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Chapter Five Strangers and Soteriology in the Apocryphon of James Indeed, any concrete discourse (utterance) . . . is entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgments and accents. The word, directed toward its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tensionfilled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents, weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others, intersects with yet a third group: and all this may crucially shape discourse, may leave a trace in all its semantic layers, may complicate its expression and influence its entire stylistic profile. —Mikhail Bakhtin Not all early Christians thought that speaking about themselves as aliens was a good thing. While numerous texts of the first and second centuries were making exactly this move (as evidenced by our analysis thus far), this was not the only conceptual option available to Christians as they thought about their identity and what its legitimate relationship ought to be to the rhetoric of alienation. Thus there were (perhaps not surprisingly) voices of protest to the increasingly common strategy of constructing the Christian self as other. These voices were not separate or outside the contested discourse of formative Christian identity, but instead entered this “dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment” (to borrow Bakhtin’s phrase) in order to make a different kind of claim, one that rejected the valorized alien as a valid trope for identity. One example that has come down to us is the Apocryphon of James. Given its Nag Hammadi provenance, this is a text that has too often been cordoned off both from broader explorations of early Christian identity and from discussions of the alien topos more specifically. Yet Ap. Jas. belongs in these conversations. When it comes to the topos, the text contains several familiar themes: Jesus calls James and Peter to compare themselves to strangers, he articulates a vision of soteriology in which Christians possess a distinct city, and he reflects on the relationship of 92 Chapter 5 strangers to that city. But these common themes of the topos are put to a very different end from anything we have seen so far. Unlike 1 Peter, Hebrews, Diognetus, or Hermas, the apocryphon never makes the move to valorize alien status for the purposes of identity formation . In fact, it explicitly rejects this valorization, instead articulating Christian identity in terms of a particular soteriological agenda—one in which James, Peter, and other disciples must take hold of their salvation for themselves. As such, the text strategically figures the move to claim an alien identity as a mistake, metaphorically equating alien status with a failure to understand salvation correctly. But this reversal is itself a way of deploying the alien topos—and one that must be considered dialogically in relation to the valorization that the text rejects. Indeed the intensity of Ap. Jas.’s discursive bite only becomes fully legible in the context of the topos’s other (more common) uses in early Christian texts. Thus the apocryphon actually plays off these other positions (though not necessarily the specific texts we have examined) for the very power of its point. Dialogue and Authority in Ap. Jas. The Apocryphon of James is a Subachmimic Coptic text translated from a Greek original and preserved in Codex I (the Jung Codex) of the Nag Hammadi corpus.1 The text is of unknown provenance and offers us few clues regarding its social or historical location. No other early Christian literature mentions it, and it does not even specify which James it takes as its protagonist.2 In the most extensive English language study of the text to date, Ron Cameron has argued on form-critical grounds for a dating in the middle of the second century.3 But on the whole, as Pheme Perkins concludes, Ap. Jas. is “notoriously difficult to locate within the spectrum of early Christianity.”4 The bulk of the text can be classified as a post-resurrection dialogue between Jesus and two of his disciples, James and Peter.5 What difference does the genre of post-resurrection conversation make? Perkins suggests that this setting for a dialogic exchange is an important way in which texts such as Ap. Jas. ground their authority to argue for a particular theological position. As she construes this, “the frequency with which Gnostics set their dialogues into a post-resurrection appearance of Jesus suggests that they considered that a distinct type of dialogue. . . . Such dialogues sought to establish the claim of Christian Gnosticism to...

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