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.
101–200
3 works
c. 120–180; survives in fragment
Greek
Anonymous
After the Saviour departs, Mary Magdalene comforts the frightened disciples and reports a vision she alone received; Andrew and Peter object that he would not have spoken privately to a woman.
c. 150–200
Greek, surviving in Coptic
Sophia Jesu Christi
Anonymous
The risen Saviour appears on a mountain in Galilee as an invisible spirit of light and answers twelve disciples and seven women, delivering the contents of Eugnostos as revelation rather than argument.
c. 150–200
Greek, surviving in Coptic
Trimorphic Protennoia
Anonymous
A feminine divine voice speaks in three descents — as Voice, as Speech, as Word — putting on the likeness of each order of being in turn until she takes the form of a man and is not recognised.
201–300
3 works
c. 200–250
Greek, surviving in Coptic
Anonymous
Christ speaks in the first person and says that it was not he who died: another drank the gall and vinegar, another carried the cross on his shoulder, and he himself was above, laughing at their ignorance.
c. 260–264; survives in fragments
Greek
Dionysius of Alexandria · c. 190 – c. 265
An answer to Egyptian millenarians, arguing on grounds of vocabulary, grammar, and style that whoever wrote Revelation cannot be the man who wrote the fourth gospel — the one writes flawless Greek and never names himself, the other names himself constantly and writes barbarously.
c. 250–300
Greek
Anonymous
Eleven years after the resurrection, Jesus explains the fall and repentance of the aeon Sophia to disciples including Mary Magdalene, who asks most of the questions.
501–600
1 work
c. 540–560
Greek
Oecumenius
The earliest surviving Greek commentary on Revelation, read almost entirely as already fulfilled in the incarnation and the passion rather than as a map of the future. The woman clothed with the sun is Mary; the thousand years are the present age.
601–700
1 work
c. 611
Greek
Andrew of Caesarea
Revelation read on three levels at once — literal, moral, and spiritual — with the millennium taken as the present age of the church rather than a coming one, and Gog and Magog as nations still to appear.
701–800
1 work
c. 703–709
Latin
The Venerable Bede · c. 673 – 735
Bede's earliest book, written in his twenties, dividing Revelation into seven recapitulating sections after Tyconius and firmly against reading it as a calendar. The thousand years are the age of the church, and the numbers are meanings rather than dates.
901–1000
1 work
c. 910–913
Greek
Arethas of Caesarea · c. 860 – c. 939
A reworking of Andrew of Caesarea with more history in it — the seven churches given their actual circumstances, the plagues read against the Arab and Bulgar wars the writer had lived through.
1901–2000
1 work
1919; second edition 1922
German
Der Römerbrief
Karl Barth · 1886–1968
A commentary that reads less like exegesis than an explosion: a Swiss village pastor, disillusioned by his teachers' support for the war, insists that God is not the highest human value but the one who confronts every human project as its crisis.
11 of 1774 works