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Loading...In my previous post I gave some of the early chapters from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. It seems like a pretty straightforward and entertaining set of early legends about the boy Jesus. But it turns out the scholarship on the text is complicated. Here is how I describe some of it in the edition I co-authored with my colleague Zlatko Pleše, The Other Gospels. I have omitted here some of the more technical discussion (mainly about manuscripts in other ancient languages, that are so different from one another that we are not sure even what the Gospel was originally called); but this should give you a taste of some of the key issues scholars wrestle with.
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The so-called Infancy Gospel of Thomas presents some of the most intractable textual and historical problems of the entire corpus of early Christian literature. On the most basic level, we do not know the scope and contents of the original version of the book, if we can even speak about an “original.” This Gospel, in its various forms, presents a number of self-contained narratives about the young Jesus, between the ages of five and twelve. It was probably written originally in Greek. But the Greek manuscripts that contain the account differ radically from one another, with entire chapters missing from some witnesses and present in others. Of the fourteen Greek manuscripts that attest the Gospel, fully eight have never been published or made available to scholarly scrutiny. Moreover, these manuscripts are all very late — most of them from the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, well over a millennium removed from the earliest attested form of the text. We do have, on the other hand, earlier manuscripts in other languages (Syriac, Latin, Georgian, Ethiopic, Slavonic, etc.)
When was the first account of these “childhood deeds” written? Any…
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Since the narration doesn’t bear any account of the “historical” Jesus and seems to be produced for literary or propagandistic purposes then it’s proved that religious sources can appear out of the blue. Holy scriptures can be the literary production of a group of people without any connection to real facts.
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is pure myth. But the canonical gospels are not much distant.
Aside from Literary criticism would be delightful if burning old manuscripts that bear any historical ground they gave out some blue light revealing their inner truth trampling to ashes. People then would mourn for their loss, with intention.
Reminds me of the Twilight Zone episode “It’s a Good Life”.
“Oh yes, I did forget something, didn’t I? I forgot to introduce you to the monster. This is the monster. His name is Jesus ben Joseph. He’s six years old, with a cute little-boy face and blue, guileless eyes. But when those eyes look at you, you’d better start thinking happy thoughts, because the mind behind them is absolutely in charge. This is the Twilight Zone.”
Miracle worker? I get impatient when people say “miracle”. There are no miracles. Everything in the universe is vibration; my diningroom table is not solid, it’s mostly ‘space’. Humans vibrate between 20 and 80 Hz. In the NT the bleeding woman waited along Jesus’s path on his way to crucifixion. As he passed her she reached out and touched the hem of his garment. Immediately energy drained from him and she was healed. In physics we know that when higher Hz and lower Hz meet each other they settle in the middle. If her vibration was raised, she would have been healed; below 20 Hz = death, and Jesus was probably at least at 70 Hz at this time on the road. No miracles here, folks, move along.
Only three comments on this one. Wow.
Given the diversity of early Christianity it is not too surprising that some people saw nothing wrong with presenting the young Jesus as so vindictive, but I cannot believe there weren’t others who found this amiss. At any rate, it sounds like no proto-orthodox writer had a favourable word to say about it.
Dr. Ehrman,
Do any of the infancy Gospels (or other early apocryphal books) have a lot of manuscript attestation? Is anything comparable to the canonical Gospels as far as manuscript copies?
Well, a lot more than *most* books from the ancient world (since most of them are lost forever!). There are relatively many for two of the Infancy Gospels: the proto-Gospel of James survives in over 20 manuscripts (plus a number of manuscripts of ancient versions); and the Pseudo Gopsel of Matthew (far more mss I imagine, but I haven’t checked just now). But nothing like the canonical Gospels for which there are hundreds. Mark was the least copied of the Gospels and we have about 1800 or so mss in Greek.
Dr. Ehrman,
What would you say to someone who argues that this is “proof” everyone knew the canonical Gospels were the correct traditions that go back to the original apostles? In other words, since we have so many more copies of the canonical Gospels than anything else, that means everyone saw those as “legitimate?”
94% of our copies come from the 9th century. Are you willing to think that whatever the majority of Christians thought was true in the 9th century is necessarily true? 🙂 Seriously, I think it a crazy argument. If everyone thinks the earth is flat does that mean it’s a legitimate view? If everyone thinks that a particular painting is a Rembrandt but then scholars show definitively it is not (this does happen, of course!) that the 99.99% of people who think / thought it was authentic show that it really is a Rembrandt? My view is that people who make arguments like this just ain’t thinkin’.
ha! That’s great! Is there a type of chart listing the stats of the number of manuscripts and what years they were produced? When I was a Christian I remember how our teachers would boast about the number of manuscripts as “proof” this was from God. But if they were all late, it really wouldn’t matter much. What about early on (say the first five centuries). How do the manuscripts of the NT stack up against other Christian writings and non-Christian writings?
In the first few centuries there are probalby more manuscripts of the Shepherd of Hermas than, say, of 2 Peter or Mark.