For decades, a clumsily written document sat unnoticed at a university library in Germany, believed to be nothing more than a very old, everyday note, such as a private letter or a shopping list. Now, more than a millennium and a half after it was written, researchers believe the papyrus fragment is no ordinary memo, but the oldest surviving written copy of a gospel detailing Jesus’ childhood.
Lajos Berkes from Humboldt University of Berlin and Gabriel Nocchi Macedo from the University of Liège in Belgium, two papyrologists, date it to the 4th or 5th century, according to a news release.
They deciphered the fragment and identified it as a passage from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a work that is apocryphal — or outside the accepted canon of scripture — and is believed to have been originally written in the 2nd century A.D. That makes it the oldest extant copy of that particular gospel.
The fragment is “of extraordinary interest for research,” Berkes said in the statement, noting it offers “new insights into the transmission of the text.” Nocchi Macedo said it confirms assessments that the Infancy Gospel of Thomas was originally written in Greek.
After researchers noticed the word “Jesus” in the document, they decoded it “letter by letter and quickly realized that it could not be an everyday document,” Berkes said. Key terms including “crowing” and “branch” allowed them to compare it to other early Christian texts and identify it as an early copy of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. The manuscript’s clumsy writing was long seen as a sign that it was an insignificant document, but now researchers believe it was created as an exercise at a school or monastery.
Biblical apocrypha, from the Greek apokryphos, or “hidden,” are stories that did not make it into the Bible but were read widely in antiquity and the Middle Ages, the statement notes. While Christian sects disagree over the status and extent of the apocrypha, they have long been studied, providing context to understanding the backdrop to the New Testament, according to the Center for Christian Apologetics, Scholarship and Education in Australia.
Michael Zellmann-Rohrer, a papyrologist at Macquarie University in Sydney who studies ancient religion and magic, called the fragment’s decoding an “exciting find.”
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“Here we have one more witness to the diversity of Christian scripture before the development of a fixed canon,” he said in an email, noting it also offers “a detailed look at the shape in which one such noncanonical text was copied and read in Late Antiquity.”
Certainty is “difficult when faced with fragmentary texts like papyri,” he added, but called the proposed identification “highly probable.”
He notes that while the birth of Jesus is already recounted in the canonical gospels, this is the “earliest manuscript record that attests the childhood of Jesus in detail.”
The words on the fragment are believed to be part of a story in which a 5-year-old Jesus is playing near a stream and molding clay that he finds in the mud into sparrows. When Joseph scolds him and asks him why he is doing this on the Sabbath, or the day of rest, Jesus claps his hands and the figures come to life.
Zellmann-Rohrer said the episode’s playfulness, the claim of Jesus creating of life from an inanimate substance, and “the texture of the relationship between Jesus and Joseph” depicted adds “significantly to the picture of the childhood of Jesus that we get from the canonical gospels.”