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Infancy Gospel of Thomas | |
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Information | |
Religion | Christianity |
Author | "Thomas the Israelite" |
Language | Greek |
Period | Early Christianity (2nd Century) |
Part of a series on |
New Testament apocrypha |
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The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is an apocryphal gospel about the childhood of Jesus. The scholarly consensus dates it to the mid-to-late second century, with the oldest extant manuscript dating to the fourth or fifth century.[1] The document is generally considered to be Gnostic in origin because of references in letters (by Hippolytus of Rome and Origen of Alexandria) to a "Gospel of Thomas", but it is unclear whether those letters refer to the Infancy Gospel or the Gospel of Thomas, a sayings gospel discovered near Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945.[2]
Early Christian writers regarded the Infancy Gospel of Thomas as inauthentic and heretical. Eusebius rejected it as a heretical "fiction" in the third book of his fourth-century Church History, and Pope Gelasius I included it in his list of heretical books in the fifth century.