Christianity: Details about 'Apocryphon Of James'
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The Apocryphon of James, also known by the translation of its title - the Secret Book of James, is a text amongst the New Testament apocrypha. It survives primarily as part of a codex in the Nag Hammadi library. Although the text appears to be a Coptic translation from Greek, the author claims to have written in Hebrew. The text is framed as an Epistle (i.e. a letter) from James to someone else (whose name is obscured by the damage to the text). Within the Epistle, which has no significant narrative continuity, the author describes a vision in which Jesus expands on various sayings. The flavour of the sayings is quite gnostic in tone, although it doesn't mention the standard, Valentinian, gnostic cosmology. Although many of the sayings appear to be shared with the Gospel of Matthew or with the Gospel of Luke, a notable feature of the text is that in the fourth paragraph it says, "And five hundred and fifty days after he arose from the dead, we said to him: ..", which is considerably longer than the forty days the Christian Orthodox Bible teaches for His Ascension. As such, it appears to support the idea of a Q Gospel, which was devoid of the Passion. The brief framing letter appears somewhat independent of the remainder of the text, and consequently may have originated as two separate texts redacted together, as many think. The discussions of martyrdom and prophecy also appear to be somewhat separate, indicating an original text, for the main body of the document, which was composed of brief sayings. References
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