heeled young people chose to “refrain from filthy intercourse,” elite society would face a crisis. What would happen if there was not a next generation to inherit the wealth and good taste of the current one?
The erotic literary twin of the Apocryphal Acts is the popular Greek romances of the Roman era, also, canonically speaking, five in number. They celebrate the marriage of young aristocrats. Their stories were popular among those who had the most at stake in the maintenance and passing down of elite Greek culture: the wealthy Greek-speaking audiences of Asia Minor who lived in the shadow of Rome. Tales of separation and reunion shored up the notion of public Greek identity in this context by expressing and maintaining a connection to an idealized, Hellenistic past. Wealthy lovers—“to the manor born”—are separated by shipwrecks, bandits, kidnapping, and war. But dislocation ultimately comes to an end: the pair reunite and pledge their love to one another. The Greek romance sets the “happy ending” in a suitably Hellenized city.17 The union guarantees the stability of well-to-do society.
The Apocryphal Acts, with their tales of apostles breaking up aristocratic betrothals, have been read as targeting an upper-class anxiety of “social reproduction.” But they may also be attacking a set of ethics based on conjugality, like the one found in the happy endings of the Greek romances.18 The upper-class argument for a conjugal morality is precisely what is denied in the Apocryphal Acts, which depict conventional marriage as a cesspool of iniquity. “Men and women giving up sex may tell the story of asceticism and subversion,” Andrew Jacobs argues, “but men and women giving up marriage tell a story about families and Christian ethical resistance along social status lines.”19
What apostles offer instead is a spiritualized relationship, an “apostolic love triangle.”20 Christ in the Acts of Thomas urges the couple to eschew one form of married life and replace it with another kind of commitment: “But if you obey and preserve your souls pure to God, there will be born to you living children, untouched by these hurtful things, and you will be without care, spending and untroubled life, free from grief and care, looking forward to receive that incorruptible and true marriage, and you will enter as groomsmen into that bridal chamber full of immortality and light.”21 Lovers turn away from each other and look for guidance from another figure: the apostle and, in the case of the Acts of Thomas, Christ, the twin brother of Thomas. The story continues: “And when the young people heard this, they believed the Lord and gave themselves over to him and refrained from filthy lust, and remained thus spending the night in the place.”22 The message of salvation comes to the bedroom, breaking up the carnal union. In its place is a pledge of lifelong continence. Following the example of the apostle, the converts follow the path of salvation to a place where everything is illuminated. A chaste bedroom leads to perfect knowledge.
The Apocryphal Acts contrast their vision of spiritual marriage and heavenly knowledge to the “filthy intercourse” of conventional marriage. But Christians were not the only ones to try to raise marriage to a higher plane. Pagan authors of the Roman era also cast marriage in elevated terms. Plutarch, the Greek moral essayist of the Roman era, portrays the institution as nothing less than a philosophical school. He creates an image of the bedroom as a schoolhouse of discipline in Advice to a Bride and Groom.23 The husband’s role is to teach his wife and to create order and harmony in the household.24 This includes behavior in the bedroom: the husband should train his wife in the arts of pleasure (without giving into excessive desires or wantonness). But there is also the education of the mind to consider. By teaching his wife mathematics, the husband guarantees that she will be rightfully ashamed to dance and make a spectacle of herself in public. By teaching his wife the science of astronomy, the husband ensures that she will recognize the tricks of astrologers. Instruction leads to wisdom and the possibility of overcoming the inherent weaknesses of her sex.
Plutarch and the Apocryphal Acts are unlikely bedfellows! Their appraisals of the value of marriage could not be farther apart. Nevertheless, they hold something in common: the notion that the household—traditionally conceived or transformed into a spiritual version—can be a setting for increasing and perfecting knowledge.
This is not the only point of contact between Christian and pagan sources. In the decades following the death of Paul, some of his interpreters took it upon themselves to develop a vision of family life and household order.25 Perhaps the best known of these passages are shared by Ephesians and Colossians (and 1 Peter): “Wives, be subject to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives and never treat them harshly. Children obey your parents in everything for this is your acceptable duty in the Lord. Fathers, do not provoke your children, or they may lose heart. Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything. . . . Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, for you know that you also have a Master in heaven” (Col 3:18–4:1; cf. Eph 5:21–6:9; 1 Pet 3:1–7). The stratified Household Codes project a vision of domestic order.26
A similar Christian voice speaks in the three Pastoral Epistles of the New Testament, also attributed to Paul. Hierarchy of gender is essential: “Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent” (1 Tim 2:11–12). Some scholars have argued that the assertion of patriarchal authority in these letters is meant to undermine the female heroes of accounts such as the Acts of Paul and Thecla.27 By the time the Pastoral letters were composed, Christian communities were no longer on the lookout for the end of days. What was needed instead was leadership. In an early “job description” for the office of bishop, the pseudonymous author of 1 Timothy contends that a bishop “must manage his own household well, keeping his children submissive and respectful in every way—for if someone does not know how to manage his own household (tou idiou oikou), how can he take care of God’s church?” (1 Tim 3:4–5). A successful bishop fosters harmony at home and in “God’s church.”28
The link between household and wider society, in this case “God’s church,” runs parallel to the public imagery and rhetoric of the Roman Empire.29 The Roman Empire was a well-managed household, overlapping with the “sentimental ideal” of the Roman family that projected concord in marriage, dutiful children, and slaves. The first Roman emperor, Augustus, championed this comparison: he presented the empire as a harmonious family.30 He accepted the title pater patriae or “father of the country.”31 In imagery and coins, the Augustan household was advertised across the empire.32 Subjects were encouraged to see Augustus as their benevolent head of household. Practical measures of tax relief for aristocratic, childbearing families were passed during his reign.33 Romans included images of the genius of Augustus on home altars. In the provinces, such as the Greek-speaking area of Asia Minor, Augustus was proclaimed the “father of the human race.” A century later, it reached an apogee, as Peter Brown observes: “The second century witnessed a striking convergence around the image of familial unity as a reflection of the harmony of the Roman Empire.”34
Under the watchful eye of Roman emperors, a new religion grew up in homes throughout the empire. Much of the language that Christians use to this day reflects the early appropriation of familial imagery and metaphor. Even so, the household soon became a source of controversy. By the second and third centuries, Christians were preoccupied with debating different models of family life. Some of these models corresponded to broader imperial notions of family as a symbol of harmony. Others rejected altogether marriage and childbearing. What binds all of these Christian attitudes together is the assumption that the closeness of the household, when properly understood, offers a natural setting for mutual understanding. When Christians authors wanted to evoke intimacy, they turned to family: “ ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ This is a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the church” (Eph 5:31).35 Members of a family are supposed to know one another. And this is why accounts of confusion and misunderstanding between Jesus and his parents warrant our attention.
Much of what readers know about the family of Jesus comes from a handful of chapters—five in all—at the beginning of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Take out these few chapters about the birth of Jesus, and what is left are only tantalizing glimpses. The father of Jesus is mentioned only once—and not by name—when Jesus travels to his hometown of Nazareth (Matt 13:54–58; cf. Mark 6:1–6; Luke 4:22). Jesus begins to speak, and his former neighbors are taken aback. He seems haughty; they know better: “Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary? And are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas?” (Matt 13:55). Two thousand years later, one can still feel the disdain in their questions. There are also poignant moments. One of the best-known passages involves the death of Jesus. The Gospel of John reports that Jesus, as he was being crucified, made provision for his mother: “When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother’ ” (John 19:26–27). Michelangelo’s Pieta, the sculpture that depicts Mary cradling the dead body of her son, lacks an explicit reference in Christian scripture. But the familial sentiment of the Pieta may perhaps be echoed in the story about Jesus’ final act of filial devotion, in which he asks a friend to take care of his mother and his mother to take care of his friend.
In death there is affection, but in life there is strain.36 The cold welcome that Jesus receives from erstwhile neighbors is not unlike the chilly relationship he has with members of his family. Jesus spends far more time with his disciples than with his mother. When he does speak with Mary, at a wedding in Cana in the Gospel of John, the exchange does not bespeak filial devotion (John 2:1–11). Mary says to Jesus, “They have no wine.” Jesus, sensing what his mother wants, replies curtly, “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come” (John 2:3–4). But Jesus relents and turns water into wine—“the first of his signs” (John 2:11). Mary, at least, believes that Jesus is capable of great things, which is more than can be said for other members of his family. Elsewhere the Gospel of John reports, “not even his brothers believed in him” (7:5).
A pair of moments in Chapter 3 of the Gospel of Mark raises more questions about the relationship of the adult Jesus and his family. At this point in Mark, Jesus has already made a name for himself as an exorcist, attracting a “great multitude from Galilee” (Mark 3:7). Jesus and his disciples go to his home for supper. The mob follows, creating so much chaos that Jesus and his disciples “could not even eat bread” (Mark 3:20). Somehow a report of the event reaches the family or “relatives” of Jesus, and “they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, ‘He has gone out of his mind’ ” (Mark 3:21). Why does the family act to stop Jesus? Their motive remains unstated. Do they act from a protective instinct, worried that the crowd might turn on Jesus? Have they grown accustomed to the noise around Jesus? Is this why, when the news comes, they do not hesitate but immediately strike out for the scene?
Amid the uproar inside the home, scribes begin to question the source of Jesus’ supernatural powers. They accuse Jesus of demon possession. Jesus rebukes the charge with a rhetorical question: “How can Satan cast out Satan?” (Mark 3:23). And then, in terms that may gesture to wider societal divisions, Jesus remarks, “If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand” (Mark 3:24–25). At this point, the “mother and brothers” of Jesus arrive at the house. Because of the crowd, they must “stand outside” (Mark 3:31). They send word inside, asking to see him. The crowd relays the message: “Look, your mother and brothers are outside seeking you” (Mark 3:32). “Who are my mother and brothers?” Jesus responds (Mark 3:33). Then, looking around the room at the people encircling him—both to gesture to those listening and, perhaps, to take the temperature of the room, so to speak—he continues, “Look, [you] are my mother and brothers. For whoever does the will of God, this one is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:34–35). The family of Jesus is unable to penetrate the barrier of the crowd. In a gospel that returns frequently to the image of those on the outside and those on the inside (Mark 4:10–12), the scene is telling: the family of Jesus is on the outside.
If this collection of passages is jarring, it is a credit to the stories of the birth of Jesus. In them, Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus seem bound tightly together by a secret, known only to them. The infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke put the story of one family at the center of large-scale events.37 Otherwise, the two versions of the Christmas story are quite different.38 In the Gospel of Matthew, Joseph and Mary are forced to flee Bethlehem after the client-king Herod of Judea orders the slaughter of all babies under the age of two: “Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah: ‘A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more’ ” (Matt 2:18). The “Massacre of the Innocents” is not part of the Gospel of Luke. Instead of regional bloodletting, geopolitics is the backdrop to the Lukan account of the birth of Jesus. Joseph travels with Mary to Bethlehem (from Nazareth) because the Roman ruler Augustus has called for a census: “In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered” (Luke 2:1).
The story of the new family begins amid turbulent circumstances. It takes place against the backdrop of the pious curiosity of shepherds and Magi as well as the implacable quest of ruling powers to acquire information.39 In the Gospel of Matthew, a mad client-king seeks to wipe out an entire generation of children. In the Gospel of Luke, the Roman emperor wants to consolidate power by gathering census details on each and every family within the realm; Rome is an empire of data in Luke’s telling. Together, the two accounts suggest a dark parallel: the birth of Jesus happens under rulers who seek to control the production of knowledge and, grimly, the production of offspring.
If we want to understand the later Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Proto-gospel of James, the stories of the birth of Jesus in Matthew and Luke are a good place to start.40 They supply the characters that people the family gospels. Mary and Joseph, the parents of Jesus, are the most important figures, although we do not learn from Matthew and Luke any specific details about how old they are or how they met. Neither account digs too deeply into the emotional life of their relationship. The reticence to do so is more conspicuous in one gospel than the other. Luke offers a moving portrayal of a couple, but it is not of Mary and Joseph. The first chapter relates a “prequel” to the birth of Jesus. It features Mary’s elderly cousin, Elizabeth, who, after living for years without children of her own, finally conceives a child with her husband, Zechariah. In a span of three verses (Luke 1:5–7), the reader learns crucial information, including the family backgrounds of Zechariah and Elizabeth, the upright character of each, their lack of children, and their advanced age: “But they had no children, because Elizabeth was barren, and both were getting on in years” (Luke 1:7). It is a slender but powerful combination of facts that gives an emotional depth to the relationship. They are running out of time to have a child.
By contrast, since we are told so little about it, the relationship of Mary and Joseph does not possess the depth of Elizabeth and Zechariah’s. This flatness is striking because the first two chapters of Luke spill over with emotion. Mary is moved to sing a song about the events that have overtaken her (Luke 1:46–55). Indeed, readers are afforded more than one glimpse into the heart and mind of Mary. The earliest example comes when Mary learns that, like Elizabeth, she is about to become unexpectedly pregnant. This set of circumstances is even more shocking in her case than in her cousin’s, and Mary voices her confusion: “How will this happen? I have not known any man” (Luke 1:34).41 As the story develops, Mary’s own emotions about the pregnancy bubble to the surface time and again. Meanwhile, the only reference to Joseph in all of Chapter 1 comes in the verses cited above (Luke 1:26–27), as the stage is being set for the visitation. Joseph does not utter a word of direct discourse in the gospel, and Luke’s profile of Joseph is restricted to his lineage. We are not told of his reaction to Mary’s pregnancy, nor are we given enough information to infer what it might have been. We learn how Mary feels about her child and her God, but her feelings toward Joseph and his toward her remain invisible.
The central feature of the accounts is the miraculous conception of Jesus by Mary. In Matthew, Mary is already engaged and pregnant, while in Luke, Mary is already engaged and then becomes pregnant. Mary and Joseph are bound together in a liminal state, on the threshold of parenthood. This bit of information is repeated by Luke later, in the same unadorned way, when the couple travels to Bethlehem: “Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child” (Luke 2:4–5). The evangelists carefully circumscribe the when of the supernatural conception of Jesus: it was after this (engagement) and before that (sex).
While the Gospel of Luke includes a long prologue in the story of Elizabeth and Zechariah, the Gospel of Matthew dives into the problem of the relationship between the two. Joseph intends at first to “dismiss her quietly,” hoping to save Mary from public humiliation. He wants to protect Mary from public ridicule, but he is also worried about his own reputation. He decides to seek a “quiet” divorce. But then an angel appears to Joseph in a dream and offers reassurance: “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child she conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit” (Matt 1:20). Joseph sets asides his worries, and “he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife” (Matt 1:24). Matthew then implies, perhaps, that the couple eventually had sex, after the birth of Jesus (Matt 1:25).
Joseph’s moment of hesitation is so brief that it can be quickly passed over. But it should not be overlooked since it is one of two instances of uncertainty in the early family life of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in the Synoptic tradition. The other belongs to the Gospel of Luke (2:41–52). Although the episode rests in close proximity to the stories of birth and infancy, it belongs to a later period in the life of Jesus. At the age of twelve, Jesus wanders off on his own, distressing his parents. When Mary and Joseph find Jesus in the temple of Jerusalem, they reproach him. Jesus responds in kind: “And his mother said to him, ‘Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.’ He said to them, ‘Did you not know that I must be concern myself with the things of my father?’ But they did not understand what he said to them” (Luke 2:48–49).42 It seems that mother and son “talk past one another” here. The awkward exchange between Mary and Jesus in the Lukan “Finding of Jesus” may seem unusual, even alien to the spirit of the rest of the earliest gospels. But perhaps it is better understood as one in a range of images of family life that stretches across various canonical and extracanonical accounts. On one end are stories of conflict and confusion, such as when Jesus refuses to speak with his mother and brothers. On the other are moments that evoke a sense of profound intimacy, such as when Jesus, dying on the cross, asks a friend to take care of his mother, something that he will no longer be able to do.
If the history of Christian debates over family life can tell us why early Christians expanded storytelling into the family of Jesus, then the moments of uncertainty in the earliest gospels can tell us why the storytelling takes the shape it does. The Lukan story of Jesus and his parents in the temple acts as a dividing line between different kinds of Christians of the second century. The clash shows how different Christians used the family of Jesus to explore the relationship between human and divine beings, as well as the limits of human understanding in the face of divine activity. In the examples that follow, we look at two different moments, one in the second and the other in the fourth century. One of the through lines of these examples is the story of the twelve-year-old Jesus. The other is the rejection of the kinds of stories that are part of the family gospels.
Irenaeus of Lyons, a figure who would later be accorded “orthodox” status, reports on the interpretation of a rival group of Christians. In the late second-century Adversus haereses, or Against Heresies, Irenaeus describes the “Marcosians,” followers of a Christian teacher named Marcus.43 Irenaeus attacks them, first, for their use of apocryphal stories.44 Irenaeus accuses his followers, the Marcosians, of creating a number of “apocryphal and spurious writings” to mislead others.45 Irenaeus gives an example: “When the Lord was a child and was learning the alphabet, his teacher said to him—as is customary—‘Pronounce alpha.’ He answered: ‘Alpha.’ Again the teacher ordered him to pronounce ‘Beta.’ Then the Lord answered: ‘You tell me first what alpha is, and then I shall tell you what beta is.’ This they explain in the sense that he alone understood the Unknowable, whom he revealed in alpha as in a type.”46 This story about Jesus and the letter alpha closely resembles an episode in the Infancy Gospel, one of at least three “schoolhouse” scenes that belong to the childhood tradition.47
Irenaeus ramps up his ridicule of the Marcosians when he takes up their use of a different source. Unlike the “apocryphal and spurious” story of Jesus in the classroom, this episode comes from a gospel that Irenaeus revered: the Gospel of Luke. Irenaeus reports: “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.”48 As the Marcosians understand it, the story depicts a divine child who enlightens his ignorant parents. The scorn of Irenaeus for this interpretation comes through in the biting sarcasm at the chapter’s end. The Marcosians posit an unknowable God and “still they announce him!”49 If God is unknowable, Irenaeus scoffs, on what basis can the Marcosians claim to discuss the deity?
The interpretation of the Marcosians, however loathsome and illogical to Irenaeus, made sense to at least some ancient Christians. It did so, I suspect, because it addresses a problem that is difficult to resolve: the surprising parental ignorance of Mary and Joseph. Why did the parents of Jesus not understand his words in the temple? The Marcosian rendering of the twelve-year-old’s question both acknowledges the puzzle and attempts to solve it. The parents did not understand because the truth of the “Unknowable One” is beyond their grasp, or so goes the thinking of the Marcosians. They are lost in the darkness of a malformed world. Ignorance remains a film over the eyes of Mary and Joseph. The twelve-year-old Jesus peels it away through his teaching.
Two centuries later, the commentary of John Chrysostom, reflected in his Homilies on John, takes on the problem of Mary and Joseph’s failure to understand their twelve-year-old son. It also explores more broadly the question of intimacy and understanding between Mary and her son, touching on themes that belong not only to the Infancy Gospel of Thomas but also to the Proto-gospel of James. To understand his perspective on the story, we must first grasp his position on childhood miracles attributed to Jesus. John Chrysostom—alternately bishop and exile of fourth-century Constantinople—affords a glimpse inside the head of an early Christian familiar with the family gospels or of an account that resembles them. Like Irenaeus, he rejects such stories.50 He ascribes preeminence to the canonical gospels; they are the benchmark against which all other traditions are measured. In them, according to John Chrysostom, the miracles of Jesus begin in adulthood. His specific objection to childhood tales about Jesus rests largely on a claim in the Gospel of John, which records the water-to-wine miracle in the wedding at Cana as the “first of his signs” (John 2:11).51 John Chrysostom insists that accounts of “childhood deeds,” such as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, attributed to Jesus are “false, and merely products of the imagination of those who bring them to our attention.” This is because reports of childhood deeds contradict the letter and spirit of John 2:11: “If he [Jesus] had worked miracles beginning from his early youth, neither would John have been ignorant of him, nor would the rest of the crowd have needed a teacher to reveal him.”52 In addition to John 2:11, John Chrysostom has in mind the Baptist’s own words: “I myself did not know him” (John 1:31).
Some studies of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas view John’s judgment as a historical rather than a theological one. John, contends Reidar Aasgaard, rejects the Infancy Gospel for being “historically untruthful,” not for being “heretical.”53 But the problem is neither history nor heresy. The problem is knowledge. The notion of childhood miracles violates John Chrysostom’s sense of coherence or what we may be tempted to call “plausible deniability.” If Jesus had performed wonders as a child, the masses would have heard about Jesus long before his dunking in the Jordan. Miracles speak for themselves, creating their own publicity. To follow the logic of John Chrysostom a bit further: John the Baptist, a relative of Jesus according to the Gospel of Luke, would certainly have learned about the childhood wonders of Jesus, had the boy performed any. It would turn implausible the “plausible deniability” of the Baptist in John 1:31. To side with the approach of John Chrysostom for a moment, readers of the gospels of the New Testament may have noticed that not one of the neighbors in Nazareth recollects anything special about the childhood of Jesus. On the contrary, they ask, “Is not this the carpenter’s son?” (Matt 13:55; cf. Mark 6:3; Luke 4:22).54 They remember an unremarkable childhood.
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.”55 The sheer quantity of miracles let loose a flood of reports about the adult Jesus. The same would have happened, argues John Chrysostom, if he had performed wonders as a boy.
His next step is to address the lone childhood story of the earliest gospels, the Lukan episode of Jesus and his parents in the temple. His stresses the limited scope of the incident. “For as a child he did nothing (ouden) 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.” Does this qualify as a miracle in John’s mind? Perhaps. But its effect is limited. 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 come apart in the next section, as he begins to explore more broadly the character of the relationship between son and mother. Here we take note of a rhetorical question that John poses: if Jesus’ childhood was not extraordinary, “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 of her child’s greatness.”56 Now Mary kept this “suspicion” entirely to herself throughout Jesus’ 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” to ask her son for a miracle during the latent period of Jesus’ 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 a miracle.
The relationship between Mary and Jesus tests the limits of plausible deniability—a problem that still bedevils commentary.57 John Chrysostom tried 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. Here, John Chrysostom’s thinking overlaps with questions in the Proto-gospel of James: How much did Mary understand about her own pregnancy? Did she know how she became pregnant and why? The challenge pushes John Chrysostom to specify two ideas somewhat in tension with each other: one, that Mary had an inkling of Jesus’ 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 Chrysostom quotes from the evangelist: “But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart” (Luke 2:51).
At the same time, John Chrysostom does not blame Mary, and his view of the correspondence of miracles and knowledge offers a way out. 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. Everything in its appointed season: the miracles of the mature Jesus led to celebrity, and celebrity led to the cross. Thus, it comes as no surprise that Mary regarded Jesus as an ordinary boy, “one of many”: the less others knew about Jesus, the more control Jesus exerted over his own fate.
In a different collection, Homilies on Matthew, John Chrysostom describes a messianic smokescreen: “For while at twelve years old he showed himself, he was quickly overshadowed again.”58 In the temple, Jesus revealed himself: he taught “things which the Jews had never seen nor heard.” It was a flash of light that a moment later dimmed, as the twelve-year old shrank back into an ordinary life.59 John Chrysostom’s correlation of miracles and knowledge remains intact, as does his view of Mary. Of course, John Chrysostom might have said, Mary wanted to know the truth about her son, to see him for all that he was and all that he would become. And had she seen her son perform miracles as a child, she would have been able to perceive his brilliance. But she did not and so could not, and that is the way Jesus wanted it.
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Why did family matter to ancient Christians? We have seen that Christianity began in households and that familial language pervades early Christian writings. Soon Christians, like others in the Roman Empire, were engaged in a debate over the meaning and shape of the ideal family. Images of family life pervaded culture and society. In the Roman era, they could be found in the monuments to imperial households and in the moral essays of Plutarch. Some ancient Christians embraced images of familial harmony and order. Others waged an assault on this vision. They nevertheless exchanged one ideal for another. The Apocryphal Acts describe a “love triangle” between chaste couples and a charismatic apostle, an ascetic family already experiencing the glory of the God, together sharing perfect knowledge and heavenly insight. In this sense, it was not all that different from the domestic unity envisioned in the Pastoral Epistles.
Within and against these projections, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Proto-gospel of James offer something different and messier. The family gospels gather together strands of storytelling in earlier gospels to create a profile of family life, one that at once alludes to the source material and goes beyond it. Much is ambiguous in what the earliest gospels report the relations between Jesus and his family, including the Lukan story of the twelve-year-old Jesus and his parents in the temple. Like Irenaeus, the Marcosians, and John Chrysostom, the authors of the family gospels saw this ambiguity and used it as a basis for exploring the limits of human understanding. And like these interpreters, the family gospels call attention to the problem of what the parents know about the child and, more important, what they do not and cannot know about him.
One could say that the family gospels owe something to the “antifamilial” strain of early Christianity. Mary and Joseph do not have sex in the Proto-gospel of James. So too both family gospels portray the domestic life of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph as a scene of distress and ignorance. Confusion travels along horizontal as well as vertical lines, for Mary and Joseph fail to understand one another just as they fail to understand Jesus. Still, against this strictly “antifamilial” view is the worth given to familial relationships in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Proto-gospel of James. While their stories expose the limits of human understanding, they also affirm the capacity of human beings, in the face of uncertainty, to choose to stick it out together. In so doing, the family gospels give to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph a dysfunctional and weirdly plausible domestic life.
Family mattered in antiquity, and this is why the family gospels matter. Their stories are about more than just filling in gaps of earlier sources. In the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Proto-gospel of James, family life is the setting for examining the reach of human knowing and the problem of ignorance. What happens when human beings are caught up in the plans of God? Under such circumstances, what are human beings able to know, and what remains beyond their comprehension? In the chapters that follow, we explore how these questions shape the storytelling of the family gospels. Chapter 2 looks first at the way that the supernatural spectacles recounted in the family gospels bring into relief the push and pull of human relationships.