The Gospel of John, retold in Homer's meter by the poet who also wrote the longest surviving epic about Dionysus.
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This is how every Great Library book reads, word beneath word. Paraphrase of the Gospel of John’s own first lines appear here the day its pilot is pressed.
In the fifth century AD a poet from Egypt rewrote the whole Gospel of John as Greek epic, one book of hexameters for each chapter. His other surviving poem is the Dionysiaca, 48 books on the god of wine. The two share a vocabulary, so at the wedding at Cana, Christ's miracle is told in the language of Dionysus. It's in the press now and not readable yet. Help us press it.
Nonnus came from Panopolis, modern Akhmim, in Upper Egypt, and wrote around the middle of the fifth century. Almost nothing else is known about him, including whether he wrote the Dionysiaca before or after this poem, and scholars still argue over it. The Paraphrase runs to about 3,700 lines. We will read it beside John's own Greek, which is already complete on this shelf.
John begins, 'In the beginning was the Word.' Nonnus begins, 'Timeless was the Word, unreachable, in an unspeakable beginning,' and he keeps going like that, stretching every phrase of the gospel into epic. The added words are where the fun is. Laid next to John's plain Koine, you can see exactly which adjectives he could not resist.
Making an interlinear Paraphrase of the Gospel of John is real work — freezing a scholarly source text, aligning every word to its dictionary form, glossing what resists translation, and proofing it all to a hard quality bar. Pressing a book is how that work gets funded. When enough readers press it, Chapter 1 gets made — and then it is free to read forever, for you and for everyone who comes after.
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