The Church Fathers · c. 329–330
Four Books of the Gospels
Evangeliorum Libri Quattuor
Juvencus
What it is
The gospel story, mostly Matthew, recast in some thirty-two hundred lines of Virgilian hexameter by a Spanish priest of noble birth. The preface says plainly what it is for: Homer and Virgil will burn with the world, but a poem carrying the deeds of Christ will not.
Why it lasted
The first Christian biblical epic and the beginning of Latin Christian poetry as a serious enterprise — the claim that the highest pagan form could be taken over rather than avoided. It was still a school text a thousand years later.
Scripture it works from
Where to read it
Public domain and free to read in full, though not held here. The archives below have it.
These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.
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