A newly deciphered manuscript dating back more than 1,600 years has been identified as the earliest known account of the childhood of Jesus Christ.
The manuscript, written on papyrus in the 4th or 5th century, had been stored in a library in Hamburg, Germany, for decades, and was long believed to be an insignificant document.
However, two experts have now decoded the text and say it is the oldest surviving copy of the Infant Gospel of Thomas.
“The papyrus fragment is of extreme importance for research,” Lajos Berkes, a theology teacher and one of the two men who deciphered the document, said in a press release.
“It was thought to be part of an everyday document, such as a private letter or a shopping list, because the handwriting appears so clumsy,” the expert explains. “We saw the word Jesus in the text for the first time. Then, by comparing it with countless other digitized papyri, we deciphered it letter by letter and quickly realized that it could not be an everyday document.”
The piece of papyrus contains a total of 13 lines in Greek letters and comes from late antique Egypt, which was a Christian society at the time.
The manuscript describes the beginning of the “Quickening of the Sparrows” – a story from Jesus’ childhood in which he turns twelve clay sparrows into living birds.
According to the text, Jesus played beside a flowing stream, where he molded the sparrows from soft clay. When rebuked by his father Joseph, five-year-old Jesus clapped his hands and brought the clay figures to life.
That story, described as Jesus’ second miracle, is a well-known part of the Infantile Gospel of Thomas (IGT).
The IGT describes the childhood of Christ, and its stories were both popular and widespread in ancient and medieval times.
However, the apocryphal text was not officially included in the Bible because some early Christian writers doubted its accuracy.
It is believed that the IGT was first written down in the 2nd century; Until now, however, a codex from the 11th century was the oldest known Greek version of the text.
The newly deciphered papyrus fragment predates that document, as much as 600 years older.
“Our findings on this late ancient Greek copy of the work confirm the current assessment that the Infant Gospel of Thomas was originally written in Greek,” said Gabriel Nocchi Macedo, the other expert who helped decode the papyrus fragment.
Both Macedo and Berkes believe that the manuscript on the papyrus fragment was written as a writing exercise in a school or monastery.
“We know from comparison with already known manuscripts of this Gospel that our text is the earliest,” says Berkes.
