The Infancy Gospel of Thomas as Pilgrimage Guidebook
Last summer I was invited to a conference at the Universität Regensburg on the topic of “Extracanonical Traditions and the Holy Land” (July 2–5, 2019); you can read a summary of the conference by Jan Bremmer HERE and the papers will be published next year. Tobias Nicklas, who convened the conference, knew of my work on the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, and asked me to contribute something on the text. I have to confess, it seemed a bit of a stretch. What can Infancy Thomas possibly have to say about Palestine? As it happens, a few scholars have actually tried to make connections between the text and Jewish Christianity as well as arguing for Palestine as a place of composition. But their work, or at least these aspects of their work, has not been taken very seriously by other scholars. Still, as I revisited the paper to prepare it for publication I was struck by how the text connects to certain pilgrimage locations in late antique or Medieval Nazareth. I can see now how the text COULD have been used as a sort of pilgrimage guide to the city (though I’m not so sure it was).
There are several pilgrimage accounts that mention sites in Nazareth. The earliest of these is the anonymous pilgrim of Placentia, who traveled the Holy Land around 560–570. The pilgrim mentions three locations in Palestine that have some connection to stories in Infancy Thomas. The first portion of the account mentions a synagogue …