Last night I read a truly splendid article by R. Van Den Broek, Four Coptic Fragments of a Greek Theosophy, Vigiliae Christianae, 32 (1978), 118-42. It’s on JSTOR here. If you have JSTOR access, don’t try to read it on-screen, because it will make your eyes hurt; print it on paper and read it that way.
What’s great about it, I hear you ask? Well, the first three pages provide a really good overview in English of a subset of gnomologia; ancient collections of pagan prophecies predicting the coming of Christ. Most of these have never been translated into English, and all are hard to access and understand.
It seems that in late antiquity, as the temples were being demolished, the Christians of the period justified this to educated pagans by appealing to quotations from the philosophers predicting that the temples would fail and become unnecessary.
This gives us a date for the origin of this kind of literature; the 5th century, when paganism was far from dead among the aristocracy, and such arguments could be useful. The ‘quotes’ themselves tend to be a bit bogus; dodgy people like Hermes Trismegistus are invoked. Oracles of the gods themselves are included.
There’s a few of these sayings in Cyril of Alexandria’s Contra Iulianum. But the big 5th century collection is an anonymous Greek “Theosophy”. This is lost, except for a longish chunk of book 11, containing quotes from the Sybilline oracles. But a long abstract has been preserved, known as the Tübingen Theosophy and published by H. Erbse in Theosophorum Graecorum Fragmenta. (This is not one of those monster tomes, but a smallish book). This tells us about the content. The first few books were dedicated to describing the true faith, and the next few to predictions of Christ of this kind.
The fragment of the “Theosophy” tells us that the quotes come partly from Lactantius. As might be expected, manuscripts of the fathers are the main source, and probably even glosses on those manuscripts were used as if by pagan authors — after all, without quotation marks, who could be sure?
Later collections play down oracles by the gods — now relegated to history — but instead start using pagan predictions to parallel those from the Old Testament. An example of this is John ibn Saba’s Precious Pearl.
The actual research in the article is four more bits of ‘prophecy’, this time from Coptic sources. Sebastian Brock published some from Syriac. My own site contains text and translation of a few from Arabic.
Sayings literature was a popular genre. Consequently maxims and sayings spread all over the literate world. It would be interesting to learn whether any made their way into Persian or Indian!