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Baby Jesus Research Paper

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Over the ages, Christians have grappled with the miracle of the incarnation of God as Jesus. Found in the biblical account of Matthew (Chapters1-2) and Luke (Chapters 1-2), the Nativity story is of Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem. An infant swaddled in cloth that Luke referred to as “the Messiah, the Lord.”(Luke 2) The most puzzling question about the life of Jesus is whether he was born with all the wisdom of God, or if he was simply born with the potential, like all children, to develop in his life in the wisdom of God. This paper examines the roles of infants, including baby Jesus, who appeared in three Cycle plays from the fifteenth century, and compares the portrayal of children as human, divine or both, during the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance period: The Nativity, The Slaughter of the Innocents and The Second Shepherds’ Play.
Cycle plays were medieval plays that were performed together in …show more content…

In the case of baby Jesus in The Nativity, how can a baby be a deity and humanity merged in the same person? Or in The Slaughter of the Innocents, how can infants be helpless but also be a force that cannot be threatened? And in The Shepherds’ Second Play, how come the shepherds ultimately loved Jesus as a baby and not the King of Kings? If babies are usually not seen in a play, why do they have such an impact on the audience? The Nativity was written as part of the York Cycle plays. The play was produced sometime around 1376-1569 by the Tile-thatcher’s guild, which was specialized in roof building. The play tells the story of the birth of Jesus, commonly known as the Nativity. Interestingly, the York Play only had two actors, playing Joseph and Mary, and just one simple theater setting of the humble stable. The short story specifically uses an unadorned setting with very little props and characters. The staging was unembellished to draw emphasis on Jesus’s miraculous

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