The Library
1780 works catalogued century by century, from the literature the Bible was written among to the present — each with a note on what it is, why it lasted, and where to read it.
1–100
2 works
c. 50–90
Greek
Doctrina Apostolorum
Anonymous
A short moral catechism setting two roads before the hearer — one of life, one of death — and filling each with plain commands and plain vices. It is the material the Didache opens with and the Epistle of Barnabas closes with, surviving on its own in a Latin manuscript at Freising.
c. 90–110
Greek
Didache ton dodeka apostolon
Anonymous
A short manual of Christian practice for a congregation still finding its footing: the Two Ways of life and death, then plain instructions for baptism, fasting, the eucharistic prayers, and how to tell a true travelling prophet from a freeloader.
101–200
1 work
c. 198
Greek
Paedagogus
Clement of Alexandria · c. 150–c. 215
Christ as the tutor of ordinary life, with detailed and often amused guidance on eating, drinking, sleeping, laughter, jewellery, bathing, and how to behave at a dinner party.
1401–1500
1 work
c. 1418–1427
Latin
De Imitatione Christi
Thomas à Kempis · c. 1380–1471
Four short books of counsel on self-knowledge, inner detachment, the consolations of the interior life, and the sacrament — written in aphorisms brief enough to stop a reader on almost every page.
1601–1700
1 work
1678; part two 1684
English
John Bunyan · 1628–1688
Christian flees the City of Destruction with a burden on his back and travels through the Slough of Despond, Vanity Fair, and the Valley of the Shadow to the Celestial City — written largely in prison by an unlicensed preacher.
1901–2000
2 works
1937
German
Nachfolge
Dietrich Bonhoeffer · 1906–1945
An exposition of the Sermon on the Mount written while training pastors for an illegal seminary under the Nazi regime, opening with the distinction between cheap grace — forgiveness without repentance, grace as a doctrine rather than a call — and costly grace.
1998
English
Dallas Willard · 1935–2013
A philosopher's argument that the gospel has been reduced to a transaction about the afterlife, and a recovery of Jesus as a teacher whose Sermon on the Mount describes an available kind of life in the kingdom now.
7 of 1780 works