Did we discover an account of Jesus’ childhood?

#maklelan2090

[@christasimon9716]

"You can't tell me what to do, Joseph! You're not my real dad!"

[@DavidAlastairHayden]

😂 Aha! Another Seth Meyers fan.

[@azurejester]

Word, that's pretty funny...

[@sadib100]

Young Jesus, coming to CBS!

[@andrewkircher8261]

I saw the article and immediately thought of Dan and couldn't wait to get his reaction. The article was not easy to follow the time lines.

[@iamfiefo]

Is this the one where Jesus was like that kid in the Twilight Zone who could zap the townspeople and turn them into scarecrows if they were mean to him?

[@digitaljanus]

Pretty sure it's the one where seven-ish year old Jesus shoves his friend off the roof, killing him, and then resurrecting him on the spot, yeah.

[@DneilB007]

No, it’s the one about Jesus biting off the heads of lizards and then bringing them back to life.

[@morrismccab]

​@@DneilB007 Grimms' Jesus Tales?

[@jeffreylehman1159]

Pretty much, Jesus gets mad at another kid, kills him with a thought, then repents, as Dan mentioned. Clearly “fan fiction”, but wild reading.

[@jeffreylehman1159]

Great Twilight zone episode, one of my favorites, called “It’s a good life”

[@dennism206]

I knew that news article was misleading, Thanks Dan for confirming!

[@danjohnston9037]

A print news article mentioned that they think the document itself is a school writing exercise So maybe the fact that the Infancy Gospel was once (yr 400ce) part of a school curriculum is notable

[@RKling-o2b]

😂

[@emptyhand777]

In my youth I would have taken this and ran with it. My typical response was always confirmation bias. I am happy to have developed decent critical thinking skills later in life. How I wish I had them in my youth. Dan, you are doing a greater service than you may realize.

[@blahblahblah6]

It's a common enough mistake.

[@TacticusPrime]

It's cool that they found such an early manuscript of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. From what I remember the other early manuscripts in Greek have significant differences between them.

[@sweetgrassviews5841]

When I read the article I knew to wait until you hit us with the truth! Thanks!

[@samephraimshaversjr8864]

Thanks again for helping us think critically about the latest information, Dan.

[@welcometonebalia]

Thank you.

[@MarcosElMalo2]

Jesus was just an infant when he was sent to Earth from the planet Krypton. It was on Earth that Jesus was found and adopted my Joseph and Mary Kent. He took the name Jesus Kent.

[@CHURCHofX]

But sensationalism sells

[@OldMotherLogo]

❤the T-shirts!

[@benroberts2222]

Yeah I found that article annoying, they really buried the lead that it's a known gospel fragment and they treat the story contained on the fragment like it's historical

[@MarcosElMalo2]

It’s sad, really, because the straight story, truthfully told, is pretty interesting in its own right.

[@Lowlandlord]

For some reason these stories about infant Jesus is making me think of baby Herc in the Disney Hercules movie, beating up snakes and stuff.

[@erink476]

I haven't actually seen that movie, so I don't know how it goes in the movie, but the mythological Hercules/Herakles did strangle some snakes sent to kill him in his cradle. Said snakes were sent by a jealous Hera, which I presume is not their origin in the Disney movie, because my understanding is that Hera is his bio-mother in that, not the cucked wife of his bio-father

[@MarcosElMalo2]

@@erink476 It could be post partem depression that made her send the snakes.

[@AntinAchtymichuk]

That was super interesting. Going to check this out soon. The shirt was killer.

[@Aldrnari956]

I saw the headlines and just knew it had to be overblown. Reading the articles just confirmed it.

[@CarlTuckersonn]

We won’t ever find anything like this until the Church decides to make whatever is found canon and to be found canon lol

[@creamwobbly]

*_eArLiEsT kNoWn AcCoUnT!!!!1!!@!!one!!!!!!!_* I have to imagine these journos writing a breathless account of the tragic loss of Pope Innocent the XIIIth

[@kamilgregor]

We indeed dis

[@stephenleblanc4677]

We discovered Baby Yoda, so anything is possible.

[@sadib100]

I love the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. It's the only gospel that I've read.

[@JohnThomas-ut3go]

I prefer the accounts of the life of Jesus' childhood life according to his best friend Biff

[@Cornelius135]

And if my understanding is correct, they didn’t even “discover” this fragment recently, they’ve had it for a while! They just didn’t realize that it was what it was because the handwriting was bad so they assumed it wasn’t all that important.

[@langreeves6419]

Stories related to religion always have wildly misleading headlines. Thanks for your clarifications.

[@dannyboyakadandaman504furl9]

It does have a great story arch I've read it's actually brilliant.

[@BlackLionSupreme]

I call it baby gangsta Jesus lol.

[@corlissmedia2.0]

Thanks Dan (but could you please correct the title of this video?)? Mark

[@Atheist-gy7wp]

🤙

[@ninjoshday]

Great video! But fyi there's a typo in the title

[@davidjanbaz7728]

Muslims like this book!!

[@grahamjones5400]

The Abrahamic God character has been a plague upon humanity for 2000 years.

[@langreeves6419]

That's an odd profession of faith. So you believe this god is real and powerful, but you don't like the god? Nobody has evidence of who or what god(s) is/are. This god you believe in but don't like...might not be real. Throughout history, people have changed their conceptualizations of god. As we grow, we find our older understandings fail to work. So we re-imagine and update our understanding of what god might be. The abrahamic god has been described very differently. The Bible portrays this god in diverse manners, and people reading those scriptures have had many different interpretations. The books in the Bible are not against slavery, but most Christians today are against slavery. The scriptures are often sexist, but the early church had women leaders. Then the church forbade women, but today there are many affirming churches that have women leadership again. It's not the middle ages. We arent required to believe in a certain god in a certain way. You can conceptualize the abrahamic god however you want....or you can understand god as not being abrahamic, or as a force of the universe, or as nonexistent However you decide to think of god, there are probably some other people who think similarly that you can be in community with.

[@davidjanbaz7728]

​@langreeves6419 you confuse a Pastor/ Elder / Bishop position as being a Non affirming church if they R restricted to a Man as Paul states. There were both Male & female leadership in the Church just NOT the leader of an assembly. Not speaking in church had more to do with teaching due to the non education of women in Theology at that time period . But I see you picked up Dan's vocabulary of bias against church tradition and fighting his fight against male dominated leadership as practiced poorly in the Mormon church as well as hyper literalist fundamentalist churches. Woke affirming churches just reflect the continuation of Dan's liberal biases of his minimalists scholarship from the 19th century German critics of the Bible. But u do u !

[@langreeves6419]

@davidjanbaz7728 I will choose to accept historical records of early women apostles, pastors, and other roles of leadership that women had and which Paul himself approved (Of course he would, why would Paul reject those whom God calls?) But you are free to reject history, reject the Bible, and reject God and God's servants.

[@lysanamcmillan7972]

"Abrahamic" is not 2000 years. It's considerably longer. You sound like a fundamentalist Christian arguing young-Earth Creationism with this pathetic excuse for a label and timeline.

[@roberthunter6927]

"Tommy" is not the "real bible" so....... A bit like people arguing if "Predator" or "Alien" is going to win in a fight. It depends entirely on the script writer. Neither of them are real monsters. You like the guy with the funny mouth parts, or the one with acid for blood? [To be fair, Ripley's aliens have funny mouth parts too]. Short version: Thomas is as authoritative as the bits in the official bible, which is not very much in both cases. I guess the bigger "Canon" wins?

[@emalee8366]

"Dis we" or did we? 😄

[@gregoryryan762]

Wait so you are saying this should definitively end the debate over the Gospel of Thomas Syriac origins?

[@Misa_Susaki]

Dis

[@DneilB007]

I could be mistaken, but I was certain that the Infancy Gospel of Thomas was written by Christopher Moore and published in 2002.

[@andrewsuryali8540]

No. That one's wackier. My favorite part of it is that Moore, probably unknowingly, promulgated Jerome's little-known theological insistence that Jesus must have been a virgin too. And he did that as a running gag. Also, that book was what made me realize that the two-humped camel was wooly. I mean, I'd ridden both the one-humped and two-humped variants but never realized that the latter was wooly. I actually went and checked the next time I saw one (Great Wall of China tour) and sure enough, wool!

[@DneilB007]

@@andrewsuryali8540Of course they are woolly; they evolved in northern Canada and crossed the Berring Land Bridge into Eurasia. Everything that they adapted to survive in the Arctic turned out to be very advantageous for desert living.

[@grumpyukrainian6076]

Still an interesting find, even sans all the clickbait.

[@BryanMaxDobberstein]

New video. Who dis?

[@sbaker8971]

Who is "we"?

[@ronjones1414]

I was wondering when this would be addressed. The new age does impact some narratives about the first few centuries, it will be interesting to see how that plays out.

[@drlegendre]

Fix the typo in the title.

[@gdevelek]

Just fix the title, man...

[@maskedsaiyan1738]

I don’t think that we’ll ever know what Jesus’ childhood was like. He likely couldn’t read or write. In my opinion, the historical Jesus is less important for a lot of believers than the Jesus of faith.

[@DneilB007]

Your first & last statements are undeniably true; the middle bits are probably inaccurate, and are based off unchallenged scholarly assumptions and post-Biblical myth making that is highly questionable when compared with the earliest known traditions about Jesus and his family. I think the estimates of literacy rates in the Roman Empire are far lower than what the reality was. I have two arguments for a reasonably widespread level of functional literacy in the Roman Empire: graffiti and coinage. Any time we have a preserved wall surface from public spaces (and often with a preserved floor surface from a parade ground), we see graffiti-for example, the donkey-head Jesus graffito. The upper class does not, generally speaking, make crude graffiti (when you’re wealthy, it’s an inscription, not a graffito). The upper classes do not enlist in the lower ranks of the military; and we have zero evidence (written or archaeological) that the legions taught literacy. There was a high enough level of literacy that the lower ranks of the Roman Army scribbled graffiti everywhere. They likely couldn’t quote the speeches of Cicero, but they could read orders and write reports. The second piece of evidence is the coinage. Roman coinage has writing on it-names, cities, slogans. Copper coins, silver coins. Why do I mention this? Who used the copper coins? The plebs. The poor. Why did they have slogans on the coins? Because Roman coinage was a propaganda machine. Emperors used coinage to promote their accomplishments-victory over the Parthians, the British, whomever they defeated. They stopped a civil war? “Restutitor Orbis”. We even have a counter-example of contemporary coinage practices in a society with an attested-to low literacy rates. In pre-Roman Britain, several tribes (like the Cornovii, the Catubellauni, the Belgae) adopted Roman-style coinage programs in their respective polities. They have one significant distinction between their coins and the Mediterranean coins that they cribbed from in their designs-they would have more iconographic imagery and little to no writing. They might have a royal name (Cvnobellin) but zero sloganeering. (They also have a very low rate of graffiti; but because of their construction methods and materials, there’s so much room for a survival bias wrecking the data that it’s not worth addressing). So, we see places with low literacy rates use very little writing on their coins; we see, in contrast, Romans using coins as a propaganda tool and integrating slogans into that use of coins; and we see the survival of significant graffiti on public spaces throughout the Roman world. All of this suggests that the level of functional literacy in much of the early Roman Empire, while obviously nowhere near the same levels as in a modern society, was likely at least into the double digits for urban dwellers. When you couple that with Nazareth was likely a worker’s suburb of the Romano-Galileean city Sepphoris, and Josephus’ claim that Herod Antipas went on an Augustus-like building spree in Sepphoris during Jesus’ pre-ministry years, and Mary’s family ties to the priesthood (her sister married a priest who worked in the Jerusalem temple daily-remember, that would have been an arranged marriage, set up by both families), and the narrative of Jesus being an illiterate rural peasant is really an extra-Biblical narrative that we’ve constructed that probably derives from an antisemitic want to push him as far away from the Jewish establishment as possible. TLDR: from what limited resources we have, Jesus’ maternal line was linked to the lower levels of the Temple elites from very early on in the history of Christianity, and the levels of literacy in the Roman world was certainly higher (especially in urban centres) than we give them credit for. He was probably at least functionally literate.

[@lysanamcmillan7972]

@@DneilB007 And in at least two languages, since as a Jewish boy, he'd learn how to read from the Torah. Joseph's carpenter business would've been dependent on being able to track orders and keep books, so numerical literacy would also have come into it. In effect, he'd have had "readin' and writin' and 'rithmetic" taught to him from a young age. It's more than suggested he spoke Aramaic ("Talitha, koum") and there's the argument over whether he also spoke Koine Greek (odds point to yes when dealing with an average man in Judea at the time). So illiterate bumpkin is utter nonsense. An historical person of his situation would've done comparative rings around the average American saying he was one. To match, the slanderer would need to speak at least one language useful in his area other than English, such as Spanish.

[@digitaljanus]

We don't have an accurate childhood account of any of Jesus' historical contemporaries, including some of the most powerful and well-attested people of the Greco-Roman world. It was not a priority for ancient peoples, especially given even the children of the most wealthy and powerful people of that era had a 25-50% chance of dying before age 10. What we have are some fanciful biographies of famous personages long after the fact that ascribe very non-childlike attributes and actions to them to show how they were destined to achieve the status they ultimately did. Like this one, or like the childhood accounts of Alexander the Great and the Buddha.

[@russellestes1764]

FALSE TEACHER ...BEWARE!

[@RKling-o2b]

Yeah, we disn't just discover this. It's just another example of Biblical fan fiction like many other noncanonical "gospels", the books of Enoch, book of Mormon, and others.

[@choogchoog2419]

Dis

[@Chiefdixon]

I never believe the first story or two of anything

[@tussk.]

No.

[@gecalebsmith]

Dis

[@hrvatskinoahid1048]

We know from Deuteronomy 13 that a false prophet can do miracles.

[@enumaelish6751]

They're all false prophets, champ. The Abrahamic god isn't real.

[@hrvatskinoahid1048]

​@@enumaelish6751 I do not share your hatred of tradition. You are neither better nor wiser than previous generations.

[@davidjanbaz7728]

​@@enumaelish6751LOL 😂 provide any evidence for your ignorant opinion !!!

[@lysanamcmillan7972]

@@enumaelish6751 You can't prove falsity of gods any more than anyone can prove existence. This person is willfully misguided in my mind, but you're challenging him with an untestable statement. This puts you as being just as ignorant of reality as he is in other spaces.

[@mdelaney9008]

In Luke we see what we need to know. That Jesus was already learning and discussing Biblical text with the scholars in the temples. As He told His Mother, don’t you know I must be doing the work of my Father? Why do we need so much more information? Doubt. If we trust our Father, we don’t need any more than what the Bible tells us. Extra proof is nice, but if we absolutely have to have it for our own belief, then we are never going to develop faith. Just my opinion, so I prefer to let the Bible show me what I need to know. I fully trust that our Father has given us exactly what we need in His Word.

[@jamesarnette1394]

Your faith has no relevance to my life.

[@jamesarnette1394]

Oh, and the academic consensus is that Luke is complete fiction.

[@mdelaney9008]

@james Annette. Why are you lurking on here? Most atheists could not care less about topics of a Christian nature. However, your being here speaks volumes about the state of your soul. You are drawn here because you are desperate to soothe your soul. If you could only prove God doesn’t exist, you could get your soul to be quiet. But you can’t and you know it. I feel sorry for you.

[@jamesarnette1394]

.... as well as Acts, who's author is also the author of luke.