Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of
God belongs to such as these” (Matt 19:14; Mark 10:14; Luke 18:16). Based on the
gospel accounts of Jesus’s welcoming of little children, many people today often
presume that early Christianity offered a new, uniform, and positive understanding of children against the backdrop of the ancient world. Challenging such a
Christian exceptionalist approach to history, this book asks how individual texts
construct childlikeness as it relates to God’s kingdom within their socio-cultural
milieus. In particular, this book examines imagery of the child used in the Gospel
of Matthew, 1 Corinthians, and the Gospel of Thomas vis-à-vis a set of philosophical, historical, and archaeological materials concerning ancient children, thereby
presenting a socio-cultural context in which to understand the childlikeness each
text distinctively promotes