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, which is more than 1,600 years old, had lain unnoticed for decades at the Carl von Ossietzky State and University Library in Hamburg until Macedo and Dr. Lajos Berkes of the Institute for Christianity and Antiquity at Humboldt University in Berlin identified its true origin.

The small fragment, which measures just over 10 cm by 5 cm, contains 13 lines of Greek letters from late ancient Egypt. The contents were originally thought to be part of “an everyday document, like a private letter or a shopping list, because the writing is very clumsy,” Berkes said. “Then, when we compared it to many other digitized papyri, we deciphered it letter by letter and quickly realized that it could not be an everyday document.”

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

“The fragment is of extraordinary research interest,” Berkes said. “On the one hand, because we were able to date it to the fourth to fifth century, making it the oldest known copy. On the other hand, because we were able to gain new insights into the transmission of the text.”

Although the words in the document are not taken from the Bible, they describe a “miracle,” according to the Gospel of Thomas, that Jesus performed at age 5 when he molded soft river clay into sparrows and then brought them to life.