Recently, an article appeared in an online Australian news outlet under the headline, “Secret Bible text changes everything”. Naturally, I was keen to read the article, considering it is always interesting when the secular world claims to have discovered some secret that has eluded believers for all these years. The sub-heading of the article was, “A mislabeled fragment of Egyptian papyrus tucked away in a German library has blown apart thousand-year-old perceptions about the Bible, and Jesus himself.”
I could have stopped right there and saved myself the frustration of reading yet another hit piece on my Saviour and my faith. However, I was compelled to read on. The article continues as follows: “The Son of God was a terror as a pre-teen. At least if a newly discovered papyrus about Jesus Christ’s childhood is to be believed. He fibbed. He tantrumed. He killed. If so, little wonder the canonical (accepted) Gospels of the Biblical New Testament don’t say much about the Christian messiah’s early years”. So, what is this “secret” book that purports to have blown the lid off the early life of Christ? It is known as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.
Although many may be tempted to immediately equate the Infancy Gospel of Thomas with the Apostle Thomas, there is no evidence that is the case. The works claim to have been written by “Thomas the Israelite”, but the author is not identified further, other than a vague reference to the events which “happened in my region”. Scholars have dated the writing to the second century AD.
In the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (which you can read for yourself online), it is claimed that, as a child (between the ages of 5 and 12), Jesus:
- Brought to life clay sparrows that He had crafted on the Sabbath;
- Cursed a boy, who then dies;
- Struck people with physical blindness;
- Raised a boy named Zeno from the dead (the boy’s parents accused Jesus of pushing him off a roof so Jesus supposedly raised him from the dead so he could tell his parents Jesus did not push him);
- Healed a woodcutter who had cut off part of his foot;
- Carried water in a cloak after the water pitcher was broken;
- Sowed one measure of wheat but harvested a hundred measures;
- Stretched a piece of wood in order to make it the same length as another piece;
- Cursed a teacher who then died;
- Healed James from a snake bite;
- Raised a dead baby;
- Raised a builder who had died in an accident.
Clearly, the writings detail a number of distorted and disturbing characterisations of Jesus and should be rejected by all believers. In fact, if one was to believe everything written in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, the only conclusion you could reach about Jesus in His boyhood is that He was quick tempered, spiteful and disrespectful. So, why was it written in the first place? Some scholars believe it was a piece of “Christian missionary propaganda” intended to demonstrate the divine nature of Jesus in a manner familiar to those who accepted pagan mythological teaching. In other words, it is assumed that the writer was comparing Jesus to Greco-Roman or Egyptian gods in order to impress Hellenistic, Egyptian and pagan sensibilities.
Whatever the reason behind writing The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, what is clear is that the reason this news (and others like it) hits mainstream media is due to the ongoing subversion of Christianity by media conglomerates whose goal is to marginalise and ridicule Christians and their faith. In fact, this revisionist portrayal of history and our faith is a major weapon employed by the media today, designed to give the appearance that Christians are an uneducated bunch of backward thinking people who ignore the supposed “enlightenment” offered in the modern age.
The mainstream media conglomerates have taken it upon themselves to be the gatekeepers of spiritual guidance and moral orientation which has now exacerbated distrust of the Bible, hatred of Jews and Christians and the promotion of moral anarchy through the rejection of a Biblical worldview. Of course, there is a spiritual reason for this. The enemy is seeking to marginalise Christian thought and practice in the public square. In other words, the underlying goal is to change public behaviours by changing private attitudes. It is just another step in the long-held dream of the ruling elite to create a subservient population through the pursuit of “common knowledge”. Not common knowledge based upon Biblical principles, but common knowledge through the pursuit of indoctrination.
In order to freely pursue these goals, the enemy wants your silence and he will use the full weight of the government, corporate institutions, media and social groups to achieve it. For those who refuse, you should expect ridicule, cancellation, hatred and rejection. This should not come as a surprise. As Jesus said in John 15:18: If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you.
Just as it was then, so it remains to this day: the followers of Jesus would be known by their love and the world would be known by its hatred.
