The infancy Gospel of Thomas: Allegory or myth – Gnostic or Ebionite?

Abstract

The aim of this article is to show that scholars assess the Infancy Gospel of Thomas disparagingly as “illogical”, “un-Christian” and “banal”. A more positive judgment is that it is either “Gnostic” or “purified of Gnosticism”, or merely one of many ancient tales in the form of a historical allegory about Jesus as a child. The article argues that the author of the Greek version of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas in Codex Sinaiticus (Gr 453) describes the miracles of Jesus in a positive and negative light as if he were an adult. This phenomenon should be understood against the background that this second-century gospel is presented not so much in the genre of a Gnostic redeemer myth, but rather as a god-child myth that has neither an Orthodox nor a Gnostic orientation. Its context is rather early Ebionite Christianity.

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