Ancient Texts

Religion is the section for the ancient texts that stayed out of the Bible. Here you find them in modern English editions prepared by Jeremy Payton. These are books for curious readers, not for scholars. Each one opens with an introduction, keeps the notes short and lays the text out in a plain way. So you can read them without Greek and without a seminary. The largest is The Apocrypha Master Collection, which gathers the Apocrypha in one volume. Then come the single texts. The Books of Enoch tells of the fall of the Watchers and the visions of the end. The Book of Giants is the Dead Sea fragment about their sons. Next, The Gnostic Gospels collects the gospels found at Nag Hammadi. Two of them also have books of their own, The Gospel of Thomas and The Gospel of Mary Magdalene. Finally, The Book of Revelation reads the last book of the Bible verse by verse. Each post here follows the same plan: the cover, who the book is for, what is inside. Then comes the link to the shop. Moreover, the posts link to one another. So you can move from the collection to a single text and back. If you want to go deeper, Jeremy keeps a blog on his own site. There he answers one question at a time about the same material. In short, Religion is the place to start if you have heard of the Book of Enoch and want to read it. The same goes for the Gospel of Thomas: read it, rather than read about it. Start with the collection if you want the whole picture. Otherwise, pick a single text, if one name already draws you. Every book is on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.