Religions Reviewed

While the “positive reversals” characteristic of orientalism are not immediately evident in I Corinthians, they certainly emerge in the larger context of Christian scripture. Both Gundry-Volf and Carroll remark the tension between passages in which children are used as overtly positive models, and alternatively as negative ones.[1] The chief cases of “positive reversal” are found in the gospels, most especially Matthew 18:1-14 and its synoptic parallels.[2] Gundry-Volf and Carroll likewise both suggest the mechanism of eschatological reversal as a possible contributing factor in the ambivalence of ‘childishness’ in the gospels; children are the last who shall be first in the coming divine reordering of society.[3] (Note also in this connection the identification of children with the various categories of the Beatitudes in Matthew 5, and the notion of “status reversal” from Old Testament sources.[4])

Gundry-Volf provides an explicit disclaimer that her “Jesus” is “not ‘the historical Jesus,’” but rather the representation of Jesus in the gospels.[5] Carroll, on the other hand, who is more intent on ministerial and pastoral concerns than scholarly ones, does not bother to make such a distinction.[6] Yet both of them neglect textual history in order to prioritize “Jesus” over “Paul.” Rather than seeing Paul as a flawed evangelist who failed to fully embrace the radical message of Jesus regarding the alterity of childhood, it probably makes more sense to view the gospels as containing a later, more elaborated grammar of childhood tropes than the ones in the Pauline epistles. The more exalted ‘children’ of the gospels would then benefit from the gradual development and application of ideas of eschatological reversal, and could even draw on other Pauline notions, like the orientalizing dialectic of ‘slave and free’ in I Corinthians 7:20-24.

The last of the three terms for children in I Corinthians is paida (paida), which can mean children, pupils, or servants, or even slaves. It appears in I Corinthians 14:20 with an uncompromising tone:

“Brothers and sisters, do not be children in your thinking; rather, be infants in evil, but in thinking be adults.”

There is a clearer orientalizing undercurrent in the middle of this citation; adults are wise in understanding, but children are innocent of malice. Even so, the beginning commands that the believers not be children, and the end again calls for them to be adults. The ‘value’ of childhood is associated with “evil.”

            The implicitly and explicitly negative regard for children (nepioi and paida) in I Corinthians was of a piece with the Hellenistic milieu in which Paul addressed himself to the Corinthian church. As Gundry-Volf points out, “in a Greco-Roman setting, comparison with children was highly insulting.”[7] And well might it have been, when children were often non-persons subject to arbitrary maltreatment. There can still be a strong residue of violence against children in the text, where childhood is a contemptible condition to be abolished through education and maturation. The child and the adult should not coexist in one person. But in 14:20 they do!  In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, the mixture of different references to children suggest the emergence of grammars and models through which a Christian community’s valuing of children might go beyond the Greco-Roman, or even the ancient Hebrew ideas of children as subordinate extensions of the family, and through that relationship question the received orderings of society.

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[1] Gundry-Volf 2001, 58, 60; Carroll 2001, 127.

[2] Gundry-Volf 2001, 41-42.

[3] Gundry-Volf 2001 43; Carroll 2001, 127-8.

[4] Gundry-Volf 2001, 38; Carroll 2001, 124.

[5] Gundry-Volf 2001, 30.

[6] Carroll 2001, 132-4.

[7] Gundry-Volf 2001, 39.