For the first time, scholars have found a copy of the original Greek manuscript describing what Jesus secretly taught his brother James.
Biblical scholars at the University of Texas at Austin discovered the manuscript in the Nag Hammadi Library at Oxford University, where it may have been a tool teachers used to help students learn to read and write.
According to ScienceDaily, to find a copy of such a manuscript in Greek—the language in which it was originally written—is incredibly rare.
The Nag Hammadi Library is a collection of 13 Coptic Gnostic books, also called codices, which were found in Egypt more than 70 years ago. Only a small handful of works from the library have been recovered in their original Greek versions.
"To say that we were excited once we realized what we'd found is an understatement," Geoffrey Smith, an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the two scholars who made the discovery, told
ScienceDaily. "We never suspected that Greek fragments of the First Apocalypse of James survived from antiquity. But there they were, right in front of us."
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"The New Testament says nothing about Mary being a perpetual virgin, it says she virginally conceived Jesus, and it certainly implies that she went on to have more children after that, and his brothers and sisters are in fact his brothers and sisters," Witherington told
CNN.
