The First Apocalypse of James is regarded as part of the New Testament apocrypha. It was first discovered amongst 52 other Gnostic Christian texts spread over 13 codices by an Arab peasant, Mohammad Ali al-Samman, in the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi late in December 1945. Another copy has more recently been found in the Codex Tchacos, where it is merely titled 'James'. Those texts were in the Coptic language. In 2017, the first Greek copy was found amongst unpublished Oxyrhynchus Papyri housed at Oxford University. The Nag Hammadi Coptic manuscript is remarkably well preserved for its age; it was reported that the cache of texts called the "Nag Hammadi library", when originally found, were sealed within a large terra cotta vessel. They were secreted during the fourth century, in an effort to hide the texts from destruction by others. The form of the text is primarily that of a Revelation Dialogue/Discourse between James the brother of Jesus and Jesus, with a rather fragmentary account of the departure of James appended to the bottom of the manuscript, connected to the remainder by an oblique reference to crucifixion. The first portion of the text describes James' understandable concern about being crucified, whereas the latter portion describes secret "passwords" given to James so that he can ascend to the highest heaven after dying, without being blocked by evil "powers" of the demiurge. In the text, Jesus tells James, "you are not my brother materially." Some of the framing background details about James given in the text are thought by academics to reflect early traditions; according to the text:
The first-known Greek copy of the text was discovered in 2017 at Oxford University by Geoffrey Smith and Brent Landau, religious studies scholars at the University of Texas at Austin. The fragments date from the fifth or sixth century and were probably a teacher's model used to help students learn to read and write. The fragments will be published in the Oxyrhynchus compilation The Greco-Roman Memoirs. One of the most curious features of the First Apocalypse of James is that the range of dating of its original text, assigned to it by scholars, requires that it was written after the Second Apocalypse of James.
