Scrap from extra-biblical Infancy Gospel of Thomas discovered in German archive contains story of young Jesus bringing clay birds to life on the Sabbath

25 June 2024, 5:51 am

A small, 1,600-year-old papyrus fragment discovered in a German archive has been revealed to contain the earliest known copy of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, an early Christian text describing the childhood of Jesus that once enjoyed enormous popularity but was not canonized into the New Testament.

The fragment, measuring about 11 by 5 centimeters (4.3 by 2 inches), contains “a total of 13 lines in Greek letters, around 10 letters per line, and originates from late antique Egypt,” according to a press release from Humboldt University of Berlin earlier this month.

The papyrus fragment, part of the Hamburg State and University Library archive, was discovered after it was scanned and put online as part of an ongoing digitization project. It contains part of a story, from the beginning section of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, in which a young Jesus fashions birds from clay and then brings them to life.

“We almost overlooked it. This text is not from a book; it’s probably a writing exercise. For this reason, the script is not very nice, and the fragment is very tiny,” explained Dr. Lajos Berkes of the Institute for Christianity and Antiquity at Humboldt-Universität in Berlin.

“We found the word Jesus, in Greek. That could figure in a normal papyrus letter… then we saw some other rare words, and so we thought it was maybe a literary text,” Berkes said, speaking to The Times of Israel via Zoom.

By cross-referencing the text fragment with a database of ancient Greek literature, the researchers were able to show that the papyrus fragment contained part of the Infancy Gospel. Berkes, together with Prof. Gabriel Nocchi Macedo of Belgium’s University of Liège, published the findings on the fragment earlier this month. Both scholars are academic researchers and papyrologists, not theologians, Berkes stressed.

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