Brian McDonald
A recently deciphered manuscript dating back 1,600 years has been found to be the oldest record of Jesus Christ’s childhood, experts say. said in a press release.
The piece of papyrus has been stored in a university library in Hamburg, Germany, for decades, historians at Humboldt University announced. The document “remained unnoticed” until Dr. Lajos Berkes of the German Institute of Christianity and Antiquity at Humboldt University in Berlin and Professor Gabriel Nocchi Macedo of the University of Liège in Belgium studied it and identified it as the oldest surviving copy of the “Gospel of Infancy”. of Thomas”, a document detailing the childhood of Jesus Christ.
The translation marks a “significant discovery for the field of research,” Humboldt University said. Until now, it was believed that the oldest version of this gospel was an 11th century codex.
Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg/Public Domain Brand 1.0
The document translated by Berkes and Macedo was dated between the fourth and fifth centuries. The stories contained in the document are not in the Bible, the press release said, but the papyrus contains anecdotes that would have been widely shared in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The fragment’s few words describe a “miracle” that Jesus performed as a child, according to the Gospel of Thomas, which says he brought clay figures of birds to life.
The document was written in Greek, Macedo said, confirming to researchers that the gospel was originally written in that language. The fragment contains 13 lines in Greek letters and originates from late ancient Egypt, according to the press release.
The papyrus was ignored for so long because previous researchers considered it “insignificant,” the press release said. The new technology helped Berkes and Macedo decipher the fragment’s language and compare it with other early Christian texts.
“It was intended to be part of an everyday document, like a private letter or a shopping list, because the handwriting looks very clumsy,” Berkes said in the press release. “First we noticed the word Jesus in the text. Then, comparing it with several other digitized papyri, we deciphered it letter by letter and quickly realized that it could not be an everyday document.”
Macedo and Berkes said in the press release that they believe the gospel was created as a writing exercise in a school or monastery. That would explain the clumsy handwriting and jagged lines, they said.
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