Thursday 26 July 2018

Jesus: The Early Years

I'm not sure who had the responsibility of picking the stories about Jesus to put into the Bible but whoever it was decided to go from born in a manger straight to adulthood and missed out all the teenage angst bits of a teenage Jesus in Nazareth.  
The rejected bits that didn't make it in went into another book, the New Testament Apocrypha, a series of tales deemed unfit for inclusion due to being a bit mad.
For example, the first dropped onto the cutting room floor came from the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, Chapter 18 which tells of how a two year old Jesus stopped a horde of scaly, fire-breathing, winged lizard-dragons from eating his friends and family. 
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas 3:2-3 tells how whilst five-year-old Jesus was playing beside a small brook with some other children, he got splashed by one of the other kid and in a fit of pique, told him that: 'thou shalt be withered like a tree' and the boy started ageing rapidly and withered away.
Later that day, in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas 4:1 another boy bumped into him on the street and Jesus said: 'Thou shalt not finish thy course' and immediately he fell down dead which some may say seems a bit excessive.
In chapter 18:13-16 of the same book, Jesus comes across a child who had been bitten by a snake and so he stormed after the snake, told it to suck all the poison out of the child and once he had confirmed he had done so, blew the snake up.
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas 5:1 explains how the good people of Nazareth were getting concerned that Jesus was blowing up animals, turning their kids into trees and generally killing them for scuffing his sandals so they went to see his parents, Mary and Joseph, (spoiler: not his real dad) and Jesus reacted in the way only the son of someone who killed everyone on the planet in a massive flood would, he made blind everyone who grassed on him.
Joseph decided that blinding half the townspeople wasn't great for neighbourly relations and 'grabbed his ear and wrung it til it was sore' and told him to uncurse everybody and he was probably grounded for a week and no whatever passed for TV back then.
Compared to his youth, his adult miracles of bread splitting or wine making might seem a bit dull, but that's just because the church decided that the part where Jesus became a person blinding, dragon taming tree creating bad boy was a little unbelievable so just went with the talking snakes and unicorns instead.

No comments: