The Bible says little about Jesus’ childhood – but that didn’t stop medieval Christians from having fun with tales of him as holy ‘rascal’

Manger scenes displayed around Christmastime normally feature an ox and an ass beside the infant Jesus. According to the Gospel of Luke, Mary placed her child in a manger – an animal feeding bin – “because there was no room for them within the inn.”

No mere babysitters, the ox and ass harken back to the Book of Isaiah 1:3, a verse early Christians interpreted as a prophecy of the birth of Christ. In some early artwork, these beasts of burden kneel to point out their reverence – recognizing this swaddled babe, who entered the world in humble circumstances, as lordly.

The canonical Gospels, the accounts of Jesus’ life included within the Bible’s New Testament, make no mention of those animals welcoming the newborn. Yet the motif was already seen in art from the fourth century. It was further popularized by the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, an apocryphal text – that’s, one not included within the canon of Scripture. Pseudo-Matthew was composed by an anonymous monk, probably within the seventh century, and includes many tales about Jesus growing up.

After its account of Jesus’ birth, the Bible is nearly entirely silent on his childhood. Yet legends about Jesus’ early years circulated widely within the Middle Ages – the main focus of my 2017 book. While the detail of the ox and ass is sort of familiar to many Christians today, few are aware of the opposite striking tales transmitted by the apocrypha.

Wonder-worker

The Bible does include one famous scene from Jesus’ youth: the incident when 12-year-old Jesus stayed behind on the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, unbeknownst to his parents. Searching for him with great anxiety, they find him conversing with religious teachers, each asking questions and astounding them together with his answers. Fourteenth-century painter Simone Martini’s “Christ Discovered within the Temple” portrays him standing before his parents with crossed arms – a stubborn youth, apparently unapologetic about making them worry for days.

The apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew – especially versions that incorporate material from a good earlier apocryphal gospel, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas – focuses on the years of Jesus’ childhood. Like the temple story, they show the boy Jesus as sometimes difficult and having preternatural wisdom that amazes and even offends his would-be teachers. More dramatically, the apocryphal legends depict Jesus exercising divine power from a really young age.

Like the adult Jesus of the New Testament, this apocryphal Christ child often works wonders to assist others in need. According to the biblical Gospel of Matthew, Mary and Joseph take the infant Jesus to Egypt after an angel warns in a dream that Herod, King of Judea, would kill the kid. In Pseudo-Matthew’s elaboration of this episode, we see Jesus, not yet 2 years old, bravely stand on his feet before dragons emanating from a cave, where his family has stopped to rest.

The terrifying dragons worship him after which depart, while Jesus boldly assures those around him that he’s the “perfect man” and may “tame every form of wild beast.” He later commands a palm tree to bend down in order that a weary Mary can partake of its fruits, and he miraculously shortens their journey within the desert.

At times, the Jesus of those legends is basically accountable for the troubles around him. The 14th-century Tring Tiles, now within the British Museum, depict certainly one of Jesus’ friends imprisoned by his father in a tower. Christ pulls him out of a tiny hole, like a gallant medieval knight rescuing a maiden in distress. The father had tried to insulate his son from Jesus’ influence – comprehensible, considering that many legends show Jesus causing the death of his playmates or other boys who someway irked him.

In a story summarized by one scholar as “death for a bump,” a boy runs into Jesus. He curses the kid, who immediately drops down dead – though Jesus brings him back to life after a temporary reprimand from Joseph.

In one other tale, included in an Anglo-Norman narrative that survives in an illustrated manuscript, Jesus takes off his coat, places it upon a sunbeam and sits upon it. When the opposite children see this, they “thought they’d do the identical …. But they were too eager, they usually all fell down without delay. One and one other jumped up quickly onto the sunbeam, nevertheless it turned out badly for them, since each broke his neck.” Jesus heals the boys at his parents’ prompting.

Joseph admits to his neighbors that Jesus “was indeed too wild” and sends him away. The 7-year-old Jesus becomes apprenticed to a dyer, who gives him very precise directions about dyeing three pieces of fabric in three different vats. Once his master has left, Jesus ignores his instructions, throwing all the material into one vat – yet still achieves the specified end result. When the master returns, he at first thinks he has been “ruined by this little rascal,” but then realizes that a wonder has occurred.

Bond with animals

These apocryphal legends also show the boy Jesus having power over the animal world. When he enters a dreaded lion’s cave, cubs “ran about around his feet, fawning and fidgeting with him,” while “the older lions … stood at a distance and worshipped him, and wagged their tails before him.” Jesus tells bystanders that the beasts are higher than they’re, since the animals “recognize and glorify their Lord.”

Indeed, these tales characterize Jesus as a relatively haughty boy, conscious of his divinity and never glad with those that treat him as a mere child. At the identical time, they depict him as an actual child who likes to play. The boy Jesus is childlike in the best way he often acts on impulse, not paying much attention to the admonitions of his elders.

His affinity for animals, too, makes him seem childlike. Strikingly, beasts within the apocrypha, starting with the ox and ass, often seem to understand that Jesus is not any strange child before human characters do.

The legends’ insidious insinuation that most of the Jews around Jesus weren’t as perceptive because the animals is an element of medieval Europe’s widespread antisemitism. In one fifth-century sermon, Quodvultdeus, the bishop of Carthage, asks why the animals’ recognition of Jesus within the manger was not a sufficient sign for the Jews.

In the Bible, Jesus works his first miracle as an adult, at a marriage feast in Cana. The apocryphal tales, nonetheless, toy with the thought of the God-man revealing his power early on. The legends suggest that the childishness of Christ distracted lots of those around him, stopping them from concluding that he was the Messiah. This allows the apocrypha to avoid contradicting the Bible’s reference to Jesus as simply “the carpenter’s son,” the other of a wonder child.

Each Christmas, modern Christians within the Western world are likely to have a good time Jesus’ birthday, then quickly drop the theme of the Christ child. Medieval Christians, in contrast, were fascinated by tales in regards to the Son of God growing up. Despite acting as a dragon tamer, physician and magician, the young Jesus of the apocrypha largely flies under the radar, cloaking his divinity with “little rascal” boyishness.