Children in the first century
Anyone know some good resources on how the culture treated children back in the day.
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Josh Hunt said:
Anyone know some good resources on how the culture treated children back in the day.
Are you looking at how the first Century Church did? Or the Roman world? or in Israel?
We know how Jesus treated them but the tradition of ignoring women and children seemed prevalent.
Logos 7 Collectors Edition
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how the culture in Jesus day treated children
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There is a chapter called "Jewish and Christian Families in First Century Rome" in the book Judaism and Christianity in First-Century Rome by Karl P. Donfried (not available in Logos, but you can see a preview of it on Google Books and poke through much of that chapter). There are sections in that chapter on "Family Structure" and "Parent-Child Relationships."
Searching through Google books for families children "first century" -twenty (I omit twenty in the search to weed out all the books that refer to "twenty-first century"), you'll probably find some other useful hits. For example, there's a book called Let the Little Children Come to Me: Childhood and Children in Early Christianity. Searches for Jewish and Roman within that book find tons of hits, so it probably deals with the surrounding cultures.
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IVP's Dictionary of New Testment Background is a good source. It has an entry called "CHILDREN IN LATE ANTIQUITY'.
Also, Nelson's Illustrated Manners and Customs of the Bible (by Packer, Tenney, & White) and Nelson's New Illustrated Bible Manners & Customs (by Vos, H. F.) have entries on children and/or childhood. (They are considerably different books, despite the similar titles).
I have a Logos collection of Bible background resources in which I searched for "children" to find these resources. That collection is defined with this rule:
title:(background,manners,customs,milieu),subject:(background,manners,customs,milieu)MacBook Pro (2019), ThinkPad E540
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My library is (slowly) indexing right now but I did find two humorously opposing references. My search "children in the first century" had 4 hits. Other searches were giving me 27,000 kits.
"Because of the symbolic value which parents attached to children in the first century, they were in general very proud of their children. After all, the children shared the inherited status of their parents and forebears." -- Malina, B., & Joubert, S. (1997). A time travel to the world of Jesus. Halfway House: Orion.
"Although it is easy to romanticize about children with respect to this pericope, such qualities as “innocence,” “openness to the future,” and “trusting” are not the first ones that come to mind when reviewing general perceptions of children in the first century. We have already noted the high mortality rate about young children; added to this is the simple observation that children were viewed as “not adults.” They might be valued for their present or future contribution to the family business, especially in an agricultural context, but otherwise they possessed little if any intrinsic value as human beings. Luke’s phrase “even infants” draws attention to the particular vulnerability of the smallest of children, perhaps accounting for the widespread practice of infanticide and child abandonment—and, thus, for the suitability of the infant as a particularly effective example of the lowliness accented in vv 9–14. “Little children,” on the other hand, translates a term used for household slaves and children, those maintained in a relationship of subordination in a Greco-Roman household. Against this cultural horizon, the response of the disciples is easily understood, even justifiable. Why should Jesus’ time be taken up with persons of such little importance, especially when a “ruler” was waiting in the wings (v 18)? " Luke 18:15–17 from -- Green, J. B. (1997). The Gospel of Luke. The New International Commentary on the New Testament (650–651). Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
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