Introduction to This Volume

How this book is arranged

This is the hundred and fifth 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 psalms, odes, tales of wisdom and oracles that circulated among Jews and Christians. This volume holds the Psalms and the Odes of Solomon, the Story of Ahikar, the Letter of Aristeas, the Fourth Book of Maccabees, the Sayings of the Fathers, the Biblical Antiquities of Pseudo-Philo, the Sibylline Oracles and a Syriac Jeremiah apocryphon.

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 in Charles’s Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English, the Odes and Psalms of Solomon of Harris and Mingana, Terry’s Sibylline Oracles, Herford’s Pirke Aboth and Mingana’s Syriac texts 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 and footnotes 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 Syriac psalms of William Wright were transcribed for Roger Pearse’s collection.

In this volume

The first half of this volume gathers the poetry and wisdom of the Jewish and early Christian world outside the Bible: the Psalms of Solomon, written in Jerusalem in the generation after Pompey took the city, the Odes of Solomon, which are the earliest Christian hymnbook that has come down to us, and the story of the wise Ahikar, which was already old when the book of Tobit was written.

The second half holds the Letter of Aristeas, which tells how the Septuagint was made, the Biblical Antiquities that were once ascribed to Philo, and the Sibylline Oracles, in which Jews and Christians put their own teaching into the mouth of the pagan prophetess. The Oracles are given in the blank-verse version of Milton Terry.

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 range from the fifth century BC to the fifth century AD, and several of the Syriac psalms are known only from medieval copies.