Lately I have been trying to read more broadly. For most of my adult life I have been engaged in scholarship and teaching, which is rewarding and fun, but which has the effect of consuming all of my energies and time for reading. I have read a lot of religious studies and biblical studies and historical stuff, much of which is very engaging. But I have not kept up with any other genres very well; when someone wants to talk to me about the latest novel or memoir, there’s a very good chance that I won’t be able to keep up my side of the conversation. So, I’ve been more intentional about reading more broadly.
The genre that I am most drawn to recently is memoir and biography, and some other kinds of literature that engage with the lives of people without fitting neatly into one of those categories. I’ve read a few wonderful examples of this lately. The book Wayward Lives and Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman really captured my imagination when I read it several years ago; it’s a book that sorts through archival materials to reconstruct the lives of people who were part of the Great Migration. Another Great Migration book, The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, fascinated me with its treatment of the stories of several people who left everything in the Jim Crow South and made a new start somewhere else. As part of a workshop I did a couple of summers ago, I read memoirs by Donald Quist (To Those Bounded) and Sophfronia Scott (The Seeker and the Monk), both of which are fascinating and worth your time. I really enjoy celebrity memoirs too; I’ve read Brandi Carlile’s book Broken Horses (I recommend the audiobook) and pretty much everything David Sedaris writes. There’s something that I find really engaging about zeroing in on someone’s experiences and biography as a way of saying something more broadly about the world. I think those kinds of books can help the reader figure out their own place in things, or at least that’s true for me as a reader.
Now that I’m trying to read modern biography and memoir, I can’t help but take some of those things back into my readings of biblical texts too. This week’s lectionary gospel reading is a great example. It’s the first Sunday after Christmas, which means that the lectionary is launching its brief journey into Jesus’ early life. In comparison to the rest of the church year, lectionary traditions don’t tend to spend a lot of time with Jesus’ childhood and adolescence. That’s reflective of the amount of attention that the canonical gospels themselves pay to that period of Jesus’ life: not very much. Luke, from which the reading this week comes, does this most substantially, but even in Luke the accounts of Jesus’ upbringing are very thin. The other gospels pay even less attention. (There are some who read John 2, the story of the wedding at Cana, as a story about a teenage Jesus, and I think that way of understanding that enigmatic text makes a ton of sense). There are other gospels—non-canonical ones—that include things about Jesus’ childhood or even focus on his childhood completely. This latter category is called Infancy Gospels (even though they don’t only focus on infancy, but childhood and adolescence too), and they are, as a group, wild. I’ll be adding a post with more information on some of those soon, in response to a question from a subscriber. (Did you know that if you have a paid subscription to this substack, you can assign me a writing prompt as a reward?).
Through the lens of modern biography and memoir, a few things stand out about the reading from Luke 2:22-40. One of the biggest things is simply the question of what parts of the story to tell. As I think about how people tell the story of a life in the modern world—their own life or someone else’s—I notice that people tend to zero in on vignettes or episodes that are specific to one moment in time but that also speak to the major themes of a person’s story. For a musician, it might be the story of getting their first guitar; for the characters in Wilkerson’s book, these kinds of stories were often about the hardship and prejudice faced by people in the Deep South. These kinds of stories act as a lens through which the reader is invited to see the rest of the story; they are frames that wrap around other stories and give them boundaries and meaning.
Luke was no doubt thinking about his audience when he decided to tell the story of the infant Jesus’ visit to the temple. Scholars are divided about how we should think about Luke’s audience, but there is a broad group of people who understand the gospel to have been written with a particular person in mind. In chapter 1, right at the beginning, Luke mentions a “Theophilus,” to whom the book seems to be dedicated. If Theophilus was a real person (and not just a sort of ideal stand-in for the book’s readers), then their name and the way Luke addresses them (“most excellent,” elsewhere used by Luke only to refer to Roman officials) suggests that they might have been a member of Roman society. So, it might be the case that Luke wrote the gospel with that person in mind—a patron, perhaps, or a powerful figure who Luke wanted to convince of Jesus’ importance, innocence, or genius, for one reason or another. If we read with that reader in our minds, we can see how Luke might have pointed things toward Theophilus in certain ways. In this weeks’ passage, for example, notice the parenthetical material in 2:22, where Luke is kind of filling the reader in on why they were going to the temple in the first place. That’s the kind of information that you would include for someone who wasn’t in the know—someone who wasn’t familiar with Jewish practice. (Actually, Luke’s rationale here is a little strange, because Jewish law does not in fact require a rite of purification for either the father or the baby, so “they” would not have needed a visit to the temple for that purpose at all). Verses 23 and 24 are explaining what they would have done at the temple, including his parents presenting him at the temple (again, not required by Jewish law as Luke suggests) and offering a sacrifice.
Why put this story here, early in this account of Jesus’ life? If you’re thinking like a biographer, it might accomplish a few things. It orients the reader to the religious world of Jesus; Jesus was a Jew, and his life begins amidst Jewish things and among Jewish people. It shows that Jesus’ family, and by extension Jesus, are pious people—something that might have been important if you were writing to a Roman official about the story of a man who had been executed by the state. This story points to the centrality of Jerusalem, which by the time Luke was writing had almost certainly been destroyed in the Jewish War of 66-70, and which Luke therefore makes a big focus of his storytelling. Luke’s inclusion of this story, which no other gospel tells, might be a signal for the kinds of things the author wants the reader to understand about Jesus’ life.
Similarly, the stories of Simeon and Anna are included only here in Luke, and they are probably here to help the reader situate Jesus within the history of Israel and its tradition of expecting a messiah. Simeon is an interesting case; as the text tells us, he had been promised by the Holy Spirit that he would not die before he met the messiah. The Spirit is all over this passage (it rests on him, reveals to him, and guides him, all in a few sentences), which is suggesting to the reader a divine providence to things. And Simeon is led to the temple where he meets Jesus, and in response Simeon lets forth a canticle of praise.
Anna, meanwhile, is called a prophet, putting her in the tradition of female Hebrew prophets (Huldah, especially, and also Deborah and Miriam). She is aged and widowed, presented as something of a seer, and she serves in this story to announce to whoever could hear that this child had something to do with “the redemption of Jerusalem.” Luke uses figures like Anna in a number of ways, sometimes sympathetically and sometimes not, but always taking for granted that divine oracles can pass through human mouthpieces. Anna, like Simeon, is part of the story because she authenticates Jesus for the reader—she is vouching for him, essentially.
Zooming out a bit, and thinking about these moments within the broader sweep of the gospel, it seems that Luke more than any other canonical gospel writer is invested in the reader understanding Jesus’ origins. He wants a rich account of where Jesus comes from, and why he is the way he is. Luke tells these stories, and also other stories still to come, as a way of setting the stage for Jesus to dazzle, and priming the reader to understand Jesus’ life and teachings in specific and important ways. Luke doesn’t want to present Jesus’ teachings as abstracted from his biography, like the Gospel of Thomas does. He isn’t interested in a Greatest Sayings of Jesus type book. Instead, Luke wants the reader to have a context for understanding Jesus, and for interpreting his words and ideas in light of Jesus’ identity. These stories are precision-engineered to do that, especially for the person or people that Luke was thinking about as he wrote. We are not that person or those people—we are not the people Luke had in mind when he was writing. But we can still find ourselves being oriented to Jesus’ life by these early stories we encounter at the beginning, and we can still ask ourselves what they are asking us to believe or understand about Jesus.