In this matter, as about the Infancy generally, the apocryphal gospels are as rich in detail as the canonical are poor. Again and again does Joseph figure in them as a working carpenter, or plough-maker, or house-builder. [148] The words of Origen might imply that it was from some such source that Celsus drew his statement that Jesus was a carpenter; and yet none of the preserved apocrypha speaks of Jesus as working at carpentry save by way of such miracles as that of the elongation of the piece of wood. Having regard to the mythical aspect of the whole, we suggest an easily misinterpreted Gnostic source for the basis. For some schools of the Gnostics, the Jewish God was the Demiourgos, the Artisan or Creator, a subordinate being in their divine hierarchy. The word could mean an artisan of any kind; and architector, the term in the Latin version of Thomas, points to a reflex of the idea of "creator" which attached to the Gnostic term.
That the doctrine of the Demiourgos was already current in Jewish circles before the period commonly assigned to Christian Gnosticism has been shown with much probability by Dr. S. Karppe. In a Talmudic passage given as cited by Rabbi Jochanan ben Saccai before the middle of the first century, C.E., there is denunciation of those who "spare not the glory of the Creator"; and other passages interpret this in the sense of a heresy which "diminishes God" and "sows division between Israel and his God." [149] Debate of this kind emerges with the name of the Judæo-Christian heretic Cerinthus. For him, Jesus, though naturally born, was entered at his baptism by Christ, the son not of the Jewish God, the Demiourgos, but of the Supreme God. [150] There might well be, however, round Cerinthus, who retained Jewish leanings, Jews who held to the Judæo-Christian primary position that Jesus was the son of Yahweh. By some early Gnostics he could hardly fail to be so named. Could not then the Gnostic "Son of the Demiourgos," the Artificer, become for more literal Christists "son of the carpenter," even as the mystic seamless robe of Pagan myth became for some a garment which had to be cut in pieces to be divided?
Met by such suggestions, M. Loisy tells us that we are superficial. But is he otherwise? Is he not simply evading his problem? Can he see nothing strange in the sudden mention of the carpenter in a "primary" gospel which had set out with a divine personage and had never mentioned his parents or upbringing? On the mythic theory the apparition of the Messiah without antecedents is precisely what was to be expected; if there was any clear Jewish expectation on the point, it was that he should come unlooked for, unheralded save, on one view, by "Elias." [151] Thus the Gospel record fits into the myth theory from the outset, while on the assumption of historicity it is but a series of enigmas.