MDDM Ch. 50 Infancy Gospel of Thomas

[Dave Monroe]

   "'In the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, you see, Jesus
as a Boy made small, as you'd say, toy Golems out of
Clay,-- Sparrows that flew, Rabbits that hopp'd. 
Golem fabrication is integral to the Life of Jesus,
and thence to Christianity.'" (M&D, Ch. 50, p. 486)

>From M.R. James, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1924) ...

The stories of Thomas the Israelite, the Philosopher,
concerning the works of the Childhood of the Lord.

I. I, Thomas the Israelite, tell you, and all the
brethren that are Gentiles, the works of the childhood
of our Lord Jesus Christ and his mighty deeds, and all
that he did when he was born in our land:

II. 1 This little child Jesus when he was five years
old was playing at the ford of a brook: and he
gathered together the waters that flowed there into
pools, and made them clean, and commanded them by his
word alone. 2 having made soft clay, he fashioned
twelve sparrows. it was the Sabbath when he did these
things. And there were also many other little children
playing with him.

3 a certain Jew when he saw what Jesus did, playing
upon the Sabbath day, departed and told his father
Joseph: your child is at the brook, and he has taken
clay and fashioned twelve little birds, and has
polluted the Sabbath day. 4 Joseph came to the place
and saw: and cried out to him, saying: Why do you
these things on the Sabbath, which it is not lawful to
do? But Jesus clapped his hands together and cried out
to the sparrows and said to them: Go! and the sparrows
took their flight and went away chirping. 5 when the
Jews saw it they were amazed, and departed and told
their chief men that which they had seen Jesus do.

http://wesley.nnu.edu/noncanon/gospels/inftoma.htm

http://wesley.nnu.edu/noncanon/gospels/inftomb.htm

http://wesley.nnu.edu/noncanon/gospels/inftoml.htm

"Except for the similar names, the 'Infancy Gospel of
Thomas' and the 'Gospel of Thomas' are not
historically connected. The 'Infancy Gospel of Thomas'
and related texts contain stories of Jesus' birth and
his childhood.

http://home.epix.net/~miser17/Thomas.html

http://www.misericordia.edu/users/davies/religion/InfancyT.htm

"Golem fabrication is integral to the Life of Jesus,
and thence to Christianity"

Cf. ...

"The craze for Gothic fiction after 'The Castle of
Otranto' was grounded, I suspect, in deep and
religious yearnings for that earlier mythical time
which had come to be known as the Age of Miracles. In
ways more and less literal, folks in the 18th century
believed that once upon a time all kinds of things had
been possible which were no longer so. Giants,
dragons, spells. The laws of nature had not been so
strictly formulated back then. What had once been true
working magic had, by the Age of Reason, degenerated
into mere machinery. Blake's dark Satanic mills
represented an old magic that, like Satan, had fallen
from grace. As religion was being more and more
secularized into Deism and nonbelief, the abiding
human hunger for evidence of God and afterlife, for
salvation - bodily resurrection, if possible -
remained. The Methodist movement and the American
Great Awakening were only two sectors on a broad front
of resistance to the Age of Reason, a front which
included Radicalism and Freemasonry as well as
Luddites and the Gothic novel. Each in its way
expressed the same profound unwillingness to give up
elements of faith, however 'irrational,' to an
emerging technopolitical order that might or might not
know what it was doing. 'Gothic' became code for
'medieval,' and that has remained code for
'miraculous,' on through Pre-Raphaelites,
turn-of-the-century tarot cards, space opera in the
pulps and the comics, down to 'Star Wars' and
contemporary tales of sword and sorcery. 

"To insist on the miraculous is to deny to the machine
at least some of its claims on us, to assert the
limited wish that living things, earthly and
otherwise, may on occasion become Bad and Big enough
to take part in transcendent doings...."

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html

Or, at any rate, compare 'n' contrast ...

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