Page:Apocryphal Gospels and Other Documents Relating to the History of Christ.djvu/73

Rh be wanting, I have added, by way of supplement to this work, a version of the very ancient Syriac History of the "Boyhood of our Lord Jesus," which is but another form of the Thomas.

This book vies in antiquity with the Protevangelium, and claims to have originally appeared about the middle of the second century, if not before. We seem not to possess it in an unmutilated form, but what we have is very curious. It was the offspring of heresy for which heterodoxy is too mild a term, and after all the expurgation it has undergone, the evidence of its paternity remains upon its face. The author, or compiler, as in similar cases, wished to produce a sort of preliminary Gospel, and as he imagined the infant Jesus was wayward and captious, mischievous and arbitrary, he made him so in the fables he wrote.

Justin Martyr speaks of Jesus doing carpenter's work (Trypho 88), in almost the same words as Pseudo-Thomas speaks of Joseph (1 Thomas xiii.). Irenæus also, when speaking of Marcus, the founder of the Marcosians, mentions the mysteries he found in the alphabet (Bk. i. 10-17). Special reference is made by Irenæus to "an unspeakable multitude of apocryphal and spurious writings," which these