THE 'CHILDHOOD OF JESUS' AS CHRISTIAN ALLEGORY (Pages 153-159) by Ms. Chung Chin-Yi in THE ENGLISH RESEARCH EXPRESS / ISSN:2321-1164 (Online); 2347-2642 (Print)

Simon and Ines turn out to be David’s spiritual parents, who are bonded together by their common mission to protect David, or read allegorically, to protect their bonds in the Holy Spirit and advance the mission of safeguarding Jesus and delivering him from persecution by worldly authorities, which in the case of the book, is the Spanish authorities of Novilla who seek to put David in a special school and rehabilitate him to become more normal or worldly when it is clear David is not one of them in the sense that David, as a metaphor for Christ, is one who is not of the world but one of the kingdom of heaven which he sees as his mission to lead others to and save people on earth from by leading them to a new destiny as his followers and members of his kingdom which will eventually succeed Satan’s current reign on earth. The detachment of worldly ties, the mission to liberate people from worldly ties and entrapments, and the deity of Jesus, or in this case David, all lend support to Coetzee’s Childhood of Jesus as an allegory for the Christian experience of renouncing old blood ties and the past and being born into a new spiritual family. Keywords: Divinity, Coetzee, Nativity story, Christianity, Allegory, Childhood, Jesus