Christ Child by Stephen J. Davis

Author:Stephen J. Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 2. Texts and Readers

1. Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?

2. See also the work of Najman (“Traditionary Pro cesses”), who critiques the prevailing assumptions among biblical scholars who “operate with an overly simplistic, unilinear conception” of their subject matter, thinking in terms of “organized unities of familiar kinds—texts, books, collections.” Instead, Najman wants to ask: “What makes texts into unities?” In reassessing the ways such “textual unities” are constructed, Najman focuses especially on Nietz sche’s notion of the authorial “personality” or “figure” and Foucault’s “author function,” both of which recognize these categories as constructed in and through the pro cess of reading: see Nietz sche, “Homer and Classical Philology,” 145–70; and Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 205–22. Najman (“Configuring the Text,” 3–22) also explores how such notions of “textual unity” are connected with constructions of authorial and genre unity. On processes of editorial revision and textual fluidity in early Christianity, see also Czachesz, “Rewriting and Textual Fluidity in Antiquity,” 426–41.

3. Aasgaard (Childhood, 113–36) has a whole chapter entitled “Intertextuality—Reflections of the Bible,” where he argues that the influence of biblical texts (from specific references to more general allusions and themes) is “considerably stronger than has been previously observed” (p. 113).

4. Gero (“Infancy Gospel,” 47) sees in these stories “the patent retrojection of synoptic miracles into the period of the Childhood.”

5. On seeking and finding, cf. Matthew 7:7–11 and Luke 11:9–13. On his birth and origins, cf. Luke 11:27. In addition to such gospel references and allusions, Aasgaard (Childhood, 118–20) also notes Zacchaeus’s allusion to the Pauline phrase “noisy gong and clanging cymbal” (Paidika 6.2ff.; Burke, De infantia, 316–17; cf. 1 Corinthians 13:1).

6. Matthew 21:18–19; Mark 11:12–14.

7. Burke (De infantia, esp. 203–4) has proposed that the editor of the earliest Greek recension of the text may have been exclusively acquainted with the author of Luke-Acts: In addition to the Paidika’s clear reliance on Luke 2 in chapter 17, he also notes the similarities between Jesus’ healing of the man bitten by a snake in chapter 15 and the story of the snake-bitten Paul on the island of Malta in Acts (28:3–6), the companion volume to Luke. Geert van Oyen (“Rereading the Rewriting,” 482–505) has argued, however, for a broader (and more variegated) relationship between the Paidika and the New Testament writings.

8. Burke, De infantia, 203; Aasgaard, Childhood, 115–18; also Schmahl, “Lk 2,41–52 und die Kindheitserzählung,” 249–58; Jonge, “Sonship, Wisdom, Infancy,” 347–48. Outside this final pericope, however, the evidence for exclusive dependence on Luke is elusive. On this subject, Kaiser (“Jesus als Kind,” 263–64) observes that any such privileged connection with the Gospel of Luke seems to have been lost on later recipients of the Paidika.

9. See, e.g., Cullmann, “Kindheitsevangelien,” 330; Vielhauer, Geschichte, 674; Chartrand-Burke, “Completing the Gospel,” 109–16; Kaiser, “Jesus als Kind,” 260–63.

10. Burke writes that even “the author of the Luke-Acts would have recognized a kinship between his work and the ‘heretical’ infancy gospel” (Chartrand-Burke, “Completing the Gospel,” 112–13; also Aarde, “Kindheidsevangelie van Tomas as ’n heroïese

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