Gospel of Pseudo-Thomas: What the fascinating papyrus tells us about the childhood of Jesus

It was an ordinary summer afternoon for researchers Gabriel Nocchi Macedo and Lajos Berkes. In Berkes' office at the University of Berlin, they examine digitized images of old documents.

“We knew that we were interested in some papyri from the University of Hamburg,” Macedo explains in an interview with BBC News Brazil.

“Papyrological documentation is kept in libraries, museums or universities in general, and many of these collections are now partially or entirely digitized, with photographs available on the internet,” he explains.

“This work of observing papyri through photographs is part of the daily life of papyrological research.

It was then that a document caught the attention of experts.

From the first deciphering work, they noticed that there was a sequence of three ancient Greek letters with the sound ies, “of Jesus”.

“There aren't many words in the Greek language that start with these letters, so we understood that there was a mention of Jesus,” he explains.

This type of search usually starts with a few keywords, to try to give an idea of ​​what is being written.

Indeed, in addition to using an ancient language, these papyri are often fragmentary and their texts are written in a spelling very different from that of today.

Later that day, they published the identified words in a professional database where all known texts of Greek literature from Antiquity to the Middle Ages are recorded.

They discovered that the papyrus was a copy of the first extract of the famous Gospel of Thomas on the childhood of Jesusan apocryphal text which recounts passages from what would have been the life of Jesus between the ages of 5 and 12, that is to say stories which are not included in the Bible, since the four canonical gospels are silent on this phase.

For 18 months, the Brazilian Macedo and his Hungarian colleague Berkes have been studying the papyrus in detail. They personally traveled to Hamburg to physically analyze the material.

And, everyone in their university – Macedo is a professor at the University of Liège in Belgium, Berkes at the University of Berlin in Germany – has studied in detail all the characteristics of the document which, last June, was revealed to the whole world .

This document has the distinction of being the oldest known manuscript of this important story of the childhood of Jesus. According to researchers, the papyrus found was written between the 4th and 5th centuries.

This dating is based on spelling style.

“The writings are different depending on the era. And some are more difficult than others,” says Macedo.

“In the case of our papyrus, it is not calligraphic, it is not beautiful, well done. This is uglier writing, done by someone who didn't know how to write very well. He wasn't a professional, a copyist, I think that's why she didn't attract attention [parmi les nombreux documents archivés à Hambourg] ».

One of the hypotheses put forward by researchers is that the text was produced as part of an apprenticeship by a student monk to perhaps one day become a copyist. This would explain the clumsy writing and the irregularity of the lines.

“Unfortunately, like the archaeological context from which it [le papyrus] origin is not known, the only tool we had to date it was paleography, that is to say the type of writing. We used the comparative method,” he explains.

In the academic article they wrote, the two researchers point out that “there is no evidence of how the papyrus was discovered, nor when it was discovered.”

According to the researchers, the papyrological collection of the University of Hamburg was formed by the acquisition of a collection between 1906 and 1913, and “then by individual purchases until 1939”.

They believe that the document analyzed was only inventoried by the university during this century, since in 2001 “the collection [de l’université] had only 782 numbers”, and that this papyrus was cataloged under the number 1011.

“The fragment could have belonged to the original collection or to a batch of papyri […] transported in a wooden box from Berlin to Hamburg in 1990,” the researchers explain.

“We are trying to find documents on the history of papyrus. Unfortunately, there is not much about it,” laments Macedo.

The Infancy Gospel of Jesus, also called the Gospel of Pseudo-Thomas or Protogospel of Thomas, was already well known to religious scholars.

Previously, the oldest Greek document containing this story dates back to the 11th century.

“It has a tradition, a very complex transmission, since it is known in nine ancient languages ​​and some are already medieval translations. Some of these languages ​​have several versions: Greek, for example, had four different versions,” explains the Brazilian researcher.

The fragment, which measures 11 by 5 centimeters and has 13 lines of text, contains an extract from the beginning of this gospel. This is the story of what is said to have been the first miracle performed by Jesus, when he was only five years old.

According to the text, “he played at the ford of a stream, he gathered the running waters into pools and purified them, and he did these things in words only”, as translated by Professor Frederico Lourenço of the University of Coimbra.

“He made malleable clay and formed twelve sparrows from it. He made them on Saturday. And there were many other children playing with him,” the text continues.

A Jew, seeing what Jesus was doing while playing on the Sabbath, immediately went and said to his father Joseph: “Behold, your son is by the stream; he took clay and fashioned twelve sparrows, and he profaned the Sabbath,'” the report continues.

In this case, the problem was due to Jewish law which required not working on the Sabbath.

“Joseph, when he came and saw him, cried out, “Why do you do these things on the Sabbath that it is not lawful for you to do? “Jesus, clapping his hands, called the sparrows and said to them: 'Go! And the sparrows flew away singing.”

According to Federico Lourenço's commentary in the book Apocryphal Gospels – Greek and Latin – “it is not possible to determine, from this text, neither its authorship, nor its date, nor its original title”.

The Portuguese professor and translator writes that the hypotheses put forward to date the text were disparate and ranged between the 2nd and 6th centuries; the current discovery narrows this gap somewhat.

“It is a confusing text in several respects, notably in the way in which it depicts an insensitive and capricious child Jesus,” he analyzes in his book.

“It is also curious that it is the apocryphal gospel which has the fewest parallels with the four canonical gospels (and with other apocrypha) and which exists as if in its own bubble.

Lourenço adds that “some have called it the first example of children's literature […] in a Christian context.

Macedo, a professor from Coimbra, says he based his work on the Greek writing of two manuscripts dating from the 15th century. He says he is surprised “that the Greek manuscripts of this gospel are, in general, so late”, because “there are older testimonies of the text (6th century) in the Syriac translation”.

The researcher explains to BBC News Brasil that this is one of the points that modifies his discovery: some believed that the report was originally written in Syriac.

There is now virtually no doubt that the first version was in ancient Greek, the lingua franca of the Mediterranean intelligentsia in these first centuries of the Common Era.

Specialist in early Christianity and author of several works on the subject, historian André Leonardo Chevitarese, professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), points out that, apparently, the concern for what happened in the The first years of Jesus' life was a late construction, that is to say, it did not concern the first generation of his disciples.

“The authors who could have told us about the childhood of Jesus, in the 50s and 60s of the first century, said nothing [à ce sujet] “, he told BBC News Brazil.

“It is therefore very likely that the stories contained in the Gospel of Pseudo-Thomas are very late, dating from the second half of the second century.

At a time when “the one who could tell us what that childhood was like was no longer alive to tell us anything,” says the historian.

In an interview with BBC News Brazil, theologian, historian and philosopher Gerson Leite de Moraes, professor at Mackenzie Presbyterian University, said the text “is an attempt to fill a gap.” In this case: the lack of biographical or hagiographic data. Information about an important period in the life of Jesus.

“It was written at a time in history when various theological currents exist and coexist, on the margins, inside or outside of Christianity, in competition,” he specifies.

Chevitarese comments that the major importance of this discovery is “that it significantly calls into question the dating of this gospel” and the fact that “the original was most likely in Greek”.

Moraes argues that “any manuscript which traces the origins of Christianity” is very important because it “proves and corroborates an entire tradition of theological, philosophical, historical and sociological elements which were the basis of the organization of Christianity”.

Mr. Moraes recognizes that “the great novelty” of this discovery lies in its dating:

“There is evidence that [l’Évangile du Pseudo-Thomas] is a very old document, which has enormous support from a great tradition,” he says.