The articles grouped by subject rather than by date.
Enoch and the Watchers
The fallen angels and the flood
Genesis gives the sons of God four verses. The Book of Enoch gives them a rebellion, a list of names and a trial. The Watchers angels came down and taught what they had no right to teach. They left the…
The Books of EnochGnostic Beliefs
Sophia, the Demiurge, the Pleroma
Gnostic beliefs start from an uncomfortable premise: the world has a maker, and he is not the highest God. What follows is a whole cosmology. These articles set it out in order rather than treating it as a curiosity. The…
The Gnostic GospelsRevelation Explained
Seals, beasts and numbers
Revelation symbolism is not a code with a single key. Every image in the last book of the Bible comes from somewhere older. The readers John wrote for recognised the borrowing. These articles take the book piece by piece. Each…
The Book of RevelationDeuterocanonical
The books between the Testaments
The deuterocanonical books sit inside Catholic and Orthodox Bibles and outside Protestant ones. That makes them the clearest case of a canon that was never quite one list. They are not obscure fragments. These are complete works of history, wisdom…
The ApocryphaMary Magdalene
Apostle, not penitent
Ask who was Mary Magdalene and you get an answer other people put together: a penitent, a bride, a symbol. Almost none of it comes from the sources. These articles separate the woman the earliest texts describe from the figure…
The Gospel of Mary MagdaleneSayings of Jesus
Thomas and the lost logia
There is no birth, no cross and no resurrection in the collection behind these articles. It holds only sayings of Jesus, one after another, a hundred and fourteen of them. That form is older than the narrative gospels. Scholars therefore…
The Gospel of ThomasGiants and Nephilim
Og, Goliath and the Rephaim
The nephilim giants get one ambiguous sentence in Genesis and an entire book at Qumran. The Book of Giants picks up where the Watchers left off and follows their children. Its giants are enormous, articulate and afraid. They have worked…
The Book of GiantsSecond Temple Judaism
The world Jesus was born into
Second Temple Judaism is the world behind these books, and without it they read like eccentricities. Between the return from exile and the destruction of the temple in seventy, Judaism argued with Greek philosophy. It watched Persian ideas arrive from…