Religions Reviewed

A focus on the references to children and childhood in I Corinthians can bring such traces into view, considering Yonder Moynihan Gillihan’s apt characterization of its authorship: “a former Pharisee writes in Greek to a primarily pagan audience” to establish norms of Christian conduct and belief.[1] There are three different Greek terms for children used in I Corinthians, and each of them represents a relatively distinct engagement with a grammar of alterity. The terms are teknion, nhpioV, and paidion (nepios, teknion, and paidion).

            The first of these stands at the core of the verse with which Gillihan’s article is chiefly concerned: I Corinthians 7:14, where tekna literally means ‘offspring’ or ‘descendants,’ and does not denote immaturity or childhood as such.[2] Nevertheless, in its context it also appears to specify dependents in a household within the community of Corinthian Christians. The enigmatic character of the instruction in that passage has produced some pertinent speculation on the status of children among the early Christians to whom the Pauline letter was addressed. Gillihan and Judith M Gundry-Volf each have made recent attempts to explicate the directive in which “the unbelieving husband is sanctified (hgiastai) in the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband; otherwise your children would be unclean, but now they are holy (agioV).”

Gundry-Volf collapses the two terms egiastai (sanctified) and hagios (holy).[3] As a result, she (along with the others who have thought along similar lines, discussed by Gillihan) concludes that the children “are holy through the Christian parent.”[4] This apparent solution would employ the encompassment grammar described by Baumann, in which the children are subsumed by the value of the believing parent, and thus rendered similarly “holy.”[5] In support of the idea that this form of alterity for children could be at work in the Pauline corpus, Gundry-Volf’s reading of Colossians and Ephesians notes, “children are subsumed—but hopefully not lost!—under the general category of fellow members of the community….”[6]
——————————————————————————–

[1] Gillihan 2002, 744.

[2] Gundry-Volf 2001, 48. Tekna is also the term used by Paul to address his readers as “my little children” (thus KJV and RSV) in Galatians 4:19. The “little” is thus of questionable value in the translation; Paul is addressing them as his doctrinal descendants, not as his young innocents.

[3] Gundry-Volf 2001, 51. This position is also taken by the editors of the NRSV Bible, who use “holy” in for both the parents and the child.

[4] Gundry-Volf 2001, 51. Gillihan cites G.R. Beasley-Murray, Conzelmann, O. Larry Yarborough, and Dale Martin as proponents of this view (Gillihan 2004, 733-7).

[5] Baumann 2004, 25-6.

[6] Gundry-Volf 2001, 57; italics in original.