George T. Zervos presents the first in a two-volume critical investigation of one of the earliest and most important of the New Testament Apocrypha, the Protevangelium of James, also known as the Infancy Gospel of James. Zervos challenges the prevailing view that the ProtJac is a 2nd-century unitary document, finding it instead to be the product of an ongoing redactional process in which a 1st-century CE “heretical” text was progressively conformed to the “orthodox” Christian doctrine of the time.

Zervos tells the story of how an early apocryphal gospel provided the developing church with doctrinal material, which was incorporated into both the theology and the ecclesiastical liturgical cycle of the medieval Church, thus becoming a significant part of the standard catechism for generations of Christians. In this first volume Zervos provides a critical introduction to the text and discusses ProtJac's publication history, scholarly investigation, compositional problems and evidence of redaction, as well as a in-depth analysis of the narrative.

For the first time the readings of the vast majority of the known Greek manuscripts appear together, with a transcription of the original text of the complete copy of the ProtJac found in Papyrus Bodmer V.