Lives of the Prophets
ancient account of the lives of the prophets from the Tanakh, surviving in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Armenian, and Arabic manuscripts
The Lives of the Prophets is an apocryphal set of manuscripts written largely in Greek during middle antiquity as an interpretation of the lives of the prophets of the Hebrew Bible. The work is not regarded as scripture by any Jewish or Christian denomination. The work may have been known by the author of some of the Pauline epistles, as there are similarities in the descriptions of the fates of the prophets, although without naming the individuals concerned.
Manuscript iterations
The work survives only in Christian manuscripts. There are two groups of Greek manuscripts: the first group includes many versions, well known in the past centuries, with heavy Christian additions. Some of these versions were attributed to Epiphanius of Salamis, others to Dorotheus of Tyre. The other group of Greek manuscripts is more stable and free from the interpolations found in the previous group: the best codex is a 6th-century CE manuscript usually referred to as Q or as anonymous recension, which is the earliest Greek version of this work. There is also a Latin version (Vitae prophetarum) with a text near to Q used by Isidore of Seville (before 636 CE). There are also versions in Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopic and Arabic. There are an abundance of Greek manuscripts, the most important of these are the following:
Codex Marchalianus, Codex Vaticanus Gr.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Lives of the Prophets” is ancient account of the lives of the prophets from the Tanakh, surviving in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Armenian, and Arabic manuscripts. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Lives, Prophets and ancient, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “ancient account of the lives of the prophets from the Tanakh, surviving in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Armenian, and Arabic manuscripts” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4015013. VIAF identifies the subject as 177498537. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
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- Expand the search: follow Lives of the Prophets primary sources, Lives of the Prophets archive and Lives research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Lives of the Prophets” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.