The teacher who produced this manuscript must have 'had a particular affinity for the text,' Landau said. Such divisions are very uncommon in ancient manuscripts, but they do show up frequently in manuscripts that were used in educational contexts,' said Landau, a lecturer in the UT Austin Department of Religious Studies. 'The scribe has divided most of the text into syllables by using mid-dots. With its neat, uniform handwriting and words separated into syllables, the original manuscript was probably a teacher's model used to help students learn to read and write, Smith and Landau said.

Such apocryphal writings, Smith said, would have fallen outside the canonical boundaries set by Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, in his 'Easter letter of 367' that defined the 27-book New Testament: 'No one may add to them, and nothing may be taken away from them.' 'The text supplements the biblical account of Jesus' life and ministry by allowing us access to conversations that purportedly took place between Jesus and his brother, James - secret teachings that allowed James to be a good teacher after Jesus' death,' Smith said. The ancient narrative describes the secret teachings of Jesus to his brother James, in which Jesus reveals information about the heavenly realm and future events, including James' inevitable death. But there they were, right in front of us.' '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.

Bible discovery aids austin tx