Jesus’ childhood is shrouded in mystery. Aside from the story of his birth, which we know as Christmas–and which has become one of the most widely disseminated stories in the Western world– the canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, chronicle his life from the start of his mission, at roughly at the age of 30, to his death and resurrection. The rest is sparse and largely enigmatic, offering only a fleeting glimpse of the twelve-year-old Jesus debating with the rabbis at the temple.
In the absence of detailed biblical accounts, various apocryphal texts attempted to fill in the gaps, though these are not considered canonical by mainstream Christianity, and are more likely to be considered interpretive representations.
This scarcity of information has led to much speculation and curiosity over the centuries. Now, a recently deciphered manuscript, dating back to the 4th or 5th century and stored in a university library in Hamburg, Germany, has been identified by researchers as the earliest surviving account of Jesus Christ’s childhood.
“Our findings on this late antique Greek copy of the work confirm the current assessment that the ‘Infancy Gospel of Thomas’ was originally written in Greek,” said papyrologist Gabriel Nocchi Macedo from the University of Liège in Belgium.
The papyrus fragment dates back more than 1,600 years and had gone unnoticed for decades at the Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky State and University Library, until Macedo and Dr. Lajos Berkes from the Institute for Christianity and Antiquity at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin identified its true origin.
Measuring just over 4 inches by 2 inches, the fragment contains thirteen lines of Greek letters from late antique Egypt. The content was originally thought to be part of “an everyday document, such as a private letter or a shopping list, because the handwriting is so clumsy,” said Berkes. “Then, by comparing it with numerous other digitized papyri, we deciphered it letter by letter and quickly realized it could not be an everyday document.”
Previously, the earliest text that we had relating any part of Jesus’ childhood was the ‘Infancy Gospel of Thomas’ manuscript from the 11th century.
The researchers believe the copy of the Gospel just found was created as a writing exercise in a school or monastery; this would explain the clearly amateurish level of the writing. Dating from the 4th to the 5th century, this would be the earliest surviving copy of the gospel than the ‘Infancy Gospel of Thomas’ manuscript from the 11th century.
“The fragment is of extraordinary interest for research,” said Berkes. “On the one hand, because we were able to date it to the 4th to 5th century, making it the earliest known copy. On the other hand, because we were able to gain new insights into the transmission of the text.”
While the words in the document are not from the Bible, they describe a “miracle,” according to the Gospel of Thomas, that Jesus performed as a 5-year-old child as he molded soft clay from a river into sparrows and then brought them to life.
