A newly deciphered manuscript dating back 1,600 years has been determined to be the oldest record of the childhood of Jesus Christ, experts said in a press release.
The piece of papyrus has been stored in a university library in Hamburg, Germany for decades, Humboldt University historians announced. The document “went unnoticed” until Dr Lajos Berkes of the German Institute for Christianity and Antiquity at the Humboldt University in Berlin and Professor Gabriel Nocchi Macedo of the University of Liege in Belgium studied it and identified it as the earliest surviving copy of the “Infancy Gospel.” 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, the oldest version of this gospel was believed to be an 11th century codex.
Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg/Public Domain Mark 1.0
The document translated by Berkes and Macedo was dated to between the 4th and 5th centuries. The stories in the document are not found in the Bible, according to the release, but the papyrus contains anecdotes that would have been widely shared in Antiquity and the Age average The few words in the passage describe a “miracle” 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 for researchers that the gospel was originally written in that language. The fragment contains 13 lines in Greek letters and comes 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 language of the fragment and compare it to other early Christian texts.
“It was thought to be part of an everyday document, like a private letter or shopping list, because the handwriting looks so clumsy,” Berkes said in the press release. “We first noticed the word Jesus in the text. Then, comparing it to many 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.
