Innocence is one of the dominant paradigms of modern childhood, yet obsolete claims regarding how medieval society viewed childish innocence persist. Misrepresentations of the historical interrelationship between the concepts of innocence and childhood, especially in modern media, can reinforce erroneous teleology. One egregious example asserts:

Childhood and innocence belong within a far longer and more complicated framework than such inaccurate imaginings of a premodern past imply. Those writing in the Middle Ages firmly situated the motif of childish innocence within a broader context of original sin, but they drew on a variety of conflicting biblical and patristic perspectives in which sinfulness, and especially sin's inherited nature, was a contested topic. ‘[N]o man of himself is innocent before the Lord; who renders the iniquity of the fathers to the children, and to the grandchildren, unto the third and fourth generation’, declared Moses when he received God's commandments on Mount Sinai. Later in the Old Testament, God espoused a different approach, conveying a prophecy to Ezekiel which called for the people of Israel to abandon their collective system of judgement, in which the inherited stain of sin tarnished future generations. Ezekiel introduced a new custom: ‘The soul that sins, the same shall die: the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, and the father shall not bear the iniquity of the son’. Henceforth, the Lord would individually judge each person for their own transgressions. Even though, in the Latin Vulgate, these conflicting verses from Exodus and Ezekiel both use the term filius (‘son’ or the less gendered ‘offspring’) rather than vocabulary specifi-cally associated with young children, the ideas they convey became part of later theological discussions of sin and childhood.