Secular/Sacred Blurring in Early Christian Apocryphal and Popular Texts

        When trying to figure out how to read the miracle tales told by the Prioress and the Second Nun, or other religious figures who retell narratives that do not occur in the Bible, keep in mind that medieval Christians hungered for further information about the Divine as a force they might meet in their everyday lives.  Just as modern Americans' desires for encounters with aliens and for the unlikely rescues of abducted children result in countless Internet rumors about them, these Christians' desires to know more about Jesus and the other characters of the biblical story generated a great stream of popular narrative.  One such source is the apocryphal gospel attributed to Thomas which fills in 7 missing years of Luke with tales of the Infancy of Jesus.  There, you can learn this about what it's like to play with the young Jesus:

9 A few days later Jesus was playing on the roof of a house when one of the children playing with him fell off the roof and died. When the other children saw what had happened, they fled, leaving Jesus standing all by himself.
(2)The parents of the dead child came and accused Jesus: "You troublemaker you, you're the one who threw him down."
(3)Jesus responded, "I didn't throw him down - he threw himself down. He just wasn't being careful and leaped down from the roof and died."
(4)Then Jesus himself leaped down from the roof and stood by the body of the child and shouted in a loud voice: "Zeno!" - that was his name - "Get up and tell me: Did I push you?"
(5)He got up immediately and said, "No, Lord, you didn't push me, you raised me up."
(6)Those who saw this were astonished, and the child's parents praised God for the miracle that had happened and worshipped Jesus.

For more examples, see one of the translated versions at this website: http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/infancythomas.html (Andrew Bernhard's translation and notes are dead links, but the rest work)