How Children Read Biblical Narrative

Book excerpt: How do children read the Bible? This book makes a major contribution to this underexplored area by analyzing how children interpret Bible stories, focused around an empirical investigation of one group of eleven- to fourteen-year-old children, and their readings of the Gospel of Luke. The first section of the study establishes the nature of the text and the readers in this project: exploring the Gospel of Luke as a narrative of Jesus' birth, life, death, and resurrection, and then looking at the developmental traits of children as readers. The next section offers a model account of how biblical scholars can investigate empirical readings of Scripture, by describing the methods used to bring together one group of child readers and Luke. The third section then analyzes the resulting multitude of interpretations that the children offered in their reading of the book, concentrating on the key trends in their interpretive strategies. It critiques the children's readings of Luke, but it also points to some of the surprising and beneficial results of reading Luke using the interpretive strategies of a child.