Infancy Gospel of Thomas

Overview

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is a document that strings together brief episodes from the life of Jesus from about the age of five to the age of twelve. No Christian denomination includes it in the canon (the list of books the church recognizes as authoritative Scripture). Scholars classify it among the apocrypha, that is, early Christian literature outside the canon. Some Greek manuscripts name the author as "Thomas the Israelite." Few scholars, however, believe that the apostle Thomas wrote it. The Coptic Gospel of Thomas, discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945, is a collection of sayings of Jesus and is entirely different from this book in both content and character.

Background

The Gospels of the New Testament say almost nothing about the childhood of Jesus. Apart from the birth narratives, the only episode is his visit to the Temple at the age of twelve, recorded in Luke 2:41–52. Around the second century, stories arose among some Christians to fill in this gap. This book is regarded as one of the earliest of these so-called "infancy gospels."

Development

• Date of composition: Many scholars date the work to the middle or later part of the second century. Irenaeus's Against Heresies, written around 180, contains a story in which the boy Jesus questions his teacher about the meaning of the alphabet. Because this story resembles an episode in the book, it is generally held that similar traditions were already circulating by that time.
• Principal contents: At the age of five, Jesus fashions sparrows out of clay on the Sabbath and makes them fly away. He curses a child who interferes with him, causing the child harm, and he bests in argument the teachers who try to instruct him. He raises a child who has fallen from a roof and died, and he miraculously helps his father, Joseph of Nazareth, in his carpentry work. The book closes with the same Temple episode found in Luke.
• Manuscript tradition: The prevailing view is that the original was written in Greek. Manuscripts survive in many languages, including Syriac, Latin, Georgian, and Ethiopic. One of the oldest is reported to be a Syriac manuscript from around the sixth century. Because the number and order of the episodes differ greatly from manuscript to manuscript, it is difficult to establish a single definitive text.

Legacy and Influence

The book's episodes were absorbed into later infancy literature, such as the Latin Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and the Arabic Infancy Gospel, and through them these episodes spread into the popular piety and art of medieval Europe. The story of the clay birds brought to life has a parallel in the Qur'an (3:49; 5:110), and it is frequently cited as evidence of how widely this tradition circulated.

Assessment

None of the major traditions—Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant—recognizes the book as canonical, and it is not used as a basis for church doctrine. In the Korean church it is rarely used in preaching or teaching; it is treated mainly in seminary courses on the background of the New Testament and in introductory materials on the apocrypha.

Critical assessments generally follow two lines. The first is that the portrayal of the boy Jesus angrily harming people does not accord with the picture of Jesus in the Gospels. The second is that the book fails to convey the human growth of Jesus described in Luke 2:52, which says that he "increased in wisdom and stature."

Opinions also differ about the book's theological character. In the past some scholars associated it with Gnosticism (an ancient religious movement that emphasized salvation through special knowledge) or with Docetism (the claim that Jesus only appeared to be human). More recently, many scholars regard it not as the document of a particular heretical group but as a collection of stories handed down in popular tradition.

Historians do not regard the book as a source of information about the actual childhood of Jesus. They do, however, recognize its value as evidence of how some second-century Christians imagined the divinity of Jesus and the Incarnation (God becoming man).