Discovery of the oldest manuscript describing the childhood of Christ

The papyrus fragment, which had been stored in a university library in Hamburg, Germany, for decades, “passed unnoticed” by Lajos Berks, of the German Institute for Christianity and Archaeology at the Humboldt University of Berlin, and Gabriel Noche Macedo, of the Humboldt University Library of Berlin. . The University of Liège in Belgium studied it and determined it to be the oldest surviving copy of the “Gospel of the Childhood of Thomas,” a document detailing the childhood of Jesus Christ.

The manuscript dates back to the beginnings of Christianity. To date, the oldest copy of this Gospel is an 11th-century manuscript, the oldest Greek version of the Gospel of Thomas, which was written in the 2nd century.

“It was thought to be part of an everyday document, like a private letter or a shopping list, because the handwriting looked so clumsy,” Burks, a professor at Humboldt University School of Theology, said, according to a statement. “We notice the word “Jesus” in the text for the first time. “Then, by comparing it with many other digital papyri, we decoded it letter by letter and quickly realized that it could not be an everyday document.”

Using other key terms, such as “corner” or “branch,” which papyrologists had searched for in other early Christian texts, they realized it was a copy of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. “Compared to already known manuscripts of this Gospel, we know that our text is the oldest.”

The fragment, which measures about 11 x 5 centimetres, contains a total of 13 lines of Greek letters, about ten letters per line, and dates back to late ancient Egypt. The document dates back to between the fourth and fifth centuries, and tells of events from Jesus’ childhood that were not included in the Bible. However, his stories enjoyed great popularity and widespread circulation in antiquity and the Middle Ages. The few words in the piece show that the text describes this The beginning of “The Revival of the Birds,” an episode from Jesus’ childhood considered the “second miracle.” From the Gospel of Thomas, according to the story, Jesus fashioned 12 birds from the soft clay he found in the clay. When his father Joseph scolds him for doing so on Holy Saturday, Jesus, then five years old, claps his hands and brings the clay figures to life.

“Our findings on this ancient Greek version of the work confirm the current assessment that the Gospel of Thomas was originally written in Greek,” continues Macedo, of the University of Liège.

The researchers assume that the sample was created in the form of… Writing exercise in a school or monasteryas evidenced by clumsy handwriting and irregular strokes.