The so called Apocryphal Gospels, edited a century ago by M. R. James, abound in weird and wonderful stories of the boy Jesus.
For example, he takes a salted fish and tells it to swim around, or strikes another boy dead and then revives him. Some of these stories are charming, for example Jesus shaping twelve birds out of clay; he claps his hands and they all fly away. Others, about miracles worked by a flannel that has contacted the infant’s bath water, are less charming. The range and number of such stories has been greatly increased by manuscript sources discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi. But how reliable are they? Comparisons with the canonical gospel stories may help.
