Infancy Gospel of Thomas Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas (mid-2nd century AD) is an example of a popular genre of the 2nd and 3rd centuries, a miracle literature of Infancy Gospels that was both entertaining and inspirational, crafted to satisfy the hunger for more miraculous and anecdotal relations of the childhood of Jesus, thus filling the need left unmet by the second chapter of the Gospel of Luke. The Infancy Gospels also provided opportunities to underscore some of the developing theologies, whether of the continuing virginity of Mary, which derives entirely from such apocrypha, or gnostic doctrines later condemned as heresy. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is an pseudepigraphical work, for it claims within its text to have been written by "Thomas the Israelite" (in a Latin version). The historical Thomas is very unlikely to have had anything to do with it. Whoever its author was, he had no knowledge of Jewish life, beyond the Passover observance, and he had the completed Gospel of Luke to lean on, so this work does not date from the 1st century. The first traced quote from it is in writings of Irenaeus of Lyon, ca 185, which sets a terminus ante quem.Scholars disagree whether the original language of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas was Greek or Syriac. The few surviving Greek manuscripts are all late. The earliest authorities are a much abbreviated 6th century Syriac version and a Latin palimpsest at Vienna of the 5th or 6th century, which has never been deciphered in full. There is such an unanalysed welter of manuscripts, translations, shortened versions, alternates and parallels that they have prevented an easy decision. This number of texts and versions reflect its widespread popularity, and it may have influenced passages of the Qur'an.
Thus this Infancy Gospel of Thomas has had a much wider distribution than the simpler, less artful and less narratively structured "sayings" Gospel of Thomas that was discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945.
Later references by Hippolytus and Origen are more likely to be referring to this Infancy Gospel than to the Nag Hammadi "sayings" Gospel of Thomas.
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