A “vengeful and obstinate” child Jesus who killed people and animals. His mother, Mary, the daughter of a wealthy man, was raised by religious figures in the Temple of Jerusalem and became pregnant as a teenager. On the other hand, Joseph, an elderly man, widower and father of six biological children. While the so-called canonical gospels—those of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—that make up the Bible do not contain many biographical details about the three members of the so-called Holy Family, the texts considered apocryphal offer ample information to fill those gaps. And these accounts, which sometimes contain information that clashes with the image that has been created around the family of Jesus, end up causing perplexity in many readers. Taken as literature, these texts make sense in that context. Which doesn't mean they aren't true.

“The canonical gospels have many gaps in the childhood of Jesus and even the life of the Holy Family, because they obviously only focus on the apostolic work of Jesus,” researcher Thiago Maerki, a member of the Hagiography Society in the United States, told the BBC.

“So, many authors and groups during the first centuries of Christianity began to write and produce gospels (now called apocryphal) with information that in some way completes or helps to fill in those gaps,” he added.

The expert points out that this type of literature is also present in other religious traditions. “It belongs to the genre of biographies, that is, any genre that attempts to narrate the life of a hero, a saint, or an important figure.” For Andre Leonardo Chevitarese, professor at the University of Rio de Janeiro and author of “Discovering the Historical Jesus,” these texts, as well as the canonical ones, should be considered literature, without being assigned a sacred character. “The so-called New Testament material tells us very little about the birth, childhood, and adolescence of Jesus,” Chevitarese explained to the BBC.

“And these are topics that will somehow awaken the interest of the public that consumes literature and the public that consumes stories about Jesus,” he added.

It was in this context that these texts considered apocryphal were written in the first centuries of Christianity.

“No one consulted an archive for this information. These are stories that were part of the oral tradition, invented to satisfy the desire for information. To satisfy the curiosity of Christians about the life of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Chevitarese explained.

“That is the basic principle of this type of literature,” he added.

Pure fantasy

The Franciscan priest Jacir de Freitas Faria, president of the Biblical Association of Bible Researchers (ABIB) and author of six books on apocryphal texts, launched the book “Apocryphal Bible” at the beginning of the year, an annotated edition that brings together these texts.

“These writings contain more information about the Holy Family because they were written to supplement the canonical texts,” he noted.

“They are curiosities that may or may not be true. Some texts are aberrant, that is, pure fantasy," he added.

The so-called apocryphal literature was probably written between the 2nd and 7th centuries. There are dozens of texts, and according to Faria, seven are about the childhood of Jesus, 15 about Mary, and one about Joseph, among those texts whose knowledge has reached us today. In a way, they sought to answer latent questions the first Christian groups. "The discussion among them is about humanity and divinity of Jesus gave rise to apocryphal literature about his childhood. Once the theological questions about Jesus were resolved, the communities demanded that the Church take a position on Mary's role in the history of Salvation. Given this, the life of Joseph, remembered as a carpenter, father, and educator of Jesus, could not be left out,” he noted. The expert noted that these literary narratives, due to their wide dissemination, had a “strong influence on Christianity” in those early centuries and later contributed to a “devotional and dogmatic” religiosity that endures to this day. Indomitable Genius Indomitable Genius In the best-known text Regarding Jesus' childhood, in the Gospel of Thomas, the boy is presented as someone who performed miracles from a young age. The story tells that he made 12 sparrows out of clay and, when reprimanded, gave the order for the animals to come to life and fly away. There is another story of a boy who ruined his game in the river, and Jesus took revenge by causing him to lose his youth. One can also read the story of a boy who bumped into him, Jesus told him he was not going to continue his journey, and the boy died.

“It is a perplexing text on several levels, especially in the way it portrays Jesus as an insensitive and capricious child,” explained Federico Lourenco of the University of Coimbra in his book “Apocryphal Gospels – Greek and Latin.”

On the other hand, the text also portrays Jesus as having above-average intelligence, mainly based on his interaction with a Greek teacher who was in charge of teaching him to read and write.

This coincides with the account in the canonical Gospel of Luke, which tells of Jesus teaching the scriptures to the doctors of the temple when he was only 12 years old.

“Jesus' intelligence as a child was such that he did not need to attend school regularly. He knew more than his teachers. According to these texts, he had three teachers who quit their jobs because they could not stand their intelligence,” he indicated. Faria.

“One of them claimed that he had sought a student and found a teacher. On the third attempt to educate Jesus, the teacher resigned. He remained at the school, while being recognized by all as someone with a supernatural, divine power," he recalled.

This text shows that Joseph, his adoptive father, rebukes him several times and helps him in his vocation. And Jesus also performs positive miracles such as healing the sick and even raising people from the dead.

"Although hearing that Jesus was an evil and vengeful child can be problematic, the truth is that this account makes him easier to understand," Faria noted.

“Many apocryphal accounts of Jesus' childhood are not accepted by us because they speak of aberrations to which we are not familiar, but which could have been committed by the child Jesus. And the authors considered that he was already God from that moment,” he added.

“In that sense, the texts intended to portray a child who was simultaneously the lord of life and death. There are texts that suggest that Jesus killed people and animals,” the academic pointed out.

“In the canonical texts, Jesus withers the fig tree because it has no fruit and sends the demons he has just exorcised to a group of pigs, which they kill. We must consider that in the canonical texts we do not find accounts of Jesus killing and “Then resurrecting people, as in the case of the Greek teacher who challenged him,” the specialist said. For Faria, all these apocryphal narratives serve to demonstrate that Jesus, being God, had power over life and death. That is, to highlight the issue of his divinity. According to the expert, a parallel can be drawn with the narratives of the Greco-Roman world, in which the adults' abilities were highlighted in his childhood: “With the apocryphal texts of childhood, Although they tell the story of a mischievous, powerful, wicked, Gnostic, wise child capable of performing miracles, the authors' intention was not to cause controversy, but to clarify that phase of his life and satisfy the curiosity of Christians.”

Maerki classifies these texts as hyperbolic because “they exaggerate to emphasize the power of a child.A child Jesus who gets irritated with his friends and uses his supernatural powers to harm them would be unthinkable from the traditional Church perspective. that which was not considered inspired by the Church, was responsible for the Marian cult. “More than a dozen apocryphal Marian texts tell her story,” Faria commented. In the second century, there was a Greek philosopher named Celsus who was very critical of Christianity. He wrote an essay presenting as true a story that Mary had become pregnant by a Roman soldier named Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera. “It cannot be said that Celsus's version is true, but it does indicate the role of that literature that spoke about the birth of Jesus.” “It wasn't just to fill the gaps, but to respond to criticism,” Chevitarese explained. In the apocryphal texts, the dogmas about Mary's purity are clearly laid out. These texts indicate that she was conceived without her parents, who were from a wealthy family, having sexual relations. That she became pregnant without having been intimate with a man and remained chaste and a virgin for the rest of her life. “These texts show us how, at the beginning of Christianity, Mary's virginity was valued.” “Virginity was the product of a way of thinking that despised the body,” Faria explained. The first Christians were influenced by dualistic thinking that proclaimed the separation between soul and body, through light, life, death, God, and the world. Everything that belonged to the world was despised, for that was a trap of the powers of evil," she added. Mary was taken to the Temple in Jerusalem at the age of three and there she was educated and raised in a place suitable for virgins. Nine years later, when she entered adolescence, it was established that it was necessary to "give her in marriage." At a meeting of all the men of the community, a sign indicated that the chosen one should be Joseph, a widowed and elderly man considered righteous. She would have moved in with the earthly father of Jesus when she was 12 or 13 years old and became pregnant at 14.