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.
1000–901 BC
1 work
c. 1200–900 BC; date heavily disputed
Avestan
Zarathustra
Seventeen hymns in the prophet's own voice, addressed to a single wise lord who created light and darkness and set two primal spirits at the beginning, one choosing truth and one the lie — and every person after them choosing too. At the end comes a judgement by fire and molten metal, and a world made fresh.
200–101 BC
1 work
c. 124 BC
Greek
Abridged from Jason of Cyrene
A rhetorical history of the same revolt as First Maccabees, told for effect rather than for the record. Heliodorus is flogged by an apparition in the treasury; Eleazar refuses to pretend to eat pork; a mother watches seven sons die and tells the last that God made the world out of things that did not exist.
100–1 BC
1 work
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
2 works
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. 100–120
Hebrew or Greek, surviving in Syriac
The Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch
Anonymous
Baruch is shown that Jerusalem fell because angels pulled its walls down before the Chaldeans could claim the honour, and that the true city was shown to Adam before he sinned. It closes with a letter to the nine and a half tribes.
101–200
5 works
c. 150; survives in fragment
Greek
Anonymous
A passion narrative that exonerates Pilate, blames Herod and the Jewish leaders, and stages the resurrection itself with two angels and a walking, talking cross.
c. 140–170
Greek
Epistula Apostolorum
Anonymous
A post-resurrection dialogue in which the risen Christ answers the eleven, written in the form the Gnostics favoured but arguing hard for a real body and a real resurrection.
c. 150–200
Greek, surviving in Coptic
Letter to Rheginos
Anonymous
A short letter to a student worried about death, arguing that the resurrection is not a future event to be waited for but a present one already accomplished — flee the divisions and the fetters, and you have risen already.
c. 160–190
Greek
Anonymous
A letter from the Corinthians reporting two teachers who deny the resurrection of the flesh, and Paul's reply insisting on it from the seed sown in the ground and the bones of Elisha that raised a dead man on contact.
c. 180; attribution debated
Greek
Athenagoras of Athens
A philosophical defence of bodily resurrection, arguing from the nature of the human being as a composite of soul and body that judgement of one without the other would be incoherent.
201–300
2 works
c. 208–212
Latin
De Resurrectione Carnis
Tertullian · c. 155–c. 220
A defence of the resurrection of the body in its full physicality against those who would spiritualise it, arguing that flesh is the hinge of salvation.
c. 300
Greek
Methodius of Olympus · d. c. 311
A direct attack on Origen's teaching that the risen body will be a spiritual form rather than this flesh, insisting that the same body is raised and transformed.
301–400
3 works
c. 318
Greek
De Incarnatione Verbi Dei
Athanasius of Alexandria · c. 296–373
A short, unhurried argument that the Word took a body because a creation running back toward nothing could only be restored from inside it — and that the resurrection is the demonstrable proof, visible in martyrs who no longer fear dying.
374
Greek
Ancoratus
Epiphanius of Salamis · c. 315 – 403
A letter to Christians in Pamphylia who asked for something to hold on to, written three years before the Panarion and covering the same ground more calmly: the Trinity, the resurrection of this same body, and a warning against Origen's allegory.
c. 380
Greek
Gregory of Nyssa · c. 335–c. 395
A dialogue at his sister Macrina's deathbed, in which she takes the role Socrates played for Plato and argues him through grief to the resurrection and the final restoration of all things.
501–600
1 work
c. 500–518
Greek
Aeneas of Gaza · d. c. 518
A Platonic dialogue arguing against the pre-existence of souls and the eternity of the world, and for the resurrection of the body.
1101–1200
1 work
c. 1160–1182
Old Church Slavonic
Kirill of Turov · c. 1130–c. 1182
Festal sermons of high rhetorical polish, giving speeches to biblical figures and describing spring as the resurrection of the world.
2001–2100
1 work
2008
English
N. T. Wright · b. 1948
A New Testament historian argues that the Christian hope is not disembodied souls in heaven but resurrection into a renewed creation, and works out what that does to funerals, politics, and the point of present work.
18 of 1780 works