In Ireland especially we are well used to seeing pictures of the Holy Family, Jesus, his mother etc. Usually these pictures are scenes from the birth of Christ depicted in a stable with mother, child, stepfather, shepherds, a cow and an ox, and maybe an angel or two in the background. If you wait till the feast of the Epiphany (6th January) which celebrates the revelation of God in human form in the person of Jesus Christ then you'll probably have the three wise men thrown in as well.
There are lots of great pictures of the Holy Family painted by many gifted artists through the centuries. Some of these portray the Holy Family itself, some with Christ's birth, some dealing with the flight to Egypt, and some dealing with later times. One of these is the picture by the surrealist artist Max Ernst, The Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus before Three Witnesses: André Breton, Paul Éluard, and the Painter. A bit of a mouthful, but it is shown above.
I only came across this picture recently and was taken aback by it. It is not often you see the mother of God spanking her son. He must have been pretty bold as you can see his halo is on the ground. And the more I looked at this portrait, the more intrigued I became as it shows the deep humanity of not only Christ, but his mother also and certainly raises a number of difficult questions on the whole idea of God-become-Man and I suppose the issue of corporal punishment. Frankly on that subject a kick in the arse from my father never did me any harm and today there are a lot of spoilt brats running riot who badly need the hand of their parent. Anyway, I'm not going to get into that now.
I write as an agnostic who rather hopes the whole thing (or at least certain aspects of it) are true, but I think for the purposes of this article, we should agree to suspend disbelief for a moment and accept that God came down as a man in the form of Jesus some two thousand years ago.
Of course Jesus wasn't exactly accepted as fully God and fully Man initially and controversies raged in the early church for the first four centuries as to exactly what the nature of Jesus was. It was clear that he was the son of God, but what did this mean? Was he actually God or just the son of God? Was he created by God or did he always co-exist with God? Some even said that he was a divine being who took on human appearance but not flesh. It took a couple of church councils to clear the matter up, not without a lot of bitterness on opposing sides. In fact some of this bitterness led to downright murder. Certain bishops in those early days weren't averse to bumping off their opponents in the name of their beliefs. The most widely accepted definitions on the nature of Christ were made by the Councils of Nicaea, Ephesus and Chalcedon, this last in the year 451 AD.
Based on these council decisions, Jesus was now fully God and fully Man. However, even though he was a man subject to all the usual temptations, fears and needs of a man, because he was also God he could not commit sin. Which means that Max Ernst's portrait couldn't be true. Jesus couldn't have been bold as a child and there would have been no need for his mother to smack him.
From the new testament we know practically nothing about the early life of Christ as a boy, except for his getting lost in the temple (which was somewhat careless of his parents, he was missing for three days and they didn't even realise he was gone for about a day!). In fact we only meet him again at around the age of 30 when he appeared at the river Jordan and was baptised by his cousin, John the Baptist.
The new testament has four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John which are very familiar to most people. However, these were only the gospels which made it into the bible. There are lots more which were considered by the early church to be non-canonical, i.e. they were suspect and were not considered to have been inspired by God. In fact the early church did their best to suppress these gospels and nearly succeeded. Many of them we knew only because the early church fathers mentioned them in their writings in order to condemn them, others were discovered at various times and places since then. In fact one of the great finds was in a place called Nag Hammadi in Egypt around 1945 where a number of lost manuscripts were found in an earthenware jar by some local farmers.
One of these gospels is the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (not to be confused with the Gospel of Thomas made popular by the film, Stigmata, some years ago) and wasn't one of those discovered at Nag Hammadi. In this gospel we find the boy Jesus up to all sorts of shenanigans. In one episode he makes clay birds and then brings them to life. Another time he was playing with some other boys on the roof of a house. One of the children was pushed off by another and he fell to the ground and was killed. All the children ran away except for Jesus and when the dead boy's parents heard of it and arrived on the scene, they thought that Jesus was responsible and accused him of their child's murder. At this, Jesus leapt down from the roof and said to the dead child to arise and tell who had thrown him from the roof. Accordingly the dead child arose and told his parents the truth.
However, in a more sinister vein, on another day Jesus struck a child dead because he threw a stone at him. It is not recorded whether he brought this kid back to life or not.
Maybe that is why his mother spanked him.
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