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| Artwork showing Jesus as a child at the temple. Image source. |
I've been reading the book "Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles", which is a collection of academic essays about children's bibles. In this post, I want to show you all a few quotes from the chapter "The Word Became Visual Text: The Boy Jesus in Children's Bibles" by Melody Briggs. This chapter examines the way that children's bibles tell the story of Jesus at age 12 in the temple (Luke 2:40-52).
Briggs categorizes children's retellings of bible stories into 4 groups (p 158):
Some retellers use the story to foreground a particular social value, constructing an implied reader who needs moral guidance. I refer to this approach as value-driven retellings. Other retellers seek to protect the reader from theological error and so construct an implied reader who requires theological boundaries. I refer to these texts as dogma-driven. Others supplement the narrative with information that, while providing background to the story, is not central to the biblical version. The implied reader here appears to be in need of education, and I refer to this approach as education-driven. Finally, some retellers seek to maintain the ambiguity of the text while encouraging child readers to resolve this ambiguity. This implied reader is in need of stimulation to engage with the story, and I refer to these texts as engagement-driven. These uses of the story are not mutually exclusive, and many children's Bibles incorporate elements from more than one approach. But for the sake of clarity, we will consider each approach separately.
!!!! This is such a good insight! Children's bibles are always presented like they're simply telling the story- like if you have a kids' book about Daniel in the lions' den, you would introduce the book by saying "here's the story of Daniel in the lions' den." But it's not. The writers make choices about how to present the story to child readers. What they want the kids to learn from it. What the "point" of the story is.
People who make bible story books for kids are ALWAYS making these choices. And Briggs points out 4 different ways to spin a bible story. I like the "engagement-driven" one better than the others, but actually I don't think any of them are inherently bad. But they would be bad if they're presented as "this *is* the point of the story." It would be much better if we told children to view them as "here's this book's opinion on this bible story" and then you go read a different take on it, that spins it a different way. So they learn to not take any of them too seriously- that there's always room for different people to interpret the stories differently.
There are a few more quotes I want to post from this chapter:
This section, about a 1997 paper called "Do We Want Our Children to Read This Book?" by Francis Landy (p 162):
Landy points out that children's Bibles, in an attempt to be responsible, create a canon within a canon, which "adapts the Bible to our ethical needs." Landy considers this "an act of bad faith" (1997, 164); that is, such adult censuring displays a lack of faith in the text. In fact, authors who frame text around an interpretation in line with a particular set of values or a theological position display a lack of faith in both the text and their readers.
This is so real. The bible is weird and confusing, and Christians are always slightly simplifying it into something NOT weird/confusing when they tell the stories (to children or to anyone else). Why's that? Do we not trust that the bible is just fine the way it is, and we have to change it into something less confusing?
(I mean... when you believe that people will go to hell if they don't understand the bible the "correct" way, then you can't really take any chances, you really have to spoon feed it to your kids so they don't understand it "wrong"...)
And this from p 166:
When the retellers of the story of Jesus in the temple shape the story around a particular concern, what child readers experience is not the polyphony and otherness of the biblical world, but a domesticated story that, while being perfectly safe, holds little challenge. This analysis has shown that it is not just the text that is tamed; it is also the reader. Indeed, it could be said that the text is tamed in order to produce a certain outcome in the reader. The text becomes a didactic tool, and narrative takes second place to function. When stories become repositories for teaching, their "narrative power" is often overlooked (Stephens and McCallum 1998, 16), and children are robbed of one of their primary motives for reading.
Children do not read in order to absorb approved ideologies. If child readers are to read the biblical text more than once, and in a variety of forms, it must be allowed to be narrative. When children's Bibles present the biblical text as a source of information or training, readers my be led to think, "I know that information or moral. I don't need to read it again." For readers to experience the text in such a way that they want to return to it, children's Bibles need to draw readers into the biblical world and leave them wanting to visit there again.
Briggs is absolutely right! The bible is so much more complex and interesting than you would expect if you just read children's bible stories about how this bible character teaches us this tidy moral lesson. Children's bibles are about taking the stories from the bible and reshaping them to make some kind of point that the writers think is appropriate for children to learn. But that's not what the bible actually is.
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Posts about "Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles":
"Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles" (I LOVE THIS BOOK SO MUCH)
David and Jonathan's (One-Sided) Friendship
Who Cut Samson's Hair? (a post about reading the bible for what it is)
The way we write children's bibles is "an act of bad faith"
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