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This is an archived Zoom recording of the December 22, 2025, Bible and Beyond Discussion, in which Dr. Shirley Paulson and participants spoke with Dr. Tony Burke.

Reading the stories of Jesus’s birth in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, we either accept them or wish for more details. In fact, several early Christian writers provide those details. These new stories became important to the early Christian church because they formed the basis of faith in Jesus’s role as the God-promised messiah. Many of the details support the gospel stories, but they also become more remarkable and elaborate tales on their own.

Dr. Tony Burke is a Professor in the Department of the Humanities at York University in Toronto. Much of his published work focuses on the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. He is the co-founder of the North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature (NASSCAL). The society is currently involved in two projects: e-Clavis: Christian Apocrypha and the Early Christian Apocrypha series. Burke edited the newly released second volume of the series New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, which is a collection of  little-known and never-before-published texts in English translation.

Links to texts for this discussion, as well as a written transcript are available on the show notes page on the Early Christian Texts website. https://earlychristiantexts.com/an-ap...