Jesus said: “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God.”
I noticed the other day that Luke uses a different word for “children” here than either Matthew or Mark. Luke uses bre,foj==. Both Matthew and Mark use paidi,on==. (Again, you’d have to have the BW font to see that correctly – the words are brefos and paidion, for those without the fonts.)
Which made me wonder why.
One rule in doing
Jesus said: “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God.”
I noticed the other day that Luke uses a different word for “children” here than either Matthew or Mark. Luke uses bre,foj==. Both Matthew and Mark use paidi,on==. (Again, you’d have to have the BW font to see that correctly – the words are brefos and paidion, for those without the fonts.)
Which made me wonder why.
One rule in doing word studies is to be careful from drawing too many conclusions, especially when there was no alternative word available. (You can’t conclude a lot from the fact I choose to use the word “onion” in a sentence if I know no synonyms for “onion”). What follows is necessarily tentative. Nevertheless, Luke did have an alternative to bre,foj==; he could have used paidi,on== which was one of the ordinary Greek words for “child”, occuring some 52 times in our NT.
So, let’s have a look at where else the word bre,foj== is used, and build a picture of what it means.
Here are paraphrases of the settings for the 7 other occurences of the word in the NT. I’ve put the word itself in bold.
- Luke 1:41 – speaking of the baby in Elizabeth’s womb that leapt for joy on hearing Mary’s voice
- Luke 1:44 – ditto
- Luke 2:12 – the shepherds were told that they would find a baby lying in a manger
- Luke 2:16 – ditto
- Acts 7:19 – Ruthless Pharaoh forced the Israelites to leave their newborn boys out in the rain to die.
- 2 Timothy 3:15 – “How from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures which…”
- 1 Peter 2:2 – Crave milk like a newborn.
The 4 references from Luke and the 1 Peter reference must be speaking of under-one year olds. We don’t know about the Acts 7:19 reference – although the implication from Exodus was that the Israelites were expected to expose their boys to die immediately, because Moses should have died before he grew big enough to be noticed. We just don’t know what age 2 Timothy 3:15 speaks of – arguably a little older as the ability to talk may be implied.
The implication is that parents were, amongst others, bringing toddlers and babies to Jesus. Pre-schoolers. And even though older children may have been brought, Luke wants to draw his readers’ attention to these youngest children.
Which still leaves the question: Why? In the journey to Jerusalem section of Luke (9:51 to somewhere around the end of chapter 19), one of the themes Luke is building is the consistent surprise about who is in and who is out. Those you would expect to be “in the kingdom” reject it. Those who would be universally expected to be “outsiders” turn out to be in. Story after story builds this theme.
What Luke is doing for us, then, is deliberately showing how the children being brought to Jesus included some who were so young we could not possibly think they would interest him. Had he used paidi,on== instead, we would have assumed he meant older children – these must be the keen teenagers who were ahead of their years. So he shocks us on purpose by using a word that shows he doesn’t mean this. He means children so young that virtually everyone would assume Luke can’t mean them.
What Luke says is probably as shocking today as it was when it was first penned.
Add new comment