For two centuries there was no New Testament, only early Christian writings in circulation, some of them read in worship and later dropped. A church manual, a visionary allegory, an adventure story about a woman who refuses to marry: these were the books congregations actually had, and this archive treats them as the ordinary literature of a young movement rather than as rejects.

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

Then the stories. Thecla cuts her hair, follows Paul and baptises herself, and the presbyter who wrote her story lost his office for it. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas gives Jesus a childhood that later readers found alarming, the Protevangelium of James supplies most of what tradition thinks it knows about Mary, and the Gospel of Nicodemus sends Christ down to the underworld and brings him back. The Gospel of Peter and the apocryphal acts round out the picture.

These works are printed alongside the rest of the non-canonical corpus in the Apocrypha Master Collection.