The Library
1774 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
42 works
c. AD 20–40
Greek
Legum Allegoriae
Philo of Alexandria · c. 20 BC – c. AD 50
Three books working verse by verse through Genesis 2 and 3, where Adam is the mind, Eve is sense-perception, the serpent is pleasure, and the garden is the soul's own condition.
c. AD 20–40
Greek
De Gigantibus
Philo of Alexandria · c. 20 BC – c. AD 50
On the sons of God who came down to the daughters of men, read not as a myth of fallen angels but as an account of souls that sank into bodies and stayed there, against those that rose.
c. AD 20–40
Greek
De Opificio Mundi
Philo of Alexandria · c. 20 BC – c. AD 50
A reading of the six days of Genesis in which God first frames an intelligible world of ideas and only then the visible one modelled on it, and in which the numbers of the days carry as much meaning as the things made on them.
c. AD 20–40
Greek
De Migratione Abrahami
Philo of Alexandria · c. 20 BC – c. AD 50
Get thee out of thy country read as the soul's departure from the body, from sense, and from speech, in that order, toward a homeland it has never seen.
c. AD 20–40
Greek
De Confusione Linguarum
Philo of Alexandria · c. 20 BC – c. AD 50
Babel taken as the scattering of a mind that had agreed with itself in wickedness, with a long digression on the divine Word as God's eldest son, his image, and the one who stands between creation and the uncreated.
c. AD 20–40
Greek
Quis Rerum Divinarum Heres Sit
Philo of Alexandria · c. 20 BC – c. AD 50
On Abraham's question at the covenant of the pieces, expanding into an account of prophetic ecstasy — the mind setting when the divine light rises — and of the Word as the divider who cuts all things into their opposites.
c. AD 30–45
Greek
De Vita Contemplativa
Philo of Alexandria · c. 20 BC – c. AD 50
An account of the Therapeutae, a community of men and women outside Alexandria who lived in separate cells, ate once a day after sunset, studied allegory, and kept an all-night vigil of antiphonal singing every fiftieth day.
c. AD 30–45
Greek
Quod Omnis Probus Liber Sit
Philo of Alexandria · c. 20 BC – c. AD 50
A Stoic thesis argued from Jewish examples, closing with a description of the Essenes — who hold no slaves, swear no oaths, and keep no private property.
c. AD 30–45; survives complete only in Armenian
Greek, surviving in Armenian
Quaestiones et Solutiones
Philo of Alexandria · c. 20 BC – c. AD 50
A running catechism on Genesis and Exodus in question-and-answer form: why this word and not another, why this number, why God is said to repent when he cannot.
c. AD 30–45
Greek
De Specialibus Legibus
Philo of Alexandria · c. 20 BC – c. AD 50
Four books sorting every particular commandment under one of the ten, so that circumcision, the priesthood, the festivals, marriage, courts, and the treatment of slaves all turn out to be applications of a single decalogue.
c. AD 30–45
Greek
De Abrahamo
Philo of Alexandria · c. 20 BC – c. AD 50
Abraham presented to a Greek readership as a living law — a man who kept the Torah before it was given, because he had read it off the order of the world.
c. AD 30–45
Greek
De Vita Mosis
Philo of Alexandria · c. 20 BC – c. AD 50
Two books making Moses king, lawgiver, priest, and prophet at once, written plainly enough for readers who had never opened the Pentateuch, and including the story of how the Seventy produced identical translations in separate cells.
c. AD 30–45
Greek
De Decalogo
Philo of Alexandria · c. 20 BC – c. AD 50
Why the ten were spoken by God directly and the rest through Moses, why they divide into two tables of five, and why a voice rather than a body was the fitting form for God to take at Sinai.
c. 41
Greek
Legatio ad Gaium
Philo of Alexandria · c. 20 BC – c. AD 50
Philo leads a delegation to Caligula to plead that Jews not be compelled to set up the emperor's statue, and is kept walking behind him through a villa's gardens while the emperor asks why they will not eat pork.
c. 41
Greek
In Flaccum
Philo of Alexandria · c. 20 BC – c. AD 50
The pogrom of AD 38 in Alexandria told by a witness: the mock-crowning of a beggar to insult the Jewish king, the houses looted, the elders flogged in the theatre, and the governor who allowed it dragged off to exile and killed.
c. 50 BC – AD 100
Greek
Anonymous
Job on his deathbed retells his own story: he brought the disaster on himself by destroying an idol's temple, endured it as an athlete endures a bout, and leaves his three daughters not property but cords that let them speak in the tongues of angels.
1st century
Greek
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. 50–70; reconstructed, no manuscript survives
Greek
Reconstructed
A collection of sayings of Jesus — beatitudes, woes, the Lord's Prayer, the mission charge, the coming judgement — with almost no narrative and no passion account. It exists only as a reconstruction from the material Matthew and Luke share against Mark.
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. 70
Hebrew, surviving in Latin
Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum
Pseudo-Philo
A retelling of the Bible from Adam to the death of Saul that fills every silence — naming Cain's wife, giving Jephthah's daughter a lament and a name, inventing whole speeches for judges the book of Judges dismisses in a line.
c. 73; date disputed, possibly 2nd–3rd century
Syriac
Mara bar Serapion
A Stoic prisoner writes to his son about the folly of killing wise men: the Athenians killed Socrates and were struck by famine, the Samians burned Pythagoras and were buried by sand, and the Jews executed their wise king and lost their kingdom in the same hour.
c. AD 1–100
Greek
Apocalypse of Moses
Anonymous
What Adam and Eve did after the garden: the penance standing in the Jordan and the Tigris, Satan's account of why he refused to worship a creature made of clay, and Eve's deathbed confession to her children of how it all happened.
c. 100 BC – AD 200
Greek
Anonymous
Genesis says Joseph married the daughter of an Egyptian priest and says nothing else. This fills the gap: Aseneth's seven days in sackcloth, the angel who gives her a honeycomb made by the bees of paradise, and her rebirth as a City of Refuge.
c. 75
Greek
Bellum Judaicum
Flavius Josephus · c. 37 – c. 100
Seven books on the revolt of 66–73 by a man who commanded in Galilee, surrendered, and then watched the siege of Jerusalem from the Roman side. It ends with the burning of the temple and the last stand at Masada.
c. 80
Greek
Anonymous
A Jewish oracle in Greek hexameters, put in the mouth of the pagan Sibyl, running through the empires to the eruption of Vesuvius and the rumour that Nero had fled east and would return. It calls for repentance, washing in rivers, and hands raised to heaven.
c. AD 1–100; date heavily disputed
Greek, surviving in Slavonic
The Book of the Secrets of Enoch
Anonymous
Enoch is carried through ten heavens, sees the prison of the fallen watchers and the place prepared for the righteous, is anointed and clothed as one of the glorious ones, and returns for thirty days to dictate three hundred and sixty-six books.
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. AD 40–100
Greek
Anonymous
A philosophical address arguing that devout reason rules the passions, proved at unbearable length from the torture of Eleazar and the seven brothers and their mother, who die one by one rather than eat what the law forbids.
c. 70–100 (the Vision, chs. 6–11)
Greek, surviving complete in Ge'ez
Anonymous
Isaiah is carried up through seven heavens, each brighter than the last, and watches the Beloved descend through them disguised — taking on the form of each rank of angels so that none recognises him — until he is born, crucified, and climbs back in glory.
93
Greek
Antiquitates Judaicae
Flavius Josephus · c. 37 – c. 100
Twenty books retelling the whole of Jewish history from creation to the eve of the revolt, for Greek and Roman readers. Along the way it mentions John the Baptist, James the brother of Jesus, and — in a passage every scholar since the Renaissance has argued over — Jesus himself.
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.
c. 96
Greek
Clement of Rome · d. c. 99
A letter from the church at Rome to the church at Corinth, which had deposed its presbyters. Clement argues from creation, from Israel's history, and from the apostles that the Christian community is ordered rather than improvised, and pleads with the ringleaders to step aside for the sake of peace.
c. 97
Greek
Contra Apionem
Flavius Josephus · c. 37 – c. 100
A defence of Jewish antiquity against Greek writers who said the nation was recent and its books unreliable, answering the slanders about the temple one by one and setting out which books the Jews count as sacred and why.
c. 99
Greek
Vita
Flavius Josephus · c. 37 – c. 100
Josephus defends his conduct in Galilee against a rival historian who had accused him of starting the war, describing his priestly training, his three years with a desert ascetic, and his trial of each Jewish school before choosing the Pharisees.
c. 100
Hebrew or Aramaic, surviving in Latin and Syriac
Anonymous
Seven visions in which Ezra, sitting in the ruins of Jerusalem, refuses to accept the angel's answers: why does God let the wicked prosper, why were so few made to be saved, and what use was a law that no one could keep. The consolations do not silence him.
c. 70–150
Hebrew, surviving in Slavonic
Anonymous
Abraham smashes his father's idols, then is taken up by the angel Yahoel to see the throne, the fall, and the burning of the temple — with Azazel presiding over the nations and a strange figure worshipped by both Jews and Gentiles.
c. 100–125
Syriac
Anonymous
Forty-two short hymns of unusual sweetness, sung in the voice of the redeemed and sometimes in the voice of Christ himself, full of milk, harps, crowns, and living water.
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.
c. 100
Greek
Anonymous
Michael is sent to tell Abraham he is dying and cannot bring himself to say it. Abraham stalls, asks for a tour of the world first, starts calling down fire on sinners, and has to be stopped — and at the judgement scene Abel weighs each soul on scales.
1–40 of 42 matching · 1774 in the Library