The first known quotation of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas is from Irenaeus of Lyon around AD 180, who calls it spurious and apocryphal.

"[4] At least some period of oral transmission of the source material is generally believed to have occurred, either wholly or as several different stories before it was first transcribed and over time redacted.

[4] This infancy story ends with Jesus in the temple at age 12 quoting parts of the gospel of Luke.

[6] In later manuscripts dating from the Middle Ages, the Gospel opens with a prologue where "Thomas the Israelite" introduces himself, but with no further explanation.

The few surviving Greek manuscripts provide no clues themselves because only one small scrap on papyrus[8] predates the 13th century, whereas the earliest authorities, according to the editor and translator Montague Rhodes James, are a much abbreviated sixth-century Syriac version, and a Latin palimpsest of the fifth or sixth century, which has never been fully translated and can be found in Vienna.

[11] The Greek B was found by Tischendorf on a trip to Mount Sinai in 1844, which is not only shorter (11 chapters), but is a different version of the well-known A text.

[1][15] The text describes the life of the child Jesus from the ages of five to twelve,[16] with fanciful, and sometimes malevolent, supernatural events.

[16] The stories cover how the young Incarnation of God matures and learns to use his powers for good and how those around him first respond in fear and later with admiration.

Subsequently, he resurrects a friend who is killed when he falls from a roof, and heals another who cuts his foot with an axe.

The structure of the story is essentially: Episodes from Jesus's childhood as depicted in the Klosterneuburger Evangelienwerk, a 14th-century gospel translation: