The
Infancy Gospel of Thomas is a non-
canonA Biblical canon or canon of scripture is a list or set of Biblical books considered to be authoritative as scripture by a particular religious community, generally in Judaism or Christianity. The term itself was first coined by Christians, but the idea is found in Jewish sources...
ical text that was part of a popular genre,
aretalogyAretalogy is a form of sacred biography where a deity's attributes are listed, in the form of poem or text, in the first person.-Usage:Often each line starts with the standard "I am …". Usually, aretalogies are self praising. They are found in the sacred texts of later Egypt, Mesopotamia and in...
, of the 2nd and 3rd centuries— a miracle literature of Infancy gospels that was both entertaining and inspirational, written to satisfy a hunger for more miraculous and anecdotal stories of the childhood of
JesusJesus of Nazareth —also known as Jesus Christ or occasionally Jesus the Christ—is the central figure of Christianity. Within most Christian denominations...
than the
Gospel of LukeThe Gospel of Luke is the third and longest of the four canonical Gospels. This synoptic gospel is an account of the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. It details his story from the events of his birth to his Ascension...
provided. Later references by Hippolytus of Rome and Origen of Alexandria to a
Gospel of Thomas are more likely to be referring to this Infancy Gospel than to the wholly different
Gospel of ThomasThe Gospel According to Thomas , also known as The Gospel of Thomas, is a New Testament apocryphon, nearly completely preserved in a Coptic papyrus manuscript discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi, Egypt...
with which it is sometimes confused.
The
Infancy Gospel of Thomas is a non-
canonA Biblical canon or canon of scripture is a list or set of Biblical books considered to be authoritative as scripture by a particular religious community, generally in Judaism or Christianity. The term itself was first coined by Christians, but the idea is found in Jewish sources...
ical text that was part of a popular genre,
aretalogyAretalogy is a form of sacred biography where a deity's attributes are listed, in the form of poem or text, in the first person.-Usage:Often each line starts with the standard "I am …". Usually, aretalogies are self praising. They are found in the sacred texts of later Egypt, Mesopotamia and in...
, of the 2nd and 3rd centuries— a miracle literature of Infancy gospels that was both entertaining and inspirational, written to satisfy a hunger for more miraculous and anecdotal stories of the childhood of
JesusJesus of Nazareth —also known as Jesus Christ or occasionally Jesus the Christ—is the central figure of Christianity. Within most Christian denominations...
than the
Gospel of LukeThe Gospel of Luke is the third and longest of the four canonical Gospels. This synoptic gospel is an account of the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. It details his story from the events of his birth to his Ascension...
provided. Later references by Hippolytus of Rome and Origen of Alexandria to a
Gospel of Thomas are more likely to be referring to this Infancy Gospel than to the wholly different
Gospel of ThomasThe Gospel According to Thomas , also known as The Gospel of Thomas, is a New Testament apocryphon, nearly completely preserved in a Coptic papyrus manuscript discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi, Egypt...
with which it is sometimes confused. Some of the episodes from the Infancy Gospel were topics of mediaeval art.
Author
The
Infancy Gospel of Thomas is, like many such texts, a
pseudepigraphicalPseudepigrapha are falsely attributed works, texts whose claimed authorship is unfounded; a work, simply, "whose real author attributed it to a figure of the past." The word "pseudepigrapha" is the plural of "pseudepigraphon" ; the Anglicized forms...
work, for it claims within itself to have been written by
"Thomas the Israelite" (in a medieval Latin version). The biblical Thomas (or Judas Thomas, Didymos Judas Thomas, etc.) is very unlikely to have had anything to do with the text. Whoever its initial author was, he seems not to have known much of Jewish life besides what he could learn from the
Gospel of LukeThe Gospel of Luke is the third and longest of the four canonical Gospels. This synoptic gospel is an account of the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. It details his story from the events of his birth to his Ascension...
, which the text seems to refer to directly in ch. 19;
SabbathShabbat is the seventh day of the Jewish week and a day of rest in Judaism. Shabbat is observed from sundown Friday until the appearance of three stars in the sky on Saturday night...
and
PassoverPassover is a Jewish and Samaritan holy day and festival commemorating the Hebrews' escape from enslavement in Egypt....
observances are mentioned.
Dating
The first known probable quotation from its text is from
IrenaeusSaint Irenaeus , was a Christian Bishop of Lugdunum in Gaul, then a part of the Roman Empire . He was an early church father and apologist, and his writings were formative in the early development of Christian theology...
of Lyon,
ca 185, which sets a latest possible date of authorship. The earliest possible date is in the 80s AD, when Luke's gospel was probably composed, from which the author of the Infancy Gospel borrowed the story of Jesus in the temple at age twelve (see Infancy 19:1-12 and Luke 2:41-52). Scholars generally agree on a date in the mid- to late-second century AD, since there are two second century documents, the
Epistula ApostolorumThe Epistula Apostolorum is a work from the New Testament apocrypha. Though the content was thought to be lost by the majority of the academic community, it turned out that the text was used regularly among the previously somewhat secretive Ethiopian Orthodox Church.Although the text is framed as...
and Irenaeus'
Adversus haeresesOn the Detection and Overthrow of the So-Called Gnosis , commonly called Against Heresies , is a five-volume work written by St. Irenaeus in the second century. Due to his assertion that Eleutherus was the current bishop of Rome, the work is usually dated...
, which refer to a story of Jesus' tutor telling him, "Say alpha," and him replying, "First tell me what beta is." It is generally agreed that there was at least some period of oral transmission of the text, either wholly or as several different stories before it was first redacted and transcribed, and it is thus entirely possible that both of these texts and the
Infancy Gospel of Thomas all refer to the oral versions of this story.
Manuscript tradition
Scholars disagree whether the original language of the
Infancy Gospel of Thomas was Greek or Syriac., based on the finding or lack of badly-translated Greek or Syriac vocabulary or idiom. The few surviving Greek manuscripts provide no clues in themselves, for none of them date before the 13th century (James), while the earliest authorities, according to the editor and translator, Montague Rhodes James, are a much abbreviated 6th century Syriac version, and a Latin
palimpsestA palimpsest is a manuscript page from a scroll or book that has been scraped off and used again. The word "palimpsest" comes through Latin from Greek παλιν + ψαω = , and meant "scraped again." Romans wrote on wax-coated tablets that could be smoothed and reused, and a passing use of the rather...
at Vienna of the 5th or 6th century, which has never been deciphered in full. There is such an unanalysed welter of manuscripts, translations, shortened versions, alternates and parallels, that James found that they have prevented an easy accounting of which text is which. This number of texts and versions reflect the work's widespread popularity into the High Middle Ages.
Content
The text describes the life of the child Jesus, with fanciful, and sometimes malevolent, supernatural events, comparable to the
tricksterIn mythology, and in the study of folklore and religion, a trickster is a god, goddess, spirit, man, woman, or anthropomorphic animal who plays tricks or otherwise disobeys normal rules and conventional behavior. It is suggested by Hansen that the term "Trickster" was probably first used in this...
nature of the god-child in many a
Greek mythGreek mythology is the body of myths and legends belonging to the ancient Greeks concerning their gods and heroes, the nature of the world, and the origins and significance of their own cult and ritual practices. They were a part of religion in ancient Greece...
. One of the episodes involves Jesus making clay birds, which he then proceeds to bring to life, an act also attributed to Jesus in . In another episode, a child disperses water that Jesus has collected, Jesus then curses him, which causes the child's body to wither into a corpse, found in the Greek text A, and Latin versions. The Greek text B doesn't mention Jesus cursing the boy, and simply says that the child "went on, and after a little he fell and gave up the ghost," (M.R. James translation). Another child dies when Jesus curses him when he apparently accidentally bumps into him. In the latter case, there are three differing versions recorded the Greek Text A, Greek Text B, and the Latin text. Instead of bumping into Jesus in A, B records that the child throws a stone at Jesus, while the last says the boy punched him.
When Joseph and Mary's neighbors complain, they are miraculously struck
blindBlindness is the condition of lacking visual perception due to physiological or neurological factors.Various scales have been developed to describe the extent of vision loss and define blindness...
by Jesus. Jesus then starts receiving lessons, but arrogantly tries to teach the teacher instead, upsetting the teacher who suspects supernatural origins. Jesus is amused by this suspicion, which he confirms, and revokes all his earlier apparent cruelty. Subsequently he resurrects a friend who is killed when he falls from a roof, and another who cuts his foot with an axe.
After various other demonstrations of supernatural ability, new teachers try to teach Jesus, but he proceeds to explain the law to them instead. There are another set of miracles in which Jesus heals his brother who is bitten by a snake, and two others who have died from different causes. Finally, the text recounts the episode in Luke in which Jesus, aged twelve, teaches in the temple.
Although the miracles seem quite randomly inserted into the text, there are in fact 3 miracles before, and 3 after, each of the sets of lessons. The structure of the story is essentially:
- Bringing life to a dried fish (this is only present in later texts)
- (First group)
- 3 Miracles - Breathes life into (12) birds fashioned from clay, curses a boy, who then becomes a corpse (not present in Greek B), curses a boy who falls dead and his parents become blind
- Attempt to teach Jesus which fails, with Jesus doing the teaching
- 3 Miracles - Reverses his earlier acts, resurrects a friend who fell from a roof, heals a man who chopped his foot with an axe
- (Second group)
- 3 Miracles - Carries water on cloth, produces a feast from a single grain, stretches a beam of wood to help his father finish constructing a bed
- Attempts to teach Jesus which fails, with Jesus doing the teaching
- 3 Miracles - Heals James
Saint James the Just , , also known as James of Jerusalem, James Adelphotheos, or James, the Brother of the Lord, was an important figure in Early Christianity...
from snake poison, resurrects a child who died of illness, resurrects a man who died in a construction accident
- Incident in the temple paralleling Luke
Injilu 't Tufuliyyah
An Arabic text,
Injilu 't Tufuliyyah or the
Arabic Infancy GospelThe Arabic Infancy Gospel is one of the texts found in the New Testament apocrypha concerning the infancy of Jesus. It may have been compiled as early as the sixth century, and was based on the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, and Protevangelium of James.-Contents:...
translated from a Coptic original gives some parallels to the episodes, "recorded in the book of
JosephusJosephus , also known as Yosef Ben Matityahu and, after he became a Roman citizen, as Titus Flavius Josephus, was a first-century Jewish historian and apologist of priestly and royal ancestry who survived and recorded the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70...
the Chief Priest, who was in the time of Christ": Jesus speaking from the cradle and the episode of the swallows made of clay are also found in the
Qur'anThe Qur’an is the central religious text of Islam...
.
Further reading
- Barnstone, Willis (ed.). The Other Bible, Harper Collins, 1984, pp.398–403. ISBN 0062500317
External links