Authorship and Date
The document presents itself as written by James: "I, James, wrote this history in Jerusalem." Thus the purported author is James, brother of Jesus, whom the text claims to be a son of Joseph from a prior marriage.
Scholars have established that the work is pseudepigraphical (not written by the person it is attributed to). That conclusion is based on the style of the language and the fact that the author describes certain activities as contemporary Jewish customs that probably did not exist. For example, the work suggests there were consecrated temple virgins in Judaism, similar to the Vestal Virgins in pagan Rome, this is unlikely to have been a practice in mainstream Judaism, but could possibly have been a practice within the ancient Essene culture.
The consensus is that it was actually composed some time in the 2nd century AD. The first mention of it is by Origen of Alexandria in the early 3rd century, who says the text, like that of a "Gospel of Peter", was of dubious, recent appearance and shared with that book the claim that the 'brethren of the Lord' were sons of Joseph by a former wife.
Read more about this topic: Gospel Of James
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