“Jesus of Nazareth” talk by Washington University speaker

“

What Child Is This?:
Negotiating Jewish and Christian Identities
 in Patristic and Medieval Narratives of Jesus’ Childhood”

A lecture by Wendy Love Anderson
Center for the Humanities, Washington University, St. Louis
7 p.m.
Nov 17
Violette Hall 1010

Jesus of Nazareth, born into a Jewish family, became identified as the founder of a distinctly non-Jewish (and sometimes anti-Jewish) Christianity. As early as the second century, and well into the Middle Ages, Christians struggled to address Jesus’ putatively Jewish childhood in terms that made sense of the eventual split between Judaism and Christianity. In this talk, I will analyze a range of apocryphal Christian narratives, polemical set-pieces and even a few early Christmas carols that deploy the infancy or childhood of Jesus in an effort to define boundaries between Judaism and Christianity.

Sponsored by the Department of Philosophy & Religion, the Medieval Studies Minor and the Art History Program