Entering God’s Kingdom (Not) Like A Little Child: Images of the Child in Matthew, 1 Corinthians, and Thomas

186 Pages·2021·0.833 MB·English

by  Eunyung Lim

Eunyung Lim
Entering God’s Kingdom (Not) Like A Little Child
Beihefte zur Zeitschrift
für die neutestamentliche
Wissenschaft
Edited by
Matthias Konradt, Judith Lieu, Laura Nasrallah,
Jens Schröter, and Gregory E. Sterling
Volume 243
Eunyung Lim
Entering God’s
Kingdom (Not)
Like A Little Child
Images of the Child in Matthew,
1 Corinthians, and Thomas
ISBN 978-3-11-069498-7
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-069507-6
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-069517-5
ISSN 0171-6441
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021933238
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The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
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www.degruyter.com
To My Parents

Abstract
“Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of
God belongs to such as these” (Matt 19:14; Mark 10:14; Luke 18:16). Based on the
gospel accounts of Jesus’s welcoming of little children, many people today often
presume that early Christianity offered a new, uniform, and positive understand-
ing of children against the backdrop of the ancient world. Challenging such a
Christian exceptionalist approach to history, this book asks how individual texts
construct childlikeness as it relates to God’s kingdom within their socio-cultural
milieus. In particular, this book examines imagery of the child used in the Gospel
of Matthew, 1 Corinthians, and the Gospel of Thomas vis-à-vis a set of philosophi-
cal, historical, and archaeological materials concerning ancient children, thereby
presenting a socio-cultural context in which to understand the childlikeness each
text distinctively promotes.
Situating the selected texts within discourses and practices related to chil-
dren in the ancient Mediterranean world leads to an understanding that Matthew,
1 Corinthians, and Thomas do not speak of childlikeness in the same way. The
Gospel of Matthew turns to the social disparity between royal children and poor
ones in a post-70-CE Roman colony, using the little child (Matt 18:2) to urge the
hearers to abandon their aspiration to political and economic privileges. In 1 Cor-
inthians, “infant” is a term of invective against the Corinthians, whose infantile
lack of proper speech and logos marks their unpreparedness for God’s kingdom.
In the Gospel of Thomas, the child serves as an exemplar of the primordial being
in Gen 1:27 who exists without shame, for this gospel idealizes the child’s sexually
undeveloped body and liminal status in society. As these texts take up various
aspects of the child from contemporaneous discourses on childhood according to
their historical situations, theological foci, and rhetorical purposes, they present
no one uniform understanding of childlikeness. Instead, the child’s marginalized
status in Rome’s client kingdom, the intellectual incapability of infants presented
in ancient philosophical discourse, and the ancient cultural perception of the
baby’s non-gendered state define childlikeness in Matthew, 1 Corinthians, and
Thomas respectively, functioning to communicate to their historical audiences
different human values regarding God’s kingdom.
Despite these different understandings of childlikeness, however, it is impor-
tant to note that Matthew, 1 Corinthians, and Thomas simultaneously invite
the adult audience to “think with” children in the process of seeking God’s
kingdom. These varied images of children respond to an important religious and
ethical question – what kind of bodily form or human quality should we culti-
vate to enter God’s kingdom? – thereby concretizing social, moral, and spiritual
transformations that Christ-followers must aspire to or avoid. In turn, these texts’
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110695076-202
VIII   Abstract
references to children cannot be used as direct evidence for claims that early
Christ- followers were kind to children. However, they present the richness and
diversity of theological ideals among those who first received Matthew, 1 Corin-
thians, and Thomas. Exploring the developmental characteristics and social sit-
uations of children reveals that some early Christ-followers cast young children
as effective theological imaginaries for expressing various visions of a human
condition in which one is worthy to enter God’s kingdom.
Acknowledgments
This book is a revised version of my doctoral dissertation, which I completed at
Harvard University Divinity School and defended in the Spring of 2018. I would
like to thank the editors of Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wis-
senschaft for accepting this book into their fine monograph series, as well as the
editorial staff at Walter de Gruyter, especially Alice Meroz and Sabina Dabrowski,
for their kind assistance and meticulous work throughout the publication process.
I acknowledge that an earlier draft of Chapter 2 of this manuscript was published
in the Catholic Biblical Quarterly (83 [2021]: 425–45) under the title, “Entering the
Kingdom of Heaven Not like the Sons of Earthly Kings (Matthew 17:24–18:5).” I am
grateful to CBQ general editor, Leslie Hoppe, for his kind support.
When I embarked on this journey through ancient childhood, I had little
knowledge of where it would lead me over the next ten years. Living far from my
homeland while writing about how early Christians thought of children led me to
experience temporal, cultural, and linguistic border crossings, which often both
challenged me and brought unexpected wonders. Many people have accompa-
nied me and witnessed my joys and struggles on this long, arduous path as my
research has been reborn into this book.
My deepest gratitude goes to Laura Nasrallah, my dissertation advisor and
longtime mentor, for the countless hours she has spent patiently and thoroughly
reading so many different iterations of my work; her caring words, practical
wisdom, and genuine encouragement have always come right as I’ve needed
them most. Both her academic rigor and selfless mentorship have been so exem-
plary that I will always strive to emulate them as a scholar and a teacher.
I would also like to extend my sincere thanks to Karen King for her insightful
comments on this research. I learned so much from her expertise in the Coptic
language and comparative study of religion, and her encouragement during the
final writing stage of my dissertation meant a great deal to me. Giovanni Bazza-
na’s incisive feedback was crucial for my analysis of the Gospel of Matthew, and I
am grateful for his warm support and professional advice throughout my doctoral
study. Thank you to Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza for raising thought-provoking
questions about my theoretical framework for this project. Her democratic, femi-
nist pedagogy will continue to inspire my teaching. I would also like to acknowl-
edge two late professors at Harvard, François Bovon and Helmut Koester, whose
scholarship opened my eyes to a variety of ancient materials that I had not previ-
ously known. Additionally, I am grateful to Michael D. Jackson for his anthropo-
logical insights, which helped me to evaluate ancient texts through a fresh lens,
and Stephanie Paulsell, who has shown me that mentoring students and writing
can be forms of ministry.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110695076-203
X   Acknowledgments
The collegial and supportive atmosphere of the New Testament and Early
Christianity program at Harvard offered continual motivation for salvaging my dis-
sertation writing from the abyss of time. My thanks go especially to Margaret Butter-
field, Jung Hyun Choi, Greg Given, Sarah Griffis, Chris Hoklotubbe, Roberto Mata,
Lydia Bremer-McCollum, Karen Connor McGugan, Heather M cLetchie-Leader,
Kelsi Morrison-Atkins, Chan Sok Park, Sarah Porter, Jennifer Quigley, and Tyler
Schwaller for providing thoughtful feedback on rough drafts of my manuscript
and for creating such a wonderful academic community. Friendship, as well as
practical and spiritual support, both within and beyond my Harvard circle also
sustained me while I was conducting my research; for this, I am especially grate-
ful to Eleanor Craig, Ashleen Menchaca-Bagnulo, Eunhee Nah, Erin Northington,
Young Ra Rhee, and Ann Bartels Tackett, inter alios. I would also like to thank my
faculty colleagues and students at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago for
their eagerness to read this book. I am especially looking forward to sharing the joy
of publishing my first book with Barbara Rossing, Esther Menn, and Klaus-Peter
Adam.
Finally, words are not enough to express my enormous gratitude to my
family. My father, Yongsoon Lim, and my mother, Sangran Yoo, never gave up
on me (Mark 5:21–42; Matthew 15:21–28) and their unceasing prayers, deep faith,
and unstinting love are the reasons why I am who I am. Special thanks go to
my siblings, extended family, and mentors in Korea, especially Yongseok Chung,
Taeyeon Cho, and Jinsoon Song, who have long cheered me on from afar. Above
all, my gratitude goes to James Lee, who has been a brilliant and caring conver-
sation partner, and who studied, suffered, and rejoiced with me (Romans 12:15)
through each challenging and wondrous year of this project. I deeply appreciate
his bringing so much joy to my life and being a loving father to Ethan and Sophia,
who were born at the alpha and the omega stages of this book, respectively.