Abstract:

“The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him ... And [he] increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.” With these words Luke frames a story about the twelve-year-old Jesus in Jerusalem, the bar mitzvah scene in the 1977 made-for-TV movie Jesus of Nazareth being the culmination of its filmmakers’ sequences inspired by the first (2:40). But does the evangelist really envision a pilgrim newly inaugurated into adult life and responsibility? Some scholars are inclined to think so while others claim such an understanding misses Luke’s point entirely. Excavating around these opposing interpretations uncovers the ambiguous terrain through which children journey toward culturally-relative adulthoods in increasingly prolonged stages of ‘becoming’. Far from offering a clear-cut rite of passage for its protagonist, Nazareth’s visual exposition of Luke 2:40 is fraught with its own tensions by tapping into both English-language ‘coming-of-age’ films and postwar Italy’s neorealist tradition with its ‘Christ’-like innocents. By situating the movie within these trajectories of juvenile and adolescent masculinity in cinema I expose its image of the boy Jesus as a multifaceted cultural construct and forge a hermeneutical loop for biblical scholars to approach the Lukan text as a similarly complex presentation of its young protagonist and to recognize the impact of their own constructed ideals about children on the interpretive process.