| Gathered
here for the first in one comprehensive
volume are excerpted ancient holy texts
from Judeo-Christian traditions that
were excluded from the official canon of
the Old and New Testaments. The Other
Bible is a unique sourcebook of
essential selections from Jewish
Pseudepigrapha, early Kabbalah, Haggadah,
Midrash, Christian Apocrypha and Gnostic
scriptures.
The Other Bible provides a
rare opportunity to discover the poetic
and narrative riches of this
long-suppressed literature and
experience firsthand its visionary
discourses on the nature of God,
humanity, the spiritual life, the world
around us, and infinite worlds beyond
this one.
After the closing of the Old
Testament and during the first centuries
of the Common Era, inspired
authors,--Jews, Christians, Gnostics,
and Pagans--continued to write sacred
scriptures. Many of these texts were of
amazing beauty and religious importance
and competed with books withing the
[established] canon... Had events been
otherwise, and certain of these texts
incorporated in our Bible, our
understanding of the tradition of
religious thought would have been
radically altered. Today, free of
doctrinal strictures, we can read the
'greater bible' of the Judeo-Christian
world.
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