The many Jesus-like figures of the ancient world

What people tend to forget about Jesus Christ is that he killed children. As a five-year-old, Jesus was toddling through a village when a small boy ran past, knocking his shoulder. Taking it like any five-year-old would, Jesus shouted after him ‘you shall not go further on your way’, at which point the boy fell down dead. Later, when the boy’s parents admonished Joseph and Mary for failing to raise their son properly, Jesus blinded them. Something to bear in mind next time you ask yourself: ‘What would Jesus do?’

If this story is unfamiliar, that is because it doesn’t appear in any of the Bible’s traditional Gospels. It is recounted in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a text composed around the mid-2nd century AD (and so around the same time as the four traditional Gospels, which are dated between 70-110 AD). This is just one text among many now labelled apocrypha, but which, as Catherine Nixey outlines in her wonderfully readable, informative book Heresy, ‘were believed and read by Christians for centuries’.

In bewitchingly titled chapters such as ‘The Falsehoods of the Magicians’, ‘The Breeds of Heretical Monsters’ and ‘Fruit from a Dunghill’, Nixey takes us on a tour across the early centuries of Christianity, when who Jesus Christ was, what he did, and whether he mattered at all were issues highly contested by followers and critics alike.

For in the beginning were the words. Alongside his animosity towards fellow children, Jesus smites teachers, sells a ‘twin’ into slavery, has someone crucified in his stead and, in what Nixey describes as a ‘somewhat surprising’ turn, impregnates his own mother. That’s not the only time Mary’s vagina is invoked – in the Infancy Gospel of James, a woman arrives at the nativity scene sceptical of Mary’s virginity.