국민대학교

국민인! 국민인!!
고대이집트 Oxyrhychus 고문 서연구 유럽 A&HCI 저널 출판 / 데이비드 윌리엄 김(교양대학) 교수

영국 왕립역사학회(The Royal Historical Society, UK) 석학회원인 교양대학 데이비드 윌리엄 김(David William Kim)교수는 고대이집트 Greek and Coptic 고문서 분야에서 현제 영국 옥스퍼드대학교에 100년가까이 보관되어 그 비밀이 풀리지 않은 Oxyrhynchus Papyri (P.Oxy. 5533)를 Nag Hammadi Codices (NHC V,3. 24–44)와 Codex Tchacos (CT 2.10–30)로 최초 역사비판적 분석을 통해 아직 베일에 쌓인 유대제임스공동체과 사상전승 연구를 발표해 관련학계 인류학, 고고학, 로마문학, 종교사회학, 철학자들에게 인정받아 스위스에서 출판했다.

아래는 원문 (The First Apocalypse of James in a Socio-Linguistic Perspective: Three Greek and Coptic Versions from Ancient Monastic Egypt)일부를 간략하게 소개하고 있다.

    
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