Before the Church · c. 50 BC – AD 50
The Sentences of Pseudo-Phocylides
Pseudo-Phocylides
What it is
Two hundred and thirty lines of hexameter moral advice under the name of an archaic Greek poet, and Jewish throughout without ever mentioning Israel, the temple, the sabbath, or circumcision — only the commandments that a Greek could also recognise as reasonable.
Why it lasted
Jewish ethics stripped of everything distinctively Jewish, which is exactly the move the early Gentile mission would make. Its household instructions stand behind the codes in Colossians, Ephesians, and 1 Peter.
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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