The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is a non-canonical Christian text from the mid-2nd century AD that was part of a popular genre of the 2nd and 3rd centuries -- a miracle literature of Infancy Gospels that was both entertaining and inspirational, written to satisfy a hunger for more miraculous and anecdotal stories of the childhood of Jesus than the Gospel of Luke provided. In the Thomas text, the young Jesus works miracles as in the Gospels, but also peevishly slays another child who bumps into him, and makes his neighbors afraid of being 'maimed' by him. It is not a Jesus we easily recognize today.
The Infancy Gospels also emphasized some of the developing Christian doctrines of the time, including that of the continuing virginity of Mary -- which derives entirely from such apocryphal texts in apparent contradiction to the canonical Gospels, in which at least six siblings of Jesus's are noted. (Tradition and contemporary authors such as Josephus include among them James the Just, an apostle and the first bishop of Jerusalem.)
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is, like many such texts, an pseudepigraphical work, for it claims within itself to have been written by "Thomas the Israelite " (in a Latin version). The historical Thomas (or Judas Thomas, Didymos Judas Thomas, etc.) is very unlikely to have had anything to do with the text: whomever its ultimate author was, he seems not to have known anything of Jewish life except for the Passover observance, and certainly had the completed Gospel of Luke to lean on, which did not appear until the 2nd Century. The first known quote from its text is from Irenaeus of Lyon, ca 185, which sets a terminus ante quem, or a latest possible date of authorship.
Scholars disagree whether the original language of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas was Greek or Syriac. The few surviving Greek manuscripts are all late, while the earliest authorities are a much abbreviated 6th century Syriac version, and a Latin palimpsest at Vienna of the 5th or 6th century, which has never been deciphered in full. There is such an unanalysed welter of manuscripts, translations, shortened versions, alternates and parallels, that they have prevented an easy accounting of which text is which. This number of texts and versions reflect the work's widespread popularity during its day. It may, in fact, have influenced passages of the Qur'an, since the miracle that Jesus performs in this Gospel (Making clay birds come to life) is also attributed to Jesus in the Qur'an.
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas enjoyed a much wider distribution than the narrative Acts of Thomas, and especially than the simpler, less narratively-structured, and Gnostic-tinged "sayings" Gospel of Thomas -- an apparently first-century text whose only known complete version was discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945.
Later references by Hippolytus and Origen are more likely to be referring to this Infancy Gospel than to the "sayings" Gospel of Thomas.
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