The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, dated to around the mid to later second century, strings together a series of pious and often shocking stories of the childhood of Jesus. He strikes teachers dead, brings to life clay birds, petulantly raises the dead to redeem his honour, and so forth. I have read here and there how some of these stories are taken from those of pagan gods but have not yet come across anything that addresses their origins or similarities to other stories in depth.
I did recently come across this passage:
Usually, apparent analogies in Indian childhood stories about Krishna and Buddha have been adduced. Scholars have also opted for Egyptian roots interpreting episodes in IGT as allegories of the Horus myth.3
3. Conrady, Ludwig. “Das Thomasevangelium: Ein wissenschaftlicher kritischer Versuch.” TSK 76 (1903) 377–459.
I have since seen the same Conrady citation in a couple of other works, too.
I don’t read German but I have learned to extract information I want by various manuevers with online translators and dictionaries. So all I had to do was to find an online copy of Conrady’s article, no doubt sitting in the Internet Archive given that it goes back to 1903. And I was in luck. I found it there. But then my luck ran out. The text is that Gothic or Blackletter script. That means I cannot run it through any optical character recognition (OCR) tool available to me — which I need to be able to do in order to create a text that machine translators can read.
If anyone passing by does have a similar interest in what has been written about the origins of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and also has the means/equipment to be able to convert Gothic text into more “normal” text they can download the Conrady article that I have extracted from Internet Archive (archive.org) and enabled it to be shared via Google Drive: Conrady, Das Thomasevangelium. It’s a file of approx 3 MB. The article is nearly 90 pages.
Anyone who does manage to convert it to a normal text file is very welcome to send me a copy in the meantime.
Many thanks.