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.
600–501 BC
1 work
traditionally c. 600 BC; survives in fragments
Greek
Epimenides of Knossos
A poem in the voice of Minos addressing Zeus, from a Cretan seer said to have slept fifty-seven years in a cave and to have cleansed Athens of a plague by loosing sheep on the Areopagus and sacrificing each where it lay. It rebukes the Cretans for building Zeus a tomb: they are always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies — but you are not dead, for in you we live and move and have our being.
300–201 BC
1 work
c. 220 BC; survives in fragments
Greek
Demetrius the Chronographer
The earliest Jewish writer in Greek whose work survives, patiently calculating dates and answering awkward questions: how Jacob's children were born in so few years, and where the unarmed Israelites who left Egypt got their weapons.
200–101 BC
4 works
c. 158 BC; survives in fragments
Greek
Eupolemus
A history claiming Moses as the first wise man, the inventor of the alphabet, who gave it to the Phoenicians, who gave it to the Greeks — with a long invented correspondence between Solomon and the kings of Tyre and Egypt about building the temple.
c. 160–145 BC; survives in fragments
Greek
Aristobulus of Alexandria
Five fragments preserved by Eusebius, arguing that where scripture gives God hands and feet these are figures for power and standing, and that Plato and Pythagoras had both read Moses in an older Greek translation.
c. 2nd century BC; survives in fragments
Greek
Exagoge
Ezekiel the Tragedian
A Greek tragedy in iambic trimeter on the exodus, with Moses speaking the prologue. In one fragment he describes a dream in which a great figure on a throne at Sinai hands him a sceptre and a crown and steps down, and the stars bow to him.
c. 2nd century BC; survives in fragments
Greek
Artapanus
A retelling in which Abraham teaches astrology to the pharaoh, Joseph invents land measurement, and Moses — identified with Musaeus and with Hermes — organises Egypt into thirty-two districts, invents ships and weapons and philosophy, and is credited with the animal cults.
100–1 BC
2 works
c. 100 BC; survives in fragments
Aramaic
Anonymous
The giants born to the watchers dream of a tablet washed clean and a garden of trees uprooted, and send one of their number to Enoch in paradise to have the dreams read. He returns with the answer that they are all to be destroyed.
c. 50 BC – AD 50; survives in fragments
Greek
Anonymous
Known mainly from one parable quoted by Epiphanius and others: a king holds a feast and posts a lame man and a blind man at the gate. They conspire, the blind carrying the lame, to rob the orchard — and each pleads innocence, until the king shows that body and soul are judged together.
1–100
3 works
c. 55; lost, one disputed fragment
Greek
Thallus
A universal history from the Trojan war to the writer's own day, lost entirely. Julius Africanus reports that Thallus explained the darkness at the crucifixion as an eclipse of the sun, and objects that an eclipse is impossible at full moon.
c. 80–120; survives in quotations
Greek
Anonymous
A gospel used by Greek-speaking Jewish Christians in Egypt, known only from about seven passages quoted by Clement, Origen, Didymus, and Jerome. In its fragments the Holy Spirit is Jesus' mother, and the risen Christ appears first to James, who had sworn to eat nothing until he saw him.
c. 90–125; survives in fragments
Greek
Kerygma Petrou
Attributed to Peter
A missionary sermon in Peter's name, preserved in a handful of quotations by Clement of Alexandria. It sets Christians apart as a third people who worship neither as the Greeks, who serve wood and stone, nor as the Jews, who serve angels and months and moons.
101–200
22 works
c. 110–130; survives in fragments
Greek
Papias of Hierapolis · c. 60–c. 130
Five lost books gathering what Papias could learn from those who had heard the apostles, surviving only where Irenaeus and Eusebius quote him — including his notes on how Mark and Matthew came to be written.
c. 100–150; survives in fragments
Aramaic
Anonymous
An Aramaic gospel close to Matthew but not identical, known from Jerome and marginal notes in medieval manuscripts. The rich young ruler scratches his head while his brothers go dressed in filth; the man with the withered hand says he was a mason and begs not to have to eat in shame.
c. 100–150; survives in fragments
Greek
Papyrus Egerton 2
Anonymous
Four scraps of a codex bought in Egypt in 1934. A controversy with the lawyers, an attempted stoning, a leper healed, the tribute question, and a broken miracle at the Jordan where something is sown on the water and fruit appears.
c. 124–125; one fragment survives
Greek
Quadratus
The first Christian defence addressed to an emperor, of which Eusebius preserves a single paragraph noting that some healed by Jesus had lived into the writer's own lifetime.
c. 120–160; survives in fragments
Greek
Anonymous
Known from seven passages in Epiphanius. It begins not with a birth but with John the Baptist, whose locusts have become honey-cakes, and has Jesus say he came to abolish sacrifice — and that if you do not stop sacrificing, wrath will not stop for you.
c. 120–150; survives in fragments
Greek
Anonymous
A gospel of the Greek-speaking Egyptian church, surviving only in exchanges between the Lord and Salome quoted by Clement. When she asks how long death will hold sway he answers, as long as you women bear children — and when she says she has done well not to bear, he does not contradict her.
c. 130–145; survives in fragments
Greek
Basilides
Twenty-four books of commentary, of which a few paragraphs survive in Clement and Hippolytus. From a God who is not, a seed containing everything unfolds; suffering is never undeserved, since the martyr is paying for sins we cannot see, and even the sinless infant carries the capacity to sin.
c. 140; survives in fragments
Greek
Phlegon of Tralles
A chronicle by a freedman of Hadrian, lost apart from quotations. Origen and Africanus report that it recorded a great eclipse and an earthquake in Bithynia in the fourth year of the two hundred and second Olympiad, and Origen adds that Phlegon mentioned Christ's foreknowledge of events.
c. 140–160; survives in fragments
Greek
Valentinus · c. 100 – c. 175
Six or seven passages preserved by Clement and Hippolytus, plus a short poem in which the poet sees all things hanging on spirit and borne by it. One fragment describes the angels taking fright at Adam because the being they had made spoke greater things than they had put in him.
c. 165–180; survives in fragments
Greek
Montanus, Priscilla, and Maximilla
About sixteen short sayings quoted by hostile writers. I am the Father and the Son and the Paraclete; man is a lyre and I fly over him like a plectrum; Christ came to Priscilla in the form of a woman and put wisdom into her; after me there will be no prophecy but the end.
c. 165–180; survives in fragments
Greek
Heracleon
Nearly fifty passages quoted by Origen, who set out to refute them and ended up preserving them. The Samaritan woman's five husbands are the senses; the royal official is the craftsman-god; the descent to Capernaum is a descent into matter.
c. 170; survives in fragments
Greek
Dionysius of Corinth
Seven letters to churches across the Mediterranean, quoted by Eusebius. One thanks Rome for the money it has sent to poorer congregations since Clement's day; another complains that his own letters are already being tampered with by people who add and subtract at will.
c. 170; survives in fragments
Greek
Julius Cassianus
An argument that marriage itself is the fall, quoted by Clement in order to be demolished. It leans on a saying from the Gospel of the Egyptians in which the Lord answers Salome that death will hold sway as long as women bear children.
c. 170–177; survives in fragments
Greek
Melito of Sardis · d. c. 180
A petition to the emperor arguing that the faith and the empire grew up together under Augustus and have prospered together since, and that only bad emperors — Nero and Domitian — have persecuted it.
c. 172–180; survives in fragments
Greek
Apollinaris of Hierapolis
An apology addressed to Marcus Aurelius, reporting the Thundering Legion whose prayers were said to have broken a drought on campaign, together with the first written attack on the new prophecy spreading through Phrygia.
c. 175–192; survives in fragments, partly in Arabic
Greek, partly surviving in Arabic
Galen of Pergamum · 129 – c. 216
The greatest physician of antiquity mentions Christians four or five times in passing, twice comparing arguing with them to arguing with the school of Moses — they accept undemonstrated laws. But he grants that they hold to justice, restrain their appetites, and include some who philosophise as well as anyone.
c. 175–185; survives in fragments
Greek
Hypomnemata
Hegesippus · c. 110–c. 180
Five lost books of travel and enquiry into what the churches actually taught, preserved where Eusebius quotes them — including the account of the death of James the brother of Jesus.
c. 180–190; survives in fragments
Greek
Rhodon
A pupil of Tatian reports on the state of Marcion's school a generation after its founder: split into factions that cannot agree whether there are two first principles or three, and led by an old man named Apelles who, pressed on how he knew, admitted he did not know and simply believed.
c. 170–200; date disputed
Latin
Anonymous
A damaged list of the books a Roman congregation read publicly, with brief comments on why some are accepted, some allowed privately, and some rejected outright.
c. 192; survives in fragments
Greek
Anonymous
A writer who says he hesitated for years before putting anything down describes Montanus falling into a frenzy and speaking in a way the tradition knew nothing of, and the two women who caught it from him — and notes that none of them has been proved a martyr.
c. 197; survives in fragments
Greek
Apollonius
An attack on the new prophecy that goes after its finances rather than its theology: Montanus paying salaries to preachers, Priscilla and Maximilla leaving their husbands, prophets who dye their hair, paint their eyelids, play dice, and lend at interest.
c. 200; survives in a fragment
Greek
Serapion of Antioch · d. c. 211
A bishop who had allowed a congregation at Rhossus to read the Gospel of Peter without looking at it first writes back, having now read it, to withdraw permission — receiving Peter and the other apostles as Christ, but rejecting what falsely bears their names.
201–300
10 works
c. 200–215; survives in fragments
Greek
Hypotyposeis
Clement of Alexandria · c. 150 – c. 215
Eight books of brief notes on the whole of scripture, condemned by Photius for saying strange things and lost apart from quotations. It preserved the tradition that Mark wrote at Rome from Peter's preaching, and that John, seeing the bodily facts already set down, composed a spiritual gospel.
c. 221; survives in fragments
Greek
Julius Africanus · c. 160–c. 240
A universal chronology in five books synchronising biblical history with Greek and Near Eastern records, dating creation and placing the incarnation within a scheme of world ages.
c. 230; survives in fragments
Greek
Julius Africanus · c. 160 – c. 240
An attempt to reconcile the two genealogies of Jesus through levirate marriage: Joseph's father had two fathers, one by nature and one by law, so both lists are true. Africanus says the desposyni, the Lord's own surviving relatives, preserved the record.
c. 231; survives in fragments
Greek
Kestoi
Julius Africanus · c. 160 – c. 240
An encyclopedia in twenty-four books dedicated to Severus Alexander, mixing agriculture, medicine, military engineering, tactics, and frank magic — how to make a horse sweat, how to poison a well, what to chant over a wound.
c. 242; survives in fragments
Middle Persian
Mani · 216–274 or 277
Mani's own summary of his religion, written in Persian and presented to the emperor Shapur I. It opens with the claim that wisdom has come down through Buddha, Zoroaster, and Jesus in turn, and has now come complete through the seal of the prophets.
c. 240–270; survives in fragments
Syriac
Evangelion
Mani · 216–274 or 277
The first of Mani's own scriptures, arranged in twenty-two chapters after the letters of the Syriac alphabet, opening with his declaration that he is an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of the Father — the same words Paul used, claimed for a different revelation.
c. 240–270; survives in fragments
Syriac
Mani · 216–274 or 277
A retelling of the fallen watchers and their monstrous offspring, taken over from an older Aramaic book found among the Dead Sea Scrolls and rewritten as Manichaean scripture. Fragments survive in Middle Persian, Sogdian, Uyghur, Parthian, and Coptic.
1–40 of 51 matching · 1780 in the Library