Texts in Conversation
Pseudo-Orpheus, a Jewish poem written in Greek, says the one God controls the beginning, middle, and end of all things. Revelation applies the same Greek way of describing God when he calls himself the beginning and the end.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Pseudo Orpheus 35
Testament of Orpheus
Pseudepigrapha, Wisdom and Poetry
he sits alone and governs all things on earth, himself the beginning, the middle, and the end of all. So the people of old taught, and so the Nile-born sage tells,
Date: 200–101 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
Revelation 21:6
New Testament
5 And the one seated on the throne said: “Look! I am making all things new!” Then he said to me, “Write it down, because these words are reliable and true.” 6 He also said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the one who is thirsty I will give water free of charge from the spring of the water of life. 7 The one who conquers will inherit these things, and I will be his God and he will be my son.
Date: 92–96 CE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
... A phrase based on an ancient Greek way of describing the one God. A fragment of an Orphic poem preserved in the Derveni Papyrus (350 B.C.E.) contains this phrase: ‘Zeus is the beginning, Zeus is the middle, all things are fulfilled by Zeus’ (see also Plato, Laws 4.715e). In Isaiah 44:6, God says ‘I am the first and I am the last’ (compare Isaiah 41:4; 48:12). Josephus, in discussing the significance of the First Commandment, explains that ‘God is the beginning, the middle, and the end of all things’ (Against Apion 2.190). A talmudic tradition maintains that God is signified by the Hebrew word emet (truth), because it contains the first, middle, and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet (Jerusalem Sanhedrin 18a) ...
David E. Aune, “Pseudo-Orpheus,” in Outside the Bible: Ancient Jewish Writings Related to Scripture, ed. Louis H. Feldman, James L. Kugel, and Lawrence H. Schiffman (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2013), 748.
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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