'ATTACHMENT WITH DETACHMENT': A POST-SECULAR READING OF JM COETZEE'S RECENT FICTION

Abstract

Having found the 'Child', Simon becomes aware that "a child needs his childhood" (2013:83); in other words, that imagination and faith, all that the child stands for, must be anchored in the world by being '"born to a mother, so to speak'" (2013:79). [...]the allusions to the New Testament story of the Incarnation, the birth of Jesus by the Virgin, become increasingly apparent. (The linguistic principle is that there is no 'natural' connection between signifier and signified.) Such a reading strategy, however, cannot easily allow literature to reconnect with its "ancient cultural function of providing meaning in a human world that is often frighteningly chaotic and violent" (Petrolle 2008:2). By leaving the, by-now familiar, Relocation Centre - in pursuit of another attempt at a better deal, a better life - the 'holy' family (Simon, Ines, David) have become homeless once again. [...]the discipleship takes the form of homelessness (2013:257-62), which is, however, marred by an accident (2013:265267) provoked by Daga, the Trickster/devil figure in the novel. The phrase "nowhere to lay your head" is repeated several times in the novel (e.g., 2013:187; 231), suggesting an ancient cyclical condition of human existence: "homelessness strikes us each time we see through the diabolic illusion of the world as a home that provides security and well-being" (Batchelor 2004:78).

Headnote

Abstract: This article takes issue with postmodern allegorical quests as theorized by, for example, Schiralli (1999), Caputo (1997) and Petrolle (2008). While alert to the deconstructive project, these critics wish to reconstruct (as opposed to deconstruct) the value of truth claims in the midst of ontological doubts. The aim is to rehabilitate truth/value claims, while utilising postmodernist deconstruction serving a reconstructive, even spiritual puipose. T shall illustrate this dynamic based on JM Coetzee's most recent fiction.

Key-words: J.M. Coetzee, recent fiction, post-secular, ?attachment with detachment'

1. Introduction

JM Coetzee's critics have come to expect from this novelist multiple challenges in their reading journey, challenges linked to his ludic variety of skepticism of master narratives. The Nobel Laureate's latest novel, The Childhood of Jesus (2013), is no different, yet his intriguing use of the name of "Jesus" in the title warrants a fresh look at a ?religious' dimension that has hitherto been absent from his oeuvre. Even as we realise that there is no character in the novel called Jesus, it is unlikely that Coetzee has involved us simply in an elaborate deception. Despite an undoubted element of ?play', The Childhood of Jesus instills into its story-line an urgency of attachment to its religious parallel.

2. A search for a new identity beyond the contingent

The story gravitates around Simon, a migrant in an unnamed Spanishspeaking country, a man on a quest for a meaningful life. Trapped in the alienation of his own uprootedness and endlessly beset by doubts, he still aspires to an ideal state-of-mind beyond the contingent. Such a paradox, in which deconstructive suspicion is embodied in reconstructive intent, is signalled at different levels of the action. While parallels to Christ's trajectory receive parodic treatment, the textual undercurrent emanates from a profound, though non-conventional, religious sensibility: a painful longing for something invisible, a yearning for a state of being that has not yet emerged. While Childhood represents the material life without transcendence or consolation, it - at the same time - presents its characters as longing for an element beyond themselves: a longing for a radical alterity (or god?). The question I want to raise is this: how does Coetzee hold in difficult equilibrium a resistance to and an engagement with the possibility of religious illumination?

A five-year old child accompanies Simon on his journey-cum-quest. David is a child of unusual perception and intelligence, with "a spark" (2013:66) that has him beat adults at chess games, and, in the final pages, lead them towards the North Star ("Estrelitta del Norte") of their destiny. David has been lost to his mother, and the reader is faced with Simon's conviction that a certain woman in this new place - Ines, also a refugee - must adopt David. Incredibly, Ines accepts her destiny as the 'mother' of this special child, a situation that echoes the New Testament story of the Virgin Mary's acceptance of the 'good news' brought to her by the Archangel Gabriel: that she will become the mother of Jesus. Simon continues as a presence in David's life, a paternal presence. (We thus have a strangely secular 'Holy Family': Jesus, Mary and Joseph - alias David, Ines and Simon.) Once David begins school, he proves to be a rebellious child, whom the authorities want to send to a remedial institution. The child escapes from the institution, and the 'Holy Family' flees its current place/ country of relocation.

As is the case with many migrants across the globe, Simon is a refugee who cannot foresake his past identity as he wishes to embrace "a new life, a new name" (2013:18). He is on a quest for answers: What, for him, is 'true and real'? It is this question that becomes prominent during Simon's interactions with his fellow refugees in the Relocation Centre. This is a Centre ruled by devitalised functionaries (who keep losing keys), a place that reminds us of Kafka's Castle, an allegorical embodiment of estrangement from self, whether linked to the dislocation of exile or, more generally, to the condition of modern life. Most of the inhabitants - this is a recurrent motif - have "washed clean" their minds of past memories and desires. In consequence, not even their excessive goodwill is able to invoke our admiration, but rather points to an almost surreal split between reason and alienated emotion. Simon becomes increasingly aware of the high 'human' cost of such a choice. It involves stilling the 'hunger' (another insistent motif) for joie de vivre. As Simon puts it, "Everyone I meet is so decent, so kindly, so wellintentioned. ... But I don't want to starve the dog of hunger! I want to feed it!" (2013:29-30). He is, furthermore, perturbed by the fact that "things do not have their due weight here ...Our very words lack weight, these Spanish words that do not come from the heart" (2013:64-5) (an allusion here to Milan Kundera's novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.)

Simon has difficulty in discerning what - in a world of postmodern simulacra - is solidly 'there', as he doggedly pursues his quest to understand the purpose of exhausting work as a refugee: "'How does it fit into a larger picture? I don't see any larger picture, any loftier design'" (2013:108). Such comments, according to Petrolle, point to "the perennial concerns of religious allegory. [... ] How can I align myself with what is real/ true, and in so doing, save myself.. .from spiritual dissipation?" (2008:27). As it is increasingly evident, the religious undercurrent in this novel is not sourced from belief in divine entities or articles of faith. Rather, the traces of religious sensibility are reflected in Simon's insistent 'hunger', or what Coetzee himself has elsewhere referred to as "truth-directedness" (1992a:261) that helps make sense of everyday life in a "search for meaning that is itself a form of transcendence" (Foley 2012:83). Simon's 'hunger' manifests itself as an affective experience: a heightened state of attention to the extraordinary in the habitual; an undefinable longing for wholeness and wonderment.

Simon's hunger for meaning prompts this Joseph-figure to take under his wing the abandoned child, David, who embodies the freshness of what one might refer to as a 'beginner's mind' (a hint here at the novel's title), a mind as yet unadulterated by memories or set ways of thinking. The child, David - the "Jesus" of the novel's title - is an alterity that will teach Simon how to regain confidence in the contingent. Or, as Petrolle puts it, it is a child's confidence that "expresses itself as an expanded capacity for wonder, pleasure, and peace" (2008:65). Having found the 'Child', Simon becomes aware that "a child needs his childhood" (2013:83); in other words, that imagination and faith, all that the child stands for, must be anchored in the world by being '"born to a mother, so to speak'" (2013:79). Thus, the allusions to the New Testament story of the Incarnation, the birth of Jesus by the Virgin, become increasingly apparent. In the absence of any evidence, not only is there no doubt in his mind that this is the right mother for David, but he imposes on Ines the expectation of unconditional receptivity when he tells her: "'My name is Simon. You don't know me, I am of no importance. I come on behalf of someone else, bearing a proposal'" (2013:73). The allusion here is to the Archangel Gabriel, who had brought the 'Good News' of the 'Immaculate Conception' to the Virgin Mary. Simon's approaching Ines, a total stranger and fellow-refugee, with such an overbearing proposal, although eccentric, is treated by Coetzee with entire seriousness: Simon is shown to pursue a journey of faith, faith in his belief that David - despite, or because of, his unusual potential - needs a normal childhood with a mother in his life. The title of the novel begins to cohere. To borrow from the well-entrenched, postmodern vocabulary on Coetzee, Simon and Ines are capable of 'unconditional hospitality' towards 'the other' (Marais 2009). For each, this child from nowhere will become a 'saviour' and a life-giver. Simon's faith, however, is not dogmatic or doctrinaire. Rather, it encompasses the indefinable quest: a faith that has the capacity to tolerate doubts. As Caputo puts it, this is "a faith without faith [...] a certain faith in the impossible" (1997:63).

Simon's 'hunger', his urgency in pursuing what is impossible to fully comprehend - amounts, therefore, to a religious quest or aspiration. Simon brings his faith to David's 'unknowing knowingness'. He is convinced that the child must be given a chance to grow in the world, so as to experience the reality of its imperfections, especially as his adopted mother is portrayed as insecure, overprotective, a "stolid, humourless woman" (2013:257). To plot a clear correspondence between David's adoption by Ines and the New Testament story of the Incarnation would be a risky enterprise. Throughout the novel, Coetzee parodies the "virginal type" and "the aura of the virginal" (2013:103), as, in many instances, he deconstructs the received 'message' of an Immaculate Conception. It might be puzzling that Coetzee's sympathy does not lie with Ines, who is presented as a caricature of the Biblical myth of the Virgin Mary: an imperfect 'vessel' of faith. Simon is aware of her imperfections and is also concerned that Ines, like most fellow-refugees, "do not see any doubleness in the world, any difference between the way things seem and the way things are" (2103:64).

3. Theoretical perspectives and considerations

In order to do justice to the complexities of this novel, it is important to engage with some of the relevant theoretical perspectives that inform my article. Mainstream Coetzee criticism (e.g., Attridge 2005, Marais 2009, Clarkson 2009) tends to focus on reality as mediated by language, a position according to which 'meaning' is unavoidably fragile, unstable and usually contradictory. (The linguistic principle is that there is no 'natural' connection between signifier and signified.) Such a reading strategy, however, cannot easily allow literature to reconnect with its "ancient cultural function of providing meaning in a human world that is often frighteningly chaotic and violent" (Petrolle 2008:2). As the issue of belief in Childhood recurrently links the physical to the metaphysical, we may qualify the linguistic turn with a 'spiritual turn'. We may choose, as I have been doing, to 'read religiously'. To read religiously is not necessarily to subscribe to an article of faith. Rather, as Petrolle (2008:165) says, it is to submit to "a possibility of transcending ordinary operations, a reverence for partially glimpsed fragments of knowing". To read religiously is what Caputo (1997:xxviii), taking his cue from Derrida, refers to as "religion without religion": a sensibility that equates religion with processes of mindfully experienced life. Paradoxically, it is a "transcendence [that] is always rooted deep in ordinary life" (Foley 2012:83). Writers like Joyce, Proust, Rilke, Kafka, Dostoevsky - and, as I argue, Coetzee - while "rejecting] the idea of a transcendent divinity, retained a transcendent sense" of the real (Foley 2012:75). For them, the sacred is glimpsed as an affective experience perceived in moments of involved, epiphanic attention.

In practical terms, the question arises as to how to apply a religious reading to the current novel. If interpreted through the lenses of a theistic or dogmatic perspective, the title, The Childhood of Jesus, will prove to be unsatisfactory in its implied promise, as it does not offer an easy correspondence with the Christian master narrative of salvation. This notwithstanding, the reader is left with a deep sense of wonder in the face of something still 'invisible', something yet to manifest itself. It is this understanding of religion as an aspiration for transcendence (in the most unlikely of places, a refugee camp) that provides my basis of introspection. Further questions arise: How does one endorse such a reading without either naivety, or resignation? In his book, tellingly subtitled Toward a Constructive Postmodern Epistemology, Frederick Ferré (1998) suggests the need to allow for shades of trust in people's textual hunger for the affective, for meaning and relevance, and also for the co-existence of scepticism and quests of wholeness. Such fusions, in their own way, are manifestations of the religious: of post-secular attempts at creating meaning while, paradoxically, problematising the very nature of meaning.

The next step in our enquiry would be to reflect on how the postmodernist ontology of indeterminacy articulates with a contemporary religious sensibility. As several critics have suggested (Madsen 1996; Smith 1982; Detweiler 1989), it is the ancient category of the allegorical, re-imagined within a contemporary sensibility, that may be utilised as vehicle of post-secular concerns in postmodern contexts. The age-old preoccupation of allegory with the nature of the real is rooted in value claims that have their origins in the religious domain - quests for personal illumination, dream visions, battles between good and evil, personifications of mental virtues/vices. In addition to traditional allegories, postmodern allegories, at the same time, have absorbed the ontological and aesthetic insights of poststructuralism: its crisis of reference, its disorientations and alienations. Dubbed by Petrolle (2008:14) as "allegories of unfaith", contemporary allegories seek new forms of faith, in the process "practising religion without religion, using ancient rhetorical forms to search for viable forms of postmodern faith" (2008:19; my emphasis).

It is possible therefore (via allegories which have been re-shaped for postmodern times) to invoke a core of wonderment without entire subscription to religious affirmations of faith. While invoking postmodern aesthetic forms and fractured identities, the allegory continues to search for meaning within doubt, as it registers a sense of urgency in its quest for relevance and authenticity. In 'reading religiously', I do not wish to suggest that Coetzee is, or has become, a religious writer: a claim that he would certainly deny (Coetzee 1992a:261-62). Yet to ask whether Coetzee is a secular or a religious writer, conventionally speaking, would be to simplify the issue. It would be assuming that an either/or response to his work is possible. Rather, I argue, it is important to embrace a definition of religion that is uncluttered by institutional precept. What I have attempted to do so far in my discussion of the novel is to invoke Benjamin's "ragpicker" (1973:79): that is, the propensity to respond to glimpses of the religious sensibility even as gleaned within a sceptical reading condition. To reiterate, The Childhood of Jesus plays deconstructively on allegorical form as it reconstructs a tenuous hold on idealism, or differently put, on belief.

4. A spiritual journey of "attachment with detachment"

While the first part of the novel witnessed Simon's individual pursuit of a meaning that is constantly undermined by his own doubts, the second part foregrounds his growing attachment to the spiritual quest. Simon's hunger for "transfiguration" (2013:143) becomes insistent. It is what Coetzee, to reiterate, has elsewhere referred to as "truth-directedness" and "illumination" (1992a:261). In a place that can only offer him a devitalised existence, Simon desires to have a " feel of residence in a body with a past, a body soaked in its past'" (143; my emphasis). Simon also feels that the 'dis-embodied' life of exile has failed to give him profoundly new insights: '"[W]hat is the good of a new life, if we are not transformed by it, transfigured, as I certainly am not?"' (2013:143). Ironically, the solution comes from Elena, his hyper-rationalist companion, somebody who, unlike Simon, has been 'washed clean of memories': "'Instead of waiting to be transfigured, why not try to be like a child again?'''" (143; my emphasis), she advises. This is a major turning point in the novel. From this moment on, Simon will invest his energy in David's life. He is now ready to 'follow' David, ready to appreciate life with the freshness of a child: to live in the direct experience of the present moment (one recalls Wordsworth's famous aphorism: "The child is father of the man."). Child David is Simon's 'radical other'; somebody who inhabits the domain of the irrational, the invisible - the domain of "something that has not yet emerged, that lies somewhere at the end of the road" (Coetzee 1992b:246). This makes Simon feel an irresistible responsibility to make the invisible visible/comprehensible and will, therefore, immerse himself in the freshness of David's responsiveness to the immediacy of life. From being David's 'host', Simon will become David's 'follower'. As in the New Testament parallel, there is a shift from Simon, the benevolent parent, the intermediary messenger - a St Joseph or Archangel Gabriel - to Simon as David's disciple, or a St Peter. However - as was the case of Ines/Virgin Mary - these are not unqualified correspondences; rather, we encounter iconoclastic refractions of New Testament figures and archetypes.

Simon continues to believe in (and 'follow') David, while at the same time helping the child understand the value of anchoring the self in the world. Such anchoring is presented in activities of reading, writing and arithmetic. As a gifted child, David has developed a unique way of reading and doing sums. By memorising entire words and figures as singularities, he skips the steps of logical deduction in the alphabet, in books and tables, and leaps to the ideal journey: a journey, however, in which impediments seek to block the ultimate illumination. If Christ's journey intrudes upon our consciousness, then Coetzee thwarts our eagerness to attach our interpretation to the Biblical parallel. Instead, he shifts the register to the secular analogy of Don Quixote. David's way of relating to the world, his singularity, is an untenable, albeit heroic/Quixotic form of faith which, if unopposed by rationality, leads to destruction and death, to a crisis of reference. By refusing to make use of the alphabet in reading the story of Don Quixote, David reinforces the perception of Cervantes's famous character as single-mindedly heroic, a knight who fights a towering giant, not a plain windmill (2013:152). David's apparently child-like response to Cervantes's tale - his unwavering commitment to the hero's idealism - is at odds with Simon's adult willingness to accede to Sancho Panza's necessary check of pragmatism. It is a pragmatic element that is elided from the Biblical Jesus story, as told by his disciples. As in the 'reality' of Jesus' life, unalloyed idealism led to his death, which, while an exemplary death for society or humankind, was to his mother, Mary, the terrible death of a son. Here, we do not enter the language or imagery of Calvary; rather, Coetzee introduces the devil/evil in the lighter, albeit serious, conventions of storytelling in that the devil (here, referred to as Daga - a playful hint at 'dagga'/ marijuana) emerges as the Trickster tempter.

This Trickster leads the innocent David "into temptation" (2013:188) - television with Mickey Mouse and ice-cream instead of bread (2013:245). Simon's realism is nugatory when applied to a world of child-wonder. What we the readers perceive, however, is that the singular idealism of Don Quixote (or Jesus), when interpreted naively, can easily confuse salvation with illusion. David soon finds out that Quixote "is the hero and he is the magician" (2013:163), and that this Spanish knight too can lead one into illusion (magic): while tilting at windmills, he is creating the illusion of salvation. Neither Don Quixote nor Daga is a real saviour. Each is an embodiment of good-in-evil, or vice versa. As figures presented in the story-telling mode, their function is to encourage the young David to learn how to live with ambiguity and how to overcome the obstacles in his path, while not turning from his quest of finding meaning within inchoate experience. For, without idealism, there can be no transfiguration of the muddle of the world, whether evil or simply mundane. In the story of Simon and David, Simon's urgency of the real transfers itself to the son, David, whose child-like freshness of insight ("the child is father of the man") inspires the doubting Thomases of the world to persevere in pursuing the elusive path towards the truth of how to live. To pursue the spiritual path is to overcome one's initial, child-like consolations of easy salvation, and create bridges between the opposites of reason and faith, fact and fiction, and good and evil (as in the respective figures of Don Quixote and Daga). What matters is not a heroic attainment of 'Truth'. Rather, what matters is a sense of "attentiveness and responsiveness to an inner impulse that Tolstoy calls an impulse toward God [in other words, toward] truth-directedness" (Coetzee 1992a:261 ; my emphasis). And toward "illumination from the outside" (1992a:292), which could also be construed as living with grace. As I have suggested, however, salvation in The Childhood of Jesus remains elusive, and is even parodied as its attainment is deferred.

Like Simon, David also is on a spiritual path, a path of his own. His wish to become a 'saviour', has, we realise, been insistent. He had wanted to breathe life into Marciano (2013:156-159), a stevedore who lost his life when the ship's hold was flooded; he had attempted to do the same with the dead body of a horse, El Rey (tr. 'The King'), hoping that the horse would be well again in three days (2013:198) (an allusion, again in the deflationary mode, is to Jesus' resurrection after three days). Nevertheless, in spite of the many child-like interpretations of salvation, the urge to find another realm of experience (for both David and Simon) remains intact. It is in this very determination to pursue the inexpressible amidst the shards of the real that the novel's religious power can be located. To take a particular illustration, David's peculiar and - it must be admitted - precocious genius at school is incomprehensible to the soulless mediocrity of the school regime. Despite Simon's attempt to defend the boy by invoking his "philosophical difficulties" (2013:229) with conventions, the tribunal condemns David to a place behind barbed wire. The intention is to crush him mentally and spiritually. By this stage in the novel, we the readers have attuned ourselves to the serious play on the New Testament story. Like Jesus - but within the parodic-seriousness of the novel's spirit - David is being prepared to be crucified. In the closing scenes of the novel, therefore, David's journey to salvation is reminiscent of Jesus' capture and persecution, while moving beyond suffering and death to the resurrection of hope. David escapes from the reformatory: "T walked through the barbed wire [ ...] I can escape from anywhere'" (2013:240; also 253-4), he proudly announces to his surrogate parents - the barbed wire alluding to the crown of thorns that was pressed on Jesus' head after his trial. To David's accusation - '"You didn't watch over me. You let them take me to Punto Arenas'" (2013:242), the place of barbed wire - Simon retorts: "T was a bad godfather. I slept while I should have watched'" (2013:242; my emphasis). We recall that Peter slept, instead of watching over Jesus prior to his capture on the hill of Gethsemane.

While in hospital after an accident on the docks, Simon undergoes a profound change of heart that invokes in him a sense of awe that is other-worldly and in which he contemplates a dream vision that he has just had. It is a vision of David in a chariot "hovering in the air", the child's one hand held "aloft in a regal gesture" (2013:237-8). It is a vision that shakes him to his core (2013:238) and makes him fully aware that: "The life I have is not enough for me. I wish someone, some saviour would [... ] say, Behold, read this hook and all your questions will be answered. Or, Behold, here is an entirely new life for you" (2013:239; emphasis in the original). It is a vision that suggests to Simon that the child, David, might have the power to 'save' him from himself. Accordingly, he reassures David: "T have learned my lesson. I'll take better care of you in the future. [...] I'll say Try to steal my boy and you will have Don Simon to deal with'" (2013:242; emphasis in the original). As this 'Holy Family' flees the tribunal, Simon holds to his anchor of the real (his 'Sancho Panza' anchor): David, he believes, "'is going to have to make his peace with society'" (2013:263). At the same time, Simon (in his 'Don Quixote' moment) reassures Ines that he is willing to "'follow [her and David] to the ends of the earth'" (2013:263).

By leaving the, by-now familiar, Relocation Centre - in pursuit of another attempt at a better deal, a better life - the 'holy' family (Simon, Ines, David) have become homeless once again. Thus, the discipleship takes the form of homelessness (2013:257-62), which is, however, marred by an accident (2013:265267) provoked by Daga, the Trickster/devil figure in the novel. It is an accident that leaves David with "the sort of blindness you get from looking into the sun" (2013:269). In this impairment of his sight, David gains a new form of 'seeing': "Tf I close my eyes, I can fly. I can see the whole world'" (2013:269), he says as he travels towards "the new life" (2013:269). In spite of his injuries, David's faith in the 'new life' is now more determined than ever: "he stares into the sun, fully risen now above the line of blue mountains in the distance" (2013:270; my emphasis). The allusion to Jesus' Resurrection is discernible in this passage: David has risen above his physical pain, his accident now perceived as a redemptive act of self-sacrifice. In these passages, and throughout the novel, the realisation is that aspirations to real 'seeing' and 'awakening' "are only intelligible in the context of chaos, confusion and violence" (Batchelor 2004:28-33).Yet, again, the language of idealism is undercut by a more sober register. The journey from one place/ country to another ends not in paradise, but in another place where, in an allusion to the New Testament version of Jesus' birth in a stable, Simon suggests in his words of arrival at the next location: " 'Good morning, we are new arrivals, and we are looking for somewhere to stay. [ ...] Looking for somewhere to stay, to start our new life'" (2013:277; emphasis in the original).

5. Conclusion

Having begun his story in a relocation centre, Coetzee ends it with flight and relocation once again: a unifying thematic background, which draws on motifs of global contemporary significance, while retaining its 'New Testament' resonance. The phrase "nowhere to lay your head" is repeated several times in the novel (e.g., 2013:187; 231), suggesting an ancient cyclical condition of human existence: "homelessness strikes us each time we see through the diabolic illusion of the world as a home that provides security and well-being" (Batchelor 2004:78). It is precisely in this state of homelessness - in the undecidability between rationality and imagination - that the novel 'feels' its religious impulse. Neither Simon's sterile doubts, nor David's blind faith can offer ultimate answers to what is true and what is real. Neither can the novelist of The Childhood of Jesus offer ultimate answers. Rather, we the readers are offered 'religion without religion', wonder in the mud of the quotidian, the sacred imagined as earthed, embodied, ordinary and sublime - or, what Mihai Çora (1995:97) refers to as "attachment with detachment". The religious impulse lies in the negation of opposites, in a faith based not on dogma or doctrine, but on a search for the inchoate, unimaginable and 'invisible' alternatives to polarities. It is a search for David's and Simon's "passion for the impossible [...] a passion for something to come" (Caputo 1997: 228). This is an allegory - we recall - qualified by its own postmodern language games. If the 'message' of this elusive story can be summarised in the oxymoron 'secular spirituality', then that, aptly, would be the value of The Childhood of Jesus in our uncertain times.

Acknowledgment: I wish to acknowledge the financial assistance of the National Research Foundation of South Africa. Opinions are those of the author.

References

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