Early Christian Writings

For two centuries there was no New Testament, only early Christian writings in circulation. Congregations read some of them in worship and later dropped them. A church manual, a visionary allegory, an adventure story about a woman who refuses to marry. These were the books they actually had. This archive treats them as the ordinary literature of a young movement, not as rejects.

Practical texts come first. The Didache tells you how a congregation baptised, fasted and fed travelling prophets. The case for dating it to the first century would make it older than some canonical letters. Scribes thought the Shepherd of Hermas good enough to bind into fourth-century Bibles.

Then the stories. Thecla cuts her hair, follows Paul and baptises herself. Writing her story cost the presbyter his office. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas gives Jesus a childhood that later readers found alarming. Most of what tradition thinks it knows about Mary comes from the Protevangelium of James. The Gospel of Nicodemus sends Christ down to the underworld and brings him back. Round out the picture with the Gospel of Peter and the apocryphal acts.

The Apocrypha Master Collection prints these works alongside the rest of the non-canonical corpus.