A newly translated manuscript has now been confirmed to have been the oldest one about Jesus Christ’s childhood.
The document was identified as the earliest surviving copy of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, with the discovery achieved by Dr. Lajos Berkes from Humboldt University and professor Gabriel Nocchi Macedo from the University of Liege in Belgium. The two dated the manuscript to somewhere between the 4th and 5th centuries, beating the previously held record for the oldest manuscript on Jesus’s childhood by about 600 years.
“Our findings on this late antique Greek copy of the work confirm the current assessment that the Infancy Gospel according to Thomas was originally written in Greek,” Macedo said.
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas details stories of Jesus’s childhood but is considered outside the canon of Biblical scripture and is not included in the Bible itself. Despite this, the stories from this gospel were widely popular during the Middle Ages.
The document was considered insignificant for the longest time before being translated due in part to the clumsy handwriting on it. Initially, it was believed to have possibly been a letter or a shopping list due to the nature of the handwriting.
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“We first noticed the word Jesus in the text,” Berkes said. “Then, by comparing it with numerous other digitized papyri, we deciphered it letter by letter and quickly realized that it could not be an everyday document.”
The story mentioned in this document is the story of the “vivification of the sparrows,” which tells the story of Jesus molding birds out of clay before bringing them to life with a simple hand clap.
