He's a Very Naughty Boy: The Infancy Gospel of Thomas
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Chris Huntley
4.8 • 745 Ratings
🗓️ 14 November 2023
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is one of the most intriguing and peculiar non-canonical accounts of Jesus' life from outside the New Testament. The New Testament itself provides only one story about Jesus as a boy (as a twelve-year old, in Luke 2); this later account contains intriguing stories of the mischievous Son of God from ages 5-12.
Is he an uncontrollable supernatural being who hasn't yet learned to control his power? Or a Savior already confronting the evils of the world? Or a prime example of a resident family problem?
In this special episode Bart interviews Christopher Frilingos, professor of Early Christianity at Michigan State, an expert in the non-canonical Gospels with an unusual theory about the Infancy Gospel of Thomas
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. |
| 0:07.0 | The only show, where a six-time New York Times best-selling author and world-renowned Bible scholar |
| 0:13.0 | uncovers the many fascinating, little-known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the rise of Christianity. |
| 0:20.0 | I'm your host, Megan Lewis. |
| 0:22.6 | Let's begin. |
| 0:24.8 | I'd like to welcome you to a special edition of the misquoting Jesus podcast. |
| 0:31.2 | Today we're going to be talking about an area that I am really interested in and have been for a long time, |
| 0:36.9 | some of the non-canonical |
| 0:38.3 | Gospels that didn't make it into the New Testament. |
| 0:42.1 | And as you can tell, Megan is not introducing this. |
| 0:44.6 | I am. |
| 0:45.8 | And I'm introducing it because I'll be interviewing somebody other than myself to talk about |
| 0:50.4 | these, somebody who's a real expert in two of the Gospels that I think are the most |
| 0:55.4 | interesting outside the New Testament. These are two Gospels that are collectively sometimes |
| 1:00.7 | called the infancy Gospels, which means that they're about Jesus' birth and young life. |
| 1:07.1 | Both of these books were influential in Christianity historically. |
| 1:12.1 | One of them is about the life of Jesus as a boy. |
| 1:16.4 | Jesus starts out as a five-year-old, and we have stories going up to when he's 12. |
| 1:21.4 | This one is called the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, and it is very interesting, because as you're going to see, this portrays Jesus. |
| 1:30.5 | Most readers who see it today think, wow, that's a mischievous kid, and he has power as the |
| 1:36.0 | son of God. What would the Son of God be like as a five-year-old? And so that's what this account |
| 1:41.3 | is about. The other account is called the Protoggospel of James, and it's not about |
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