The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Apocrypha by Joseph Verheyden;Andrew Gregory;Christopher Tuckett;Tobias Nicklas;

Author:Joseph Verheyden;Andrew Gregory;Christopher Tuckett;Tobias Nicklas;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2015-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

First Apocalypse of James

Found amongst the Nag Hammadi corpus of writings (NHC V.3), the visionary text the First Apocalypse of James is concerned with the future sufferings soon to befall James, transmission in secret of the true teaching, the role of women disciples, and the rebuke of the Twelve (Schoedel and Parrott 1996: 260). The Lord provides James with a series of formulae that will enable him to progress past the hostile powers that will attempt to block his assent to ‘the pre-existent one’. ‘These formulae represent a dramatized version of texts that appear elsewhere in the context of rites for the dying in forms of Valentinian Gnosticism’ (Schoedel and Parrott 1996: 260). The motif of the post-mortem journey of the soul and its confrontation of hostile powers is well known in the broader thought world of the time (see the Egyptian funerary text, the Book of the Dead, and from a similar setting as the Nag Hammadi texts, see the Books of Jeu).

The narrator refers to Jesus as ‘the Lord’, whereas in direct speech James addresses him as ‘rabbi’. This may affirm the role of Jesus as a teacher of hidden mysteries, as well as attempting to communicate to readers the antiquity of the tradition, stemming from Jerusalem in the first decades of the movement. In this way the First Apocalypse of James appears to be advocating an alternative ancient strand of authoritative teaching that has an apostolic pedigree. In this text ‘the Lord’ declares himself to be unnameable, yet to be ‘an image of Him-who-is’, and his purpose is to bring forth that image to the ones who are the offspring of the highest ineffable one. Thus the Lord tells James that ‘I shall reveal to you everything of the mystery’ (NHC V.3, 25).

The text is more interested in the revelation of the mystery than in the identity of ‘the Lord’. Its view of salvation is concerned with the cosmological assent through the seventy-two heavens that are under the authority of the twelve archons. James is not only forewarned about his coming martyrdom but also the perils he will face during his cosmic journey. When one of the powerful beings will confront James with a question concerning his origin, he is instructed to answer ‘I am from the Pre-Existent Father, and a son in the Pre-Existent One’ (NHC V.3, 33). The central concern of the text is that of soteriology, but as understood from a Valentinian perspective. Many of the characters associated with Valentinian cosmology appear in this revelation dialogue about James’s future assent. Similarly there is an emphasis on the female. This occurs in two ways. First through prominence given to female disciples, with James commanded to ‘encourage these four: Salome and Mariam and Martha and Arsinoe’ (NHC V.3, 40). Also in line with Valentinian cosmology and the understanding of the reunification of the feminine soul with her masculine heavenly counterpart, the text states that ‘the perishable has gone up to the imperishable and the female element has attained to this male element’ (NHC V.

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