Child Metaphors in the New Testament

Within literary studies, the term metaphor has a variety of uses. Most narrowly, the term refers to the symbolic use of a word or phrase, applying a nonliteral meaning to a concrete group or object in order to express an abstract concept. For the purposes of this bibliography, a broader approach is applied, understanding child metaphors to encompass both figurative uses of the term child and related images and the role that child-centered readings can play in shaping the understanding of abstractions such as discipleship and the kingdom of God portrayed in the New Testament. Given this broad starting place, it should come as no surprise that exegetical study of metaphor in general, and of child metaphors in particular, is prolific. Extended studies of the use of metaphor in the Bible date to the middle of the 20th century, as Western literary studies began to influence the practice of exegesis and, in some cases, even before narrative criticism fully took hold. Nevertheless, awareness of the use of metaphor, symbol, and analogy to convey ideas about God and God’s relationship with humanity can be traced back to the earliest allegorical interpretations of Scripture performed by Paul himself. What is unique about more recent scholarship on child metaphors in the New Testament, then, is not attention to these passages as metaphors, but rather increased precision in understanding the use of the child as a metaphorical frame to understand such concepts and attention to the role that real children themselves can offer in terms of understanding child-related metaphors in their cultural contexts. To this end, Halvor Moxnes’s 1997 volume Constructing Early Christian Families: Family as Social Reality and Metaphor (Moxnes 1997, cited under General Overviews) was groundbreaking in its attention to social and cultural trends around family and children in the 1st-century Mediterranean world in order to better understand and interpret metaphors of family and children used by biblical authors embedded in this culture. Over the past thirty years, scholarly attention to the metaphorical frames of children and childhood has expanded as scholars seek to understand these frames within their cultural context and with more specific attention to the real children associated with them. This latter approach has been variously described as child-centered or childist. Child-centered interpretations employ interdisciplinary tools to focus on the socially constructed nature of childhood, while childist interpretations describes an ideological approach that touches upon “assigning voice to the (silent) child, asserting agency and filling in the gaps in a child’s narrative, pointing to the adult-centric nature or interpretation, . . . and, finally, noting the interplay between the value and vulnerability that children experience” (Kristine Henriksen Garroway and John W. Martens, “Introduction: The Study of Children in the Bible: New Questions or a New Method?,” in Children and Methods: Listening To and Learning From Children in the Biblical World, edited by Kristine Henriksen Garroway and John W. Martens [Leiden: Brill, 2020]). Across these approaches, three major modes of interpreting child and childhood metaphors in the New Testament texts have emerged, with attention to the attributes of childhood, family structure, and the spiritual application of child metaphors.