This is an extremely, not to say exquisitely, detailed analysis of what at first sight can best be described as a barbarous piece of apocryphal doggerel, replete with silly miracle stories and examples of such homicidal violence as would shock any right-minded individual. [1]
The Apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas (IGT) is venerable only because of its age (second century CE) and cultural context. In any other context it would safely have been ignored. It is primitive and without literary or theological significance, except perhaps as a reflection of Docetic Christianity at a very basic level. The remarkable propensity of the boy Jesus to curse those who even mildly offend him is common in other religious biographies, including Jewish accounts of the Old Testament prophets. It was certainly regarded in antiquity as a mark of divine power, and an indispensable characteristic of sanctity. Instance what Giraldus Cambrensis said of the vindictive cast of mind of the Irish saints: "...in eternal death the saints of this land that have been elevated by their merits are more vindictive than the saints of any other region." (Topographia Hibernica ii.55, 83)
It pretends to be a description of the childhood of Jesus, though in effect it consists of some miracle stories and some basic discourses. Some scholars claim to have detected signs in it of narrative sophistication, but it would be hard for the modern reader to find them. IGT is not to be confused with the Gospel of Thomas mentioned by some of the Church Fathers, and first made known to scholarship with the publication in 1956 of the Coptic Gnostic MS by Labib.
Chapter 1 gives a complete overview of previous scholarship on the text, starting with Thilo's critical edition in 1832 and that of von Tischendorf (1851), which remained the standard text-critical edition until the appearance of Chartrand-Burke's thesis (2001), which is due for publication in Corpus Christianorum, Series Apocryphorum. The discovery of new manuscripts and versions in Syriac, Georgian, Slavonic, Ethiopic and Old Irish has made the study of the complex relationships between those versions and the textual transmission of IGT imperative.
Chapter 2 analyses the differences between the three Greek recensions (Aasgaard calls them variants - cf. 32-3), Gs, Ga, Gd and Gb, an abridgement of Ga, from fourteen manuscripts, ranging in date from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries. Gs is the oldest version, depending upon a single eleventh century manuscript (H, Jerusalem, Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, Sabaiticus gr.259), deriving from a fifth century archetype. It thus constitutes the short and oldest Greek form of IGT. Although the Latin and Syriac versions of IGT are older, H is closest to a primitive form of the text. He concludes that the diversity between the recensions cannot be alone explained through faults in written textual transmission. Instead we need to postulate an oral/written paradigm, since, as Aasgaard quite rightly says "IGT was transmitted in a culture that was fundamentally oral" (24). He identifies certain features indicative of a partly oral transmission, or of written transcription from an oral narrative, which best explains the fluidity of the variants in structure and content within the various recensions. He similarly concludes that it is now impossible to reconstruct the archetype, and that the construction of a stemma must reflect "the interchange between the oral and the written" (33).
In chapter 3 the author analyses the structural and narrative form of IGT. He seeks to show that there is a coherent and sophisticated narrative in the text, identifying the motifs of varying audience reactions to Jesus' miracles and of the motif of blessing and cursing. There are differences in style and content between the various Greek recensions, describing the style of Gs (and, by implication, Ga and Gb also) as "unpretentious, fresh and appealing--and thus well fit for finding a broad audience" (49).
In chapters 4 and 5 he explores the topographical, social and cultural context of IGT. His analysis of these aspects is detailed, but hardly revelatory, and comes to no definitive conclusions regarding the geographical location of IGT.[2] He shows the links between the structure of IGT and the gospel of Luke and explores elements which IGT has in common with other Jewish and early Christian literature. His description in particular of human behaviour is meticulous to the point of being trite: "The actions and reactions of IGT's characters add color to its narrative world. A variety of actions take place in the gospel...forming and clapping (2:2,4), bumping and leaping (4:1; 6:7)...[and] verbal modes of expression such as speaking and shouting (2:2; 2:4; 4:1; 6:5; 9:3), laughing and praying (8:1; 10:2)" (64).
He then explores the social relations, implicit and expressed, between the characters in IGT, parents, teachers, children and religious elders, and shows that what can be inferred fits in well with a relatively prosperous eastern Mediterranean Greek-speaking rural community in late antiquity. He concludes, significantly, that it "seems not to be rooted in a Jewish core or dominated area." (69) The anonymity of its general setting facilitated its wide transmission across linguistic, geographical and cultural barriers, picking up and discarding various elements as it went.[3]
The author's analysis of cultural concepts and values in IGT is a socio-psychological examination that is interesting in itself: but it makes a lot of very little. His conclusions match up with those of chapter 4.
Chapter 6 looks at what can be inferred from the text of the human characteristics and social environment of the child Jesus. It is a very useful analysis based upon recent research into the world of childhood in late antiquity. He concludes that "the puer senex features manifest themselves solely in his relations, and then only in his verbal communication with them."
Chapter 7 deals with the development of Jesus from boy to man, dealing with manifestations of dominance and self-restraint on the one hand, and with how Jesus fits into the role of the male in late antiquity, tracking the events in Jesus' childhood from age five to his appearance before the elders in the temple at age 12 (17). Chapter 8 deals with reflections of some episodes in the NT (with the caveat that the canon of 'New' Testament had not been established in the second century), chiefly the gospel of Luke, especially Lc 2:41-52, paraphrased and/or adapted in IGT 17 from memory. The other element (IGT 6:8) comes from, or is related to 1 Cor 13:1, "If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal." Aasgaard dismisses the possibility that this expression (noisy gong and clanging cymbal) may have existed as an independent maxim outside of Paul. The lists which then follow of allusions to biblical texts, the uses of biblical words and concepts, etc., show that IGT was familiar with certain themes and elements from the NT, especially Luke--possibly also John--but it does not cite them verbatim, but from memory. But the majority are very generalised and can hardly be taken as proof of any direct connection between any specific section of the NT and IGT.
Chapter 9, 'Strange Sayings', deals with some cryptic or corrupt sayings in IGT. Their obscurity may have arisen through faulty transmission, and that lends some credence to the possibility that they are simply garbled, unintelligible in varying degrees and certainly of no obvious profundity or theological significance. One or two may have soteriological significance, such as 6:4, Jesus to the first teacher, Zacchaeus: "For I am outside of you, but I am also from within you because of my noble birth in the flesh", and the following reply to his father: "When you were born, I existed and came to you...and you will take on the saving name."[4] Similarly 6:6 "I--and he [who existed] before the world was created--know accurately when you and your fathers...were born" may refer to omniscience of Jesus. Aasgaard refuses to take any Gnostic meaning out of the exposition of the significance of the letter ?/? in 6:10, and rightly so. It may simply be a "jingle...a distortion and parody of reading exercises familiar to anyone having attended the antique school" (145-46). None of these difficult sayings, he concludes, can be taken to have any Gnostic or esoteric significance, beyond what the redactors/tellers would have found in the New Testament.
Chapter 10 looks at the theological substance of IGT, with what the author calls its "epistemology and hermeneutics, ethics and theology of creation and anthropology" (149). Aasgaard correctly identifies some, albeit unsophisticated, Christological elements in IGT: Jesus' possession of divine powers betrays some Johannine influence, direct or indirect. But his assertion that the manifestations of the divine child Jesus' powers in cursing and healing, miracle-working and saving give "evidence of radical theological reflection" (157) makes one think that the author has fallen too much in love with his subject. In dealing with the hermeneutics of the text, the author analyses the usage and meaning of the words relating to understanding and wisdom and the ability to "see". The evident lack of moral values in IGT are rationalised as reflecting the text's "strong Christological focus...demonstrating Jesus' superiority and power" (161), and concludes that, despite all, "things have turned out fine, thanks to the wonderboy Jesus" (162). Overall, he concludes that apart from some idiosyncrasy, IGT "does not represent deviation, but is compatible with commonplace early Christian thinking" (164).
Chapter 11 places IGT within the context of early Christian household storytelling. His conclusion that "Its portrait of Jesus...can have made perfectly (sic) sense to an audience of commoners" (173) is certainly convincing. The circulation in patristic literature of certain themes or even extracts from IGT (Epistle of the Apostles, Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, i.20.1-2 on the spurious writings of the Marcosians,[5] the Gnostic Gospel of Truth I,19, etc.) shows the wide dissemination either of the text itself or its independently circulating components. Aasgaard takes these to be references to IGT. But if the various recensions of IGT had an oral transmission, they might just as likely be freely circulating tales which were at one time or another amalgamated into IGT, which may thus be a collection of disparate elements put together as a single text. Apocryphal tales are eminently portable--and mutable. Certainly, IGT had a very wide geographical circulation: throughout the Mediterranean basin, and from Ireland in the west, to Armenia in the east and Arabia in the south. It circulated in the earliest MSS with "respectable" hagiographic, homiletic, patristic and some other apocryphal material. In the Latin recensions, it circulated with the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, and with other infancy gospel material.
In the final chapter 12, the author argues that IGT was composed as a story for early Christian children. He notes that this was also the opinion of other scholars, but was not developed by them. He adduces parallels from classical and early patristic literature for this. His rhetorical question "Who, then, would be particularly interested in stories about Jesus' childhood, if not...the children themselves?" has a ring of truth to it. But it must be said in reply that stories of the boyhood deeds of great heroes and holy men are part of the repertoire of many cultures, from the Buddha to Finn Mac Cumhaill, and they were not primarily children's literature. Nonetheless, Aasgaard elaborates his thesis in convincing detail, and one must be prepared to concede that IGT would have been equally agreeable to children and some adults alike-in other words, "a broad audience" ( 49).
The appendices contain the Greek text (primarily from Gs), a very readable and well structured English translation, a tabulated comparison of the outline of IGT Ga/(Gb)/Gd as against Gs, the titles of the individual episodes, a survey of the Greek variants and the versions represented by the individual MSS, a tabulation of the attestations of IGT from the second to the seventeenth century, a list of the birth and infancy narratives of Jesus (and Mary), a very full bibliography of primary and secondary sources, a biblical index, an index of IGT in its Greek variants and Latin Syriac and other versions, and finally an index scriptorum.
Altogether, this is a very exhaustive and meticulously researched study of a largely misunderstood or neglected apocryphon. Whilst one may not agree with all of the author's conclusions, one cannot fault its scholarship. It is an invaluable contribution to the study of IGT.
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Notes:
1. As in the account of Jesus cursing and striking dead his second teacher, to which Joseph replies: "Then Joseph summoned his mother and instructed her: 'Don't let him go outside the house lest those who annoy him end up dead'"!
2. In chapter 11 (188 and 190), Aasgaard opines that northern Asia Minor (Bithynia and Pontus) might be "one potential candidate as the place of origin for IGT", and repeats his earlier hypothesis that IGT had a rural origin, a "heritage of the first rural Christians."
3. Aasgaard gives an interesting instance of this on 33 n.46.
4. This section is unique to Gs.
5. Also AH i.16.3, "On the absurd interpretations of the Marcosians."