The Childhood of Jesus
June 24th, 2009 by Andrew Bernhard under Infancy Gospel of Thomas. No Comments.
I am pleased to see from Tony Burke’s Apocryphicity blog that there is ongoing research on the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. I had feared serious scholarly inquiries into the nature of this text had dried up in the mid 1990s, but they apparently haven’t. I’ve already mentioned Burke’s 2001 dissertation, “The Infancy Gospel of Thomas: The Text, Its Origins, and Its Transmission” and now comes a new book:
Aasgaard, Reidar. The Childhood of Jesus: Decoding the Apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2009.
Aasgaard is Associate Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Oslo, Norway. Among his publications is “My Beloved Brothers And Sisters!”: Christian Siblingship In Paul 
The mid-second-century apocryphal infancy gospel, the Gospel of Thomas, which deals with the childhood of Jesus from age five to age twelve, has attained only limited interest from scholars. Much research into the story has also been seriously misguided—especially study of the story’s origin, character, and setting.
This book gives a fresh interpretation of the infancy gospel, not least by applying a variety of new approaches, including orality studies, narrative studies, gender studies, and social-scientific approaches.
The book comes to a number of radically new conclusions: The Gospel of Thomas is dependent on oral storytelling and has far more narrative qualities than has been previously assumed. The narrative world depicted in the gospel is that of middle-class Christianity, with the social and cultural ideas and values characteristic of such a milieu.
The gospel’s theology is not heretical—as has often been claimed—but mirrors mainstream thinking rooted in biblical tradition, particularly in the Johannine and Lukan traditions. Jesus is portrayed as a divine figure but also as a true-to-life child of late antiquity.
The audience for the Gospel of Thomas is likely to have come from the rural population of early Christianity, a milieu that has received little attention. A main audience for the story was children among early Christians, making this—at least within Christianity—the oldest-known children’s tale.
The book provides a Greek text and a translation, and several appendixes on the story, along with other early Christian infancy material.
The book has received some strong endorsements as well, most notably from Bart Ehrman:
Although the Infancy Gospel of Th omas has long been enjoyed by readers interested in the Gospels that did not make it into the New Testament, there has been a dearth of scholarship on most of the pressing textual, historical, and theological issues it raises. Reidar Aasgaard has done the scholarly world a real service by presenting a full, interesting, and informed discussion of all these major questions. Scholars will now turn to this study before any other when they want to explore the Infancy Gospel and its traditions.
I concur with that assessment and look forward to picking up my own copy. The book is currently available from amazon.com
I’ve added Aasgard’s book to Other Early Christian Gospels Resource Center.
