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| Jesus and John the Baptist (Image is irrelevant to the text below: there is a surprising lack of decent Christ-child images out there) |
And after these things one day Jesus was playing with other boys upon the top of an house of two stories. And one child was pushed down by another and thrown down to the ground and died. And the boys which were playing with him, when they saw it, fled, and Jesus was left alone standing upon the roof whence the boy was thrown down.
And when the parents of the boy that was dead heard of it they ran weeping, and when they found the boy lying dead upon the earth and Jesus standing alone, they supposed that the boy had been thrown down by him, and they looked upon him and reviled him.
But Jesus, seeing that, leaped down straightway from the upper story and stood at the head of him that was dead and saith to him: Zeno, did I cast thee down? Arise and tell. For so was the boy called. And with the word the boy rose up and worshipped Jesus and said: Lord, thou didst not cast me down, but when I was dead thou didst make me alive.
- The Infancy Gospel of Thomas 8:1-3
Today's excerpt contains scant wisdom in the traditional sense, so perhaps I've been a tad misleading with the title. Nonetheless, I felt like sharing this passage because it serves as a prime example of the early Christian legendary accounts of Jesus of Nazareth.
Humans inherently possess a need to know, and when we lack necessary or otherwise crucial information our tendency is to provide the answers ourselves--for good or ill. If you give your New Testament a quick skim it will validate how little of Christ's youth was actually written. In this case, The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is undoubtedly a byproduct of a serious lack of infancy narratives in early Christian accounts.
Of course, one should not overlook another crucial reason for its existence -- our innate love of storytelling. Just as the New Testament is largely embellished by legendary accounts, so too did this mythologizing occur outside the New Testament. Even in second and third century Palestine we were still hardwired to tell a great tale, with more emphasis being added upon each subsequent retelling.
This gospel remains a favourite of mine, on account of how it presents a very human-like messiah (a concept rather foreign to the New Testament, with the exception of Mark's gospel). In this text the messiah is downright impish and gets into a great deal of mischief (as all children, son of God or not, are bound to do). Nonetheless there is a message threaded within the text which is clearly evident -- Jesus is a very special child favoured by God and showing clear indications of his future importance.
I like the idea of a man-child-God that raises people from the dead just to get out of trouble and clear his own name. It's endearing to me.
Anyways, sermon's closed for today. Depending on whether or not these Valentine's Day shoppers ever leave my sex shop I may or may not finish my 'Salem's Lot review and post it later on today. No promises though.
