The First Apocalypse of James is a late second century

Gnostic Gnosticism (from grc, γνωστικός, gnōstikós, , 'having knowledge') is a collection of religious ideas and systems which coalesced in the late 1st century AD among Jewish and early Christian sects. These various groups emphasized pe ...

apocalypse Apocalypse () is a literary genre in which a supernatural being reveals cosmic mysteries or the future to a human intermediary. The means of mediation include dreams, visions and heavenly journeys, and they typically feature symbolic imager ...

The form of the text is primarily that of a Revelation Dialogue/Discourse between James the brother of Jesus (James the Just) and

Jesus Jesus, likely from he, יֵשׁוּעַ, translit=Yēšūaʿ, label=Hebrew/Aramaic ( AD 30 or 33), also referred to as Jesus Christ or Jesus of Nazareth (among other names and titles), was a first-century Jewish preacher and religious ...

, with a rather fragmentary account of the departure (possibly meaning martyrdom) of James appended to the bottom of the manuscript, connected to the remainder by an oblique reference to crucifixion. The first portion of the text describes James' understandable concern about being crucified, whereas the latter portion describes secret "passwords" given to James so that he can ascend to the highest heaven (out of 72) after dying, without being blocked by evil "powers" of the

demiurge In the Platonic, Neopythagorean, Middle Platonic, and Neoplatonic schools of philosophy, the demiurge () is an artisan-like figure responsible for fashioning and maintaining the physical universe. The Gnostics adopted the term ''demiurge''. Al ...

. In the text, Jesus tells James, "you are not my brother materially."

Manuscripts

The ''First Apocalypse of James'' is regarded as part of the

New Testament apocrypha The New Testament apocrypha (singular apocryphon) are a number of writings by early Christians that give accounts of Jesus and his teachings, the nature of God, or the teachings of his apostles and of their lives. Some of these writings were cit ...

Nag Hammadi

It was first discovered amongst 52 other

Christian Christians () are people who follow or adhere to Christianity, a monotheistic Abrahamic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. The words ''Christ'' and ''Christian'' derive from the Koine Greek title ''Christós'' (Χρι ...

texts spread over 13

codices The codex (plural codices ) was the historical ancestor of the modern book. Instead of being composed of sheets of paper, it used sheets of vellum, papyrus, or other materials. The term ''codex'' is often used for ancient manuscript books, with ...

by an Arab peasant, Mohammad Ali al-Samman, in the Egyptian town of

Nag Hammadi Nag Hammadi ( ; ar, نجع حمادى ) is a city in Upper Egypt. It is located on the west bank of the Nile in the Qena Governorate, about north-west of Luxor. It had a population of close to 43,000 . History The town of Nag Hammadi is name ...

late in December 1945. The Nag Hammadi Coptic manuscript is remarkably well preserved for its age; it was reported that the cache of texts called the "

Nag Hammadi library The Nag Hammadi library (also known as the " Chenoboskion Manuscripts" and the "Gnostic Gospels") is a collection of early Christian and Gnostic texts discovered near the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi in 1945. Thirteen leather-bound papyr ...

", when originally found, were sealed within a large terra cotta vessel. They were secreted during the fourth century, in an effort to hide the texts from destruction by others.

Codex Tchacos

Another copy has more recently been found in the

Codex Tchacos Codex Tchacos is an ancient Egyptian Coptic papyrus, which contains early Christian gnostic texts from approximately 300 AD: the Letter of Peter to Philip, the First Apocalypse of James, the Gospel of Judas, and a fragment of the Book of Allog ...

, where it is merely titled 'James'. Those texts were in the

Coptic language Coptic (Bohairic Coptic: , ) is a language family of closely related dialects, representing the most recent developments of the Egyptian language, and historically spoken by the Copts, starting from the third-century AD in Roman Egypt. Coptic ...

Oxyrhynchus

In 2017, the first

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

copy was found (the work was originally written in Greek) amongst unpublished

Oxyrhynchus Papyri The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are a group of manuscripts discovered during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by papyrologists Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt at an ancient rubbish dump near Oxyrhynchus in Egypt (, mo ...

housed at Oxford University. The first-known Greek copy of the text was discovered in 2017 at

Oxford University Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...

by Geoffrey Smith and Brent Landau, religious studies scholars at the

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

. The fragments date from the fifth or sixth century and were probably a teacher's model used to help students learn to read and write. The fragments will be published in the Oxyrhynchus compilation ''The Greco-Roman Memoirs''.

References

External links

Online English text of ''The First Apocalypse of James''
* James M. Robinson, ed., ''The Nag Hammadi Library'', revised edition. HarperCollins, San Francisco, 1990. * Wilhelm Schneemelcher, ed., translation by R. McL. Wilson, ''New Testament Apocrypha : Gospels and Related Writings'' (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1992), pp. 313–326. {{Authority control Christian apocalyptic writings James, 1 2nd-century Christian texts Texts in Koine Greek James, brother of Jesus Nag Hammadi library