Infancy Gospel of Thomas

Infancy Gospel of Thomas
Young Jesus brings clay birds to life.
Information
ReligionChristianity
AuthorAttributed to Thomas
LanguageGreek
PeriodEarly Christianity
(2nd Century)

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is an apocryphal gospel about the childhood of Jesus. The scholarly consensus dates it to the mid-to-late second century, with the oldest extant fragmentary manuscript dating to the fourth or fifth century, and the earliest complete manuscript being the Codex Sabaiticus from the 11th century.[1][2] There are references in letters by Hippolytus of Rome and Origen of Alexandria to a "Gospel of Thomas", but it is unclear whether those letters refer to the Infancy Gospel or the Gospel of Thomas, a sayings gospel discovered near Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945.[3]

Early Christian writers regarded the Infancy Gospel of Thomas as inauthentic and heretical. Eusebius rejected it as a heretical "fiction" in the third book of his fourth-century Church History, and Pope Gelasius I included it in his list of heretical books in the fifth century.

  1. ^ Georgiou, Aristos (2024-06-07). "Experts decipher oldest manuscript of Jesus childhood gospel". Newsweek. Retrieved 2024-06-13.
  2. ^ Vukovic, Marijana (2022). Survival and Success of an Apocryphal Childhood of Jesus: Reception of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas in the Middle Ages. De Gruyter. pp. 32, 56. ISBN 9783110752786. Retrieved 2024-09-14.
  3. ^ Carlson, Stephen C. (1 January 2014). "Origen's Use of the Gospel of Thomas". Sacra Scriptura: How "Non-Canonical" Text Functioned in Early Judaism and Early Christianity.