Introduction to This Volume

How this book is arranged

This is the hundred and fourth volume of a series that gathers the writings of the early Church. The first volumes of the series follow the writers in order of date; this volume belongs to the later part of the series, which gathers the apocryphal and pseudepigraphal writings: the Jewish apocalypses, retellings of Genesis and farewell testaments of the last centuries before Christ and the first after. This volume holds the First Book of Enoch and the Secrets of Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, the Zadokite Fragments, the apocalypses of Baruch, Abraham and Isaiah, the Assumption of Moses, the Testament of Abraham, and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs in two translations.

Within each work the text is divided into chapters and numbered sections, so that any passage can be found again and cited. The small bold figures in the text are the section numbers.

The translations

The text is in English only. Wherever a modern English version has been prepared for SermonIndex it is used here; otherwise the book prints an older public-domain translation. In both cases the wording is the translator’s own: older translations have not been altered beyond dividing them into sections. The sources for every work are listed at the back of the book, together with the licence under which each text is released. All the works in this volume are printed in older public-domain translations. The translations by R. H. Charles and the others in Charles’s Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English were read by machine from scans of the printed books and have not been proofread against the pages, so a misreading may remain. Page numbers, footnotes, the editors’ introductions and the headings and summaries added by the editors are left out. Greek, Hebrew and Latin words in the editors’ notes are left out or, where a Greek word occurs in the text itself, given in Latin letters. The Apocalypse of Abraham was transcribed for Roger Pearse’s collection, and the Ante-Nicene translation of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs comes from the Writings-Database.

In this volume

The books in this volume were written by Jews in the centuries around the birth of Christ and kept by Christians, who read them as prophecy of the Messiah. Enoch is quoted in the Epistle of Jude, and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs were so loved in the early church that some took them for part of the Old Testament. None of them was received into the canon of Scripture.

Several of these books survive only in translations made from translations, in Ethiopic, Slavonic, Syriac and Armenian, and the English here is chiefly that of R. H. Charles and his fellow scholars at Oxford. Their introductions are kept short, and the reader should remember that each text is one scholar’s reconstruction from the manuscripts.

Dates and authorship

None of these books is part of the Bible. Some were written by Jews before the time of Christ, some by Christians in the first centuries, and some much later, and many carry the name of a patriarch, an apostle or a Father who did not write them. Some of them contain stories that the Church never received and teaching that it rejected. They are printed here so that a reader can see what they say and judge them against the Scriptures, as the Fathers themselves did. The books in this volume are Jewish works of about 200 BC to AD 100, often with Christian additions.