Religious Texts

The religious literature preserved in this library spans a vast range, from the Homeric Hymns of archaic Greece to the books of the New Testament. These texts share a concern with the divine — the nature of the gods, humanity's relationship to them, and the rituals, prayers, and narratives through which that relationship is expressed — but they differ profoundly in form, context, and purpose.

The Homeric Hymns, composed in the same dactylic hexameter as the Iliad and Odyssey, are narrative poems addressed to individual gods — Demeter, Apollo, Hermes, Aphrodite — telling the stories of their births, deeds, and the establishment of their cults. They are works of religious poetry in the fullest sense: beautiful, entertaining, and deeply embedded in the ritual life of the Greek world.

The texts of the New Testament represent a different religious tradition and a different literary world. The Gospels, the letters of Paul, and the other writings of the early Christian movement were composed in Koine Greek over the course of the first century AD. They belong to a tradition of Jewish and Hellenistic religious writing that includes prophecy, apocalypse, epistle, and narrative biography. Whatever one's theological commitments, these texts are among the most influential ever written, shaping the languages, literatures, and moral imaginations of the societies that received them.