The Gnostic Gospels

[mabuse]

;D
If you wish to understand how Christianity became the way it has become, you could do worse than to get a copy of the Gnostic Gospels, particularly "The Nag Hammadi" library. Wonder where the books they forced out of the Bible went? Some are in these tractates.
Easy to find online, as well. Always recommended. Find-out how women had a primary-role in early-Christianity. Find-out how democratic the early-Church was. Find-out why they (Church autocrats) don't want you to read them in the texts-themselves.

[Quorthon]

Are those the books chronicling Jesus as a child? Some of them?

[mabuse]

No, but some of those are extant in the Apocrypha. You can find them online. My FAVORITE is a story of Jesus being taunted by other children--he turns them into sheep! The symbolism is pretty obvious (like the rest of the Bible). It's easy to see why certain passages or books were taken-out. The Book of Mark had a whole section removed (later found in a letter from one of the Church fathers in an Eastern Orthodox in Israel in 1958), because it's obvious that Jesus is merely initiating Lazarus into "the mysteries" in the Tomb. In-short, not raising him from-the-dead at-all, just initiating him in a ritual. Just like in Freemasonry, incidentally. Symbolic-death, but rational-people know this already. :0)