The earliest known copy of an incredible story about Jesus performing a miracle as a child has been discovered scrawled on an ancient Egyptian manuscript.
The 2,000-year-old papyrus – a material that predates paper – tells the lesser-known story of the ‘vivification of the sparrows,’ when the five-year-old Messiah is said to have turned clay pigeons into live birds, a tale also referred to as the ‘second miracle’.
The clumsiness of the handwriting led the researchers to believe it was likely written as part of a class exercise in a school or religious community in 4th or 5th Century Egypt, which was a Christian society in those times.
The original story of Jesus’ miracle is thought to have been written around the 2nd Century as part of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a book detailing Jesus of Nazareth’s youth that was ultimately excluded from the Bible.
But until this discovery, the earliest written example of the gospel was from the 11th Century.
Until now, the papyrus had lay unnoticed at the Hamburg State and University Library in Hamburg, Germany.
Experts told DailyMail.com they stumbled upon the papyri while analyzing manuscripts and noticed Jesus’ name in the text.
‘It was thought to be part of an everyday document, such as a private letter or a shopping list, because the handwriting seems so clumsy,’ Dr Lajos Berkes, a co-researcher and lecturer at the Faculty of Theology at Humboldt-Universität said in a press release.
‘We first noticed the word “Jesus” in the text. Then, by comparing it with numerous other digitized papyri, we deciphered it letter by letter and quickly realized that it could not be an everyday document,’ he added.
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas (IGT) describes Jesus’ life from the ages of five to 12 and was written during the 2nd century as a way to fill in the blanks of his youth.
But this gospel was omitted from the Bible because it was thought to be inauthentic.
The Bible was also intended to focus solely on Jesus’ ministry, miracles and what led up to his dying on the cross.
In the IGT story, Jesus is just five years old playing in a stream while molding 12 sparrows out of soft clay in the riverbed mud.
When his father, Joseph, notices what he is doing, he scolds Jesus and asks why he would be molding clay on the Sabbath – a Holy day of rest and worship.
In response, ‘[Jesus] orders the clay figures to ‘take flight as living birds,’ which they do,’ Professor Dr Gabriel Nocchi Macedo, from the University of Liège, Belgium, told DailyMail.com.
The papyrus fragment measured four by two inches and contained a total of 13 lines of a popular religious story from the IGT.
Researchers said the story was likely written as part of a writing exercise in a school or monastery because of the clumsy handwriting, irregular lines and other signifiers.
‘Apart from what can be deduced from the general history of the collection, there is no evidence of how or when the papyrus was discovered,’ the researchers wrote in their article.
Dr Macedo said although they aren’t sure when the papyrus became part of the library’s collection, it seemed to have been inventoried after 2001.
However, there are two probable scenarios for how it came to be in Hamburg: ‘It belonged to the original core of the collection, which was acquired through the German Papyruskartell between 1906 and 1913,’ he said.
‘[It} then augmented through individual purchases up until 1939 [or] it arrived … from Berlin in a box full of unconserved papyri in 1990.’
Prior to this discovery, an 11th-Century manuscript of the IGT was the oldest version known to be in existence.
‘The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is an apocryphal gospel recounting episodes from Jesus’ childhood,’ Dr Macedo explained.
‘These episodes are not told in the Bible or other well-known liturgical or theological works.
‘The work has been attributed to an author named Thomas (perhaps the apostle), but its authorship is unknown.’
Accounts of Jesus’ childhood are limited to the tale of his birth, the family’s escape to Egypt, their return to Nazareth and his visit to the Temple in Jerusalem.
Further information about his youth are included in apocryphal gospels, written after his death.
‘Specialists sometimes compare the IGT to fanfiction,’ Dr Macedo said. ‘It consists of a series of loosely connected scenes where the young Jesus performs miracles, causing amazement of those around him.’
It isn’t known why Jesus’ early years were excluded from the Bible, but Charles Dyer, a professor-at-large of Bible at Moody Bible Institute told Christianity.com it’s likely because it wanted to focus on why he came to earth, his ministry and what led to his time on the cross.
‘In fact, we have, even in his adulthood, we have very little of the life of Jesus, but the part we have is what God thought was sufficient for us to truly understand who he is and why he came to earth,’ Dyer said.
Dr Macedo said he and Berkes will produce a critical edition and commentary on the manuscript and will reassess the style and language of the IGT text. Their results will be published in the Journal of Papyrology and Epigraphy.
‘The fragment is of extraordinary interest for research,’ Berkes said in the statement.
‘On the one hand, because we were able to date it to the 4th to 5th century, making it the earliest known copy,’ he continued.
‘On the other hand, because we were able to gain new insights into the transmission of the text.’
