A newly deciphered manuscript dating back 1,600 years has been determined to be the oldest record of Jesus Christ’s childhood, experts said in a news release.
The piece of papyrus has been stored in a university library in Hamburg, Germany, for decades, historians at Humboldt University announced.
The document “remained unnoticed” 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, studied it and identified it as the earliest surviving copy of the “Infancy Gospel of Thomas,” a document detailing Jesus Christ’s childhood.
