The Childhood of Jesus

Abstract Except for one story in Luke ‘s Gospel (the episode of Jesus in the Temple at the age of 12 in Luke 2: 41-50) the New Testament writings leave a tantalizing gap in the life of Jesus between his birth and his baptism at the beginning of the public ministry. Inevitably, the developing literary tradition, taking its cue from the childhood story in Luke, created a series of incidents that tell of events in Jesus ‘ boyhood. Their main theme is to show Jesus ‘ precocious awareness of his supernatural origin and his power over life, death, and nature. Such belief in Jesus ‘ divinity is clearly orthodox in Christian doctrine, but the often sensational manifestations of his supernatural abilities displayed in the numerous childhood stories in apocryphal Gospels tend to distort that belief. Extracts below from the second-third-century Infancy Gospel of Thomas, given under (1), have the effect of portraying the child Jesus as an enfant terrible. Modem readers are struck less by the piety underlying the stories than by the destructiveness of many of Jesus ‘ actions. Such a negative theme may be paralleled in the New Testament story of Jesus ‘ blasting the fig-tree (Mark 11: 12-14, 20-4), but the recurrence of the theme makes it the dominant feature of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, as well as other apocryphal texts, such as the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. Several of the stories in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas are reproduced below. Among them we read the episode of the schoolteacher, which was a particularly popular theme that recurs in different places.