The oldest manuscript mentioning Jesus during his childhood has been identified in Germany, a discovery reported by Arkeonews. The finding reframes a piece of early Christian history and adds a fresh voice to debates about the story of Jesus outside the canonical gospels.
An evaluation of the artifact shows it was created roughly 1,600 years ago. It stands as the oldest surviving copy of the Gospel of Thomas, a text that has long fascinated scholars because it preserves sayings and scenes associated with Jesus’s early years. The document hints at events from Jesus’ childhood, including a scene where clay figurines are said to come to life. Until this breakthrough, the earliest known copy of this gospel was believed to date from the 11th century, making this fragment a remarkable early witness to early Christian thought.
For decades the papyrus fragment resided in the Hamburg State and University Library. It had been dismissed by some researchers as possibly a Greek letter, a shopping list, or a rough draft with little historical value. In the latest study, scientists carefully deciphered the 13-line inscription, which contains about 10 letters per line, and cross-checked the text against other early Christian manuscripts. The handwriting’s uneven quality suggests it may have been produced by a student, or perhaps by an aspiring monk who copied texts in a sparsely equipped setting.
We first detected the name of Jesus within the fragment. By testing the inscription against a broad corpus of digitized papyri, researchers were able to confirm that this was not an ordinary bureaucratic or mundane paper item. The discovery signals a rare glimpse into the improvisational writing practices of early Christian communities and increases confidence in dating the fragment to a period when diverse Christian traditions circulated in the Mediterranean and beyond.
Previously, scholars noted a complex, ancient labyrinth used in Crete for ritual feasts, a reminder of the broader cultural and religious networks that shaped early Christian texts and their transmission across regions. This new find adds a crucial data point to that broader conversation, inviting Canada-based and American researchers to reexamine how early Christian writings traveled, were copied, and were interpreted by communities far from their original contexts. (Arkeonews)