Much of what we can gather about Jesus' early days from non-canonical works is unlikely to be confirmed for certain — or even agreed upon. The best we can do is look to such stories for hints of what the missing years of his upbringing might have been like.
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00:00Much of what we can gather about Jesus' early days from non-canonical works is unlikely
00:04to be confirmed for certain, or even agreed upon. The best we can do is look to such stories
00:09for hints of what the missing years of his upbringing might have been like.
00:13The Gospel of Matthew says that Joseph and Mary were set to be married when she became
00:17pregnant with Jesus, her firstborn son. A virgin at the time, the scripture suggests
00:21that she conceived Jesus through the Holy Spirit without intercourse. According to some
00:26sources, they had at least six other children, though whether from Joseph's previous marriages
00:30or a consummation of their own after Jesus' birth is debated.
00:34Matthew 13 says Jesus had four brothers and at least two sisters. The Catholic Church
00:39regards these as his cousins and believes Mary remained a virgin her whole life. In
00:442002, archaeologists announced the discovery of an ossuary, which is a bone box — think
00:48of it as sort of a casket for just the bones. Inscribed on it was an incredible inscription.
00:54It reads,
00:55"'James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.'"
00:58We can do an entire video on just the James Ossuary. Leave us a comment if you want to
01:02see that. In short, there's debate as to the authenticity of the inscription, but it does
01:07match up to the biblical description of Jesus having siblings.
01:11There's one other quick thing to mention. The last Jewish bishop of Jerusalem was a
01:15guy by the name of Judah Creacos. He was said to be the great-grandson of Jude, the brother
01:20of Jesus.
01:21There's even a word in Greek attached to the bishop, despisunai, which means,
01:25"'belonging to the master' — in other words, related to Jesus."
01:28Regardless of brothers, half-brothers, or cousins, it seems that Jesus didn't grow up
01:32an only child. According to Matthew, Jesus grew up in a devoutly religious household.
01:37His parents made pilgrimages to Jerusalem each year for the Feast of Passover and Days
01:41of Unleavened Bread. And when he was 12, they brought him on one of their annual trips to
01:45the Holy City.
01:46Luke 2.40 says, up until the age of 12, Jesus, quote,
01:50"'grew and became strong.' He was filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was on him."
01:54You might not have even realized he gets a mention there, but depending on how you interpret
01:58it, Jesus gets close to 200 mentions at least in the Quran.
02:02One passage there has Jesus speaking from the cradle, saying,
02:05"'Indeed, I am the servant of Allah. He has given me the scripture and made me a prophet.'"
02:10The infancy gospel of Thomas was not canonized into the New Testament. It does contain stories
02:15of Jesus when he was between 5 and 12 years old and living in Bethlehem. Some describe
02:20him using his main-story biblical healing powers during this time. In one account, there
02:24is the story of a young man who was saved by a five-year-old Jesus after cutting his
02:28foot in half, dying from blood loss. The gospel reads,
02:31"'He pressed through the crowd and laid hold of the young man's wounded foot, and he was
02:35cured immediately. And he said to the young man, "'Rise up now, split the wood, and remember
02:40me.'"
02:41Also at five years old, the gospel of Thomas claims Jesus was playing with a child who
02:45died after falling from the upper floor of a house. The boy's parents came to the scene
02:49and blamed Jesus, who yelled,
02:51"'Zeno' — for that was his name — stand up and tell me, did I throw you down?' And
02:55he stood up immediately and said, "'Certainly not, my lord. You did not throw me down, but
02:59hast raised me up.'"
03:01We've covered these extensively in the past as to why there are non-canonical gospels.
03:05The short version is that the early church did not consider them to be truthful to the
03:09real story, so the book is still out on these. But we'd be remiss if we didn't provide the
03:13full picture of early glimpses into the purported life of Jesus.
03:17Through biblical texts, both canonical and non-canonical, as well as in the Quran, Jesus
03:22is described as having powers over the laws of nature. The canonical gospels portray some
03:26of the most famous and well-known of his nature-bending miracles — turning water into wine, healing
03:31blindness, calming a storm, etc. But only in the non-canonical works can we see similar
03:36acts as a child.
03:37In the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, he is described as sowing
03:42many seeds of corn. The former says, from one grain of corn, the latter, a little wheat.
03:47This is similar to the famous feeding of the masses with five loaves of bread and two fish.
03:52Elsewhere in the Gospel of Thomas, he stretches a wood beam into a longer one, to the amazement
03:56of his father. In the Quran, Jesus also has such powers at a young age, creating living
04:01birds from clay as a child — a story that mirrors the tale in the Gospel of Thomas.
04:05He was only beginning to realize his power."
04:09It is, of course, this discrepancy that is one of the biggest clashes between canonical
04:13New Testament works and its apocryphal writings — and one of many contradictions between
04:17Christian and Islamic writings on Jesus.
04:20In a piece for Christianity.com, James Warner Wallace suggests that though Jesus held his
04:25divine power for his entire life, he did not show it until later. He wrote,
04:29"...the best and most reasonable inference from the ancient historical record related
04:33to Jesus is that he waited until his public ministry, as an adult, to reveal his power
04:37to his disciples and the world he came to save. Jesus did not perform miracles as a
04:42child."
04:43In June 2024, a 1,600-year-old papyrus fragment provided yet more possible information on
04:48Jesus' childhood. The 4-by-2-inch scrap was discovered in a Hamburg State and University
04:53Library archive. According to a press release from Humboldt University of Berlin, it contains
04:5813 lines of Greek letters, with about 130 characters total. The fragment originates
05:03from 284 to 641 A.D. and is from, you guessed it, the infancy Gospel of Thomas, believed
05:10to be written in the 2nd century.
05:12In the press release, the researchers claim that the fragment contains part of the vivification
05:16of the Sparrow story, which is very similar to the Quran's passage about Jesus making
05:20birds from clay written from 610 to 632 A.D. The passage goes,
05:25Jesus plays at the ford of a rushing stream and molds 12 sparrows from the soft clay he
05:30finds in the mud. When his father Joseph rebukes him and asks why he is doing such things on
05:34the holy Sabbath, the 5-year-old Jesus claps his hands and brings the clay figures to life.
05:40At the least, the fragment shows that 1,800 years ago or so, there were stories in the
05:44ancient world that filled in the gaps of Jesus' childhood. These non-canonical stories were
05:49mostly lost to history until around 1945. Perhaps there's more infancy stories yet to
05:54be discovered that could potentially fill in more gaps in the early life of Jesus.