What is the Infancy Gospel of Thomas?

This closes the record of the Holy Childhood as furnished by the canonical Gospel. Cf. Edersheim, "Life of Jesus the Messiah," i. 226-234; Nicoll "The Incarnate Saviour," chapter 3; and Hughes, "The Manliness of Christ," pp. 35-60. Apocryphal accounts, like the "Gospel of Thomas," allege working by the youthful JESUS of no less than sixteen miracles: see Orr, "Apocryphal Gospels," p. 122. Such conduct, however, as these portray, would be "as unlovely as shocking" (Rush Rhees, p. 57).

Now if we compare legendary accounts, what do we find? I am almost ashamed to recount such things of the blessed Lord. I do not speak of the Roman church receiving all the miracles I refer to, but I cite them to shew the taste of early ecclesiastical writers and their frauds. The Lord and other boys were playing, and one fell from the top of the house, the rest fled, and the Lord remained. The parents of the dead child came and charged Him with throwing him down; He approached the dead child and said, Zenuine, who threw you down? The dead child answered, You did not throw me down, but such an one did. His mother sent Him to the well to get water, and when He took the vessel up full, it was broken, and so He brought the water gathered up in His cloak, and His mother hid all these things, and kept them in her heart. He was with other boys making fish-ponds and mudsparrows. A boy came to destroy them because it was the sabbath; he destroyed the children's fish-ponds, and the child Jesus laid His hands on the sparrows, and they fled away piping. The boy came near His fish-pond, and the water disappeared; and He said, "As the water has disappeared, so shall you," and immediately he dried up. Another boy met Him as He was returning home in the evening, and knocked Him over in running hastily; "As you have knocked against me," said He, "so fall, and do not rise again"; and the boy tumbled down the same hour and expired. A master was teaching Him his alphabet, and, on the child asking the meaning of "aleph," stretched out his hand to strike Him, when his hand dried up, and he died. And then Joseph and Mary would not let Him go out any more; for whoever opposed Him, they said, was struck with death. Other stories there are of many boys bitten by serpents also, and healed by His clothes by the hand of divine Mary — but I suppose we have enough.

I should not demand better evidence of the difference of the human mind and the divine as communicated in the Gospels than for a person to read the spurious gospels, if he has patience to get through them, and compare the senseless fatuities of what was not written by inspiration in those days and the four Gospels; and if he cannot find out the difference, he is quite fit to be an infidel author. Christ, it is said, when a child was making mud birds and ponds, and it was the sabbath, and a big boy came and broke His ponds, the birds took flight and went away, and Christ said, As you have dried my ponds, may you be dried up! So he dried up and died. In this kind of way He became the means of the death of so many that His mother had to keep Him at home in the house. He maltreated the master that taught Him His letters in a like way.

The church confesses the truth, and so is the pillar and ground of the truth, but it does not teach. Suppose I were to say here to Mr. O. "Now I cannot believe you, 'O.' until Mr. B. guarantees what you say." What would that prove? Just this, that I do not believe Mr. O. at all, I should be believing B., not O. And if I do not believe what is in the word until the church says it is right, I do not believe the word at all, but the church … I am sure I am very thankful to have been brought up to confide in the word; but if you come to real power, then you never believe in the word, but by its power over your own conscience. I remember a priest saying to me "How do you know that it is the word of God?" And I asked him, suppose I give you a deep gash in your arm, how do you know what I have got in my hand is a knife? The trouble is, such things silence people at the moment, but they do not bow; it shews mere infidelity. How did the woman in John 4 know that Christ was a prophet, and not merely own that what He said was true? What He said was true, but because it was true, and came to her conscience, she knew that He was a prophet. … I quite admit there is external testimony to the word, but I do not believe that gives faith. You get the power of the word in your conscience, and you have the testimony of it there. As for the Apocrypha, in the preface of the Maccabees, the writer says, "I have abridged five books because they were too long." What authority can that carry? And there are numerous "gospels," so called, with horrid stories about Christ's power as a child, so that one says they were obliged to shut Him up, lest He should kill everybody. But you do not find people quarrelling with the Koran as they do with the Bible; it is because it is the word of God that they will not let it alone. They do not quarrel with Homer, or books that have no power of conscience.

It is clear that this baptism of Christ by John lies at the entrance of His public ministry. Before this, with the exception of the notices of His birth, and the one incident of His youth which Luke recalls, the silence of the Gospels with regard to His life up to this time, when He is about thirty years of age, is absolute and profound. So strange has it seemed that this should be, that, as is well-known, the gap has been sought to be filled by apocryphal statements, in which miraculous deeds, as unlike the soberness of Scripture as possible, and as far removed from the character of the "signs" which bore testimony to His divine nature, fill the pages with transparent falsehood. They only have their use in showing us what our Gospels would have been, had they been left merely to human wisdom to provide for us. We have not really a scrap of this apocryphal work which is otherwise worth preserving. The denial of all this invention of the miraculous is found where the turning of water into wine at Cana of Galilee is stated to be the "beginning of miracles" which He did, and which showed forth His glory (John 2:11). And the silence of Scripture otherwise as to all these years of His life regarding which there were, of course, so many witnesses ready to utter all they knew, and so many eager, as we should be, to take it in ― this silence can only be accounted for by a Hand controlling, and a divine design.

And never at any time were inferior or spurious writings allowed to usurp the place of Scripture. There are several ancient books in existence, certainly written very soon after, and some even before, the Canon of the New Testament was settled: such as the Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, an Epistle ascribed to Barnabas, and certainly of very ancient date: some Epistles of Ignatius and Polycarp, who were St. John's disciples, and a curious allegory, called the Shepherd of Hermas. These books are genuine and perhaps more or less valuable; but no one ever mistook them for Scripture. There are also extant, but very little known, certain manifest forgeries:— such as a pretended Epistle of Christ to King Abgarus, several pretended gospels, and some spurious Epistles. We call these forgeries manifest, for they abound in the most palpable anachronisms and mistakes, and never seem to have deceived any one. Some of the stories about the early life of Jesus are in marked contrast with the simplicity and truthfulness of the real Gospels, and are filled with the wildest accounts of his miracles.

"Now they having departed, behold an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph, saying, Arise, take to thee the little child and His mother, and flee into Egypt, and be there until I shall tell thee; for Herod will seek the little child to destroy it. And having arisen, he took to him the little child and His mother by night, and departed into Egypt, and he was there until the death of Herod, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord, through the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my Son" (verses 13-15). Thus the narrative continues. The child is the only prominent figure in it. There is a spurious gospel, called the Gospel of the Infancy of our Lord, (Evangelium Infantiae), in which the flight to Egypt is adorned with many miracles. We mention some of them. Idols broke to pieces wherever the child came; the three-year-old child of an Egyptian priest who was possessed by demons put a swaddling cloth of the child upon his head, and the demon fled; a woman possessed by a demon was healed by looking upon Mary; robbers fled in terror before the child; all manner of diseases were healed, including leprosy, etc. The whole book shows that it is a counterfeit, gotten up by some one who favored the worship of Mary and the child. How simple the story is here in Matthew. The child is dependent upon Joseph, who is now mentioned, and in poverty, under great danger, at night, they had to flee. God could have transported His Son by a miracle, but the Son of God had become man, and now it was for Him to enter into all. He has to go the long and weary road. The cause of the flight was Herod, who under the power of Satan sought the life of the child. He shows himself here as the murderer from the beginning. Satan is that still, the great red dragon with seven heads and ten horns, ready to devour the man-child (Rev. 12). The place of refuge is Egypt. There He is to go, to be called back after a while in fulfillment of the prophetic Word, "Out of Egypt have I called my Son."

They returned to Nazareth. The visit of the wise men, the flight into Egypt and the return are omitted. Twelve years passed and it did not please the Holy Spirit to give us a report of them. Spurious Gospels of the Infancy were circulated later; they are all legendary and unreliable. As the true Man He grew from infancy to boyhood. Of all the sinless conditions of the human body He was partaker. He grew both mentally and physically. His heart ever seeking God and being in subjection unto Him.

Then He was making figures of animals and birds out of mud. Now, He says, I shall order them to move. Are you, said the boys, the Creator's Son? But then He ordered them, and they went and came back when He called. At another time at a dyer's He threw all the articles out into the yard; the dyer was in a great way about it, when he returned them piece by piece of the right colour. He made all Joseph's work fit exactly.

208 He went out to play, but the boys left and hid themselves, and when in each house they were denied to be there, What (said He) have you there in the furnace? Three-year-old goats, said the woman; and He said, Come out here to your Shepherd, goats, and they came out like goats and leapt around Him, and the women were all terrified, and besought Him; and then He said, Come, boys, and let us play, and immediately they were restored to their proper form.

Then He made ponds and twelve little birds, three of a side and a Jewish boy, Hananus, it being the sabbath, came up and reproved Him and destroyed His fish ponds, but He, clapping His hands on the birds, they flew away piping; and Hananus coming up to destroy the fish ponds of Jesus also the water disappeared, and He said, as the water disappeared, Your life shall disappear also, and immediately the boy was dried up.

What can be more contemptuous towards the constant snare of Jews as well as Gentiles than the apostle's exhortation: "The profane and old-womanish fables refuse"! So he characterizes that which takes the place of God's word, the food of faith. Where there is no healthy appetite of the new man, fabulous dreams have ever had an attraction for the heart and mind of man; and these which surely abound in proportion to distaste for divine revelation. They stimulate, they inflate, they in a measure satisfy nature. But the true God is not there, nor Jesus Christ Whom He has sent, and least of all where they dare most profanely to conceive and set forth either God or His Christ according to their own imaginings. What can be more offensive than the pseudo-evangels about the Lord? How palpable the darkness in contrast with the true light which shines in Him according to the Gospels! How absurd, indeed morally impotent and positively mischievous, the imaginary miracles of His childhood! How holy and wise and perfect the glimpses we have of the truth in the Gospel of Luke!