An authentic portion of unorthodox Christian writing has been found at Oxford University's archives. The manuscript depicts the secret teachings of Jesus Christ to his brother James. The writing, which is believed to be more than a millennium years old, constitute one of a few number of early Christian documents found to be written in Greek.
The archaic writing, which could have been penned during the fifth or sixth century, characterizes secretive apocalypses brought about by Jesus and related it to his brother James. The script mentioned details in connection to heavenly kingdom and impending occurrences not to mention his brother's demise.
The unverified texts were treated as heretical or unorthodox since it occurred outside the canonical extent. It was the Bishop of Alexandria who determined the boundaries and wrote: "No one may add to them, and nothing may be taken away from them" in a letter dated 367AD outlining the 27-book New Testament.
The University of Texas at Austin (UTA) biblical scholars identified a number of pieces of the script, called the "First Apocalypse of James," at the Egypt Exploration Society's library in Oxford. The handwriting embodies a portion of the Nag Hammadi library, a collection of 13 Coptic Gnostic books. These books were found in 1945 placed inside a terracotta pot in Upper Egypt and was formerly speculated to have existed in Coptic readings, as reported by Independent.
"To say that we were excited once we realized what we'd found is an understatement," said Geoffrey Smith, an assistant professor of religious studies.
UT News claims that based on the way the manuscript was written, there is a possibility that it was used as a teacher's example to aid students in learning how to read and write. The document was neatly and uniformly written with the words broken into syllables.
Smith together with co-scholar Brent Landau revealed the discovery at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting in Boston in November. They are set to publish their initial discovery in the Greco Roman Memoirs series of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri.
