Kimberley Plutat

Qualification student M.A.

Between childhood, humanity and divinity: contradictions in mental modelling in the portrayal of Jesus’ childhood in the ‘Passional’

My masterthesis examines the portrayal of Jesus as a child in vernacular ‘Passional’ (late 13th century) with focus on their narrative inconsistencies. The starting point is the observation that biblical epic fulfils an independent theological and didactic function and narratively elaborates biblical and apocryphal material in order to make salvation history vivid and emotionally accessible. The ‘Passional’ in particular shows how apocryphal traditions are integrated into a vernacular context without breaking the dogmatic framework. The depiction of Jesus’ childhood opens up a field of narrative tensions: the text presents Jesus both as a divine figure of salvation and as a child who acts impulsively, aggressively or in violation of norms in individual episodes. These irritating traits contrast with the expected sympathy associated with the figure of Christ.

The work combines medieval research perspectives on contradictory figure portrayals with cognitive character narratology to show that contradictions in pre-modern texts are not errors but a functional narrative principle. Contradiction creates coherence by presenting opposites and allowing the ‘model reader’ to process them using cultural and theological frames of inference. Through this process, the text deliberately keeps the character’s mental model unstable and directs the reader’s reception towards reflection, norm testing and meaning formation.

The aim of the analysis is to highlight the areas of tension between divine majesty and childlike fallibility, to describe their narrative markers and to determine their functions within the narrative. The work shows that the contradictory nature of the figure of Jesus in the ‘Passional’ gains narrative and theological depth not despite, but because of this tension, and at the same time exemplifies how vernacular biblical epic operates with competing horizons of interpretation.