For years I thought that was a silly story showing the ridiculousness of the apocrypha, and it was only decades after first reading it in a high school class that I effectively realized it was subversive satire.
The Thomasine tradition was notoriously opposed to physical resurrection early on. Hence “doubting Thomas.”
This opposition to a core canonical principle was likely part of what led to the Gospel of Thomas eventually being punishable by death to even possess.
But here’s this text attributed to the Thomasine tradition that probably had more resurrections per page than maybe any other text in any religion, and certainly in Christianity. And so instead of needing to be buried in a jar like the other, it survived the dark ages and middle ages fine, just as this kind of weird text but dogmatically agreeable.
And yet the story in between kid Jesus smiting and resurrecting is all about how Jesus, despite being very bright, wasn’t able to learn his letters and looked at letters and words different from others. A weird focus for the text, and one that at its end overlaps with part of the opening of Luke.
Then if you look closer, some other details stand out.
For example, it mentions how the author ‘Thomas’ is a philosopher in the opening.
And through that lens, another detail stands out - the kid that falls off the roof to his death and then is raised back up is named Xeno - like the philosopher famed for his paradoxes of motion. Probably not a very common name in a Jewish town in 1st century Galilee.
These days that text reminds me of a famous adage, “the only way to tell the truth is through fiction.”
I think a group, that was on the outskirts of a growing organized religion that eventually becomes the canonical church, took their own stories about Jesus’s childhood where he was bright but struggled with learning letters and reworked them into a tale so over the top and ridiculous it was actively making fun of the canonical infancy stories that were being added to the Synoptics. But that the canonical group, blinded by their own beliefs, failed to even recognize the satire and ended up keeping the texts alive thinking that they were agreeing with them, even though it was effectively the philosophical sect of early Christianity taking the piss at their fantastical dogma.
And then today we just take it at face value as authentically intended and just think “man people back then believed weird stuff.”
Yes, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.
For years I thought that was a silly story showing the ridiculousness of the apocrypha, and it was only decades after first reading it in a high school class that I effectively realized it was subversive satire.
The Thomasine tradition was notoriously opposed to physical resurrection early on. Hence “doubting Thomas.”
This opposition to a core canonical principle was likely part of what led to the Gospel of Thomas eventually being punishable by death to even possess.
But here’s this text attributed to the Thomasine tradition that probably had more resurrections per page than maybe any other text in any religion, and certainly in Christianity. And so instead of needing to be buried in a jar like the other, it survived the dark ages and middle ages fine, just as this kind of weird text but dogmatically agreeable.
And yet the story in between kid Jesus smiting and resurrecting is all about how Jesus, despite being very bright, wasn’t able to learn his letters and looked at letters and words different from others. A weird focus for the text, and one that at its end overlaps with part of the opening of Luke.
Then if you look closer, some other details stand out.
For example, it mentions how the author ‘Thomas’ is a philosopher in the opening.
And through that lens, another detail stands out - the kid that falls off the roof to his death and then is raised back up is named Xeno - like the philosopher famed for his paradoxes of motion. Probably not a very common name in a Jewish town in 1st century Galilee.
These days that text reminds me of a famous adage, “the only way to tell the truth is through fiction.”
I think a group, that was on the outskirts of a growing organized religion that eventually becomes the canonical church, took their own stories about Jesus’s childhood where he was bright but struggled with learning letters and reworked them into a tale so over the top and ridiculous it was actively making fun of the canonical infancy stories that were being added to the Synoptics. But that the canonical group, blinded by their own beliefs, failed to even recognize the satire and ended up keeping the texts alive thinking that they were agreeing with them, even though it was effectively the philosophical sect of early Christianity taking the piss at their fantastical dogma.
And then today we just take it at face value as authentically intended and just think “man people back then believed weird stuff.”
Wow. Did Thomas write other fanciful stuff to take the piss?