HARRISBURG (TNS) — A newly deciphered manuscript, dating back to the 4th or 5th century – that’s about 1,600 years – has been determined by researchers to be the oldest and earliest surviving record of Jesus’ childhood, according to experts in a new release.
The piece of papyrus has been stored in a university library in Hamburg, Germany, for decades, historians at Humboldt University announced.
“Our findings on this late antique Greek copy of the work confirm the current assessment that the ‘Infancy Gospel of Thomas’ was originally written in Greek,” papyrologist Gabriel Nocchi Macedo said from the University of Liège in Belgium, within the release.
The papyrus document had gone “unnoticed” for decades at the Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky State and University Library until Dr. Lajos Berkes, from Germany’s Institute for Christianity and Antiquity at Humboldt University in Berlin and Professor Gabriel Nocchi Macedo from Belgium’s University of Liège, studied it and identified it as the earliest surviving copy of the “Infancy Gospel of Thomas,” a document detailing Jesus Christ’s childhood.
The translation marks a “significant discovery for the research field,” Humboldt University said.
x“Then, by comparing it with numerous other digitized papyri, we deciphered it letter by letter and quickly realized it could not be an everyday document.”
The small document went ignored for so long because past researchers considered it “insignificant,” according to the news release.
New technology helped Berks and Macedo decipher the language on the papyrus and compare it to other early Christian texts.
The researchers believe the copy of the Gospel was created as a writing exercise, due to the clumsy handwriting and irregular lines, in a school or monastery. If so, the piece of antique would be a much earlier surviving copy of the gospel than the ‘Infancy Gospel of Thomas’ manuscript from the 11th century.
“The fragment is of extraordinary interest for research,” Berkes said within the release. “On the one hand, because we were able to date it to the 4th to 5th century, making it the earliest known copy. On the other hand, because we were able to gain new insights into the transmission of the text.”
The words in the document appear to describe a “miracle,” according to the Gospel of Thomas, that Jesus performed as a 5-year-old child as he molded soft clay from a river into sparrows, bringing them to life.
