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Religious Pron - The Infancy Gospels 3

Oct 9, 2023, 6:30 PM

In the last post on the Infancy Gospel of Matthew, we had to deal with dragons. But of course, I’ve saved the most sensational and scandalous stuff for last.

So let’s finish up the final few chapters, and then we’ll take a look at what it all means -
Once the shock and the subsequent numbness wears off.

After the baby Jesus visited Egypt, his clan returned to Israel.

And for a while, things were great. Herod was dead, the family was safe, but then things turned dark. Real dark.

It all started off so innocently, with the 4-year-old Jesus digging some pools of water down by the Jordan River. Playing in the mud, as children will do. And then a little urchin came along and smashed it all to pieces.

Chapter 26 – “Then one of those children, a son of the devil, moved with envy, overthrew what Jesus had built up. Then said Jesus to him: Woe unto thee, thou son of death, thou son of Satan! Dost thou destroy the works which I have wrought?” And immediately he who had done this died.

ZAP. Struck dead on the spot by baby Jesus. Crime scene photo below.

Naturally, the dead kid’s parents were mortified –“Your son has cursed our son, and he is dead.”
Joseph was terrified - “I dare not speak to [the baby Jesus]; but do thou admonish Him [, Mary?]”
So Mary stepped up – “My Lord, what was it that he did to bring about his death?”

So baby Jesus laid it out clearly for mom and pop: “He deserved death, because he scattered the works that I had made.” Whoa.

But the words of Mary soothed tiny Jesus, and so he kicked the young boy in the axx, and back to life.

“But He, not wishing to grieve His mother, with His right foot kicked the hinder parts of the dead boy, and said to him: Rise, thou son of iniquity…“

Now, as a former 4-year-old urchin myself, I can identify with this. I didn’t strike anyone dead, but I was ready to beat a playmate to death once. For almost exactly the same thing. He deliberately smashed my toy plastic truck.

So, I stormed in the screen door, grabbed my (soon to be ex) dad’s baseball bat from his closet, and stormed back through the kitchen.

“Where are you going with that?” My mom asked.
“I’m going to beat the fu** out of Matt B (name redacted to protect his guilty axx.)

Luckily, mom was quicker to the screen door than I was, and, since she was considerably larger than my pre-school self, I acceded to her demands to disarm myself.

The last I heard on the matter was “I’ll be talking to your father about 1) this incident, 2) your language, and 3) our future as a family, when he gets home.” Miss you, dad!

So I understand where Jesus was coming from. And I appreciate getting talked down by loving parents. And if you’ve ever been around young kids, you know they’re pretty forgiving. I think I was playing with Matt B again later that very same day.

Jesus made up with his friends too. He even made 12 clay sparrows, representing the 12 tribes of Israel, to impress them. Then he turned them to life and scattered them, just like the tribes of Israel were scattered.

Chapter 27 – “He struck His hands together, and said to His sparrows: Fly! And at the voice of His command they began to fly.”

But kids can have uneven temperaments, and so later on, the very same thing happened again, and Jesus killed again.

Chapter 28 – “the son of Annas, a priest of the temple, with great fury broke down the [toy] dams which Jesus had made with His own hands. And when Jesus saw this, He said to that boy who had destroyed His dams: O most wicked seed of iniquity! O son of death! O workshop of Satan! “And immediately, in the sight of all, the boy withered away, and died.

This time though, the whole town rose up and threatened to kick the family down the road. But Joseph and Mary calmed both the mob, and the baby Jesus, down.

“… then Jesus seized the dead boy by the ear, and his spirit came back to him, and he revived.”

Thus far Jesus is only guilty of double murder. Both probably acceptable by the rules of 4-year-old justice. But in Chapter 30, Jesus turns rude. And there’s just no excuse for that. Mary and Joseph had called in a Pharisee priest to educate him, but Jesus humiliated the poor old man.

Jesus: “I was before the law…[and] when I shall be exalted on earth, I will cause to cease all mention of your genealogy. I alone know when you were born, and how long your life on earth will be.”

Gulp. That sounds like a mob threat. The rabbi thought so too, and so he skee-daddled right on out of town. Another priest tried to teach Jesus the alphabet, but Jesus mocked and schooled him too:

“Levi said [the first] letter to Jesus, Aleph, and said to Him: Answer. But Jesus was silent and answered nothing. [Then Jesus said] Let the master of the Law tell us what the first letter is, or why it has many triangles, gradate, subacute, mediate, obduced, produced, erect, prostrate, curvistrate?”

I don’t know what all that means, but it sounds like really technical scribe stuff. The priest cried out: “I cannot withstand the words of this child: I shall now flee from this town. I do not know whether he be a wizard or a god.”

But things got better. Lots of precocious, deadly, children, eventually mature. And by age six, so did Jesus, using his miracles for better purposes.

He resurrected a playmate who was killed by being thrown off a roof (NOT by Jesus)…

He carried water in a sheet to his mom…

He helped his dad stretch poorly cut lumber to the proper length.

and he sowed and reaped 3 axx loads of hay in a single day.

By age 12 things were going so well Mary and Joseph tried to get Jesus educated again. And in Jesus’s defense, this killing was in self-defense…

Chapter 38- “The master got angry and struck Jesus; and no sooner had he struck Him, than he fell down dead.

By chapter 41 Jesus has resurrected a rich man and saved his brother James from snakebite in their vegetable garden. And by the end of our story, Jesus has matured considerably. But, while he doesn’t kill again, his family is still afraid to eat with him.

Chapter 42- [Jesus] was the first to eat and drink; for none of [his family] dared to eat or drink, or to sit at table, until He had first done so.”

His disciples seem equally intimidated. Who’s gonna be the first one brave enough to ask for the butter?

So there you have it. If you’ve ever wondered about the missing years of Jesus’s youth, from age 4 till age 12, now you know. Straight from the Infancy Gospel of Matthew.

Ok. Now it’s safe to

So what are we to make of this thing? Between flaming coochies, and dragons, and multiple murder, it’s quite a story. But it’s only apocryphal, and not heretical, to this very day. And since all scripture is useful for instruction and teaching, what on earth can we learn from this?

The monks who illuminated it weren’t lone hermits, or heretics, or pagans. They were Medieval Christians, working in Church monasteries, just like this one, in the 1200’s AD.

Klosterneuburg, Austria

It would be easy to discount the story as a fringe oddity, except that there are hundreds of copies of it floating around in Church libraries and archives in Europe today. And with people reading it for around 1000 years, it was both very widespread and apparently very popular.

In contrast, truly dangerous books, like those by Copernicus, were locked in the Libri Prohibiti section (the Forbidden Books) of monasteries, behind metal doors.

Since this is the third post on the same work, my opinion of it is unchanged. And despite the increasingly bizarre subject matter, I still look at it as a essentially a document of exaltation and admiration. Over the top, but loving.

Granted, Jesus killing multiple children is odd. But he doesn’t really kill them. What he’s doing is demonstrating his power of resurrection. He brings them all back to life. Just as he resurrected the boy from Nain and the girl from Capernaum in the New Testament:

Luke 8
54 But he took her by the hand and said, “My child, get up!” 55 Her spirit returned, and at once she stood up.

There is nothing theologically dangerous in the work, or in anything Jesus does in it. (Murder doesn’t count if you bring them back.) And the two notable things baby Jesus does, multiple times, are 1) resurrect people, and 2) humiliate Jewish priests.

“Look, let me show you old nit wits what the Law means.”

So Jesus is portrayed as both powerful and wise, but also precocious and lacking in discipline. But what small child, learning his way in the world, isn’t?

They made an episode of the Twilight Zone about this exact thing.

We still don’t know what Jesus did from say, age 12 till age 29, but at least some of the his childhood gaps have been filled in. And as unusual as this Gospel is, it’s not quite on the level of the Syriac Infancy Gospel, where Jesus has a fireproof diaper that heals people:

“And they showed them that swathing-cloth which the Lady Mary had given them…and threw that swathing-cloth into [the fire.] And when the fire had gone out, they took out the swathing-cloth and began to kiss it, and to put it on their heads and their eyes, saying: This verily is the truth without doubt; the fire was not able to burn or destroy it. Then they took it, and with the greatest honor laid it among their treasures.”

But that’ll be for another day.
So I hope you have enjoyed the Infancy Gospel of Matthew. It’s not as popular today as it was in the past, but it has had a lasting impact on Christianity. Because if you’ve ever seen an axx and an ox in a Nativity scene, now you know where they came from.

“Mary went forth out of the cave, and entering a stable, placed the child in the stall, and the ox and the axx adored Him.”

The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew (gnosis.org)

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Yeah it's a real curiosity. Sort of Jesus on steroids, but also as an out-of-control kid.

Like the episode about teaching the rabbis. I can see the author, possibly recalling an oral tradition, telling someone, "Sure the synoptic gospels say Jesus was teaching the rabbis at age 12, but guess what, he was teaching them at age SIX!" Just over-the-top exaltation stuff like that.

I'd have to read it again to be certain, but yes, I don't recall many, if any, references to saving folks in the text. The focus seems to be on resurrection and humiliating the Jewish priesthood. And secondarily, venerating Mary. Baby Jesus doesn't shape-up because he thinks he wrong in his actions, or because he gets punished, he does it because he doesn't want to upset his mom.

It's definitely a different kind of gospel.

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