"According to these Gnostic texts, Jesus taught people that the material world was actually a prison crated by an evil god - a lot like the movie 'The Matrix,' essentially." "They understood Jesus much more in terms of being a revealer of human wisdom than as a messiah," Landau said. Gnostic texts like The First Apocalypse of James were likely banned because of their "different understanding" of what Jesus' importance was, Landau said. "So clearly, this instructor, whoever he or she was, was quite fond of The First Apocalypse of James." Forbidden text "By the time this text would have been used in somebody's school in the fifth or sixth century, this text was effectively banned," Landau said. To see syllables so clearly divided like this suggests that the book was a teacher's tool produced to help students learn how to read and write in Greek. Manuscripts of the time were often written in a fluid, continuous script. "Nearly all of the syllables are divided with these little mid-dots - little dots right in the middle of the line," Landau said. Ĭonsidering the manuscript's forbidden status, another surprising aspect is that it appears to be a teaching edition. All other stories, like those found in the Nag Hammadi collection, were deemed heretical. 367 when Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria, defined the canon of 27 books known today as the New Testament. Buried in jars underground, the Nag Hammadi books were likely hidden for safekeeping sometime after A.D. The only other known version of the text was discovered in the Nag Hammadi library - a collection of 13 Coptic Gnostic books excavated in Egypt in 1945. That means while this is not the first copy of the First Apocalypse of James ever found, it is likely the oldest. "It's extremely rare to find in Greek - it was definitely the original language." "Greek was the earliest language that the original Christian writings were composed in because it was sort of the universal language of the Roman empire at that time," Landau told Live Science. ![]() The two had been studying the Oxyrhynchusfindings for more than two years. Smith and Landau pieced together the document from six different papyrus fragments in the collection earlier this summer. ![]() The find belongs to a collection of more than 200,000 papyrus documents housed at Oxford University in England, first excavated from a rubbish heap in the Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus in the late 19th century. The text was likely written in the fifth or sixth century, said Brent Landau, a religious studies lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin, who presented the findings along with Geoffrey Smith, a religious studies scholar at UT Austin, at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting in Boston in November. The findings have not yet been subject to peer review. The manuscript is a rare, Greek-language edition of an apocryphal New Testament story called The First Apocalypse of James, that, until now, was thought to only be preserved in the Coptic language (an indigenous Egyptian language evolved from hieroglyphics), according to a statement.
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