Christianity’s First Family

Apocryphal stories about the childhood of Jesus made headlines this year. Although unfamiliar to most readers of the New Testament, such childhood stories can be found in an early Christian text known as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. This past spring, two scholars, Lajos Berkes and Gabriel Nocchi Macedo, published an ancient manuscript of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (see “Early Infancy Gospel Discovered”). This fragmentary manuscript contains several lines of text that align closely with other, much later manuscripts of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (henceforth, Infancy Gospel). Lamentably, the provenance of the manuscript remains a mystery, but Berkes […]