What is written in the Gospel of Jesus' childhood, and why its content is contrary to religious dogma

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

In 1945, two brothers in Nag Hammadi, an area on the lower Nile, discovered a set of Gnostic gospels about Jesus, which recounted his childhood and early life. Accordingly, this find still causes a lot of controversy and disagreement among scientists, historians and believers, who believe that most of the texts are abhorrent to religious dogmas. After all, few people are ready to take into account the fact that what is written there may be the real truth …

Long before the religious conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, the early church was divided according to the main tenets and beliefs of Christianity. Factions with different beliefs have argued and sometimes quarreled over the nature of God, his relationship with humanity, and how people should worship him. Of all the branches, the Gnostics were considered one of the greatest threats to Orthodox Christianity.

Many Gnostic documents were lost in the ensuing power struggles between different theologies. Much has changed in the Bible since then, including the way Jesus is portrayed. Thus, the Gnostic beliefs remained a mystery, but the gathering at Nag Hammadi revealed new information about early Christianity.

One of the most shocking texts from the Nag Hammadi website is called the Gospel of Thomas, which contains a record of Jesus' childhood. This gospel portrayed the young prophet as a person unknown even to the most devoted Christians: Jesus punishes people for no reason and shows no respect for his parents. While the Gospel of Infancy is not a canonical part of the New Testament, it provides a fascinating look at what some early Christians believed might have been the childhood of Jesus.

1. He cursed the boy

According to the Gospel, five-year-old Jesus collects water from a stream into small puddles and performs a miracle. He sculpts sparrows out of mud, which come to life and fly away. However, a small boy suddenly appeared and angered Jesus by using a willow branch to break up the puddles of water that Jesus had created.

Jesus asks. Jesus curses the boy, who subsequently withers away until he meets his end.

2. Cruel reprisals against a child and his parents

Cursing the boy to death, Jesus walks through the village, where a child running towards him hits his shoulder. And this time the young messiah curses another child, after which he falls, becoming lifeless.

The parents of the deceased child go to Jesus' father, Joseph, and complain that his son killed two children in the village in one day. Joseph recalled the lad and exhorted him, saying: "Why are you doing such a thing that they suffer, hate us and persecute us?"

To which Jesus replied:. Having said this, Jesus blinds the parents of the child.

3. Bad character

After Jesus again began to commit atrocities, Joseph grabbed his ear, squeezing him tightly, but all his father's attempts were in vain. Throughout the Gospels of Infancy, Jesus confronts various teachers and authority figures. He constantly contradicts and humiliates his teachers, thereby forcing his contemporaries to think about many things in order to find justification for his actions.

4. Jesus humiliates one of his teachers

The gospel of infancy follows a certain formula that readers at the time may have found typical. There is a series of three miracles followed by a lesson. Miracles are usually allegorical constructions, but as a rule, many teachers verbalize their meaning through the Word of Jesus.

The first teacher is Zacchaeus. Joseph specifically asks Zacchaeus to teach the boy to love those who are his age, to respect old age, and to honor his elders. Zacchaeus does his best to teach Jesus the alphabet, starting with the Greek letter Alpha. Jesus then begins his discourse by questioning the knowledge of his teacher.

- he says, before correcting the teacher's inscription and taunting him.

Zacchaeus answers Jesus:

5. He left for three days without warning

As Jesus matures, in the Gospel of Infancy, he is revealed from a new side each time. His later miracles include the resurrection of people, including the healing of a sick child and a builder, but he continues to be an antagonist towards his parents. When Jesus was twelve years old, his parents went to Jerusalem for the Passover, as was the custom at the time.

Upon returning home, they discover that Jesus has disappeared. For three days they seek him out and eventually see him lecturing to a group of Elders in the Jerusalem Temple. When his mother confronts him, saying that they were worried about his disappearance, Jesus replies:.

6. Healing and Demonstration of Power

The first three miracles of Jesus involve the killing of two children, the blindness of two adults, and the humiliation of an elderly person. Joseph constantly laments that his son's actions caused the entire city to treat him with contempt. However, by making fun of the school teacher Zacchaeus, Jesus abruptly reverses all the damage he has done.

And when [the Jewish people] consulted with Zacchaeus, the little child laughed aloud and said:.

And when he stopped speaking, immediately they were all healed, falling under his curse. And after that no one dared to provoke him, so that he would not curse him and cripple him. Jesus performs this feat as a demonstration of his great abilities.

7. The Purpose of the Gospel

According to Bart Ehrman, a New Testament scholar, storytellers of this time did not share stories to show a character that meets challenges and grows as a person. Instead, the stories focused on characters whose traits were constant throughout time, from the moment of birth to death.

For early Christians, there was little or no difference between an infant and an adult Jesus. Thus, the author may not have wanted these stories to show how Jesus was once impulsive but grew into a wise leader. Rather, Jesus appears to be a person who has been given divine understanding from birth - everything Jesus did was right because Jesus did it.

8. Courage

Why is there a controversial story about a hostile boy Jesus who becomes a peaceful healer? Perhaps the author of the text was trying to model what the Romans considered masculine virtues. Roman masculinity revolved largely around the concept of virtus.

Virtus (valor, or the goddess Virtuta) had many meanings that changed over the long life of the empire under the influence of its interaction with the people it conquered, especially the Greeks. Roman masculinity meant mastery over enemies and the ability to achieve complete obedience from women, children and foreigners.

Some scholars urge modern readers to consider the gospel of infancy in this context. The concept of virtue can affect Jesus' disobedience and disrespect for his father. To become the highest person in Roman society meant not submitting to anyone's authority. Jesus cannot obey his father or his teachers because he is above all other people.

9. Some modern scholars believe that the Gospel was a satirical work

Although the gospel is an apocryphal text, scholars have tried many approaches to reconcile the biblical Jesus with the impulsive and aggressive Jesus of the Gospel of Infancy. These approaches position the text as Old Testament, Greco-Roman in nature, or simply a piece of Gnosticism.

Theologian James Waddell believes that the non-Christian wrote the Gospel as a satirical attack. He points out that the author of the Gospel of Infancy appears to have little or no knowledge of Jewish traditions during the time of Jesus' life. This probably points to either a Greek author or a Jewish writer who has not yet converted or influenced Christianity.

Second, Waddell argues that tensions between new Christians and the traditional Jewish people would increase as Christians appear to have weakened the sometimes strict commandments of Judaism. Christianity was still considered a sect of Judaism, and the bold changes in faith preached by figures such as the apostle Paul undoubtedly irritated the Orthodox Jewish people.

Thus, the many sins of Jesus, including murder, breaking the Sabbath, and refusing to honor his elders, would serve to poke a satirical finger in the eyes of those who would elevate Jesus to the status of a deity, making the divine Jesus no better than a pagan god.

10. Many of Jesus' acts in the Gospel of Infancy are mentioned in the Qur'an

Jesus is the main prophet in the Qur'an, appearing about thirty-five times. Many of these apparitions echo the stories of Jesus that come not only from the Bible, but also from Gnostic texts, including the Gospel of Infancy.

The story of how Jesus breathed life into birds of clay, for example, is repeated in the Qur'an in a passage that reads:"

11. The Gospel was written two or three centuries after the events

The New Testament, like the Old Testament, is a scattered collection of religious scrolls and stories. It took religious schisms, crumbling empires, and hundreds of years of theology to shape the modern canon. Scholars disagree about the exact dates of the compilation of the books of the New Testament, but generally agree that it began with the letters of the apostle Paul around 30 CE. NS.

In the first and second centuries, retellings were in the Gospel of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Since the Gospel of Infancy refers to a large extent to the canonical Gospels, some believe that its earliest possible date of compilation may be 80 AD. NS. It appears to have been written no later than A. D. 185. e., since the influential father of the church Irenaeus referred to her in the text. Even this date is suspicious, however, as these stories were likely passed down over the years as part of the oral tradition, and Irenaeus may have referred to these stories rather than the written Gospel.

12. The Gospel in the Roman Empire

The Gnostics are often referred to as a group of mystics who believed that physical matter was evil and therefore the spirit of Christ would not have a physical body of its own. In fact, the movement was a large and varied collection of philosophical and cosmological views. While their aversion to matter was a basic tenet, many other schismatic beliefs led them into theological conflicts with orthodox Christianity.

The early church fathers led constant theological opposition to the Gnostics and other heretics, refuting them in letters and sermons. The power and influence of the Gnostics fell sharply after the conversion of Constantine.

Christian bishops found power in the bureaucratic structure of the Roman Empire, using it to ban certain sects of Christianity and books that supported those beliefs. Among the banned literature may have been Thomas's Gospel of Infancy.

13. There are several versions of the Gospel

Although all of the canonical gospels contain accounts of Jesus' infancy and childhood, none of them are considered true gospels of infancy. However, in the Gnostic texts, Thomas is not the only author who dedicates the entire Gospel exclusively to the youth of Jesus. The Nag Hammadi Library contains the Gospel of James from the same period in the life of Jesus.

Although the gospels of Thomas and James are the most widely read, they are far from the only gospels of infancy. Outside the Nag Hammadi Library, there is the Syrian Gospel of Infancy, the story of Joseph the Carpenter, and the life of John the Baptist.

In the wake of the spread of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire, the early Christians devoured any literature related to Jesus, longing for new texts concerning their Lord. Like most of the New Testament, these texts were written at least one hundred years after Jesus' death. Many of them are borrowed from the canonical Gospels.

At the time, people understood this not as plagiarism or usurpation, but rather as a late contribution to a growing oral tradition. It was only through centuries of controversy and confusion that the New Testament was consolidated into the text we know today.

Read in the next article also who actually wrote the Bible and why there is a dispute on this matter to this day.