The Koine Bible

For your judgments are great and hard to describe; therefore untrained souls went astray

For having supposed to oppress a holy nation, they, lawless prisoners of darkness and bound in the fetters of long night, shut in beneath roofs, lay as fugitives from eternal providence.

For thinking to be hidden by secret sins, they were scattered, being greatly astonished and troubled by apparitions under the veil of forgetfulness without light.

For neither did the inner chamber holding them keep them fearless, but sounds, shaking them, resounded around, and phantoms appeared with joyless, downcast faces

And no force of fire was able to give light, nor did the brilliant flames of the stars endure to illumine that sullen night

But for them there was only of itself a fire, full of fear, and, being terrified by that sight not seen, they thought the things seen worse

But there lay the mockeries of magical art, and a reproof for boastful arrogance in prudence, a thing to be mocked at by contempt.

For those who promised to drive away terrors and tumults of a sick soul, these themselves were sick with a laughable fearlessness

For even if nothing terrifying frightened them, being driven to panic by the passages of beasts and the hissings of creeping things, they were perishing in terror, and refusing to look upon the air, from which there was no escape anywhere

For cowardice, being condemned by its own wickedness as a witness, has always taken on grievous things, being held fast by conscience.

For fear is nothing but the betrayal of the helps that come from reason

But being weaker within, expectation reckons the ignorance of the cause that provides the torment as greater

But they, sleeping the same sleep, with the night truly powerless and from the powerless depths of Hades having come upon them,

They were indeed driven on by the apparitions of monsters, but those things of the soul were loosened by treachery; for sudden and unexpected fear was poured upon them.

Then in this way whoever indeed then was there, falling down, was guarded, having been shut up for the unbreakable prison

For if there was someone either a farmer or a shepherd or a laborer of toils in the wilderness, seized, he remained under hard-to-avoid necessity; for by one chain of darkness they all were bound

whether a hissing wind or a sweet sound of birds around thick branches or the rhythm of water moving violently or the harsh crash of rocks falling down

or the course of leaping living creatures unseen, or the voice of most savage beasts roaring, or an echo reverberating from the hollowness of mountains paralyzed them, terrifying them

For the whole world was being lit up with a bright light and was held together by unhindered works.

But over those alone a heavy night had been stretched out, an image of the darkness about to receive them; but for themselves they were heavier than darkness