Ayers Bagley University of Minnesota |
Hast thou read books?
Jesus answered, he had read
both books, and the things
which were contained in books
- Gospel of Infancy |
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Jesus At School |
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Did Jesus of Nazareth go to school? Medieval
people thought so. Visual evidence of the belief is no longer plentiful. But we catch
glimpses of it, here and there, through images that somehow escaped the zeal of
Reformation clean-up crews. Prominently displayed in the British Museum, for example, is a
series of tiles illustrating scenes from Jesus' childhood, including school scenes. The
tiles date to the early 14th century, are of English or Norman manufacture, and are
thought to have been wall-mounted in the Tring parish church, which is about half an hour
by train from London. |
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Tring Tile |
The school imagery of the Tring tiles is not
obvious to the modern eye. Jesus might be known by his nimbus. That he is shown twice
within the same composition might be confusing. Modern viewers expect vertical bars to
divide pictorial content when passages of time or sequences of action are intended. Comic
strips have been our teachers in this. |
| Those who are unfamiliar with the story
illustrated by the Tring tiles would need an explanation of the images. Were we members of
the Tring congregation in the 1320s, we might have learned the meanings of the tiles
through sermons or, perhaps, from other members of the congregation who had been
initialed? We would have learned that on the tile in question, Jesus is first shown on the
right, entering school. Next, he is shown directly in front of his teacher, receiving a
slap on the face. |
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The idea, yea the sight, of a teacher slapping
little Jesus probably seems odd to modern viewers, perhaps reprehensible. Why would anyone
want to strike Jesus? The answer to that question and to other questions about the stories
illustrated by the Tring tiles are to be found in a manuscript tradition which traces
ultimately to the second century. Syriac, Arabic, and Greek texts and their recensions
telling tales of Jesus' childhood made their way into Latin and subsequently into the
other languages of Europe. Collectively, these have been called infancy gospels. |
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Although the Tring tile series is incomplete,
enough of it is extant to reveal correspondences with illuminations in manuscript of the
same time. Entitled Enfancie de Nostre Seignour, this work is thought to be the most fully
illuminated infancy gospel still extant. Rhymed in couplets, the text relates Jesus'
childhood acts. These may be characterized on a scale ranging from harmless to horrendous.
Some of Jesus' deeds are beneficent. He heals the lame. He multiplies a harvest and
distributes the surplus to the poor. Other of his acts are simply marvels. At his touch,
man-eating lions become tame as tabby cats. Beneath his hand, clay sparrows become
animate, take wing, and soar aloft. He can walk up a sunbeam or slide back down. He can,
but other children cannot. When they try, they fall and break their pales. Some texts
suggest that Jesus tempted children to follow him, intimating that he could foresee the
consequences. |
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Tring Tile |
Passages in all the infancy gospels--Syriac,
Arabic, Greek, and their later European derivatives--attribute malicious acts to Jesus.
For example, a boy running down the street bumps into Jesus, knocking him down. In the
Tring series and in the Enfancie, the collision occurs in a classroom. Wherever it
happens, Jesus grows angry as an Old Testament God, and declares: |
| As thou has thrown me down, so shalt thou fall, nor ever rise. And that
moment the boy fell down and died. |
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| A death for a bump. Jesus apparently was unaware
of ethical proportionalities long before established in the Old Testament, such as
"an eye for an eye," and so on. Indeed, Jesus regularly exhibited no sense of
proportion in the infancy gospels. He terrified the children of his village. |
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When a group of parents saw him coming up a lane
one day, they hid heir children in a large oven. Jesus asked what was in the oven.
"Little pigs," said the parents. "So be it." Jesus replied. And when
the oven was opened, lo, no children; only piglets. In another instance, Jesus had made
pools beside the river. Then a boy, son of Annas the Scribe, wrecked his handiwork. Jesus
said to him: "In like manner as this water has vanished, so shall thy life
vanish;" and presently the boy died. In the Tring tiles, Jesus uses a large compass
to make his pools round. His use of this implement lends credence to an allegorical
interpretation. |
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Jesus' creation of the pools can be seen as
parallel to the acts of God in Genesis. The motif of the large compass was often
associated with God in medieval iconography. With it, He is the Ultimate Geometer or
Architect delineating His creation, measuring it, putting it in order. Disruption of His
order would be satanic. In the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, the destructive child is twice
associated with Satan: |
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| Then one of the children, the son of the Devil, and of an envious mind,
shut up the channels which supplied water to the pools, and overthrew what Jesus had made.
Then Jesus said unto him, Woe unto thee, son of death, Son of Satan. Doss thou destroy the
works which I have wrought? And straightway he who had done this died. |
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If this interpretation fits, then the imagery of
the Tring tile might be counted successful from the point of view of allegory, i.e., God
may strike down the Devil because the contest is between incalculable good and evil. But
at the level of human acts and motives, the retribution meted out by Jesus once again
exceeds the limits of moral justice. The death penalty was incommensurate with the
offense. Certainly, it was more than could be borne by the villagers described in the
infancy gospels. |
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Outraged village parents came to Joseph
complaining of Jesus' atrocious acts. They demanded that something be done about the boy.
Joseph then attempted to admonish Jesus, but when Jesus discovered that the parents had
complained against him, he used his powers to strike them blind. It was at this advanced
stage of Jesus' delinquency that Joseph was persuaded by Zaccheus, a teacher, that the boy
should be sent to school where he might learn both discipline and literacy and more. |
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The apocryphal gospels vary in accounts of how
many teachers tried to work with Jesus. The numbers range from two to four. Zaccheus is
the first of them. Poor Zaccheus; he promises Joseph that he will teach Jesus his letters
and "with the letters all knowledge, and to salute all the older people and honour
them as grandfathers and fathers, and to love those of his own age." Zaccheus fails
utterly. Jesus overwhelms him with a display of knowledge salted with contempt.
Demoralized, Zaccheus berates himself: |
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| Woe is me...wretch that I am; I have brought shame to myself in drawing
to myself this child. Take him away, therefore, I beseech you brother Joseph. I cannot
endure the severity of his look, I cannot make out his speech at all. |
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The second teacher, "a more learned
master" called Levi in some texts, begins by requiring Jesus to say
"Aleph." Jesus complies. The text continues: |
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| And when he had said Aleph, the master bade him pronounce Beth; to which
the Lord Jesus replied, Tell me first the meaning of the letter Aleph, and then I will
pronounce Beth. |
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For this impertinence, the teacher decides to
chastize Jesus. The consequences are dire: But this master, when he lift up his hand to
whip him, had his hand presently withered, and he died. This new atrocity drove Joseph to
an extreme measure: "Henceforth," he declares, "we will not allow him to go
out of the house; for everyone who displeases him is killed." |
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A French manuscript of the fifteenth century
parallels the Norman Enfancie, but is much briefer. Its illustrations, however, are more
detailed. Jesus meets his would-be master in a room of monumental proportions, illuminated
by glassed, gothic windows. Several teachers are present, as though to observe the
teaching scene. Instead, they see their colleague come to grief. Folio 51v reveals Jesus
standing over the body of his victim The teacher's huge scourge is also on the floor. All
witnesses have fled. |
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Josef introduces Jesus
to schoolmaster |
A Latin manuscript in the Ambrosian Library
(Milan) provides an abbreviated treatment of Jesus' adventures at school. Joseph
introduces Jesus to the schoolmaster, presumably Zaccheus; outside his school house. Both
Jesus and Joseph are nimbed. Jesus holds a hornbook in his left hand; a stylus dangles
from its handle. The school house architecture is North Italian. That the school building
is represented as freestanding is more likely the result of an effort to focus attention
on the site of central interest than it is a rendering of the actual conditions of
medieval schools in Northern Italian cities. The classroom is jammed with unruly students.
Hornbooks are on the floor and on the ground outside the school. |
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The second scene concentrates on the
schoolmaster's humiliation. Stupified by Jesus' erudition, the schoolmaster holds his head
in shame. The classroom appears unchanged in the second drawing. As before, two boys in
the front of the room continue to lay claim to the teacher's ferule. |
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II |
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Josef and Mary
take Jesus to School |
The prominence of Joseph is notable in the
ancient accounts of Jesus' childhood. It is to Joseph that the villagers complain about
Jesus. It is Joseph who arranges for his schooling. Joseph makes the key decisions, and
when things go wrong, he does his best to put them right. Mary's role is limited mainly to
what her womb and breast and lap can do. |
| During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
Mary is given an increasingly important role related to Jesus' schooling. She is seen
repeatedly taking him to school; she and Jesus alone. That school is their destination is
indicated by the hornbook in Jesus' hand. In some instances, Mary and Jesus are placed at
the school door. By the Fifteenth century, Mary has made it into the presence of the
schoolmaster or even into the school. Some sixteenth century texts still allow Joseph to
participate in the imagery of Mary and Jesus on the way to school, but he has lost the
halo he enjoyed in the earlier Ambrosian manuscript. |
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Mary and Jesus
in School Room |
Whereas Mary had begun to take Jesus to school
in the thirteenth century, imagery of her role at home as housewife through the fifteenth
century emphasized needlework or reading the Old Testament. But by the sixteenth century,
she can be seen in compositions which correspond to teaching scenes in contemporaneous
secular iconography. A Swiss calendar of 1508, for example, features a woodcut in which
Mary and Jesus step into a classroom occupied by the schoolmaster and two young students.
An overscript reads: |
Ich han min Kind erzogen zarl und schon
Und wolt es gern zu schul lassen gon. |
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| Mary wants very much to have her clever,
handsome child attend school. |
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III |
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The largest category of imagery that depicts
Jesus' late childhood is conventionally called "Christ among the doctors." It is
based on an episode told briefly by Luke, who omits reference to any previous contact
Jesus reputedly had with schoolmen. Because the episode is related in Luke, one of the
canonical Gospels, visual works depicting it were less at risk during periods of orthodox
zeal. Luke's narrative is relatively benign. According to Chapter 11, verses 46 and 47,
Jesus is found by Mary and Joseph in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and
asking questions. And all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers.
Few artists and none of the infancy gospel writers were content with so bland an account. |
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Jesus Among the Learned Men
(awaiting copyright approval) |
Rather than depictions of Jesus merely sitting
"amidst" the doctors, imagery of the theme in early Christian art already began
the process of elevating him well above the learned men whom he addresses. A fifth century
ivory carving on a Bible cover is a restrained example of the type. In the imagery of
subsequent centuries, Jesus may rise still higher above the doctors. And instead of
discoursing with them, he is more likely to appear as a lecturer or a patient expositor.
In sixteenth-century baroque imagery, he can be seen as an orator performing in a manner
that should have pleased Cecil B. DeMille and Dino di Laurentis. |
| Another iconographic type stresses the
youthfulness of Jesus, reducing him from Luke's 12 year old to an earlier stage of life,
sometimes approaching infancy. This age reduction has the advantage of emphasizing the
miraculous character of Jesus' precocious wisdom. In addition, it effectively contrasts
the simplicity and freshness of the child image with those of the adult males and their
Temple space. Those heavy bodies, and of ten the Temple space itself, are laden with the
complexities of old, established institutions. At another level of symbolism, the imagery
can be read as the New Testament topping or capping the Old. |
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In the Syriac infancy gospel, as in some of the
Thomas infancy gospels, "Christ among the doctors" is the culmination of the
series in which Jesus has progressively subordinated his would-be teachers. Having
demoralized or otherwise destroyed those who tried to teach him the A B C's--in most of
the texts, he rarely let them get past B--he passes on to the institutional setting which
houses the most learned men of Israel, i.e., the Jerusalem Temple. There he meets the
"doctors." Coming before them, Jesus may be said literally to take his doctoral
orals. |
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Jesus arrives al the Temple already expert in
the trivium. The term "trivium" is not used in the infancy gospels, but if
Jesus' knowledge of Aleph and Beth as well as Alpha and Beta and the other letters of the
Hebrew and Greek alphabets are taken to signify grammar as a whole, and if his speeches to
the schoolmasters are accepted as demonstrations of his expertise in logic and rhetoric,
the result would be a symbolic equivalent of the trivium. The medieval habit of
allegorizing, inherited from the rhetorical schools of antiquity, would have made such
translations easy to accomplish in the minds of educated laymen and clergy. |
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To the scholars of medieval Europe, the
knowledge displayed by Jesus in his oral examination in the Temple could be perceived as
corresponding to the highest curriculum of the universities. The first examiner begins the
ritual with an open ended question. He asks: "Hast thou read books?" Jesus
answered, he had read both books and the things which were contained in books. He goes on
to reveal himself as a master of law. The second examiner, "a certain
astronomer," asks Jesus "Whether he had studied astronomy?" Jesus replies
in terms Ptolemaic and astrological, telling him: |
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| ...the number of the spheres and heavenly bodies, as also their
triangular, square, and sextile aspect; their progressive and retrograde motion; their
size and several prognostications; and other things which the reason of man had never
discovered. |
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Because such knowledge of astronomy presupposes
knowledge of arithmetic, geometry, and music, the term or notion of astronomy in the
foregoing passage may be understood as a metonym for the quadrivium as a whole. The final
examiner, a philosopher, asks whether Jesus has studied "physic." Jesus, it
turns out, has studied both physics and metaphysics. Seven verses are required to list his
knowledge of physiology and psychology. In the end, the philosopher declares himself
Jesus' student. We are not told whether the Rabbi and the astronomer participate in this
role reversal, but it appears that they all join together al a later point in
congratulating Mary: "O happy Mary who has borne such a son." |
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The Syriac infancy gospel translated from a
manuscript of the 13th or 14th century adds a note of hostility absent from Luke, and
which in the earlier recensions of the infancy gospels is reserved for the lower school
teachers. According to the Syriac narrative, when the doctors cannot answer Jesus'
questions, he calls them "hypocrites." His knowledge stuns them, sends their
minds reeling: |
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| Then the doctors cried out and said, "Oh, oh, it is not right for
this Child to be upon earth...What womb received this Child? Or what mother reared him? We
are not able to bear Him. We thought that a disciple had come to us, but he is found to be
a doctor." And Jesus said unto them, "Ye marvel al My smallness, but ye are
smaller than I in your minds." And the first teacher said, "He entrealeth us to
instruct Him! O my bowels. I cannot bear it!. . ." |
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The self-abasing speech of the teachers
continues for several lines before reaching the assertion: "He is either God, or He
is an angel." The passage concludes with Jesus enjoying his triumph: Then the Child
Jesus laughed and said unto them, "Indeed I laugh with you." |
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Jesus' laughter is ambiguous. Does he
sympathetically laugh "with" or scornfully laugh "at?" Although the
passage is unclear on the point, nothing in the previous episodes suggests that Jesus
would be sympathetic to his teachers so long as they thought themselves capable of
teaching him anything. Confession of inadequacy, however, sometimes caused him to relent.
This occurs in one version of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. The defeated teacher says to
Joseph: |
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| "Know, brother, that I took the child as a disciple; but he is full
of great grace and wisdom; and now I beg you, brother, take him to your house." And
when the child heard this, he at once smiled on him and said: "Since you have spoken
well and have testified rightly, for your sake shall he also that was smitten be
healed." And immediately the other teacher was healed. |
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Then Joseph took Jesus home. |
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Jesus confounded the most learned men of Israel,
refuted them utterly. How did he come to be so well informed, so proficient in argument,
so poised a public speaker? The question would have been reasonable to ask in antiquity,
when grammar and rhetoric dominated the curriculum of most schools around the
Mediterranean, and especially in the second century, when the Institutes of Oratory had
become a great text in the west. Medieval believers, accepting the legend of Mary's
education in the Temple, might assume that she taught Jesus the rudiments of literacy. |
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Concerning his vocational education, it was
possible to point to Joseph as his teacher in the carpentry shop. But what of a more
advanced formal education? The question could, of course, be ignored. The shift from
humble domesticity to high place in the Temple might be accomplished without elaboration.
It is so illustrated in a Flemish version of Ludolph's Line of Christ (1461). But for the
curious, a fuller account was required. The infancy gospels filled this need, albeit with
little sensitivity to core values of the New Testament. |
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In presenting Jesus as a Wunderkind possessed of
supernatural power, the infancy gospels left him too little of the virtues extolled by the
gospel of love, namely, humility, patience, and charily unbounded. Irenaeus (A.D. 120-202)
specifically condemned as "false and wicked" the school episode in which Jesus
refused to say Beta until the teacher explained Alpha to his satisfaction. Yet recensions
of the infancy gospels continued to multiply over the centuries. It is probably due to
them that the hugely popular Meditations on the Lime of Christ (late thirteenth century)
would include the line, ". . .among the people he was commonly known as big and
bad." |
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Might the Jesus of the infancy gospels be
excused for his excesses on the basis of his years? After all, he was only a child, which
meant that he was not yet of the age of full reason let alone judgment, according to
contemporaneous Hellenistic and Jewish theories. Such an approach to the texts from the
standpoint of developmental psychology is plausible. The passages in Luke pertaining to
the twelve year old Christ in the Temple have long been viewed in this way. There the fit
between psychology, morals, and theology requires no contortion of Christian principles.
In absenting himself from his parents without forewarning anyone, Jesus' lack of
consideration left something to be desired in respect to courtesy and filial duty. Mary
and Joseph suffered emotionally when they thought he was lost, according to Ludolph: |
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| Joseph was crestfallen; it was the worst day of Mary's life; she was in
tears; she spent the night in anguish. Yet Jesus' failure in this event could be
attributed to youthful enthusiasm for the things of God. The infancy gospels, in contrast,
make him the perpetrator of dreadful deeds triggered by comparatively small provocations.
At the same time, the texts endow him with supernatural wisdom. It is implied that he acts
knowingly, which undercuts any appeal to immaturity as an extenuating consideration. |
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Jesus' several triumphs over the men of the
schools were costly for Christian educators. Whatever was gained by his displays of
inspired intellectual power and his abuse of teachers was a loss on the side of symbolism
useful in fostering attitudes favorable to schooling. Christian parents and teachers could
not point to Jesus as a model student. They could not say to children, for example,
"See how faithfully Jesus attended school" "See how hard he worked on his
lessons!" Not having Jesus as a positive model meant having no support from an
especially important source. That would have been bad enough. But burdened with Jesus as a
negative model in relation to teachers would mean having to justify his actions and,
perhaps, to make clear that children should not imitate him in his anti-school behavior.
The redactor of the Norman manuscript seems to have been aware of the problem, for this
text includes an illuminated passage in which Jesus encourages children to go to school.
Of the extant infancy gospels and related illuminations, this is the only instance of its
kind that has come to light. The broad tendency of this literature and imagery is both
anti-school and anti-Jewish. It reflects, then, two of the least fortunate themes in the
Christian story. To study them in the words and images that describe Jesus' relations to
the schools may increase understanding of some long-term, formative elements of Western
culture. |
You may also browse through additional Jesus
at School images
without the textual accompaniment here.
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