Never Get Your Biblical Scholarship Information from Mainstream Media

It’s not an issue of wilful bias particularly. It’s an issue of not-particularly-interested-generalists having to tackle stories they don’t know all that much about, usually on a deadline. What you wind up with is “Meh! Good enough!” reporting from people in no position to judge what is good enough.

Case in Point, CBS telling their audience:

Newly deciphered manuscript is oldest written record of Jesus Christ’s childhood, experts say

A newly deciphered manuscript dating back 1,600 years has been determined to be the oldest record of Jesus Christ’s childhood, experts said in a news release.

The piece of papyrus has been stored in a university library in Hamburg, Germany, for decades, historians at Humboldt University announced. The document “remained unnoticed” 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. 

Now, here’s the thing. Experts in an ancient form of hidden knowledge known as “Math” will be able to work out that 2024-1600=c. 424ish. Others of an even more probing bent of mind will note that the Infancy Gospel of Thomas is not a new discovery, which is why I can link it on-line. And those of an even more penetrating mind will note something else: namely, that this MSS is therefore simply the earliest MSS of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, not the oldest written record of Jesus Christ’s childhood.

That honor goes to the gospels of Matthew and Luke, which were written in the first century, whereas the IGT was written in the mid-to late second century.

Funny story: critics of the New Testament love to complain that Matthew and Luke were written forty to fifty years after the events they record and therefore there is no way they can possibly be accurate (even though there are lots of people with a living memory of 1974) Many of these same critics then think nothing of grabbing hold of a piece of gnostic fan fiction like the IGT and declaring it the authentic record of Jesus “suppressed by the Church.”

The reality is that the canonical gospels got written down within the lifetime of many eyewitnesses (and borrowed heavily from the eyewitness–and likely Petrine–testimony from Mark) precisely because the early Church was obsessed (and remained obsessed) with preserving that testimony from getting cluttered with exactly the sort of legend-making, philosophizing, and fan fictioneering that would characterize the much later gnostic gospels. Meanwhile, the Church would have absolutely no power to “suppress” the publication of any documents for centuries. That’s why this new MSS dates from the fifth century. The real reason gnostic gospels vanished is that people stopped copying them, because they stopped caring about gnosticism. It’s the same reason you don’t see books on Pyramid Power anymore. They were big in the late 70s, but Reagan and John Paul II did not conspire to suppress them. The fad faded out, as fad always do.

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is a valuable source of information, not about the childhood of Jesus, but about what the particular gnostic sect that created this particular gospel thought about the universe and how they tried to press the New Hotness of the figure of Jesus into their schema of the cosmos. That why, concurrent with the composition of this gospel, Irenaeus is writing a careful dissection and rebuttal of all the different species of gnosticism that are fractaling away from the core memory of the historical Jesus being preserved by the Church. That dissection would be derided as a grossly inflammatory straw man attack on gnostics by late 19th century and early 20th century scholars–because nobody had any gnostic texts to compare it to. Then, the Nag Hammadi Library was discovered in the 1940s and it turned out Irenaeus had been meticulously fair in letting those texts speak for themselves.

Moderns desperately want to believe that some forgotten MSS is going to blow the lid off the story of Jesus or the Bible or some ancient civilization and utterly revolutionize and explode Everything We Thought We Knew. It was the same before they cracked Egyptian hieroglyphics with the Rosetta Stone. The dream was that Egyptian hieroglyphs would show how the Egyptians had conquered mysteries of science and technology moderns could scarcely dream of. Turned out it was largely magic spells, invocations of various gods, and sundry braggadocio from Egyptian kings, as well as the sort of stuff you’d expect such as brewing formulae, some folk medicine, etc.

People keep thinking that some new information about Jesus is going to blow the gospel accounts to smithereens. That’s why THE DA VINCI CODE was a big deal a while back. But there will be no new information about Jesus. Just the same old Tradition preserved by the Church on the one hand and, on the other hand, a bunch of fan fiction, whether old (gnostic gospels) or new (Book of Mormon or this godawful thing).