Infancy Gospel of Thomas & Luke

[historicaladdict]

Good morning from England. I'm new here but not entirely new to Internet blogging and forums.

Here's what I'd like to talk about.

The authenticity of:

The, 'Infancy Gospel of Thomas' and,

The, 'Gospel according to Luke' (NT)

I'm currently engaged in a fairly low-key discussion where we've finally moved on to talking about Luke's introduction, and the subject of introductions in other writings has come up, in particular the introduction to the IGOT.

[jamierobertson]

I don't think introductions to gospels are the best basis for deciding their authenticity. You have to compare the two documents in terms of:
> internal evidence of authorship
> external attestation to authorship
> evidence for date of authorship
> Genre characteristics (comparing bioi to psalms, for example)
> acceptance by the early church (who had their biases, of course, but were closer to the action than we are)
> number and quality of copies in the intervening years, to allow us to do some textual criticism and gauge how reliably the documents have been transmitted

Personally, I think Luke comes off a billion times better than Thomas when put through these tests, but hey, I'm just a biased, brainwashed faith-head

[Mike D]

In terms of authenticity:

I know of no scholars who takes the Infancy Gospel of Thomas seriously: there is a minority who take the Gospel of Thomas as an early source (different document, obviously, but the same ascribed author might lead some to givesome value to the IGOT) , but the Infancy Gospel is perceived to be a much later document, and not seen as any kind of information source for details on Jesus' life.