Of course, the word "alleged" is nowhere in the CBS News story about the discovery of the oldest manuscript fragment of The Infancy Gospel of Thomas. (Without the "alleged" or similar up front, the story is kind of clickbait.) Official news release from Humboldt University in Berlin, which had the manuscript in its possession without knowing what it was, is here.
The two key takeways?
First, this manuscript was dated 4th-5th century; the previous oldest IGT manuscript is from the 11th century. This is only 13 lines, so not of much use in text criticism.
Second? It's in Greek. Authors say that confirms Greet as the language of the original.
Because of the date and language, it's also cited by the authors as confirming second-century authorship.
What that shows is that, beyond the Protoevangelion and the various Pseudo-Acts, that "wild" stories about Jesus were developing fairly early in the Christian tradition. The fragment at hand, for example, includes the story about bubbe Yeshu creating clay sparrows and clapping them into life.
A broader takeaway, which ties to desire for specific dating of composition of IGT? The pericope at hand would indicate that Christians, on "work on the Sabbath," thought this was an issue for mocking Jews; indeed, the entire Gospel seems to have Jewish-Christian separation as its main focus. Any early church fathers calling it Gnostic are almost certainly referring to the Gospel of Thomas.
A third takeaway, not specific to the IGT? There's probably still other manuscripts of biblical books, or at least of church fathers, still floating unidentified in the archives of universities and research institutions.
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