If we did not have to live our lives amidst a fog of uncertainty about a whole range of matters that are actually of fundamental interest and importance to us, it would no longer be a human mode of existence that we would live. Instead we would become a being of another sort, perhaps angelic, perhaps machine-like, but certainly not human.
—Rescher, Forbidden Knowledge and Other Essays
Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?
—John 6:42
All books about the canonical gospels must answer the question, Why add to the shelf another study of the Gospel of Matthew or the Gospel of John? All books about extracanonical gospels must answer a different question: Why add to the shelf a study of writings that were ultimately left out of the Christian biblical canon? Why spend time on writings that were excluded from the Christian scriptures? Doesn’t this indicate the unimportance of such books—not only to the Christian religion but also to history? Some may attempt to rise above such questions by maintaining that all evidence from the past is precious. But scholars who study marginal texts ignore the “why” question at their peril. At a time when biblical scholars often lament the immense number of studies—so many that no individual could ever hope to read them all in the course of a single lifetime—it is important to reiterate why the present book deserves an audience.
The first chapter of this book sets out to answer the “why” question as clearly as possible. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Proto-gospel of James are important and relevant to the study of early Christianity because they are about family. And family is a leading theme of scholarship on ancient Christians. The first Christians met in households, as Paul’s letters show. He attempts to intervene in the affairs of Philemon’s household, and he urges followers in Corinth to “remain unmarried as I am” since “the present form of this world is passing away” (1 Cor 7:8, 31). Apocalyptic fervor waned as the decades passed, but Christian authors continued to seek to shape notions of family life. The Pastoral Epistles, by an author writing in Paul’s name, view the patriarchal household as the ideal setting for Christian teaching. Still, others explored theological issues through metaphors of domestic life: the relationship between Christ and his followers, according to the author of Ephesians, while a mystery, could be compared to the bond between husband and wife (Eph 5:31).
Leap forward to the second and third centuries and family life remains a crucial theme of early Christian literature. In the popular Apocryphal Acts, apostles find ways to break up conjugal matches. In martyr accounts, mothers give up the care of their newborn children, opting instead to join their Christian “brothers and sisters” in the arena. Rather than live with her baby under the care and protection of her pagan father, Perpetua chooses to die. To do otherwise would be to betray her loyalty to her Christian savior and spiritual family.1
Early Christian fascination with family life is the background for understanding the Infancy Gospel and the Proto-gospel of James. Having established this context, the rest of the book explores the contents of the Infancy Gospel and the Proto-gospel of James, focusing on the different kinds of family drama that emerge in the storytelling. The depiction at the heart of these stories belongs somewhere between or to the side of opposite poles. The holy household is rather chaotic, a far cry from the rhetoric of patriarchal order in the Pastoral Epistles. At the same time, the life of this family is at some remove from accounts of apostles breaking up couples in the Apocryphal Acts. When external or internal crises threaten to tear apart the trio, time and again Joseph, Mary, and Jesus affirm their familial bonds. Family ties persist in the family gospels even as the stories raise questions about household roles. Joseph is not quite a father or a husband, Mary is not quite a wife or a mother, and Jesus is not quite a son or, for that matter, even a child.2 Yet together they make a family, or as I have argued, they choose to be a family over and over again.
So much for the main argument of this book. If it has provoked readers to look again at these accounts and to think of them as “family gospels” rather than as “infancy gospels,” then I will count it a success. Readers may also wonder about a “how” question: how did the family gospels survive?3 This is a good question but one that carries with it assumptions about the canon of the New Testament. Asking about the survival of the family gospels or any other volume in the vast library of early Christian parabiblical literature implies that a certain kind of process produced the New Testament. It was the end result of a “survival of the fittest.” Such a view does not account for the continuing Christian interest in the life of the holy family. In the next section, we will look at an example of storytelling about the family of Jesus in the History of Joseph the Carpenter, an account dated to sometime in the fourth to sixth centuries. It betrays an acquaintance with the family gospels and features Jesus at the bedside of his 111-year-old father. In it we find a reflection of enduring Christian fascination with how much and how little the parents of Jesus understood about their unusual child.
If Christian claims about texts and authority in the second and third centuries were fluid, the fourth century witnessed a hardening of lines for the Christian religion. Historical factors can be enlisted to explain the difference. Uncertainty was not one problem among many; it was the enemy: emperors and clergy had decided to work together to fashion creeds that would define, once and for all, the Christian God. At the same time, influential bishops began to insist on a closed canon of “New Testament” writings.4 A high fence was built around the four canonical Gospels. Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, put it this way in 367 CE: “In these books alone, the teaching of piety is proclaimed. Let no one add to or subtract from them.”5 Athanasius envisioned “an irrefutably stabilized order of books.”6
The family gospels are not included in Athanasius’s “order of books,” and we may wonder why. The dismal portrait of Jesus is routinely cited as the reason why the Infancy Gospel of Thomas was left out of the Christian canon.7 While this may be one factor, it is not the only one. When we look for commentary on the family gospels or the Infancy Gospel in particular, the character of Jesus is not even an important factor. There is hardly unified opposition to the childhood stories about Jesus. From the perspective of John Chrysostom, childhood miracles of Jesus would contradict the Gospel of John’s reporting of the “first miracle.” In the same century, however, other Christian authorities were sanguine about the possibility of childhood stories. Epiphanius, a different fourth-century bishop, argues that Jesus “ought to have childhood miracles too, in order to deprive the other sects of an excuse to say that it is from the time of the Jordan that ‘the Christ,’ meaning the dove, came to him.”8 For Epiphanius, childhood miracles would prove that Jesus was divine from birth and not, as some Christian interpreters maintained, adopted by God at his baptism. If two fourth-century authorities could not agree on whether to accept the authenticity of childhood stories, there was some wiggle room for accounts such as the family gospels among Christian readers in that century and beyond. Perhaps the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Proto-gospel of James did not just barely escape the closing jaws of orthodoxy. On the contrary, for some arguments, childhood stories about Jesus may have come in handy.
John Chrysostom’s objection to stories like those in the Infancy Gospel may have had as much to do with the ambiguity of the storytelling as it did with breaking the “first miracle” rule. For the portrayal of the ignorance and misunderstanding of Joseph and Mary, hinted at in the earlier gospels and elaborated upon in the family gospels, raises a disturbing question: can human beings ever truly understand anything about divine affairs? A troubling question for someone like John Chrysostom, perhaps, and yet he was willing to entertain the thought in his discussion of what Mary did and did not know about her child. The relationship of mother and child gave John Chrysostom the opportunity to advance points about divine power, the limits of human knowing, and familial affection.
These are the same issues explored by the family gospels, and they echo through the centuries in other Christian accounts. The exclusion of the family gospels from Athanasius’s fourth-century canon did not impede the continuing fascination that ancient Christians had with the early family life of Jesus. The History of Joseph the Carpenter, a Coptic text that has been variously dated between the fourth and sixth centuries, is cited by specialists as a witness to the transmission of the family gospels.9 The narrative framework of the account places the adult Jesus, on the Mount of Olives, teaching his disciples. Jesus begins to relate to them the story of the death of his father, Joseph. Like the book of Tobit, it is an example of the popular genre of “testament” literature. The History of Joseph the Carpenter begins by relating details that are familiar to readers from the Proto-gospel of James: that Joseph had a prior marriage and that Mary lived in the temple until she was twelve years old. Jesus also recalls details from the Synoptic accounts: the doubt of Joseph and the reassuring message of Gabriel, as well as the flight of the family to Egypt. And, in what is perhaps a repudiation of the more troubling aspects of the Infancy Gospel, Jesus says, “I called Mary my mother and Joseph my father, and I obeyed them in everything they told me. I never contradicted them, but I loved them dearly.”10
Even so, the account does not erase entirely the memory of tensions between father and son. When Jesus turns to recalling father’s finals hours, he begins by quoting Joseph’s lament. It is a litany of physical aches and pains.11 Jesus responds by going to his bedside to comfort him. Joseph’s reaction is to praise Jesus as “truly God.”12 Then Joseph begins to confess to his own doubts and misunderstandings as a husband and father. First, he admits, “I did not understand, my Lord, nor do I know the mystery of your incredible birth; nor did I ever hear that a woman had conceived without a man, or that a virgin bore a child while sealed in her virginity.”13 All of this could be implied in the Synoptic infancy narratives. But I wonder if Joseph’s “reminiscence” of serial doubts reflects both the Synoptic gospels and the Proto-gospel of James, in which he arrives at the cave in time to witness a strange series of events: first cloud cover; then a bright light; then, suddenly, an infant at the breast of Mary; and, finally, the examination of Salome.14 Next, the dying Joseph recalls a moment from the childhood of Jesus, one that combines details from the Infancy Gospel, including the healings of Jesus and the skepticism and hostility provoked by his spectacles of power:
I remember also the day when the asp bit a boy and he died. His people surrounded you in order to deliver you to Herod. Your mercy laid hold of him: you raised him, even though they falsely charged you that it was you who killed him. And there was great joy in the house of the one who had died. I immediately took you by the ear and spoke with you saying, “Be prudent, my son!” You rebuked me at once and said, “If you were not my father according to the flesh, surely I would tell you what you did to me!”15
Joseph goes on to admit that he worries that his present suffering is the result of revenge for the way he treated the child Jesus: “Now then, my Lord and my God, supposing that you have settled accounts with me for that day and caused these fearful signs to fall upon me, I beseech your goodness not to bring me to your judgment.”16 Jesus, for his part, is moved by what he hears: “As my father Joseph was speaking, I could not refrain from shedding tears, and I cried, watching as death held sway over him and listening to the words of misery he was speaking.”17 He breaks down in tears. Mary, whom Jesus describes as “my beloved mother Mary, whose name is sweet to my mouth,” sits nearby. She asks her son, “Woe to me, my beloved son. Is he perhaps going to die . . . your beloved and honorable father according to the flesh?”18
In some ways, the History of Joseph the Carpenter is quite unlike the family gospels. Joseph, for example, here seems to express a clearer understanding of the significance of Jesus than he does in the family gospels. As one scholar observes, in the History of Joseph the Carpenter, Joseph “recognizes the divine nature of his son.”19 In other ways, however, there is a convergence. The “deathbed confession” of Joseph shows not only the possibility of redemption and forgiveness but also that some Christians of the fourth century and beyond continued to think of the early family life of Jesus as a time of turmoil and confusion. This is why Joseph, as he lays dying, must ask his son’s forgiveness. So too, like the earlier family gospels, the History of Joseph the Carpenter shows Joseph, Mary, and Jesus clinging to the ties that bind. Jesus may be in this account “truly the Son of God and son of man at once,” but he is also, for a moment at least, a member of a family, weeping for his father and with his mother.
* * *
Neither the Infancy Gospel of Thomas nor the Proto-gospel of James is found in the New Testament shared by the major branches of the Christian religion—Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant. And yet some of the authoritative ideas of the faith, such as the notion of the perpetual virginity of Mary and the names of Mary’s parents—embraced by many Catholics and Orthodox Christians—are found first in the storytelling of the family gospels.20 Orthodox Christians include readings from the Proto-gospel of James on September 8, the day on which Mary’s birth is celebrated in worship. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas has not enjoyed the same level of success in the mainstream of either Roman Catholic or Orthodox traditions. Yet, it remains intensely popular and authoritative among Ethiopic Orthodox Christians, embedded in a collection of stories known as the Miracles of Jesus.21
There are many other signs of the influence of the family gospels. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas shares at least one episode with the Qur’an: the story of a child Jesus turning toy birds into live ones.22 A robust tradition about the holy family resting in their travel to Bethlehem is central to the historical veneration of Mary.23 There is also the Piacenza Pilgrim, an account from the sixth century that describes the sacred sites of holy land pilgrimage. In it, the pilgrim describes a synagogue in Nazareth in which “there is kept the book in which the Lord wrote his ABC.”24
But this book has been about the earliest readers. And I remain convinced that what was appealing about the family gospels for ancient Christians is their depiction of human relationships. The Infancy Gospel and the Proto-gospel of James suggest that if readers want to grasp the difference between human beings and the omniscient God they worship, they need look no further than the persistent misunderstanding that plagues human communication and interaction—what Andrew Solomon describes as “the terrifying, profound unknowability of even the most intimate human relationship.”25 This would be a message of deep despair if not for another facet of human existence, one that is also suggested by the family gospels: that, in this life, it is possible to stumble arm in arm with family and friends through the “fog of uncertainty” that blankets human minds. And this is why, for me, the lingering image from all of these stories is that of Joseph, Mary, and the twelve-year-old Jesus, reuniting at the temple and returning home, together.
That’s some kind of family.