The boy was trouble.
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas includes several classroom stories. In the first one, a teacher writes out the alphabet for Jesus, but the boy remains silent.1 Angry, the teacher hits Jesus, who finally opens his mouth. What comes out is a dazzling allegory of the first Greek letter. It so baffles the teacher that he wonders aloud whether he ought to retire from the profession. Later Joseph hires a different teacher for his son, and things go from bad to worse. He orders Jesus to recite the letters: “Say alpha.” When Jesus refuses, this teacher, like the other one, swats the boy on the head. What follows is unpleasant though not, it must be said, unexpected: Jesus curses the teacher, who collapses, dying or already dead.2
For obvious reasons, scholars have focused on the depiction of the child Jesus as a truculent and, as the teachers discover, dangerous student. Some find in it a dramatization of the early Christian resentment of Greek and Roman education.3 But if we shift the focus away from the pupil, another feature stands out: Joseph’s persistence in the face of failure. Despite all that he has witnessed, Joseph continues to seek out teachers for his recalcitrant child. “When Joseph saw his wisdom and understanding, he desired him not to be in lack of letters. So he handed him over to another teacher.”4 Joseph wants his boy to get an education. These stories are not just about the child. They are also about the father and the future that he desires for his son.
Parental hopes likewise come to the surface in the Proto-gospel of James. In this account, the destination is the temple of Jerusalem instead of the schoolhouse. When Anna learns that she is pregnant (with the child she will name Mary), she dedicates the as yet unborn baby to the temple: “I will offer it as a gift to the Lord my God, and it will minister to him its entire life.”5 After Mary is born, Anna turns the nursery into a “sanctuary” and “did not allow anything impure or unclean to pass through her lips.”6 Later Anna does the hardest thing of all: as promised, she says goodbye to her three-year-old daughter and hands her over to the priest, who accepts the toddler into her new home, the house of God. Like Joseph, Anna wants what’s best for her child, whatever it takes.
This chapter is about the aspirations of parents. It is also about conflict. What are parents willing to do to realize the dreams they have for their children? What are they willing to give up? And what if the child takes a path other than the one that has cost the parents so dearly? This set of questions may at first seem more promising for the analysis of one family gospel than the other. In the Infancy Gospel, the classroom is depicted as a setting for intellectual and social growth. It prepares children for a respectable adulthood. It is easy for readers to understand why Joseph would invest in education on behalf of Jesus. So too it is easy to understand why the son’s poor conduct leaves his father disappointed and confused. Nevertheless, Joseph persists in trying to find a teacher for his son. Why doesn’t he give up?
A similar dynamic may be found in the Proto-gospel of James, but recognizing it takes perhaps more empathy. One must see the temple through Anna’s eyes, as the place where her daughter will learn how to fulfill the highest possible calling—that of serving in the house of God for the rest of her life.7 The temple is thus both a home and a training school for Mary. But nine years after she moves in, Mary is forced out of the sacred precincts. The time for Mary’s first period arrives, and the priests fear that her presence will defile the sanctuary. Is Anna, like Joseph, mistaken about the future, about where Mary will live and what she will do?
Why do the family gospels put the conflict this way? My historical argument is that it reflects how classical Greek learning and culture, or paideia, was thought of and debated under the Roman Empire. Paideia could be viewed as a badge of good taste or as a path to a better future. One of the era’s sharpest minds, Lucian of Samosata, recounts his own teenage struggle over how to deal with the burden of family expectations, on one hand, and how to advance socially, on the other. In an essay, The Dream, he weighs in the balance costs and benefits. Here is the portrait of a young man caught between two paths to adulthood: one road leads to becoming a stonemason (what his father wants), while the other leads to joining the cultured elite (what Lucian himself wants).
The family gospels, like The Dream, depict families thinking about the future. But where the adult Lucian channels the viewpoint of his childhood, the family gospels dramatize the struggle and outlook of parents trying to secure a safe future for their children. In this difference of perspective is a larger point about the limits of human knowing. The parents risk finances, reputation, and, in Anna’s case, her only chance at being a mother. On one hand, Joseph’s persistence and Anna’s sacrifice show just how much their children mean to the parents. On the other, their efforts on behalf of their children show just how little the parents understand about what heaven has in mind for their offspring. And this is a lesson that the early Christian audience could appreciate because they knew from the Synoptic gospels that Mary did not grow old in the temple and that Jesus did not grow up to join the cultured elite and become a father himself. The lives of Mary and Jesus have a significance that exceeds human comprehension, and this is why their loving parents are unable to see what lies ahead.
One way to approach the “classroom” stories of the Infancy Gospel is to treat them as an index of early Christian attitudes to Greek and Roman education. They can serve as “insider” corroboration of “outsider” complaints about early Christians. Recall from Chapter 1, for example, the second-century pagan critic Celsus and his unflattering report of Christian contempt for education. Is the unruly student Jesus of the Infancy Gospel, which dates to around the same time, a hostile witness to the claims of Celsus?8 Tony Burke argues that ancient Christians would have cheered to see the boy turn the tables on the schoolteacher.9 Moreover, the account of Celsus corroborates other depictions of ancient Christians. Lucian, author of The Dream, also wrote the Passing of Peregrinus, a satire on the gullibility of Christians. What these sources share is an image of Christianity as a religion of fools and ne’er-do-wells. A Christian, skeptics said, was not only possessed of a feeble intellect but also rejected education.
What should we make of such claims? Were most ancient Christians suspicious of pagan teachers and classical learning? Did they encourage children to treat the wisdom of teachers and fathers as “nonsense”? The record of the first three centuries CE is mixed.10 Some early Christians thought that the apostolic founders of their religion had not needed a formal education to get the message across. As Robert Kaster observes, “The canonical reminder that Peter and John were ‘illiterates and laymen’ (Acts 4:13) and Paul’s claim to be ‘ignorant in speech but not in understanding’ (2 Cor. 11:6) converged on the powerful model of the illiterate or ill-educated apostle as charismatic teacher, whose truth owed nothing to the conventions and institutions of men.”11 The apostles did not try to persuade with elegant words but spoke only the unvarnished truth.
At the same time, Justin, a highly educated second-century Christian teacher, could demonstrate a sophisticated grasp of Greek rhetoric and philosophy even as he praises followers “who do not even know the letters of the alphabet—uneducated and barbarous in speech, but wise and faithful in mind.”12 Moreover, ancient Christians did very little to challenge the status quo when it came to education.13 Citing the case of Tertullian, the second-century North African apologist, Mary Ann Beavis notes that “it never occurred even to a rigorist like Tertullian (‘What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?’) that Christian children should eschew the schools, or that Christians should set up their own schools.”14 If the thought did not come into Tertullian’s black-and-white mind, in other words, it probably did not enter the minds of other Christians. In the eastern half of the empire, where Celsus published his caricature of the religion, Christianity slowly transformed Greek learning “from within,” as Beavis puts it.15
The attack of Celsus betrays how much Greek-speaking intellectuals cared about paideia. Why was Greek learning such an important topic in the Roman era? When the family gospels were written, Rome was identified with the exercise of rule and Greece with that of education. While Greece was held captive under the Roman Empire, a kind of power rested in the allure of Greek learning and knowledge.16 As Rome was expanding and consolidating its rule from one end of the Mediterranean Sea to the other, conquering not only Greece but also the network of Hellenized cities that dotted the eastern end of the Mediterranean world from Asia Minor to Egypt, Greek authors returned time and again in their writings to the theme of learning and, importantly, to the way of life with which learning was associated, paideia.17 A classicist has recently glossed the term in this way: “paideia . . . implies both a body of privileged texts, artworks, values—a culture to be inherited and preserved as a sign of civilization—and also a process of acculturation—education—which ‘makes men,’ which informs the structures and activities of the lives of the civic elite.”18 Under Rome, education came to be identified with Greek culture and civilization with Greek learning. For this reason, the findings of an authoritative and sweeping account of ancient learning could be summarized with this formula: “Classical education was essentially an initiation into the Greek way of life.”19 Greek paideia made the respectable Roman-era man.
Greek learning was something to be possessed, and Romans traveled from the capital city in search of it.20 The second-century CE biographer Plutarch, in his Life of Cicero, describes the midlife crisis of the great Roman politician, Cicero, who journeyed to Greece to receive advanced training from masters who embodied the ideal of paideia. Cicero’s achievements in language and rhetoric led one of his teachers to observe that, since his Roman pupil had thoroughly conquered Greek learning, there was nothing left for Greeks to claim as their own.21 The passage is illuminating both for what it says about the magnetic force of Greek culture and for what it reveals about Roman authority. The power of Rome was expressed in what was added to the stock of empire rather than by what was eliminated or destroyed. Greek paideia was respected by Roman elites and consumed by them. Meanwhile, the Greek purveyors of paideia, such as Cicero’s teacher, played a role in maintaining the image of Greek learning as something worth the while of aristocratic Romans. It was a valuable commodity, there for the taking.22
From a Roman perspective, this packaging of Greek learning and culture offered a solution to an intractable problem,23 for Romans of the imperial period considered the Greeks of their own day, as a rule, to be dissolute and immoral. But when understood in terms of acquisition, Greek paideia was splendidly free of the taint of contemporary Greek society. It belonged to the classical age of Greece, a glorious product from a bygone era that could be neatly merged with the Roman ideal of manly virtue. Romans sought out paideia from Greek teachers and philosophers, authentic purveyors of culture and education, and once they had it, they paraded their sophisticated Greek knowledge around in public.
So widely accepted was this view of Greek paideia—that acquiring it would supremely enhance one’s public perception and reputation—that it became the subject of parody. Lucian of Samosata mocks the idea of purchasing learning and culture, for example, in On Salaried Posts in Great Houses. In it, he describes the upper crust of Rome, strolling about the city, with a Greek philosopher conspicuously in tow.24 Lucian boils down the scene to its essentials: it is the beard and cloak of the Greek philosopher that are for sale, the “tchotkes of paideia for the upwardly mobile Roman,” as Laura Nasrallah memorably puts it.25 All that was required in the competitive world of Roman public life was the appearance of good taste, which could be had, for a price.
But it was not only well-to-do Romans who looked with longing on Greek paideia. Since paideia was power, education could be empowering for people on the margins—geographical and otherwise—of the Roman Empire.26 Hailing from regions that had long been dismissed as home to barbarians, some were able to use paideia as a pass into the ranks of the cultured.27 Expansion of the empire brought the prestige of Greek learning and knowledge to new audiences, a facet of imperial life that is evident in the careers of some well-known outsiders.28
Lucian, hailing from Roman Syria, was one such outsider.29 His playful adult recollection of his own childhood in The Dream offers what is ostensibly a “child’s-eye” view, from the Greek-speaking provinces, on the risks and rewards of Greek education. Lucian begins The Dream by recounting his father’s decision to put the teenage Lucian on a path to a career in masonry. Father and friends agree that advanced education would take “considerable expense,” a burden to the family’s “moderate” finances.30 Up to this point, the boy had been something of a day-dreamer in school. Rather than completing his school assignments, Lucian would create toy animals and people from the wax of writing tablets. For this, Lucian receives “thrashings” from his teachers but praise from members of his family.31 His father is impressed by Lucian’s abilities. Encouraged by this glimpse of talent, Lucian’s father cuts a deal with one of the boy’s uncles, a sculptor: “Come, take this lad . . . and teach him to be a good stone-cutter, mason, and sculptor, for he is capable of it, since, as you know, he has a natural gift for it.”32 His education brought to a halt, Lucian is suddenly pushed into the different world of masonry.
Things begin well, but soon the beginner’s clumsiness of Lucian angers his uncle. At this point in the story, Lucian begins to have second thoughts about masonry. Running back home to seek the comfort of his mother, Lucian falls asleep and begins to dream, for which the essay is named. In the vision, two female figures, a personified Paideia and a personified Technē (Craft), rise up in the mind of Lucian, each one making the case on behalf of her field of expertise. Craft, dressed in dirty, workshop clothing, tells Lucian that the work will leave him “generously kept” and will give him “powerful shoulders.”33 She also promises stability: Lucian will remain in his native Syria, among the friends and family he has always known. Paideia, on the other hand, pledges that if Lucian opts for her over Craft, he will travel the world and attain greatness: “ ‘And you, who are now the beggarly son of a nobody, who have entertained some thought of so illiberal a trade, will after a little inspire envy and jealously in all men, for you will be honoured and lauded, you will be held in great esteem for the highest qualities and admired by men preeminent in lineage and in wealth, you will wear clothing such as this’—she pointed to her own, and she was very splendidly dressed—‘and will be deemed worthy of office and precedence.’ ”34 Paideia promises Lucian the trappings of elite culture and wealth, an open door into the corridors of social power. How could Craft compete with Paideia’s vision of Lucian’s future—of having “the best seat in the house”?
Seduced by the promise of material comforts and prestige, Lucian opts for Paideia. The adult Lucian would go on to exploit the value of “playing Greek,” even as he lampooned the cheapening of paideia by the snobs of Rome.35 Is this hypocrisy? Perhaps so. And yet affection for his writings endures because of the author’s acute sensitivity to double standards, whether they are someone else’s or his own. Lucian’s awareness of his own compromised position comes out in his account. Consider how The Dream casts learning and training in transactional terms. In The Dream, a cost-benefit analysis is shared by the presentations of Craft and Paideia. Craft promises Lucian a stable future, surrounded by friends and family. Paideia tells Lucian, “You will put on a filthy tunic . . . you will make yourself a thing of less value than a block of stone.”36 And it is not only in the vision that costs are counted. There are other “expenses,” too, such as the ones that come in the form of physical punishment. Before he dreams of the personifications of Craft and Paideia, the young Lucian has a bruising interaction with his uncle. He broke a slab in a clumsy first attempt at sculpture, so his uncle hit him with a stick.37 Later in the essay, following his nocturnal encounter with Paideia, Lucian casually lets drop that the dream was probably prompted by fear of his uncle’s blows.38 The whipping, perversely and ironically, “knocked some sense” into Lucian. It begets the vision that pushes the boy away from the harsh training of Craft and into the waiting arms of Paideia and further to renown and wealth in adulthood.
There is still more irony. Paideia was as brutal as craft, as Lucian himself well knew. A schoolteacher, according to the account, administers Lucian’s first beating—for the offense of making toys from wax writing tablets. The Dream is not a position paper. It does not argue for or against the use of the rod on children. Rather, Lucian seems conflicted, both conceding and disputing the value of educational thumping. Perhaps such ambivalence reflects the tension and compromise built into the acquisition of Greek learning under Rome. Indeed, the ludic sequence of The Dream mocks the pretensions of Roman high society. First, a schoolteacher hits Lucian for making toy sculptures, then the sculptor thrashes Lucian, sending him on to paideia. The relentless beatings of childhood could be enlisted to poke fun at the ostensibly refined world of adults. Lucian is tossed between paideia and masonry and suffers on both paths to adulthood.
In the back and forth over the merits of each option, Paideia observes that no matter how much Lucian would be able to achieve as a sculptor, he would still be looked down upon by the snobby members of the upper crust. “You would still be considered a mechanic,” Paideia asserts, “a man who has nothing but his hands, a man who lives by his hands.”39 The drudgery of manual labor is thrown into relief when Paideia offers to Lucian a pair of wings instead of soiled hands. She beckons him into a carriage drawn by “winged horses.” Then Lucian suddenly soars above the clouds, taking in a view of the world spread out before him, receiving acclaim from gods and human beings. “I was carried up into the heights,” Lucian recalls, “and went from the East to the very West, surveying cities and nations and peoples . . . men, looking up from below, applauded, and all those above whom I passed in my flight sped me on my way with words of praise.”40 Recall that the story of Cicero’s journey to Greece for acquiring paideia likewise associates learning with travel. Here Lucian surpasses his predecessors. Where Cicero’s Greek tour remained confined to the ground, Lucian takes flight. For a moment, everything is illuminated.
Then Lucian returns to earth. Hope and fear meet in The Dream, as Lucian is tossed from education to sculpture and back again. An image of unsettled youth, it is also an image of uncertainty. Unlike other Greek authors who saw education as the bright line separating culture and anomie, Lucian recognizes that the pursuit of learning contains elements of both. The Dream charts a painful to and fro, raising questions: Of what value is learning? What does one have to do to obtain it? What is one willing to give up to gain knowledge—family, home? And what, in turn, can learning be “cashed in” for? As is so often true of his writings, Lucian poses these serious questions in a subversive way. While Paideia wins the contest over Craft, there is equivocation in the final sentence of the essay. He ends The Dream with a wink and nod, saying that now, as an adult master of paideia, I am “at least quite as highly thought of as any sculptor.”41 Is Lucian here acknowledging the wisdom of his father in trying to steer him toward masonry, a worthy profession? In hindsight, did Lucian’s father know best?42
Lucian knows all about the rewards that Paideia promises. But his final bon mot suggests that he wonders whether his choice of Paideia over Craft was worth it. Do the fine clothes of Paideia garner any more respect than the soiled uniform of the sculptor? Lucian’s essay is an inventory of costs: the financial burden of literary education, the physical toll of beatings, and, perhaps, the emotional cost of separation from home and family.
It is obvious that the Infancy Gospel does not involve paideia in the sense of the mature Greek literary culture that would have come to mind for Lucian and his contemporaries. Nor does the family gospel share Lucian’s style or wit. Yet, as we shall see, the Infancy Gospel, like Lucian’s essay, counts the costs. It does so from a different perspective and for a different purpose. Lucian offers readers a child’s-eye view and, in doing so, turns his conflict with his father into one of the losses incurred by his choice of Paideia. In the Infancy Gospel, it is the father, not Jesus, who is attracted to the classroom. Joseph thinks he knows what’s best for Jesus. The ensuing conflict exposes the ignorance at the heart of Joseph’s good intentions. The classroom episodes are about a parent pushing his son to reach his potential, all the while unaware of who and what his son truly is.
Even so, the family gospels do not discount the value of places of learning. As we shall see, Jesus in the Infancy Gospel speaks words of wisdom to people gathered in the classroom, and the temple in the Proto-gospel of James serves as the dwelling place of angels. And both Jesus and Mary learn in their respective locations, although this facet of the storytelling has been mostly overlooked by scholars. Jesus recites the alphabet, and Mary learns how to spin thread.
First, we turn to the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. The Infancy Gospel includes three classroom tales.43 Thanks to the careful study by Stephen Davis, it is clearer than ever how the schoolhouse scenes of the Infancy Gospel reflect educational practices of the Roman era. They also recall some of the details in The Dream of Lucian. In all three examples, the Greek terminology suggests professional teachers and settings, as Davis observes. Jesus is led, for example, into a paideuterion, a place of instruction separate from home.44 The teachers of Jesus are referred to as didaskolos or kathēgēthēs.45 They are professionals. While the Infancy Gospel does not explicitly describe Joseph paying the teachers, the use of these terms implies their hiring.
A transactional element emerges as well in other, less tangible ways.46 In this first account, the longest of the three, the teacher, one Zacchaeus, offers his services to Joseph: “Come, give him over, brother, so that he may be taught letters, and so he may know all knowledge, learn to love those his own age, honor old age and revere elders, so that he may acquire a desire for children of his own and teach them.”47 If Joseph assigns Jesus to Zacchaeus, he will receive in return a transformed child. Not only will Zacchaeus train Jesus in the basics of literacy, but he will also mold the boy into an upright member of the community. He will teach Jesus to respect adults and be kind to others so that someday Jesus can do the same with his own children. But Jesus does not wish to be taught, nor will he someday have children of his own. He declares his intention to reverse the flow, to teach to Zacchaeus and Joseph “a paideia by me which no other knows nor is able to teach.”48 Then, turning to a crowd of onlookers, Jesus asks, “Why do you not believe the things I said to you?”49
The prospects for fulfilling the terms of the deal—for teaching the child Jesus his letters and his proper place in society—seem dim. And this first hostile exchange between the child Jesus and the adults he is supposed to respect may have called to mind for ancient Christian readers another story from the earlier Gospel of Luke, the rejection of the adult Jesus in the synagogue in Nazareth (Luke 4:16–30). In the Lukan account, Jesus reads a passage from the scroll of Isaiah and claims to embody its fulfillment. The people in Nazareth wonder aloud, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” (Luke 4:22). Conflict erupts when Jesus, comparing himself to Elijah and Elisha, contends that “no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown” (Luke 4:24). The crowd chases him outside to the edge of a cliff, but Jesus escapes (Luke 4:29–30). In this story, the adult Jesus demonstrates reading proficiency; what he lacks is the acknowledgment of his neighbors. If we think of this Lukan image of the adult Jesus as the backdrop to the classroom stories of the child Jesus, it suggests the futility of Joseph’s efforts. The child, ancient Christians knew, would not grow up to be the kind of adult that Zacchaeus describes to Joseph.
As a child, Jesus at first resists Joseph’s plan, then he yields. Escorted by Joseph, the boy goes to the schoolhouse of Zacchaeus. Joseph remains in the classroom, a point later confirmed when Zacchaeus asks the father to take his son back home. The supporting role of the household in “educating Jesus” is a recurring element of the storytelling. Joseph remains steadfast in his desire to secure an education for his son, despite the difficulties. It is Joseph, after all, who continues to look for teachers for his son. The classroom stories always involve more than a tug-of-war between pupil and tutor. Home life is bound tightly to the experience of the classroom, for good and for ill. When Jesus gets in trouble at school, it follows him back to the household of Joseph and Mary.
It is not long before Jesus is the subject of the corporal punishment of his teacher. Childhood remembrances by authors from Lucian to Augustine attest to the rough treatment meted out by fathers and teachers in the name of learning.50 Zacchaeus begins the lesson by writing the alphabet, cueing Jesus to say the letters. When Jesus refuses to speak, Zacchaeus strikes Jesus on the head.51 The reaction of Jesus to the blow is, unsurprisingly, anger. He declares once more his superiority to Zacchaeus: “I wish to teach you rather than be taught by you, for I know the letters you are teaching more accurately and far better than you.”52 And yet, what follows in the wake of this reproach seems to undermine the idea of Jesus’ renunciation of the student role. When he finishes his speech and his anger ceases, Jesus recites “by himself all the letters from alpha to omega with much skill.”53 In the middle of rebuking Zacchaeus, Jesus pauses to complete the assignment.
Zacchaeus gets both more and less than he bargained for. Recalling the original deal the teacher strikes with Joseph, we now see that the classroom story offers a menu of different kinds of learning. Zacchaeus pledges to teach Jesus “his letters,” respect for authority, and love for neighbor.54 Three items of learning, and Jesus performs one: elementary literacy. It is, perhaps, missing the point to infer that Jesus knew “his letters” before arriving in the classroom.55 What the story suggests is cause and effect. Jesus learns the Greek alphabet and practices the knowledge he acquires as a result of the beating he receives at the hand of the angry Zacchaeus.
To elementary literacy, Jesus adds a mystical riff on the letter alpha.56 “Hear, teacher,” Jesus says, “and understand the order of the first element. Pay close attention here how it has sharp lines and a middle stroke, which you see pointing, standing with legs apart, meeting, spread, drawn aside, elevated.”57 Jesus continues in this vein for several more lines. Jesus’ articulation of heavenly knowledge overwhelms the teacher, to the degree that Zacchaeus seems unable to recall and recognize the partial success of getting Jesus to recite the alphabet. (Joseph, likewise, does not understand, for later he worries about Jesus’ “lack of letters.”58) Zacchaeus laments the moment as a defeat: “Woe is me! Woe is me! I have been baffled, wretch that I am.”59 He regrets having taken on Jesus as a student: “I have brought shame down upon myself, attracting me to this child.”60 He admits that the tables have turned: “He stupefies me. I cannot follow along in my mind. I have deceived myself, thrice unhappy as I am. I thought to gain a student and I am found having a master.”61 Finally, Zacchaeus pledges to withdraw completely from village life, to accept a social death: “I must be cast out and die or flee from this village on account of everyone, especially after all these people saw that I was defeated by a very small child.”62
Ancient Greek and Roman biographies often include tales about the precocious childhood of admirable figures. Reports of a superior mind in boyhood may be found throughout Plutarch’s profiles, from Solon to Alexander the Great to Augustus. It is part of the checklist of ancient biography. And it was a commonplace of ancient biography to describe the student teaching and surpassing the teacher—a “prophecy of future greatness.”63 Consider Philo’s biography of Moses: teachers arrived from Egypt and Greece to dispense their knowledge, but soon the child “devised problems which they [i.e., the teachers] could not easily solve.”64 It is not an act of rebellion against formal education but evidence of inspired ability: “For the gifted soul,” Philo affirms, “takes the lead in meeting the lessons given by itself rather than the teacher and is profited.”65 Setting aside for the moment the misery of Zacchaeus, the classroom story could be said to run parallel to Philo’s high-minded vision of learning.66 Indeed, rather than humiliating Zacchaeus, the child Jesus may be showing off what he has learned from the teacher. Jesus’ mastery of the Greek alphabet is the foundation upon which he builds the allegory.
But the nature of the storytelling in the Infancy Gospel invites us to push beyond the listing of parallels, as important and revealing as some of these may be. It is one thing to show great figures as children exemplifying the traits that would make their adult lives worthy of remembrance, as Greek and Roman biographies do. It is another to string out the depiction of learning over multiple episodes, as the family gospels do, and to describe the interruption and failure of learning. Ancient biography has been put to good use as comparative material to the Christian gospels, especially regarding the art of characterization.67 But the genre may not yield much in the quest to understand why Jesus fights with his teachers. Why, for example, once they decided to put Jesus in the schoolhouse, did Christian storytellers make him into such a pill? And why does Joseph keep asking for trouble by hiring more teachers?
Jesus has the teacher’s number. Zacchaeus, by contrast, remains mystified: “What great thing he is—god or angel or whatever else I might call him—I do not know.”68 Zacchaeus tells Joseph to take Jesus back home. The story draws a boundary between the divine mind of Jesus and the limited understanding of Zacchaeus. In light of what Zacchaeus says, it is understandable why scholars construe the episode as an all-or-nothing contest that shows that Jesus does not have anything to learn.69 But is it? To my mind, it also suggests a crossing of that boundary, for teacher and student come together, albeit briefly, when Jesus recites the Greek alphabet. Moreover, elsewhere the child Jesus shows himself to be a creative and eager learner outside the classroom. Much of this learning extends what readers encounter in the opening scene: there Jesus molds toys from the mud, an act that may remind us of Lucian’s play with wax tablets. Jesus collects water for his mother and gathers fuel for a fire for her baking.70 So too he helps his father to farm.71 Most intriguing, perhaps, given the contrast of masonry and paideia in The Dream, Jesus helps his father in his carpentry.72
But inside the schoolhouse, the student Jesus remains a problem. In the second classroom story, Joseph resolves once again to hire a teacher: “So he handed him over to another master. The master wrote the alphabet for him and said, ‘Say alpha.’ ”73 Jesus refuses to do so and throws down the gauntlet: “First tell me what is the beta and I will tell you what is the alpha.”74 The scene begins, then, as a replay of the earlier classroom episode. On cue, the anonymous teacher hits Jesus. But where the blow of Zacchaeus leads to a performance of learning on the part of Jesus, the beating of the second teacher rebounds onto the teacher himself. Jesus curses the teacher, who immediately falls dead to the ground. Jesus walks away from the scene.75 Because Jesus kills his teacher in the second story, it can be difficult to appreciate the similar structure of the pair of episodes. Zacchaeus, we will recall, describes his defeat as a kind of mortal blow: “I must be cast out and die.” What may be the most striking difference, then, is not what happens to the teachers but the presence and absence of the learning of Jesus. In the first, Jesus makes the alphabet his starting point for teaching a divine lesson. In the second, Jesus withholds learning and instead issues a curse. In the first, learning is acquired and put on display. In the second, Jesus keeps to himself what he knows.
There is finally a third shared element: family drama. When Jesus returns home after killing the second teacher, Joseph, evidently at wit’s end, turns to Mary and commands “her not to let him out of the house so that those who make him angry may not die.”76 Joseph decides to cut off his child from society. Out of this turn of events emerges a set of parallels. Like Zacchaeus, Jesus suddenly becomes a pariah. And like Zacchaeus, Joseph does not know what to do with Jesus.
Given the drastic measures that Joseph takes in the second classroom story, it may come as a surprise to encounter a third teaching story immediately following it. A vague reference—“after some days”—serves to measure the time between the death of the second teacher and the third classroom account.77 Another teacher agrees to take Jesus, once again promising to teach Jesus “his letters.” This time Joseph does not have to escort his son: Jesus gladly trots off to school, holding hands with the instructor. Chastened perhaps by the misfortune of prior tutors, this instructor does little more than watch. The boy walks into the schoolhouse, finds a scroll, and begins to speak: “He took the book but did not read what was written in it, but, opening his mouth, he spoke awe-inspiring words, so that the teacher sitting opposite listened to him very gladly and encouraged him so that he might say more.”78 What are the book’s contents? Since Jesus does not actually read from it, the audience is kept in the dark about its precise contents. Perhaps, as some manuscripts suggest, it is scripture or, as others suggest, it is not.79 Grasping but not reading the book, the image of the child Jesus is one of being “in between.” He is an un-educable prodigy who, nevertheless, sometimes demonstrates learning in the schoolhouse.
Unlike the previous episode, the tale of the third teacher has a happy ending. Like the others, it includes a subtext of family drama. Shifting from close-up to wide angle, the narrator pans around to take in an admiring crowd: “the crowd standing there were astonished at his holy words.”80 Joseph, who is not part of the crowd but somewhere else nearby, overhears the clamor and rushes to the scene, “suspecting that this teacher too was no longer inexperienced and that he may have suffered.”81 Joseph fears the worst and arrives too late to hear any of his son’s words, which have electrified the audience. But the teacher lavishes praise on the boy: “Please know that I accepted this child as a student, but already he is full of grace and wisdom.”82 The teacher has acquitted himself well, and the result is a show of benevolence: “Since you have spoken and testified rightly,” Jesus says, “that other teacher who was struck down will be healed.”83 Here the public recognition of the boy’s greatness—specifically, the teacher’s praise of his lesson—triggers a reversal of past harm. Life is restored to the dead teacher of the second classroom story.
What would Zacchaeus think about this final classroom episode? We do not know. He is not mentioned again after the first schoolhouse incident. He might be proud of Jesus for demonstrating key social lessons: respect for elders and kindness to others. One scholar has recently noted an “evolving pattern of the portrayal of a more socially conditioned Jesus, who learns to live within the constraints of the human world.”84 A similar proposal describes the Infancy Gospel of Thomas as a story of growing maturity. When Jesus acts out as a child, he is shown to be acting like a child or, at least, childishly, lacking in self-control. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas goes on to describe the “slow transformation” of Jesus, his gradual maturation “from boy to man.”85 It is an attractive theory, in part because the cursing diminishes as the gospel unfolds. In the third classroom story, congeniality reigns. The teacher yields the floor immediately to Jesus, and later, speaking to Joseph, he speaks highly of the student.
All is well. It must be said, however, that Jesus’ self-control is not truly put to the test in this scene. What would Jesus have done if this teacher, like the second one, had hit him on the head? Rather than a sign of Jesus’ emotional development, the episode can be viewed as a lesson in conflict avoidance. If experience is the best teacher, this is the lesson: flatter Jesus and get out of his way.
But I would suggest a different meaning. What binds the last story to the others is incompleteness. Jesus holds the book but does not read from it. Moreover, the third teacher sends Jesus home with Joseph without having ever taught the boy “his letters,” which is why Joseph hired the teacher in the first place. The third story is an inverse reflection of the first story: Jesus learns either his letters or good manners but not both at once. For this reason, I have doubts about a model of evolution or a linear development in the classroom stories. I would suggest instead a triptych, on whose panels are depicted three iterations of the classroom scene. Across the images, Jesus accepts some bits of knowledge while refusing others and, each time, leaves the classroom before the lesson has been completed. Perhaps these scenes of interrupted learning are designed to remind readers of the rushed exit of the adult Jesus from the synagogue in Nazareth (Luke 4:16–30). If so, ancient Christians also would have been reminded that they knew the end of the story in a way Joseph could not. Joseph, unable to comprehend who or what Jesus is, keeps bringing Jesus back to the classroom, imagining for his son a future that will not come to pass.
Teachers and classrooms do not figure into the Proto-gospel of James. Yet, this gospel, like the other accounts we have discussed, shows a parent who dreams up a future for a child. More specifically, it shows what a mother, Anna, is willing to give up to see her child, Mary, live out the dream. What does it cost Anna? What will she sacrifice on Mary’s behalf? And what does it mean that Anna’s vision of Mary’s future does not come to pass?
The young Mary does not astound the adults of her village with precocious intelligence.86 She nevertheless charms the neighbors in the playful, slightly irreverent way that only children are allowed to get away with. When she turns three, her parents, Joachim and Anna, bring their daughter to the temple. Mary is received by the priest, who declares a benediction: “Through you will the Lord make known his redemption to the sons of Israel at the end of time.”87He sets the toddler down on the third step of the altar, and little Mary does the most adorable thing: “She danced on her feet, and the entire house of Israel loved her.”88 Mary basks in the glow of public acclaim. Such is not the case in much of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Receiving compliments about their son is something the parents can only dream of.
As a toddler, Mary is hailed as an apocalyptic messenger, someone who will announce God’s “redemption” to the people of Israel at the end of time.89 The quest for revealed heavenly truth is an important feature of the Proto-gospel of James. Before and after this scene are episodes about humans seeking answers from above. Many examples involve the temple, which, like the classroom of the Infancy Gospel, is a setting for acquiring knowledge. Priests and laypeople visit the sacred precincts looking for heavenly insight.90 But unlike the Infancy Gospel, which depicts an uneasy relation between heavenly and human learning—think of the allegory of the letter alpha that Jesus uses to stump Zacchaeus and the book that Jesus takes up but does not read in the classroom—the two are intertwined in the Proto-gospel of James.
The most striking example of human and divine learning coming together involves Mary. The temple serves as a training school for Mary, for it is there that Mary learns how to spin thread.91 Now spinning thread can be dismissed as a rather ordinary sort of learning. And it can be overshadowed by the dramatic instances of revealed heavenly information elsewhere in the family gospel. But it should not be ignored. Not only does Mary’s spinning have heavenly origins, since she learns how to do so from angels in the temple, but it is also put to use in a divine task: the creation of the curtain in the temple. It is also, as we shall see, important as a reminder of an unfulfilled or interrupted promise. Anna, Mary’s mother, believes that Mary’s future consists of dwelling in the temple. When an angel tells Anna that she will conceive a child, Anna responds by making a vow: “I will offer it as a gift to the Lord my God, and it will minister (leitourgōn) to him all the days of its life.” The Greek term leitourgōn expresses the liturgical aspect of Anna’s vow: she sees Mary, like the high priest Zacharias, who describes himself as a “minister” (leitourgos), as playing a role in the formal worship of the temple.92 Anna gives up the chance to watch her child grow up under her own care in order to uphold the terms of the vow. She believes that she is giving Mary the best of all possible worlds. But Anna, although she wants what’s best for her child, is mistaken about the future: her daughter will be forced to leave the temple. Heaven has other plans for Mary.
Before we can understand Anna’s attempt to secure a future for Mary, we must look at how she and her spouse, Joachim, try to make sense of the past, specifically, why for so many years they have been unable to have a child. This is one of three set pieces, all of which patrol the boundaries of human perception and knowledge. The first involves the conception of Mary, which brings an end to the childlessness of Anna and Joachim. The second involves priestly worry over the problem of Mary getting her period in the temple. A solution leads to Joseph being chosen to take Mary away from the temple to his own house. A surprising turnaround is the subject of the third example: having been forced to leave the temple, Mary is called back and asked to use her skill at spinning thread.
The first moment of learning involves the conception of Mary, which is modeled on the biblical account of the birth and childhood of Samuel (1 Sam 1:1–4:1).93 Following the biblical template, the story of the Proto-gospel of James begins with a childless couple, Joachim and Anna. Joachim is a wealthy man of Israel.94 He is also generous, giving twice what is expected. But his ostentatious gift seems to rankle some onlookers. When Joachim goes up to offer his sacrifice, another man, Reuben, blocks his way. “You are not allowed to offer your gifts first,” Reuben says, “since you have not produced any offspring in Israel.” When Joachim’s plan stalls, he leaves behind Reuben in order to consult an authority about his situation.95 He turns to the “[Book] of the Twelve Tribes of Israel,” a reference to some unknown archive.96 There Joachim learns that “everyone who was righteous” had offspring. The dispute between Reuben and Joachim is thus about the latter’s integrity. Why doesn’t Joachim have any children? Is it a punishment for some unseen wickedness? But Joachim is not defeated. He “remembers” Isaac, the son born to the righteous Abraham in his dotage. Joachim’s story remains unfinished. He decides to retreat into the wilderness, abandoning his wife, Anna. There he prays for divine aid, staying put “until the Lord my God pays me a visit.”97 Joachim’s self-imposed exile is an act of defiance against Reuben’s interpretation.
So too Anna must contend with others over the meaning of this state of affairs. The question is posed again in the ensuing scene, when Anna gets into a fight with her slave, Judith.98 The catalyst for the argument is obscure. As the “great day of the Lord” approaches, Anna is in mourning “twice over,” both for not having children and over the absence of her husband. Judith, in what might at first be seen as kind gesture, urges Anna to change into more festive clothing and offers to give Anna a “headband” to wear.99 But Anna finds the offer tantamount to an accusation of loose living. She scolds Judith, saying, “Go away from me. I did none of these things and yet the Lord God has severely humbled me. For all I know, some scoundrel has given this to you, and you have come to implicate me in your sin.” Like her husband, Anna rejects the notion that her childlessness is retribution for her own sinful acts. “I did none of these things,” she protests. Judith, undaunted, clings to the theory, insisting that God is responsible for the closing of Anna’s womb.100 To Judith, the situation is obvious: Anna is in denial.
The problem of how to interpret the childlessness of the couple moves into a new arena when an angel appears separately to Joachim and Anna to announce the news of Anna’s pregnancy. Importantly, the angelic announcement does not refer to sin: “Anna, Anna, the Lord has heard your prayer. You will conceive a child and give birth, and your offspring will be spoken of throughout the entire world.”101 The angel likewise tells Joachim to return home, for “the Lord God has heard your prayer.”102 But sin is on Joachim’s mind when he decides, the next day, to go up to the temple to offer a sacrifice. There, he believes, looking into the “the leaf of the priest,” likely some kind of mirror, he will learn whether or not he is blameworthy.103 On his way up to the altar, he peers into the glass and sees a pure reflection. Sin is absent.
Does the glass confirm the suspicions of Reuben and Judith?104 Or does it do just the opposite and show that sin was not a factor in the childlessness of Joachim and Anna? Reuben and Judith do not appear again in the story, so we do not know how they and other naysayers react to news of Anna’s pregnancy. Joachim, for his part, believes that the mirror shows the grace of God, that whatever his sins, they have been forgiven. By contrast, the restoration of social respectability is the main theme of Anna’s take on events. For her part, she believes that the birth of her daughter has, once and for all, exposed as baseless the whispered gossip of misdeeds. “I will sing a holy song to the Lord God,” Anna declares, echoing the victory cry of the biblical Hannah, “for he has visited me and removed from me the reproach of my enemies.”105 To this, she adds a personal rebuke of one of the couple’s accusers: “Who will report to the sons of Reuben that Anna is now nursing a child?”106
In the temple, the knowledge of heaven is disclosed. Discerning its meaning is left up to human beings. If the opening set piece establishes the temple as a place of learning, so too it illustrates the economy of sacrifice. Joachim’s offering on the altar—before he searches the priest’s mirror—suggests a transaction, not unlike that of Joseph’s hiring of teachers for the child Jesus in the Infancy Gospel. So too consider that upon receiving the news that she will conceive, Anna proposes an exchange: “As the Lord God lives,” she prays, “whether my child is a boy or a girl, I will offer it as a gift [dōron] to the Lord my God, and it will minister to him its entire life.”107 As Lily Vuong has recently emphasized, Anna has vowed to deliver Mary to the temple as a dōron, the Greek term routinely used for sacrifice in the Septuagint.108
The gift of Mary is also the sacrifice of parents.109 She and Joachim give to God all they have to give: Mary, their only offspring. What Anna wants in return is for Mary to grow up and grow old in the temple. The vow turns the infant Mary into a resident alien in her own home from the moment of her birth. Not surprisingly, Anna and Joachim both put off meeting their obligations for a few years. In the meantime, Anna pledges to create a sanctuary in her own home.110 Once Mary turns three, Joachim and Anna act to fulfill the vow. They worry that little Mary will lose heart and become “homesick for her father and mother” on her way to the temple. To ease the transition, Joachim and Anna arrange to have the “undefiled virgins of the Hebrews” line the path with torches ablaze. And as Mary travels between the home and temple, she walks down the illuminated path.111
Anna’s sacrifice is a cost. The fulfillment of the vow means breaking up the family. Is it worth it? For a long time, everything unfolds according to the terms of Anna’s vow. Mary passes nine uneventful years in the temple, a period of time summarized in one brief sentence: “Mary was in the Temple of the Lord, cared for like a dove, receiving her food from the hand of an angel.”112 Mary’s life in the temple is heaven on earth.
But then a crisis erupts, and this leads to the second moment of learning. Mary, now twelve, approaches puberty, and the priests start to worry about ceremonial purity and the possibility it will be defiled by Mary’s first period. Because of the condensing of nine years into one sentence, the arrival of the crisis is sudden and abrupt. Has something gone wrong? Didn’t the priests anticipate this maturing of Mary when they admitted her to the temple?113 The priests gather to work on the problem. Zacharias, the high priest, enters the Holy of Holies, the most sacred space in the temple, seeking an answer.114 An angel appears in the temple and prescribes a ritual for resolving the problem of Mary’s growing up. Gather the widowers of Israel, the angel tells Zacharias, and look for a sign, for Mary “will become the wife of the one to whom the Lord God gives a sign.”115
The ritual of selection requires a new sacrifice, one less tangible than Anna’s gift of Mary. Zacharias, following the angel’s prescription, calls the widowers of Israel to the temple. Singled out by the casting of lots, Joseph is instructed to take Mary “into his safekeeping.”116 Joseph immediately objects. Reminding the priest that he is an old man, he refuses because it risks his reputation: “I do not want to become a laughingstock to the sons of Israel.”117 The priest trumps this worry with a threat of divine repercussions. Remember, he tells Joseph, what the Lord did to Dathan, Abeira, and Korah for their disobedience: they were swallowed up by the earth (Num 16:1–33). “Now, Joseph, you should be afraid of this happening to you.”118 Joseph, sacrificing his dignity and reputation, relents and takes Mary to his own home. At the same moment, the terms of Anna’s vow are suddenly vacated.
The crisis in the temple exposes the limits of human perception. Mary, under Joseph’s care, is now cut off from the temple. And her role as a gift, a sacrifice, is interrupted, similar to the way that the student role of Jesus repeatedly comes to an abrupt halt in the Infancy Gospel. But Mary, in a third moment of learning, has brought with her to Joseph’s house the skill of spinning thread—manual dexterity that she acquired at the temple—and it will lead to a restoration. Spinning, of course, resonates with one of the best-known images of “women’s work” in the Greek world: the nightly unraveling of the cloth of Penelope, the long-suffering wife of the paradigmatic traveler, Odysseus. In the Proto-gospel of James, it is the spinner, Mary, who is forced to leave her home in the temple.119 And it is spinning that brings her back to the temple, something that neither the priests nor the vow of Anna’s anticipate.
In Chapter 11 of the Proto-gospel of James, the priest Zacharias sends out servants to collect the “undefiled virgins” of the “tribe of David” to spin thread for the curtain.120 When he does so, he remembers that Mary is also from this tribe, and “the servants went out and led her back.” While her tribal identity makes her eligible for the work, it is her acquired skill that receives more attention. We are not told where the other virgins learned to spin thread, but in Mary’s case, there is only one possibility: she learned to spin in the temple, while being “cared for like a dove and fed by the hand of an angel.” The sacred character of her own learning is confirmed in another priestly ritual designed to disclose heavenly knowledge. Lots are cast once again, and Mary is selected to spin the royal threads of scarlet and true purple.121 She returns home to complete the task.122
The depiction of Mary as a spinner may be a riposte to the attacks of Celsus, whom we encountered earlier in the chapter.123 In the True Doctrine, Celsus launches an ad hominem assault on the family background of Jesus. The marriage of Joseph and Mary was a sham, he contends, and the child of Mary is illegitimate. Mary herself was obviously a woman of loose morals, he maintains, because she sought employment in spinning cloth. The Proto-gospel of James, by contrast, puts Mary’s quiet labor in the best possible light: hers is the work of the kingdom of God.
What begins as a series of moments that reveals information about Mary—about her parents, about her conception, about her life in the temple, and about how she met Joseph—culminates in the image of Mary using her own acquired learning. It is spinning thread that allows Mary to continue to “minister” after her expulsion from the temple, and it allows at least a partial restoration of Anna’s vow. What Anna wanted for her child has both come to pass and not. When Mary finishes the work, she takes the threads back to the temple, where the priest receives her with a blessing: “Mary, the Lord God has made your name great; you will be blessed among all the generations of the earth.” She receives the blessing happily, “full of joy.”124 What she has created will now be installed in the temple. Mary remains bound to the temple, even after she is forced to live outside its walls.
At the same time, the reunion would have served as an ironic reminder to an early Christian audience of the limits of human understanding. They would have known from the Synoptic gospels that the curtain of the temple, sewn from threads that Mary joyfully spun, would be torn in two later when Mary’s grown-up son, Jesus, hung dying on the cross.125 And there is yet another dark irony, for by the time the Proto-gospel of James was composed, the temple in Jerusalem was no longer standing.126
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In the family gospels, the promise of the future matters, or this at least is what drives the parents. When Joseph sends Jesus to the schoolhouse and when Anna sends Mary to the temple, the parents are trying to set their children on a path to an adulthood of dignity. That Joseph and Anna are willing to sacrifice so much to realize these dreams bespeaks their good character and loving devotion. But it also implies a reckoning of costs and benefits, one that may reflect wider debates under the Roman Empire about the worth of Greek education and culture. If Lucian offers a teenager’s perspective of the choices before him and the risks entailed, then the family gospels give us an idea of what parents go through under similar pressures. Indeed, just as The Dream can bring to the surface dynamics in the storytelling of the family gospels, the family gospels can do the same for Lucian’s essay. Although Lucian recalls his father sending him to study masonry under an abusive uncle, we can wonder if he was motivated to do so by the same hope for a respectable future that, in the stories of the family gospels, fills the hearts of Joseph and Anna.
Jesus learns his letters, while Mary spins thread for the temple curtain. What remains elusive is the precise meaning of these images. For example, how should we interpret interruptions in the learning process? Jesus tangles with a teacher and quickly leaves the classroom before the lesson is completed. Mary is dedicated to a lifetime of service in the temple but then, amid a crisis of ritual purity, she is sent away. What is the significance of these breakdowns? And what is the point of having Jesus and Mary return to schoolhouse and temple to leave once again? Between home and schoolhouse, on one hand, and between home and temple, on the other, Jesus and Mary are displaced, unsettled. And if the student Jesus is “in-between,” then so too is Joseph. He is in the middle of something that he does not understand. As we shall see in the chapters that remain, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph often find themselves poised between possible futures in the family gospels.
Conflict and the limits of human understanding remain important themes of the chapters that follow. In them we dig more deeply into the fraught, interpersonal relationships of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus, taking up first the Proto-gospel of James and next the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Here we will see more examples of a point shared by both accounts: that the life of a family touched by God must nevertheless confront unknowns. Will the members of this small, holy family be able to overcome doubt and recriminations, or will the household instead come apart at the seams?