him, he did to him nothing more but stretched out his hand to him and blew upon the bite, and it was healed' (from Ac 28^-'?).
A closes with quite a sober version of Lk 2^^'^'*, which substitutes for v.*" the following passage : 'The scribes and Pharisees said, "Are you the mother of this child ? " She said, " I am." They said to her, "Blessed art thou among women, for God has blessed the fruit of your womb ; such glory, such virtue, such wisdom we have neither seen nor heard."' S also ends in this way, but the passage first quoted occurs at the close of L (in sub- stantially the same form), to round off a miracu- lous cure (15 : 'A few days later, a neighbouring child died, and its mother grieved sorely for it. On hearing this, Jesus went and stood over the boy, knocked on his breast, and said, " I tell thee, child, do not die but live." And at once the child rose up. Jesus said to the mother of the boy, "Take your son and give him the breast, and remember me " ') which occurs earlier (in A 17).
The data are so scanty that even conjectures must be tentative, but we may attempt to explain the literary problems by assuming that an original Gospel of Thomas was afterwards used (edited ?) by the Marcosians and Naassenes, and that it subse- quently formed the basis for the story of the Infancy in its various recensions. Was another version of it circulated among the Manichgean Christians ? * Or was the Gospel of Thomas which
* The Manichaean literature is said by Timotheus to have included also, among its ' devilish ' and ' deadly ' contents, ' the living Gospel' (of. Photius, Bibl. 85). Diodorus devoted the first seven of his twenty-five books against the Manichseans
488 GOSPELS (UlfCANOmCAL)
GOSPELS (U^CANONICAL)
they used an independent (native or Indian) work ? These are questions to Avhich, in tlie present state of our knowledge, no detinite answer can be given.
Protests were repeatedly made against the UaidLKd, from Chrysostom onwards ; but the work must liave enjoyed a popularity among Oriental Christians which orthodox censures were unable to check. One proof of this popularity may be found in the Gospel of pseudo-Matthew and the Arabic Gospel of the Infancy, wliich have worked up materials furnished by the Thomas Gospel into in- dependent collections of stories for the edification of pious Christians. The second of these two Gospels seems to have circulated among Jews and Muhammadans as well.
(c) The Gospel of pseudo-Matthew. — The Gospel of pseudo - Mattliew owes its present title to Tischendorf, the first editor of the Latin text, since the MS he used was headed : ' incipit liber de ortu beatse jMarite et infantia Salvatoris a beato Matthaeo evangelista hebraice scriptus et a beato Hieronymo presbytero in latinum trans- latus.' Thilo had already given this title to the Gospel of the Nativity of Mary. Both pieces (the former at least in one or two MSS) are prefaced by the forged correspondence between Jerome and two bishops, in which the latter plaintively bewail the apocryphal and heterodox character of the current books upon the birth of Mary and the Infancy of Jesus ; they have heard that Jerome has come into possession of a Hebrew volume on the subject by the evangelist Matthew, and beg him to translate it into Latin for the apologetic purposes of the faithful. Jerome agi'ees, explain- ing that the book was intended by Matthew for private circulation, and that in making it public he is not adding to the canonical Scriptures. This is the author's adroit * way of winning a welcome for his production and safeguarding it against suspicion. He had the fate of the Protevangeliura Jacobi and the Gospel of Thomas before his eyes. But such a description of the writing's contents as this correspondence presents is obviously more suitable to the Gospel of pseudo-Matthew than to the little treatise on the Nativity of Mary, which never alludes to the Birth and Infancy of Jesus. Tischendorf's nomenclature is therefore more cor- rect than Thilo's.
The Thomas Story of the Infancy has been exploited by the author in the third part of the book (25-42), but this is only one of his sources. The Protevangelium Jacobi is another (1-16). In fact, the Gospel must have carried the name of James occasionally ; Hrotswitha, for example, the Abbess of Gandersheim (10th cent.), who para- phrased it in Latin hexameters for the benefit of her nuns, entitled her work, ' Historia nativitatis laudabilisque conversationis intactce Dei Gene- tricis, quam scriptam referi sub nomine sancti Jacobi fratris Domini.'
In the first part (1-17), which describes the birth and maidenhood of Mary, her marriage, the virgin- birth, and the escape from Herod, tiie features of moment introduced are as follows. The home of Mary's parents is definitely Jerusalem (in the Protevangelium this is only a matter of infer- ence) ; Joachim does not otter sacrifices for forgive- ness ; he absents himself for five months instead of forty days ; Anna's vow to consecrate her child is made before, not after, the angel's announce- ment ; an angel bids her go to meet Joachim ; in
to refuting what he thought was their ' vivicium evangelium,' but which waa really the ' modium evangelium ' written bv Adda.