Please explain the difference?
They are different books. The
Gospel of Thomas was a book of wisdom sayings attributed to Christ, written around the same time as the canonical gospels. It contains very little narrative, aside from exchanges between Jesus and the Disciples, like the conversation about Mary cited in the above post. We lack a full copy of the original text, as our earliest copy is a partial one; we do possess a fuller version, but since it was recovered from the Nag Hammadi cache, most scholars believe it is a modified translation with an explicitly Gnostic bias. We know little about its reception in the ancient world, as it is scarcely mentioned in other texts. It does share quite a lot of material with the Synoptic Gospels, however, and may have been one of Luke's sources (disputed). Many scholars believe that it preserves some genuine quotations from Jesus not preserved by other sources, while many others consider it purely fictional and heretical. It has seen a considerable revival of interest and popularity since its re-publication in English, French, etc following the Nag Hammadi translation over the last decade.
The
Infancy Gospel of Thomas is a sort of religious romance novel, very common in the mid 2nd century. These were essentially adventure stories that expanded on the life and careers of Jesus and the first apostles, clearly directed at an audience who had never met any of the protagonists. This particular book was widely known in the ancient world, and considered fictional if not outright heretical by pretty much every other author who mentions it. It reads as a kind of massive expansion of the first few chapters of Luke, filling in more details about Jesus as a child and the miracles that presaged his power and might when he was but a wee bairn. As with the other book, it is considered a Gnostic work, and our best copy comes from the Nag Hammadi assemblage. Most scholars agree that its status is quite dubious, and at best a sort of midrash on the familiar gospels; I know of no one who considers it a genuine description of Jesus' historical existence, though many acknowledge it as an interesting example of the diversity and creativity of the early Christian movement.
