Christ Child: Cultural Memories of a Young Jesus.

Haughey, John C.

Christ Child: Cultural Memories of a Young Jesus. By Stephen J. Davis. New Haven: Yale University, 2014. Pp. x + 417. $45.

Some of our Christian forebears were not content to leave the early life of Jesus as blank as do the Gospels. Authors of the Apocrypha, for example, filled in the years of his youth with tales that leave one astonished about the purported wonders he performed. The Apocrypha appealed to the credulous and to those ignorant of the authority of the scriptural canon.

Davis's volume examines one of these spurious texts, the Paidika. While Greek in origin, it has a murky history beginning with oral transmissions as early as the second century and gains wonders over the next nine centuries. These nine centuries served to delimit and solidify the Paidika, and although a number of patristic authors deride it, many of the faithful passed on some of these stories.

D. has a particular interest in how human communities remember the past and transmit it to their own generations. Here he uses the narratives about the child Jesus that edified the faithful and bemused the informed. His monograph is meticulously annotated--it has some 110 pages of footnotes. While the interpretations, translations, and transmissions of the Paidika are many, D. succinctly explains what is peculiar about his book: it is "not so much about the Christ child himself as about how and by whom he was remembered" (197).

DOI: 10.1177/0040563914565315

John C. Haughey, S.J.

Colombiere Jesuit Community, Baltimore