![]() “We never suspected that Greek fragments of the First Apocalypse of James survived from antiquity. “To say that we were excited once we realized what we’d found is an understatement,” said Smith, an assistant professor of religious studies. But earlier this year, UT Austin religious studies scholars Geoffrey Smith and Brent Landau added to the list with their discovery of several fifth- or sixth-century Greek fragments of the First Apocalypse of James, which was thought to have been preserved only in its Coptic translations until now. 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. The first-known original Greek copy of a heretical Christian writing describing Jesus’ secret teachings to his brother James has been discovered at Oxford University by biblical scholars at The University of Texas at Austin. It’s precisely because of that that I had my questions: if this Greek Apocalypse of James papyrus genuinely was an Oxyrhynchus papyrus, prove it!Ī few days after the Twitter convo, we finally had an official press release from the University of Texas on this: In the age of questioning collection history, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri ‘brand’ is probably as good as you can get. 11.1351: From Oxyrhynchus to the Green Collection) as did Roberta Mazza ( Another Oxyrhynchus papyrus from the Egypt Exploration Fund distributions sold to a private collector). And every so often, we read about Oxyrhynchus Papyri being sold on the market and going to private collections Brice Jones mentioned one a couple years ago ( P.Oxy. But increasingly I find such origins stories in our discipline to become articles of faith which are never questioned. If you’re unfamiliar with the ‘origin story’ for the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, the link Dr Roberta Mazza mentions above is useful. And so, I was moved to tweet, of course, and a conversation ensued: This set off alarm bells for me because I could not immediately imagine a situation where a text of this sort would be used as a scribal teaching text. Could the middle dots have served a liturgical function, facilitating easier reading on the part of the anaginoskon ? The raison d’être of the codex is thus still being considered by the editors. Was it a school text? The editors suggest the papyri are fragments of a larger codex that probably contained the entire text of the First Apocalypse of James. This is rare in literary texts, but it does appear in school texts, which prompts the question as to how this document was used. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this papyrus is that the scribe employed middle dots to separate syllables. The two fragments have different inventory numbers but are written in the same hand and belong to the same codex. The papyrus codex fragments are housed in the Sackler Library at Oxford University and were found during the dig season of 1904/05. A paper was presented by Geoff Smith and Brent Landau on an “Oxyrhynchus Papyrus” which apparently contained the first Greek example of the First Apocalypse of James, which was previously known, but only in Coptic form ( First Greek Fragments of a Nag Hammadi Text Discovered among Oxyrhynchus Papyri!). Jones mentioned an important discovery just revealed at the Society of Biblical Literature conference in Boston. As is often the case with important discoveries related to the ancient world these days, this is a tale that has taken a while to unfold, although ab initio there were alarm bells going off for some of us.
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