Would you trust this boy? |
I
always thought Christmas was the best Christian festival—everyone loves new
baby stories. But sweet newborns become hyperactive toddlers, and so on
to the hurricanes of puberty. I have also always thought that the most entertaining Christian storytelling—the narratives labelled ‘apocryphal’—are precisely the
ones excluded from the New Testament.
The
canonical gospels are virtually silent, for example, on how Jesus of Nazareth
and his parents weathered his first decade. Fortunately a text exists in both ancient
Greek and Syriac which fills in the stormy missing years. The ‘Infancy
Gospel’ attributed to St Thomas, and vividly illustrated in a manuscript in
the Ambrosian Library in Milan, reveals a child who should have been handed
over to Psychiatric Social Services.
Zeno Falls mysteriously from the upper storey |
At
five, Jesus dammed a stream by telepathy and polluted the Sabbath by making twelve living sparrows out of mud. When another boy destroyed the dams, he
cursed the boy, who promptly died. When a second child ran into him, Jesus cursed
him and he also expired. The villagers
protested to Jesus’ human father Joseph that his son was a dangerously disturbed juvenile delinquent. Jesus’
response was to have his accusers miraculously blinded.
Mary & Joseph needed Supernanny |
When
Joseph asked for a teacher’s help in disciplining his dysfunctional child, the
five-year-old told his ostensible dad that he had been born ‘so that, father, I
could teach you a lesson’. Time for
having pocket money withheld, if you ask me. Irritatingly precocious, Jesus
taught himself the alphabet in order to show off at school. Time for Supernanny
and the Naughty Step. But no.
Unchecked by his baffled parents, Jesus then
murdered his next, wholly sympathetic schoolteacher, just for under-estimating his
IQ. A third boy called Zeno, with whom Jesus was playing on a roof, fell off mysteriously
and died.
'Who needs a bucket with my magic waterproof cloak, mum?' |
There
were, to be fair, a couple of ‘good’ miracles.
The young Jesus carried water for his mother in a cloak and sowed a
miraculously abundant harvest. But does that outweigh four undeserved deaths and a mass
blinding? I would be interested to know what you think! I need cheering up after an unexpectedly medieval week, not in a good sense, of which more anon.
;-) (evil grin) This is why I do not like "edited" religions. The writer must have felt that there was something important he wanted to say in this (what I really do not know). However, the fact of its existence as an equal to any other book would possibly "force" looking at the documents as being more than just one, united view, which it isn't. There are many uncomfortable things in the edited Novum Testamentum as it is, which most ignore. Why not more! (By the way, I am not Christian though I was brought up in the Lutheran religion. Personally, I follow Aristotle.)
ReplyDeleteLove those infancy stories. They're so 'If *you* were a child with superpowers, what would you do?' Go on a sort of 'Kill Bill' spree, clearly! Who, as a child, has not said 'I wish you were DEAD!' So here's what happens when you can do it...!
ReplyDeleteThe Quran records many of the apocryphal narratives of Jesus' life such as the creation of birds out of clay but nothing as outrageous as this.
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