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A newly deciphered manuscript dating back more than 1,600 years has been identified as the earliest known account of Jesus Christ’s childhood. The manuscript, written on papyrus in either the 4th or 5th century, had been stored at a library in Hamburg, Germany, for decades and was long believed to be an insignificant document. However, two experts have now decoded the text and say it is the earliest surviving copy of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. “The papyrus fragment is of extraordinary interest for research,” Lajos Berkes, a theology lecturer and one of the two men who deciphered the document,...

Experts in Germany have uncovered a deciphered manuscript that has been determined to be the oldest record of Jesus Christ’s childhood. As CBS News reported, the 1,600-year-old document had been stored in a university library in Hamburg, Germany, for decades. It was ignored until Dr. Lajos Berkes, from Germany’s Institute for Christianity and Antiquity at Humboldt University in Berlin, and professor Gabriel Nocchi Macedo from Belgium’s University of Liège looked it over and revealed it as the earliest surviving copy of the “Infancy Gospel of Thomas,” a document detailing Jesus Christ’s childhood. The two experts said in a news release...

The desert swallowed Tebtunis in the twelfth century A.D., so the town does not appear on any maps. We know its name, and a great deal more, from the tens of thousands of papyrus fragments found throughout the twentieth century by a succession of archaeologists, including those working at the site today. These records, which range from pieces found in ancient garbage dumps, to sheets recycled as wrappings for mummies, to five-yard-long scrolls, include literary texts and records of private contracts and public acts. "The papyri give us particular and historic information that cannot be found elsewhere," says Claudio Gallazzi,...

At first glance, the ancient Egyptian texts look like scraps of garbage. And more than 2,000 years ago, that's exactly what they were -- discarded documents, useless contracts and unwanted letters that were recycled into material needed to plaster over mummies, like some precursor to papier-mache... The texts, collectively called papyri, were donated to Stanford in the 1920s by an alumnus who bought them from an antiquities dealer in London. They've been overlooked by generations of faculty who haven't focused on papyrology, said Joe Manning, an associate professor of classics... About 70 texts in Stanford's collection of several hundred papyri...