Jesus and children: what the Gospels say and how artists paint it

A woman is trying to get to Jesus with a baby on her hip, and one of his own men is telling her to go home. That is the whole scene. Then Jesus notices, and he is angry, and the children come through.

The story of Jesus and children is told three times, in Mark 10:13-16, Matthew 19:13-15 and Luke 18:15-17. It is one of the shortest scenes in the Gospels and one of the most painted, and for two centuries it has been the picture parents hang where a child sleeps.

If you are standing in a nursery doorway wondering what goes on that wall, start with the story. It is shorter than you remember.

What happens in the story, exactly?

All three accounts agree on the shape of it: children brought, disciples objecting, Jesus welcoming them. Mark's version is the fullest, and the only one in which Jesus takes the children into his arms.

Here is Mark in full:

"And they brought young children to him, that he should touch them: and his disciples rebuked those that brought them. But when Jesus saw it, he was much displeased, and said unto them, Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God. Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein. And he took them up in his arms, put his hands upon them, and blessed them." (Mark 10:13-16, KJV)

Matthew tells it more briefly and adds that the parents wanted Jesus to "put his hands on them, and pray" (Matthew 19:13, KJV). His account ends with a plain gesture: "And he laid his hands on them, and departed thence." (Matthew 19:15, KJV). Matthew, as he does elsewhere, says "kingdom of heaven" where Mark says "kingdom of God".

Luke changes one word, and the picture changes with it. Where Mark and Matthew have children, Luke has infants: "And they brought unto him also infants, that he would touch them: but when his disciples saw it, they rebuked them." (Luke 18:15, KJV). These are babies carried in arms, not toddlers walking up on their own.

Luke's Jesus then says almost exactly what Mark's does: "Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God." (Luke 18:16, KJV) If the word "suffer" stops you, it has stopped a lot of people. In the English of 1611 it meant allow, permit, let. Jesus is telling the disciples to get out of the children's way.

Why did the disciples turn the children away?

The text does not say, so any answer is a guess. The most common one is that the disciples were guarding their teacher's time and dignity, and children in that world had no standing that would earn them a rabbi's attention.

Mark places the scene just before the rich young man asks what he must do to inherit eternal life. Read that way, the children interrupt serious adult business, and the disciples react the way gatekeepers do.

Many readers also notice that only a chapter earlier, in Mark 9, Jesus had already set a child in front of these same men and told them that whoever receives such a child receives him. They had heard the lesson once and missed it. That, too, is a reading rather than something the text spells out.

What the text does record is how Jesus took it. Mark says he was "much displeased" (Mark 10:14, KJV), a strong phrase the Gospels do not spend lightly. Whatever the disciples' reasons, they were wrong, and he said so in front of the parents.

What does "of such is the kingdom of God" mean?

Jesus says the kingdom belongs to people like these children, and that anyone who will not receive it "as a little child" will not get in at all. He never explains what a child does that a grown-up has to learn, and Christians have filled that silence in a few ways.

The oldest and most widespread is trust. A small child takes what it is given without earning it, without suspicion, and without pretending to have helped. On this reading Jesus is describing the posture of faith: open hands.

A second reading, close to the first, is dependence. An infant, in Luke's telling, cannot even walk to Jesus; it has to be carried. A third notices that children in the ancient world were at the bottom of the social order, and hears Jesus saying the kingdom goes first to the people with nothing to bargain with.

These readings are not rivals; most preachers hold all three at once. What the passage does not say is that children are innocent or sinless. That is a later sentiment, and the paintings sometimes carry it further than the text does.

How have painters shown Jesus and children?

The scene was uncommon in medieval art and became a favorite in sixteenth-century Germany, where Lucas Cranach the Elder and his workshop painted it many times. From there it passed into Dutch painting, into nineteenth-century print culture, and finally onto the Sunday-school wall.

Cranach's versions are crowded and happy. Christ stands at the center with a baby in his arms while mothers press in from every side holding up their children, and the disciples grumble at the edge.

Art historians usually connect the subject's popularity among Cranach's Lutheran patrons with the argument over infant baptism then dividing the Reformation. A painting of Jesus welcoming infants made a point without a word of theology. That connection is a scholarly inference; the paintings themselves are well documented.

Rembrandt folded the scene into his great etching known as the Hundred Guilder Print, usually dated to around 1649. It draws several episodes from Matthew 19 into one composition, and at its left a mother brings a child forward while a disciple raises a hand to stop her.

Rembrandt did not make a nursery picture. He etched the argument, and let the light settle it.

The image most of us carry in our heads comes from the nineteenth century. Bernhard Plockhorst, a German painter, produced a Christ Blessing the Children that was reproduced in enormous numbers as a lithograph and turned up in family Bibles and Sunday-school rooms across Europe and America.

Those are the pictures that fixed the scene as gentle, sunlit, and meant for children to look at. Most of us have never seen it any other way.

Why did this become the picture over the crib?

Because it is the one Gospel scene in which the child is the point. Every other story about Jesus has children, if at all, at the edges. Here they are brought to the center, held and blessed, and a mother looking at the picture sees her own arms in the mothers' arms.

The timing helped. The great age of the Sunday school, roughly the nineteenth century, was also the great age of the cheap color print, and the two found each other.

A picture of Jesus with children on the classroom wall taught the lesson before the teacher opened her mouth, and the same print went home and hung over a cot. Nobody chose the scene for the nursery so much as inherited it.

There is a theological reason under the sentimental one. Parents who have their children baptized or dedicated as infants are doing what the parents in Luke 18 did: bringing a child who cannot yet ask, trusting that Jesus will not send them back. A painting of the scene above the crib says that the bringing has been done.

What should I look for in a picture of Jesus for a child's room?

Three things: a Jesus who looks kind rather than far away, a scene a small child can understand without being told, and a painting that will not embarrass the child at twelve. That last one rules out a great deal of what is sold for nurseries.

The Victorian prints fail the third test for many families now. The children in them are too clean, the light too golden, and a teenager will see a greeting card. The same tenderness in a painterly hand wears better: visible brushwork, a real landscape, a Jesus who could be standing in weather.

A scene that holds more than one meaning also grows with the child. The picture that said "you are welcome here" at three can say "you are still held" at fifteen, when there are posters on the walls and the door is usually shut.

If you are choosing, or choosing a gift for a friend's child, stand in the doorway and ask whether the painting will still be true when the crib is gone. The ones that last say something the parent believes, not something the parent hopes the child will find cute.

Do you sell a painting of this scene?

Not at the moment. We make scenes from Scripture, and the blessing of the children is not yet among them, so we will not pretend otherwise. The piece we point parents to for a child's room is Safe in His Care, our Good Shepherd, and we have written elsewhere about what Jesus holding a lamb means.

It shows Jesus holding a lamb close while wolves wait beyond his reach, from John 10:11-15, where he says "I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep." (John 10:11, KJV). It is not the Mark 10 scene, but it says the same thing to a child, and says it in a way a child gets at once: the small one is being held, and nothing can reach it there.

Read it to a child at bedtime and the lamb becomes the child, the wolves become whatever waits in the dark hallway, and the painting turns into the room's own story. You will not have to explain it twice.

It is printed on matte cotton-polyester canvas over a solid pine stretcher, made to order in the US, with hanging hardware included. For a nursery the 8x12 or the next size up sits comfortably above a changing table or beside the crib, and a natural or black pine frame reads well against soft nursery walls.

If you are buying it for a baptism or a dedication, it sits in our Christian gifts collection with the other pieces suited to those days. Any of them will still make sense when the crib is gone.

Forbid them not

The disciples' mistake was to think Jesus had more important things to do than hold a child. The Gospels record the scene three times so that nobody makes it again.

Whatever hangs in your child's room, that is the sentence worth keeping in view: let them come. It was said to grown men who were trying to be helpful. The children were never the interruption.

Frequently asked

Where in the Bible does Jesus say "suffer the little children"?

Mark 10:14, Matthew 19:14 and Luke 18:16. Mark's wording is "Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God." (Mark 10:14, KJV). "Suffer" here just means allow.

Did Jesus hold the children or only bless them?

Mark says both: "And he took them up in his arms, put his hands upon them, and blessed them." (Mark 10:16, KJV). Matthew records only that he laid his hands on them, and Luke gives his words but not the gesture. Only Mark has him lifting the children.

Is there a famous painting of Jesus with children?

Several. Lucas Cranach the Elder and his workshop painted it many times in the sixteenth century, Rembrandt worked it into his Hundred Guilder Print, and Bernhard Plockhorst's nineteenth-century Christ Blessing the Children is the one most people know from Sunday-school rooms.

What picture of Jesus is good for a nursery?

One a small child can read at a glance and a teenager will not outgrow. We do not sell a Jesus-and-children scene; for a child's room we point parents to Safe in His Care, the Good Shepherd holding a lamb, which carries the same promise of being held.

Passages cited: Mark 10:13-16 (quoted in full); Matthew 19:13-15 (verses 13 and 15 quoted); Luke 18:15-17 (verses 15 and 16 quoted); Mark 9:36-37 (paraphrased); John 10:11-15 (verse 11 quoted).