Page:The Apocryphal New Testament (1924).djvu/120
woman healed. XXXII. A leprous bride healed. XXXIII, XXXIV. A woman haunted by a dragon freed by one of Christ's swaddling cloths. XXXV. Judas, a child possessed by the devil, smites Jesus, and the devil leaves him in the form of a dog.
XXXVI. Jesus (seven years old) makes figures of all sorts of animals of clay, and makes them walk, fly, and feed. XXXVII. The story of the Dyer Salem (see above). XXXVIII. Jesus lengthens or shortens beams which Joseph had cut wrongly: for he was not clever at his trade. XXXIX. A bed made for the king of Jerusalem pulled out to the right size. XL. The children in the oven (see above). XLI. In the month of Adar the boys make Jesus their king, and passers by have to stop and salute him. XLII. The parents of a child bitten by a snake come, and are stopped: Jesus goes with them to the snake's nest and makes it suck out the poison: it bursts: the child is healed: he was Simon Zelotes. XLIII. James bitten by the viper and healed. XLIV. Zeno falls from the house and is raised. XLV. Jesus brings water in his cloak.
XLVI. The pools and sparrows of clay. The son of Hanan spoils the pools and is palsied. XLVII. The child who ran against Jesus falls dead. XLVIII. Taught by Zacheus, who is confounded by his wisdom. XLIX. Taught by another master, who smites him and dies.
L. With the doctors at Jerusalem: questioned about the Law. LI. Questioned about astronomy. LII. And by a philosopher about philosophy: he answers all perfectly. LIII. Is found by Mary and Joseph. Returns with them. LIV. He lived in obscurity until his baptism. LV. Doxology.
The stories which this book has in common with Thomas are rather shortly told and do not help to solve difficulties in the older text. The long series of healings in Egypt and at Bethlehem is monotonous: for the most part the Virgin is the prominent figure in them. It is to her that the sufferers apply, and she gives them the water in which the child has been washed, or some of his linen, or allows them to touch him.
There is an echo of the story in ch. xli in a Western book, the Vita Rhythmica of the Virgin and Christ, a long Latin rhyming composition of the thirteenth century, edited by Végtlin (Bibl. d. Litterar. Vereins in Stuttgart, no. 180, 1888). In ll. 2,564 sqq. it is said that the Egyptian boys crowned Jesus as king and again in 2,612, after the return from Egypt, the boys made him their king and called him domicellus, 'young Lord'. The sources of this Vita are enumerated by the compiler, and are ostensibly Greek to a large extent—Germanus, Theophilus, Epiphanius, Ignatius are named, as well as the Infantia Salvatoris. With it should be read the Latin stories printed from a Giessen manuscript by O. Schade, Kénigsberg, 1876, Narrationes de vita et conversatione B.V.M. &c. They follow the text of the Vita Rhythmica closely.