The suppressed Gospels and Epistles of the original New Testament of Jesus the Christ, Volume 3, Infancy of Jesus Christ

In Short

This collection assembles apocryphal accounts of Jesus Christ’s early years, translated from original tongues by Archbishop Wake and other divines. The narrative follows Jesus, Mary, and Joseph from Bethlehem through miraculous flights in Egypt to his twelfth year in the Jerusalem temple, featuring clay sparrows given breath, healing waters, resurrected playmates, and master-defying scholarship. It persists as a vital historical window into alternative primitive Christian devotional imagination suppressed after Nicene disputations.

The Story

The narrative opens in Bethlehem, where the infant Jesus announces his divine mission from his cradle to Mary. Forced by Augustus's tax decree into a cave, Mary births the child amidst blinding heavenly light, and the infant heals an accompanying Hebrew woman. Circumcised on the eighth day, the holy family presents Jesus at the temple on the fortieth day, where old Simeon and Hannah behold him shining as a pillar of light. Wise men from the East worship the infant, receiving a swaddling cloth that later resists fire. Warned in a dream, Joseph flees to Egypt, where an idol falls and a possessed priest's son finds healing by wearing Mary's washed swaddling cloth.

Moving through Egyptian cities and towns, Mary and Jesus encounter spiritual darkness and physical decay. Mary's gaze dispossesses a demoniac woman; a mute bride clasps Jesus and recovers her voice. In another city, a servant girl cured of leprosy by Jesus's washing water guides a prince's weeping wife—whose leprous son is similarly cleansed—and later helps rescue a bewitched mule that transforms back into a young man, subsequently married to the servant girl. Along the road, robbers Titus and Dumachus show mercy, prompting Jesus to prophesy his crucifixion thirty years hence with them on either side. Idols turn to sand, a well springs up at Matarea producing healing balsam, and after three years in Memphis, the family returns near Judea, settling in Nazareth under angelic direction.

Back in Judea and Galilee, young Jesus performs marvels among playfellows. He animates clay animals, dyes stained cloths in Salem's furnace to perfection, transforms hidden playfellows playing hide-and-seek into three-year-old kids before restoring them, and crowns himself king of boys, causing a poisonous serpent that bit young Simon the Canaanite to burst. When James is bitten by a viper, Jesus heals him with a breath; accused of pushing a boy from a roof, Jesus raises the dead boy to testify his innocence. He gathers spilt well-water in his mantle and builds fish pools on the Sabbath. Brought to masters, he corrects their alphabet teachings and confounds scholarship; a second master lifts his hand to strike him and withers. At age twelve, Jesus questions doctors in the Jerusalem temple on law, astronomy, physics, and metaphysics, impressing a philosopher before returning obediently to Nazareth, later concealing his wonders until his baptism at Jordan in his thirtieth year. A supplementary fragment from Thomas's Gospel depicts five-year-old Jesus clearing muddy puddles with a word, animating twelve clay sparrows on the Sabbath, blinding accusers, and astounding schoolmaster Zaccheaus.

How It Unfolds

• The cave nativity: Mary seeks shelter near Bethlehem at sundown, finding an illuminated cave where Jesus is born and cures an old Hebrew midwife.
• The Egyptian transit: Fleeing Herod, Joseph navigates broken saddles, collapsing pagan idols, and a demon-bound boy healed by touching holy swaddling bands.
• Miraculous domestic mercies: Leprosy vanishes from servant girls and princes' sons washed in Jesus's bathwater, while a bewitched mule reverts to human shape.
• The prophetic road: Robbers fall asleep on the highway, prompting Jesus to foretell his future crucifixion between Titus and Dumachus amid shifting sandhills.
• Childhood mastery: Seven-year-old Jesus animates clay sparrows, resurrects a fallen roof-top playmate to clear his name, and withers a harsh master's hand.
• Temple disputation: At twelve, Jesus matches elders and doctors on cosmic and legal science, leaving a philosopher kneeling before returning quietly to Nazareth.

The People

• Jesus: Wants to fulfill his divine mission and reveal glory; bounded by human infancy and parental oversight; ends up concealing his active wonders until his thirtieth year at Jordan.
• Mary: Wants safety and obedience to heavenly signs; bounded by fugitive travel and maternal wonder; ends up treasuring events in her memory and bringing Jesus home.
• Joseph: Wants to protect and provide for his family; bounded by broken gear, political fear of Archelaus, and trade limitations (making imperfect furniture); ends up guided by angels to Nazareth.
• The local masters and doctors: Want traditional pedagogical control and legal order; bounded by literal literacy and conventional assumptions; end up withered, silenced, or worshipping.
• The afflicted (the leprous girl, the prince's wife, the mule-brother): Want relief from physical and sorcerous ruin; bounded by despair and hidden shame; end up restored, grateful, and integrated into households.

In Its Own Voice

Mary, I am Jesus the Son of God, that word, which thou didst bring forth according to the declaration of the angel Gabriel to thee, and my father hath sent me for the salvation of the world.

Spoken from the cradle in Chapter I, this opening declaration establishes the infant's self-awareness and mission.

When thirty years are expired, O mother, the Jews will crucify me at Jerusalem; And these two thieves shall be with me at the same time upon the cross...

Spoken along the road in Chapter VIII, Jesus calmly predicts his future passion upon encountering robbers Titus and Dumachus.

Tell me first the meaning of the letter Aleph, and then I will pronounce Beth.

Spoken to a threatened schoolmaster in Chapter XX, this response marks the child's subversion of conventional early education.

What It's Really About

This text explores the theological tension between hidden divinity and domestic reality. It asks how cosmic omnipotence inhabits messy domestic spaces—carpentry shops, washing tubs, oven sides, and village alleys. Beneath the marvelous surface runs an argument about continuity and revelation: why early tradition preserved accounts of childhood power that official canons passed over, and how human authority, pedagogy, and craft interact with unearned grace. The text ponders whether divine power breaks or restores fractured rural societies, framing salvation not merely as a future cross, but as an environmental decontamination of cursed land, broken marriage beds, and blighted childhoods.

Why Read It Today

Readers drawn to apocryphal literature, early Christian reception history, or folklore variants of biblical legend will love this text. It feels raw, archival, paratactic, and startlingly literal—reading less like modern psychological fiction and more like a collection of hagiographic village vignettes recorded with deadpan urgency.

Honesty requires noting its literary and historical friction points. The prose moves by flat accumulation rather than psychological arc; characters pivot from terror to adoration in single paragraphs; period attitudes toward witchcraft, divine retribution (such as lethal accidents for Sabbath-breakers or disobedient playmates), and gendered domestic subordination reflect unvarnished early medieval-to-late antique folkloric mentalities. Archbishop Wake's translation preserves a stiff, eighteenth-century clerical formality that contrasts sharply with the wild, vernacular folk-marvels of the narrative kernel. Yet these very rough edges reward modern engagement, offering a rare acoustic chamber where primitive Christian imagination talks aloud to itself about what the Saviour must have looked like when he dropped a pitcher or bruised a thumb.