---
title: "Testament · Sola Exemplum"
description: "The ancient texts, reworked and curated — the message before the church got to it."
canonical: https://solaexemplum.com/books/testament/
---

Sola ExemplumTestamentSola Exemplum

# Sola Exemplum: Testament

The ancient texts, reworked and curated — the message before the church got to it.

The Testament is the canon of Sola Exemplum: the ancient documents considered authoritative to the project, freshly translated from the earliest available Greek and Coptic sources, and stripped of two thousand years of theological accretion.

These are not new texts. They are old texts, read again as they were written — before the church turned them into sacraments, and before the academy turned them into museum pieces.

- What did Jesus actually say — before the church edited it?
- What survived underneath the creed?
- What have you never been allowed to read?
- Is there a version of the gospel the church didn't want you to have?
- What does early Christianity look like without the dogma?
Opening

## These are the texts that survived.

some were canonical — long since captured by the church and read through lenses that obscure what they actually say. Some were buried in jars in the desert to escape the book-burners. All of them preserve, in their own ways, a message older than the church that eventually claimed them — teachings the Testament tries to let speak again.

The shape of the book

## Table of contents

- ### Part I — Prologue of the Revealer

- 1### Thunder, Perfect Mind

The ancient paradoxical summons to recognition. A voice speaking in first-person contradictions — 'I am the mind of thunder, the thought that brings all to awareness; I am the name of the hidden and the revelation of the unseen.' — presented in full as the opening text of the Testament.

- ### Part II — Story & Sayings (the Message Inside the System)

- 2### The Gospel of Mark

The earliest surviving gospel, translated to recover what it said before its theological editors got hold of it.

- 3### The Gospel of Thomas

Hidden sayings that awaken. The Coptic sayings gospel, in full — 114 sayings plus the prologue.

- 4### The Sayings Source (Q)

The reconstructed sayings source behind Matthew and Luke — among the earliest available layers of what the teacher actually said.

- ### Part III — Advanced Teachings of the Revealer

- 5### Dialogue of the Revealer

How to exit — the place of rest, and the passing of the rulers. The Nag Hammadi text also featured in Sola Exemplum: Revealer, here presented as a bare text for the Testament canon.

- 6### The Hidden Book of James

Courage, fullness, vigilance after awakening. The Nag Hammadi text also featured in Sola Exemplum: Hidden James, presented here without the commentary.

- ### Part IV — Witness & Practice

- 7### Earliest Creeds of the Pauline Communities

Bare communal memory. The shortest, earliest creedal formulas preserved in Paul's letters — read as the community's own words before Paul's elaborations around them.

- 8### The Didache

Rhythms for an awakened community. An early-Christian training manual: two ways, prayer, eucharist, wandering teachers, church order.

- ### Appendices — Context & Parallels

- A### 1 Clement

A first-century letter from Rome to Corinth. Included as a parallel for the shape of early-Christian communal instruction.

- B### Odes of Solomon

A collection of early Christian hymns — ecstatic, mystical, unlike anything that survived into the canonical worship.

- C### The Shepherd of Hermas

A second-century apocalypse, popular enough in the early church to sit on the edge of the canon before being left out.

- D### Dead Sea Scrolls: Community Rule & Hymns

Selections from the Qumran library — the sectarian literature of a Jewish community that predated and partially shaped the movement around Jesus.