Scholars have long regarded early Christian stories about Jesus's childhood (paidika) as folksy attempts to “fill in the gaps” of biblical narratives and to entertain in the process. In the last few decades, however, we have begun to view the paidika as evidence of early Christians' interventions into important issues of the day: as early attempts at Christology; as a defense of Jesus's character in the face of slanderous attacks from Christian opponents; as pedagogical stories that shaped the morality of young readers; or as texts through which Christians could challenge contemporaneous educational practices and values. In short, scholars are beginning to explore the manifold ways in which authors and redactors of the paidika used the child Jesus in service of serious theological projects.

In this new book, Stephen Davis does much to keep this momentum going and to push the conversation forward. After an introductory section, Davis concentrates analyzes how ancient Christian readers and hearers would have made sense of the stories through associations with texts, images, places, and material objects from their own lives. For example, Davis surrounds the story of Jesus and the clay bird with late ancient references to children's toy figurines, pet birds, and the sounds of chirping birds. He pairs Jesus's tussle with a playmate with references to wrestling exercises and references to defixiones designed to undermine opponents in athletic contests. He situates Jesus's classroom musings on the alphabet within scientific and philosophical speculation of letters, devotional manipulation of letters, and “magical” vocalizations. This approach yields many new and compelling readings of the stories.

In the final portion of the book, Davis discusses the afterlives of the paidika in early medieval religious contexts. First he investigates how the childhood stories were incorporated into Jewish sources and pilgrimage sites, often serving as devices through which tensions between Jews and Christians were exacerbated, muted, or otherwise negotiated. Here Davis's discussion of the polemical use of the paidika in the medieval Jewish work, Sefer Toledot Yeshu, and Christian attempts to redact the paidika in response of these polemics, is especially illuminating (143–157). Next Davis demonstrates how the paidika were repackaged and deployed in a range of Arabic sources, with the depictions of the Christ child and the agenda served by these stories constantly shifting. For instance, in the Qur’ān and Qurānic commentaries the paidika were leveraged to address theological issues such as Jesus's divinity (or lack thereof) and God's power as creator, but when resituated within the context of medieval science, medicine, and theology, the image of the Christ child was reshaped as a precocious expert in these domains.

Throughout the monograph, Davis employs social memory theory to analyze the reception of the paidika. According to these theorists, memories of the past are refracted through the physical sites in which the act of remembrance takes place, through the people with whom the act of remembrance is shared, through ritual and habituated bodily acts associated with the remembrance, through the valuation of the media in which memories are contained and communicated (such as images and artifacts), and through the institutions and processes of enculturation invested in acts of remembrance (such as schools, religious instruction). Thinking with these theorists, Davis discusses the connections between the paidika and a range of devotional rituals, such as alphabet writing or alphabet vocalizations, clearly demonstrating how memories of the past were inscribed in habituated practices, and how these practices, when paired with the paidika, could be imbued with new theological significance. Further, Davis analyzes how the physical acts of pilgrims visiting the synagogue in Nazareth—gazing upon and touching Jesus's book of alphabetic exercises that was on display there—would have recast pilgrims' remembrance of Jesus's childhood (potentially, but not necessarily, linked to the paidika, 139–143). In many places throughout the book, Davis's use of social memory theory is well-suited and quite compelling.

Yet, in other places, the precise contexts into which the paidika were received and the precise manner in which memories of Jesus' childhood were shaped remain occluded from historians, making it difficult to employ these theoretical tools. Thus, at times, Davis needs to bend the theory to accommodate the sources, misplacing the theoretical purchase in the process. For example, when discussing children's terracotta figurines (toys that have been recovered from children's graves), Davis asserts that the physical act of depositing these toys in the graves was an act of memory-making—an attempt to “remember their sons and daughters at play”—that further imbued the objects with a new layer of significance: an association with the child who played and now also the child who died. Turning to the paidika, Davis writes, “When it came to the young Jesus (whose life also would meet a premature end), the image of him shaping birds out clay as a child would have performed similar cultural work in the minds and memories of readers” (52). Certainly the remembrance and associations imbued in childhood toys could have been retrieved by readers to make sense of the clay birds scene in the paidika, but Davis is now identifying how a social memory is activated as an interpretive framework rather than how a social memory is formed in the precise manner discussed by social memory theorists. As such, Davis's approach here is more akin to historical contextualization than to the social memory theory to which he appeals. (In fact, Davis throughout speaks of “cultural resonances” or “cultural coordinates” or “reservoirs of memories” that were drawn on by audiences.)

In this beautifully written and richly documented book, Davis succeeds in pulling together the full range of scholarship on the paidika and advancing our understanding of how stories of Jesus' childhood may have been received in an array of cultural contexts. It will be an essential resource for all future scholarship on the paidika. Moreover, Davis's analysis opens the door for further research, suggesting many potential connections—between the paidika and death practices, as well as between the paidika and magic—that are ripe for further investigation.