The first-known Greek version of a heretical Christian writing describing Jesus’s secret teachings to James has been discovered in archives at the Oxford University in the U.K. The Bible describes James as a brother to Jesus.
To date, only a small number of texts from the Nag Hammadi library — a collection of 13 Coptic Gnostic books discovered in 1945 in Upper Egypt — have been found in Greek, their original language of composition.
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin in the U.S. have expanded the list with their discovery of several 5th or 6th century Greek fragments of the First Apocalypse of James, which was thought to have been preserved only in its Coptic translation.
“To say that we were excited once we realised what we had found is an understatement,” said Geoffrey Smith, an assistant professor of religious studies, at UT Austin.
“We never suspected that Greek fragments of the First Apocalypse of James survived from antiquity. But there they were, right in front of us,” said Mr. Smith.
The ancient narrative describes the secret teachings of Jesus to his brother James, in which Jesus reveals information about the heavenly realm and future events, including James’ inevitable death.
To be a good leader
“The text supplements the biblical account of Jesus’s life and ministry by allowing us access to conversations that purportedly took place between Jesus and James — secret teachings that allowed James to be a good teacher after Jesus’s death,” Mr. Smith said.
Such apocryphal writings, Mr. Smith said, would have fallen outside the canonical boundaries set by Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, in his “Easter letter of 367” that defined the 27-book New Testament: “No one may add to them, and nothing may be taken away from them.”
With its neat, uniform handwriting and words separated into syllables, the manuscript was probably a teacher’s model used to help students learn to read and write, Mr. Smith said.
“The scribe has divided most of the text into syllables by using mid-dots. Such divisions are very uncommon in ancient manuscripts, but they do show up frequently in manuscripts that were used in educational contexts,” said Brent Landau, a lecturer in the UT Austin Department of Religious Studies.
The teacher who produced this manuscript must have “had a particular affinity for the text”, Mr. Landau said. It does not appear to be a brief excerpt from the text, as was common in school exercises, but rather a complete copy of this forbidden ancient writing, he said.
