1,600-year-old fragment identified as oldest written account of Jesus Christ's childhood

June 12 (UPI) — A newly deciphered manuscript dating from the 4th or 5th century and housed in a university library in Hamburg, Germany, has been identified by researchers as the oldest surviving account of the childhood of Jesus Christ.

“Our findings on this late ancient Greek copy of the work confirm the current assessment that the 'Infancy Gospel of Thomas' was originally written in Greek,” said papyrologist Gabriel Nocchi Macedo of the University of Liège in Belgium.

The papyrus fragment, dating back more than 1,600 years, had gone unnoticed for decades at the Carl von Ossietzky State and University Library in Hamburg, until Macedo and Dr. Lajos Berkes of the Institute of Christianity and antiquity from the Humboldt University of Berlin identify its true nature. origin.

The small fragment, which measures just over 4 inches by 2 inches, contains thirteen lines of late ancient Egyptian Greek letters. The contents were originally thought to be part of “an everyday document, like a private letter or a shopping list, because the handwriting is very clumsy,” Berkes explained. “Then, comparing it with many other digitized papyri, we deciphered it letter by letter and quickly realized that it could not be a common document.”

Scholars believe the Gospel copy was created as a writing exercise – given the clumsy handwriting and irregular lines – in a school or monastery, which would make it a much better copy of the Gospel. older than the manuscript of the “Gospel of the Infancy of Thomas”. from the 11th century.

“The fragment is of extraordinary research interest,” Berkes said. “On the one hand, because we were able to date it from the 4th to the 5th century, which makes it the oldest known copy. On the other hand, because we were able to acquire new knowledge about the transmission of the text.”

Although the words in the document do not come from the Bible, they describe a “miracle,” according to the Gospel of Thomas, that Jesus performed as a 5-year-old child while shaping clay soft water from a river to make sparrows, then he brought sparrows. give them life.