Children per se or as periphrasis? A study on the use of ’children’ in five stories from the synoptics

The purpose of this study is to examine the intention of the synoptic’ use of ’children’ in five selected stories: ’Jesus and the children’, ’Who is the greatest?’, ’The entrance ticket of heaven’, ’The demand of discipleship’ and ’The child Jesus’. It is inspired by the texts where Jesus seems to love the little children very much and yet he requires his disciples to abandon their own children for his sake. What were the synoptic’ intentions of the use of ‘children’ in these stories? Was it to show the great love Jesus had for children per se or were the children only a periphrasis, a symbolization using their properties? When first reading the stories about Jesus and children it seems that the synoptics were describing children per se; but through exegetic studies and reading the works of some earlier scholars I have come to the conclusion that the synoptics did not intend to show Jesus as an extraordinary man who, unlike the Jews or Romans, loved or treated children so much more. Instead the study shows that the synoptics more likely had the intention of using children as a periphrasis: to be able to enter the Kingdom of God you have to adopt the properties of a small child whose needs are very basic and in total dependence of its caregivers to survive. The synoptics doesn’t say anything about gender or class, but they tell us by their words that the children are small: seven years, but probably even younger. Children in those days probably had the same status as slaves, but Jewish children had a slightly higher status and position in their families. The conclusion of the study shows that the synoptics used children as periphrasis in two cases: ’Jesus and the children’, ’Who is the greatest?’ (those who at first seemed to be the opposite). They use children per se in the texts about ’The entrance ticket of heaven’ and ’The demand of discipleship’. Finally I have come to the conclusion that the last story about Jesus as a child deals with both of them: per se and periphrasis