Ancient Egyptian Oxyrhychus torture book research published in the European Journal of A&HCI / Professor David William Kim (College of Liberal Arts)
- 24.08.28 / 박서연
Professor David William Kim of the College of Liberal Arts, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (UK), has made a major breakthrough in the field of Ancient Egyptian Greek and Coptic manuscripts with his first historical-critical analysis of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (P.Oxy. 5533) as Nag Hammadi Codices (NHC V,3. 24-44) and Codex Tchacos (CT 2.10-30), which have been kept in the British University of London for more than 100 years, through the first historical-critical analysis, and published a study of the Jewish James community and the transmission of ideas, which is still a mystery, and has been recognized by anthropology, archaeology, Roman literature, sociology of religion, and philosophers in related fields.
Below is a shortened version of the original article.(The First Apocalypse of James in a Socio-Linguistic Perspective: Three Greek and Coptic Versions from Ancient Monastic Egypt)
The late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries produced textual evidence of the diversity and development of Jewish and Gnostic Christianities. The ongoing discovery of ancient Greek and Coptic papyri is unveiling the hidden secrets and narratives of various early Christian communities, many affected by a Gnostic ethos and apparently meeting religious persecution for their views and facing alienation in a changing Graeco–Roman world. As Christianity spread throughout the Mediterranean region, the Jesus tradition was transmitted across cultures and languages, becoming mixed with local ideologies and popular worldviews. This paper has attempted to introduce a case, in which the traditional figure involved was not a disciple of Jesus but was nonetheless an elevated figure in early Christian times whose aura grew in significance within the ascetic culture of Gnostic Christianity in third-to-fourth-century ancient Egypt (Goehring 1999).
A continuing transmission of early Jamesian traditions and interest in James as an authoritative source both show up remarkably in 1 Apoc. Jas., found in different Greek texts in P.Oxy. 5533 and in Coptic texts in CT and NHC. The texts are basically independent of each other, and we cannot definitively confirm that either CT or NHC V,7 depend on the extant PO Greek version. However, through comparative detection, we can deduce prevenient processes of enhancing earlier Greek versions of the non-extant Greek 1 Apoc. Jas. in a vital gnostic culture. The relative inability to draw the three versions together in a tighter way, hardly points in the direction of a unifiable or reconstructable single prototypical text. This implies that there were plural ascetic groups (or monasteries) maintaining the Jamesian tradition, even during the development of Gnostic Christianity.
Overall, in line with our object to find traces of a very early James community, the least we can say is that NHC embellishes the most as a gnosticizing document, although it nonetheless contains crucial fragmented information, especially personal names that seem to be surviving details from a distant past. We have worked on the assumption that the Greek text has priority when probing back as far as we can go, and our tabulations for comparison generally bear this out as a sensible heuristic procedure. We noted, as an important example, how Leaf G of P.Oxy. 5533 contains revelational terms, such as “these aforesaid things”, “hidden”, “he is not (there)”, and “[through] foresights]”, which look Biblical and pre-Gnostic—perhaps they even carry reminiscences of a New Testament context, even though they were susceptible to being patently re-worked by Gnostic minds.
For further research, see: https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/15/8/881
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Ancient Egyptian Oxyrhychus torture book research published in the European Journal of A&HCI / Professor David William Kim (College of Liberal Arts) |
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2024-08-28
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Professor David William Kim of the College of Liberal Arts, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (UK), has made a major breakthrough in the field of Ancient Egyptian Greek and Coptic manuscripts with his first historical-critical analysis of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (P.Oxy. 5533) as Nag Hammadi Codices (NHC V,3. 24-44) and Codex Tchacos (CT 2.10-30), which have been kept in the British University of London for more than 100 years, through the first historical-critical analysis, and published a study of the Jewish James community and the transmission of ideas, which is still a mystery, and has been recognized by anthropology, archaeology, Roman literature, sociology of religion, and philosophers in related fields.
Below is a shortened version of the original article.(The First Apocalypse of James in a Socio-Linguistic Perspective: Three Greek and Coptic Versions from Ancient Monastic Egypt)
The late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries produced textual evidence of the diversity and development of Jewish and Gnostic Christianities. The ongoing discovery of ancient Greek and Coptic papyri is unveiling the hidden secrets and narratives of various early Christian communities, many affected by a Gnostic ethos and apparently meeting religious persecution for their views and facing alienation in a changing Graeco–Roman world. As Christianity spread throughout the Mediterranean region, the Jesus tradition was transmitted across cultures and languages, becoming mixed with local ideologies and popular worldviews. This paper has attempted to introduce a case, in which the traditional figure involved was not a disciple of Jesus but was nonetheless an elevated figure in early Christian times whose aura grew in significance within the ascetic culture of Gnostic Christianity in third-to-fourth-century ancient Egypt (Goehring 1999).
A continuing transmission of early Jamesian traditions and interest in James as an authoritative source both show up remarkably in 1 Apoc. Jas., found in different Greek texts in P.Oxy. 5533 and in Coptic texts in CT and NHC. The texts are basically independent of each other, and we cannot definitively confirm that either CT or NHC V,7 depend on the extant PO Greek version. However, through comparative detection, we can deduce prevenient processes of enhancing earlier Greek versions of the non-extant Greek 1 Apoc. Jas. in a vital gnostic culture. The relative inability to draw the three versions together in a tighter way, hardly points in the direction of a unifiable or reconstructable single prototypical text. This implies that there were plural ascetic groups (or monasteries) maintaining the Jamesian tradition, even during the development of Gnostic Christianity.
Overall, in line with our object to find traces of a very early James community, the least we can say is that NHC embellishes the most as a gnosticizing document, although it nonetheless contains crucial fragmented information, especially personal names that seem to be surviving details from a distant past. We have worked on the assumption that the Greek text has priority when probing back as far as we can go, and our tabulations for comparison generally bear this out as a sensible heuristic procedure. We noted, as an important example, how Leaf G of P.Oxy. 5533 contains revelational terms, such as “these aforesaid things”, “hidden”, “he is not (there)”, and “[through] foresights]”, which look Biblical and pre-Gnostic—perhaps they even carry reminiscences of a New Testament context, even though they were susceptible to being patently re-worked by Gnostic minds.
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