First Greek Fragments of a Nag Hammadi Text Found Among Oxyrhynchus Papyri

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Secret Alias
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First Greek Fragments of a Nag Hammadi Text Found Among Oxyrhynchus Papyri

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Last edited by Secret Alias on Thu Nov 23, 2017 10:37 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Joseph D. L.
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Re: First Greek Fragments of a Nag Hammadi Text Found Among Oxyrhynchus Papyri

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This is a terrific find! Thank you for this!
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Re: First Greek Fragments of a Nag Hammadi Text Found Among Oxyrhynchus Papyri

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Quote: "There are some variants in the text (only one was discussed in the session), but Smith and Landau note that the text of their fragments aligns more closely with Codex Tchacos than the Nag Hammadi tractate."
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Re: First Greek Fragments of a Nag Hammadi Text Found Among Oxyrhynchus Papyri

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Quote: "There are some variants in the text (only one was discussed in the session), but Smith and Landau note that the text of their fragments aligns more closely with Codex Tchacos than the Nag Hammadi tractate."
Would this not mean that the above fragment is actually older (roughly late second century) than either the Nag Hammadi or Codex Tchacos manuscripts?
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Re: First Greek Fragments of a Nag Hammadi Text Found Among Oxyrhynchus Papyri

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Smith and Landau offer a tentative dating of fifth-sixth century [for this copy of the First Apocalypse of James]
Amazing to think that the Greek originals of Nag Hammadi texts were still being copied and distributed in Greek even after the Coptic translations of the fourth century.
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Re: First Greek Fragments of a Nag Hammadi Text Found Among Oxyrhynchus Papyri

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Blood wrote: Mon Nov 20, 2017 4:47 am
Smith and Landau offer a tentative dating of fifth-sixth century [for this copy of the First Apocalypse of James]
Amazing to think that the Greek originals of Nag Hammadi texts were still being copied and distributed in Greek even after the Coptic translations of the fourth century.
Gnostic Christianity survived until the 14th century when finally stamped out with the Albigensian Crusade and follow up Inquisition (giving us the Dominicans, aka, "the dogs of God"). One of the comments from that era was that the Cathars had Greek texts and the Catholics Latin. The Bogomils lasted until the 15th century, and among their books was supposedly the Apocryphon of John and also the Ascension of Isaiah (so said Euthymius Zigabenus in the 12th century). So Nag Hammadi books survived.

There seems to have been a continuous connection from the Marcionites and Manicheans to the Paulikons and then the Bogomils, Cathars and such. Moving from Asia (Turkey today) to the Balkins (which were rather loosely controlled) and having a network throughout Europe. Empires were hardly the strong nation states of today. That makes what the dogs of God managed to do all the more impressive in a scary way.

All of which is a long winded way of saying, you really should not be surprised heretical Greek texts were extant long after Nag Hammadi.
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Re: First Greek Fragments of a Nag Hammadi Text Found Among Oxyrhynchus Papyri

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Joseph D. L. wrote: Sun Nov 19, 2017 10:01 pm
Quote: "There are some variants in the text (only one was discussed in the session), but Smith and Landau note that the text of their fragments aligns more closely with Codex Tchacos than the Nag Hammadi tractate."
Would this not mean that the above fragment is actually older (roughly late second century) than either the Nag Hammadi or Codex Tchacos manuscripts?
Why?

AFAIK, the First Apocalypse of James might not have existed in the second century.

I think we can make a general argument that most (at least, a lot of...) Greek fragments in Egypt date before the shift to Coptic around the 4th century (partly in the 3rd already), but there were still plenty of Greek fragments in the 3rd century, some in the 4th and 5th and 6th. The question will probably come down to the paleography.
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Re: First Greek Fragments of a Nag Hammadi Text Found Among Oxyrhynchus Papyri

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http://www.apocryphicity.ca/2017/11/23/ ... y-day-one/

From the book display I made my way to the Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism session. The highlight of the session was the highly-anticipated paper by Geoffrey Smith and Brent Landau (both of the University of Texas at Austin) entitled “Nag Hammadi at Oxyrhynchus: Introducing a New Discovery.” I knew ahead of time what text the two were going to debut but I had promised to keep that information to myself. Smith began the discussion with a list of all of the texts from Nag Hammadi that are available in Greek—Gospel of Thomas, Wisdom of Jesus Christ, and (not from Nag Hammadi but often associated with it in scholarship) the Gospel of Mary—before revealing the new text: 1 Apocalypse of James. This was greeted with a bit of a gasp in the room, and it is certainly exciting to have the text in Greek, or at least a portion of it. The manuscript, which has been sitting in a cabinet at Oxford for a century, is dated to around the fifth or sixth century. It follows closely the text as found in Codex Tchacos, so it does not provide any new or radically different readings. Landau took over the second portion of the presentation to discuss the scribe’s use of mid-dots to divide syllables—a practice found only in manuscripts used to teach reading. Landau remarked that it is odd that of all the texts that a teacher could chose from (such as the Iliad or the Psalms), she or he chose this “obscure Christian writing.”
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
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