We know of it first from Irenaeus of Lyon, who quoted part of the text around 185 CE; but it may by then have been known for as much as a hundred years.
From internal evidence, it cannot have been written before the publication of Luke, which was in the 80s. The delightfully named "Epistula Apostolorum" also mentions it, repeating one of its stories in which Jesus' teacher tells him to "Say alpha," and Jesus replies, "First tell me what beta is."¹
Many of the stories were likely recounted orally before being written down, though whether in Greek, Syrian Aramaic or for that matter Yehudit (Hebrew) or Latin remains a we-don't-know, the non-technical term for "a mystery"; all we have are late translations - and late can mean as late as the 13th century.
"The Infancy Gospel of Thomas" belongs to a type of literature known as Aretalogy (Greek: Αρεταλογία; from ἀρετή, pronounced areté, and meaning "virtue"), a kind of sacred biography in which the attributes of a deity are listed in the form of a poem or text, and in the first person. The Tanach, and later Jewish liturgy even more, use Aretalogy regularly, in examples such as "I am YHVH your god who brought you out of Mitsrayim" (Exodus 20:2), though the Beney Yisra-El probably learned it from the Egyptians and Babylonians, both of whom were masters of the craft.
"I am Isis, ruler of every land," says a passage from the so-called Coffin Text. "I was taught by Thoth and with Thoth devised letters, both hieroglyphic and demotic, that all might not be written with the same. I gave laws to mankind and ordained what no one can change."In "The Infancy Gospel of Thomas", it was Jesus' miracles that provided the core of the self-praise, though there is very little about the acts of genius, the performance of miracles, and the proof of gifted status, that would not be regarded as the norm among contemporary parents. Some of the miracles are simply fanciful, others palpably malevolent, all of them involving the supernatural in the tradition of the trickster-god - Pan in the Greek, Loge or Loki in the Visigothic.
On one occasion Jesus makes birds out of clay, then brings them to life, a trick played elsewhere by Daedalus, and recorded in this Jesus version in the Qur'an (Qur'an 5:110).
On another occasion, not to be read to children under the age of the brothers Grimm, a child spills the water that Jesus has gathered, for which Jesus curses him, a reverse-Lazarus so to speak, with the child's body withering into a corpse - a strange tale to attribute to Messiah the Son of God, who came to heal and save the world.
Nor is this the only child whom the infant Jesus allows to gain premature entry into Paradise, or possibly the Underworld; another child dies when Jesus curses him for accidentally bumping into him, the sort of tale normally attributed to playground bullies, but even there they rarely end with corpses. In a third tale, which may be a variation in Greek of the previous tale in Latin, or vice versa, the child throws a stone at Jesus rather than bumping into him, and yet another says the boy punched him. Tales of this sort, with exactly these variations and self-vindications, are the mainstay of a school Principal's office, but what on Earth are they doing in scripture? Yet there they are.
When Joseph and Mary's neighbors complain (presumably about the spoiled brat with bullying tendencies and a psychopathic nature whom they call their son), they are miraculously struck blind by Jesus. Jesus then starts receiving lessons (the inference is private tutoring, an unlikely eventuality given his father's trade as a carpenter), but arrogantly tries to teach the teacher instead, upsetting the teacher who suspects supernatural origins. Jesus is amused by this suspicion, which he confirms, and revokes all his earlier apparent cruelty. Subsequently he resurrects a friend who was killed when he fell from a roof (another Daedalus connection? - Talos died falling from a roof), and another who cuts his foot with an axe. So we learn how a young man can learn from his mistakes. After various other demonstrations of supernatural ability, new teachers try to teach Jesus, but he proceeds to explain the law to them instead.
There are then another set of miracles in which Jesus heals his brother who is bitten by a snake, and two others who have died from different causes. Finally, the text recounts the episode in Luke (2:41-52)in which Jesus, aged twelve, teaches in the Temple (in case you think the tone in writing this commentary is tongue-in-cheek, please note that most of the last dozen or so lines have been transcribed verbatim from that other gospel of dubious scholarship Wikipedia - it is not this commentator's tongue, nor his cheek).
Among the other miracles recorded are bringing a dried fish back to life (Jewish grandmothers do this every Friday evening, aided by chopped horseradish sauce), carrying water on a piece of cloth, producing a feast from a single grain (a practice run for Tabgha presumably), and stretching a beam of wood to help his father finish constructing a bed.
As well as Aretalogy and Magic, "The Infancy Gospel" also comes into the category of Pseudepigraphica, which is writing that claims to have been written by the central figure in the story himself, but in fact was written somewhat later and by someone else - the attribution of the Zohar to Simeon bar Yochai when it was actually written a thousand years later by Moses de Léon is the best-known example in Jewish literature. The author calls himself "Thomas the Israelite", allowing the reader to assume this means biblical Thomas; but also inviting us to doubt this claim, which we dutifully do. Such historical basis as any of the stories in this gospel have appear to have been gleaned from a cursory reading of the Book of Luke; but the aim of the gospel is really the entertainment of children, and not the illumination of adults. This is Harry Potter, not Also Sprach Zarathustra.
Finally, there is an Arabic manuscript, the "Injilu 't Tufuliyyah" ("The Syriac Infancy Gospel"), which claims to be a translation of "The Infancy Gospel" from the Coptic original - thereby arguing with those who believe the original was in Syrian Aramaic. It also claims that the source of its tales was those "recorded in the book of Josephus the Chief Priest, who was in the time of Christ", which would be of interest if any man named Josephus had ever been Chief Priest in that epoch; probably this is a confusion with General Flavius Josephus, who was originally Yosef ben Matityahu before he sold out his people at Yodfat (Jotapata), and spent the rest of his life as a guest of Titus in Rome, writing propagandistic history under the Emperor's patronage. In all likelihood, the "Injilu 't Tufuliyyah" was an invention of the 6th century, partly a translation of the surviving fragments of this "Infancy Gospel", partly fragments of the Qur'an borrowed for the purpose, the rest invention for the purposes of anti-Christian propaganda in the Moslem world.
The full text of "The Infancy Gospel of Thomas" can be read here. _______________
¹ If true, it would have been Jesus' fifth language: Egyptian in his childhood (people forget that, according to the Canonical Gospels, he spent most of his first decade in exile there), Aramaic for daily use, Yehudit (Hebrew) for religious purposes, Latin in order to render unto Caesar. Why would he have needed Greek anyway - unless to read the Septuagint version of the Hebrew Bible, during his Egyptian years? And if that, then this story sould be set in Alexandria, and the student not more than eight. One last observation: the Greek alphabet and the Yehudit aleph-bet were virtually identical at that time, both based on the Ugaritic-Phoenician; if this had happened in a classroom in Judea, the dialogue would have gone: "Say aleph," with Jesus replying, "First tell me what bet is."
When Joseph and Mary's neighbors complain (presumably about the spoiled brat with bullying tendencies and a psychopathic nature whom they call their son), they are miraculously struck blind by Jesus. Jesus then starts receiving lessons (the inference is private tutoring, an unlikely eventuality given his father's trade as a carpenter), but arrogantly tries to teach the teacher instead, upsetting the teacher who suspects supernatural origins. Jesus is amused by this suspicion, which he confirms, and revokes all his earlier apparent cruelty. Subsequently he resurrects a friend who was killed when he fell from a roof (another Daedalus connection? - Talos died falling from a roof), and another who cuts his foot with an axe. So we learn how a young man can learn from his mistakes. After various other demonstrations of supernatural ability, new teachers try to teach Jesus, but he proceeds to explain the law to them instead.
There are then another set of miracles in which Jesus heals his brother who is bitten by a snake, and two others who have died from different causes. Finally, the text recounts the episode in Luke (2:41-52)in which Jesus, aged twelve, teaches in the Temple (in case you think the tone in writing this commentary is tongue-in-cheek, please note that most of the last dozen or so lines have been transcribed verbatim from that other gospel of dubious scholarship Wikipedia - it is not this commentator's tongue, nor his cheek).
Among the other miracles recorded are bringing a dried fish back to life (Jewish grandmothers do this every Friday evening, aided by chopped horseradish sauce), carrying water on a piece of cloth, producing a feast from a single grain (a practice run for Tabgha presumably), and stretching a beam of wood to help his father finish constructing a bed.
As well as Aretalogy and Magic, "The Infancy Gospel" also comes into the category of Pseudepigraphica, which is writing that claims to have been written by the central figure in the story himself, but in fact was written somewhat later and by someone else - the attribution of the Zohar to Simeon bar Yochai when it was actually written a thousand years later by Moses de Léon is the best-known example in Jewish literature. The author calls himself "Thomas the Israelite", allowing the reader to assume this means biblical Thomas; but also inviting us to doubt this claim, which we dutifully do. Such historical basis as any of the stories in this gospel have appear to have been gleaned from a cursory reading of the Book of Luke; but the aim of the gospel is really the entertainment of children, and not the illumination of adults. This is Harry Potter, not Also Sprach Zarathustra.
Finally, there is an Arabic manuscript, the "Injilu 't Tufuliyyah" ("The Syriac Infancy Gospel"), which claims to be a translation of "The Infancy Gospel" from the Coptic original - thereby arguing with those who believe the original was in Syrian Aramaic. It also claims that the source of its tales was those "recorded in the book of Josephus the Chief Priest, who was in the time of Christ", which would be of interest if any man named Josephus had ever been Chief Priest in that epoch; probably this is a confusion with General Flavius Josephus, who was originally Yosef ben Matityahu before he sold out his people at Yodfat (Jotapata), and spent the rest of his life as a guest of Titus in Rome, writing propagandistic history under the Emperor's patronage. In all likelihood, the "Injilu 't Tufuliyyah" was an invention of the 6th century, partly a translation of the surviving fragments of this "Infancy Gospel", partly fragments of the Qur'an borrowed for the purpose, the rest invention for the purposes of anti-Christian propaganda in the Moslem world.
The full text of "The Infancy Gospel of Thomas" can be read here. _______________
¹ If true, it would have been Jesus' fifth language: Egyptian in his childhood (people forget that, according to the Canonical Gospels, he spent most of his first decade in exile there), Aramaic for daily use, Yehudit (Hebrew) for religious purposes, Latin in order to render unto Caesar. Why would he have needed Greek anyway - unless to read the Septuagint version of the Hebrew Bible, during his Egyptian years? And if that, then this story sould be set in Alexandria, and the student not more than eight. One last observation: the Greek alphabet and the Yehudit aleph-bet were virtually identical at that time, both based on the Ugaritic-Phoenician; if this had happened in a classroom in Judea, the dialogue would have gone: "Say aleph," with Jesus replying, "First tell me what bet is."
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