1–22 26, 130, 142–56, 302n2
1.1 143
1.1a 145
2.1 143
2.2–7.3 145
4.1 143
7.1 143
8.1–19.1a 145
10.1 142
12.3 143
15.1 142
16.2 143
17.3 143n2
18.1 142
19.1 143
20 145
21 144, 145
22 144
The Didache
1–16 18, 19, 24, 40, 157–71, 173, 200
1.1–6.2 157
1.2–4.14 157
1.3–2.1 158
1.3–4 160
1.5 197
2.4 196
2.7–3.2 160
4.4 196
4.9 196
5.1–2 158
6.2 159
6.3–15.4 157
6.3 158
7.1–4 158
7.1 157
7.4–8.1 158
8.1–2 158
8.1 159
8.2–3 158
9.1–10.7 158
9.4 160
11.1–15.4 158
11.3–6 158
11.4 158
12.1 158
14.1–3 158
15.2 159
16.1–8 157
Epistle of Barnabas
1–21 18, 19n6, 22, 26, 40, 133, 158, 160, 172–98, 200, 201
1–17 176
1.1–8 172
1.5a 172
1.5b 172
1.8 174
2.1–17.2 172
2.1 173
2.3 172n2
4.1 173
4.12 173
4.13–14 173
4.13 173
4.14 174
4.6 174
4.8 173
4.9 171, 173, 174
4.9b 173
5.4 172n2
5.7 173
5.8ff 176
6.5 174
6.9 172n2, 174
6.10b 174
6.12 184
6.19 173
8.7 173
9.4 173, 186
9.7–8 173
9.7 174
9.8 172n2
9.9 172, 174
10.2 173
10.9 173
10.10 172n2
10.12 173
11.4 172n2
12.3 172n2
13.1 174
13.6 173
13.7 172n2
14.1–4a 173
14.4 174
14.4b–5 173
15.5 173
16.1–2 173
16.1 174
16.3–5 174
17.1 174
18–21 176
18.1–20.2 172
18.1 172, 172n2
19.1–12 172
19.1 172n2
19.4 196
19.5 165
20.1–2 172
21.1–9 172
21.1 174
21.3 173
21.5 172n2
21.6 173
Shepherd of Hermas
1–114 18, 24, 93, 175, 199–287
1.1–107.2 203
1.1–31.6 203
1–24 201, 202
1.1–21.4 203
1–4 203
5–8 203
7.4 81
8.3 37, 202
9–21 203
22–24 203
25–114 201, 202
25 201, 202, 203
26–49 201
26 203
27 203
28 203
29–32 203
33–34 203
35–36 203
37 203
38 203
39 203
40–42 203
43 203
44–49 203
50–114 201, 242
50 204
51 200, 204
51.8–82.1 203
52 204
53 204
54–60 204
58.2 200
61–65 204
62.4 252
62.6 252
66 204
67–77 204
78–114 202
78–110 204
78.1 200
81.3 275
90.2 200
107.3–114.5 203
111–114 204
Epistle to Diognetus
1–12 18, 19, 19n6, 130n1, 288–301
1–10 290
1 289
7.6 290
7.7 290
10.8 290
Papias
Fragments
1–26 302–19
3 303–4, 305, 305n13
4 303, 305
14 321
21–26 303
23 305
26 305
Other Early Christian and Gnostic Writings
* * *
Anastasius of Sinai
Considerations on the Hexaemeron
1 314
7 314
Andrew of Caesarea
On the Apocalypse
34.12 314
Apollinaris of Laodicaea
316
Apostolic Canons
39
Apostolic Church Order
158
Apostolic Constitutions
158
Clement of Alexandria
Stromata
3.13.92 82
Didascalia Apostolorum
8.2.24 304–5
Didymus
Commentary on Ecclesiastes
223.7–13 304n9
Eldad and Modat
81
Eusebius of Caesarea
Chronicle
90n4, 308
Church History
2.15 317
3.1 312
3.15.1 37n3
3.31.3 309
3.36 90n4, 94
3.36.1–2 308
3.39 308
4.3.1–2 289
4.15 145
4.23.9–11 74n6
4.23.11 37n1
5.1.1–63 145
Gospel according to the Hebrews
304, 305, 305n13
Gospel of the Egyptians
73, 74, 78, 79, 80, 82
Gospel of Thomas
22 73, 82
Irenaeus
Against Heresies
2.22.5 320
5.30.1 321
5.33.3 321
5.33.3–4 314
5.36.1–2 321
5.5.1 320
Jerome
On Illustrious Men
18 313
To Lucinius
71.5 313
To Theodora
75.3 313
Justin Martyr
1 Apology
65 167–68
Dialogue with Trypho
22
Life of Shenoute
158
Lucian
Peregrinus
13 158
Maximus the Confessor
Scholia on Dionysius the Areopagite, On the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy
2 315
7 315
On the Teaching of the Apostles (or Doctrina Apostolorum)
158
Origen
Commentary on John
6.36 37n3
Commentary on Matthew
16.6 312
Philip of Side
Church History
311
Photius
Bibliotheca
232 316
Letter to Archbishop and Metropolitan Aquileias
317
Summary of Doctrine
158
Tacitus
Annals
15.44 25n12
Tertullian
On Baptism
4 166
Old Testament Pseudepigrapha
* * *
1 Enoch
89:56 194
89:66 194
2 Baruch
61.7 190
Notes
Preface to the Second Edition
[2]. 3 vols. London: Macmillan, 1885; 2nd ed., 1889; repr. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1981.
[3]. J. B. Lightfoot and J. R. Harmer, eds., The Apostolic Fathers: Revised Greek Texts with Introductions and English Translations (London: Macmillan, 1891; repr. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1984).
[4]. J. B. Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers, edited and completed by J. R. Harmer (Grand Rapids: Baker 1956).
Introduction
[1]. Cf. Lightfoot’s estimation: “Their style is loose; there is a want of arrangement in their topics and an absence of system in their teaching. On the one hand they present a marked contrast to the depth and clearness of conception with which the several Apostolic writers place before us different aspects of the Gospel. . . . On the other they lack the scientific spirit which distinguishes the fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries, and enabled them to formulate the doctrines of the faith as a bulwark against lawless speculation” (AF 1.1.7).
[2]. Ibid., 1.1.7–8.
[3]. Ibid., 1.1.8.
[4]. Ibid., 1.1.7.
[5]. In his “Guide” (Hodegos) directed against the Monophysite heresy. Cf. Bart D. Ehrman, The Apostolic Fathers, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library 24–25 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 1:1–2.
[6]. E. J. Goodspeed (The Apostolic Fathers: An American Translation [New York: Harper & Bros., 1950]) included the Doctrina, now known only in a Latin form, which he believed to be the source of the “Two Ways” document now incorporated into both The Didache (chaps. 1–5) and The Epistle of Barnabas (chaps. 18–20). R. M. Grant, on the other hand, excluded The Epistle to Diognetus from the multivolume set he edited (The Apostolic Fathers: A New Translation and Commentary, 6 vols. [New York: Nelson, 1964–1968]) because it belongs more appropriately with the apologetic literature of the later second century.
[7]. The extant fragment of his work is given in full, however, in the introduction below to The Epistle to Diognetus.
[8]. The other one, of course, was Christianity. This way of viewing the matter suggests that rabbinic Judaism and Christianity are not parent and child (the traditional metaphor), but rather competing siblings, each affecting and being affected by the other—“Rebecca’s children,” born from the same womb (cf. Alan F. Segal, Rebecca’s Children: Judaism and Christianity in the Roman World [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986]).
[9]. The full text can be found in C. K. Barrett, The New Testament Background: Selected Documents (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 167; rev. ed. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), 211. The date and extent of the rewording is a matter of some debate; cf. C. A. Evans, “Christianity and Judaism: Parting of the Ways,” in Dictionary of the Later New Testament and Its Developments, ed. R. P. Martin and P. H. Davids (Downers Grove, IL, and Leicester, UK: InterVarsity, 1997), 167–68.
[10]. Whether the views attributed to Trypho in Justin’s Dialogue are the views of an actual Jewish intellectual or are a Christian creation of what a Jew was thought likely to say (or some combination thereof) is a much-debated question.
[11]. Ignatius, Magn. 10.3; cf. 8.1–10.2, Phil. 6.1. Origen in the third century and John Chrysostom in the fourth were still dealing with similar problems.
[12]. Tacitus, Annals 15.44, in C. K. Barrett, The New Testament Background: Selected Documents (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 15–16; rev. ed. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), 15–16.
[13]. Lightfoot, AF 1.1.11.
[14]. Cf. R. M. Grant, “The Apostolic Fathers’ First Thousand Years,” Church History 31 (1962): 421–29; repr. Church History 57 (1988): 20–28; Irena Backus, ed., The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the Maurists, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1997).
[15]. Professor at Tübingen from 1826 until his death in 1860.
[16]. For a history of this influential group, see H. Harris, The Tübingen School (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975).
[17]. T. Zahn, Ignatius von Antiochien (Gotha: Perthes, 1873), to which Lightfoot assigned “a distinct place in the train of influences which led to my change of opinion” (AF 2.1.x; his own exegetical notes, however, had already been written some years before); J. B. Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers, part 1, S. Clement of Rome (London: Macmillan, 1869; 2nd ed., 1890), part 2, S. Ignatius. S. Polycarp (London: Macmillan, 1885; 2nd ed., 1889).
[18]. For recent challenges, especially to the Ignatian letters, see the introductions to each below.
[19]. An excellent account of Strauss, Baur, and Lightfoot, told with considerable verve, wit, and insight, is given by Stephen Neill and Tom Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament 1861–1986 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 1–64.
[20]. W. Bauer, Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei in ältesten Christentum (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1934; 2nd ed., with additions by G. Strecker, 1964); Eng. trans.: Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971).
[21]. See, for example, Tom Robinson, The Bauer Thesis Examined: The Geography of Heresy in the Early Christian Church (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1988).
[22]. Noteworthy examples include the introductions by Helmut Koester (Introduction to the New Testament, vol. 2, History and Literature of Early Christianity [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982; 2nd. ed., New York: W. de Gruyter, 2000]) and Bart D. Ehrman (The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997; 3rd. ed., 2003]), who place the NT writings in the larger context of the Apostolic Fathers was well as Gnostic and apocryphal documents.
[23]. Hermeneia (published by Fortress); Kommentar zu den apostolischen Vätern (Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht); and Handbuch zum neuen Testament (Mohr/Siebeck), which has long included volumes on the Apostolic Fathers and has commissioned new ones in recent decades.
First Clement
[1]. Cf. Eusebius, Church History 4.23.11.
[2]. AF 1.1.25–61.
[3]. Origen, Commentary on John 6.36; cf. Eusebius, Church History 3.15.1.
[4]. Contra A. E. Wilhelm-Hooijbergh (“A Different View of Clemens Romanus,” Heythrop Journal 16 [1975]: 266–88), who dates it to AD 69, and Thomas J. Herron (“The Most Probable Date of the First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians,” in Studia Patristica 21, ed. E. A. Livingstone [Leuven: Peeters, 1989], 106–21), who argues for AD 70.
[5]. Contra (in part) L. L. Welborn (“On the Date of First Clement,” Biblical Research 29 [1984]: 35–54), who would allow it to be dated as late as AD 140.
[6]. Welborn, “On the Date of First Clement,” 35–54; cf. K. Erlemann, “Die Datierung des ersten Klemensbriefes—Anfragen an eine Communis Opinio,” New Testament Studies 44 (1998): 591–607.
[7]. On the use of the NT in 1 Clement, see Andrew Gregory, “1 Clement and the Writings That Later Formed the New Testament,” in The Reception of the New Testament in the Apostolic Fathers, ed. Andrew Gregory and Christopher Tuckett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 129–57.
[8]. Cf., however, the introduction to 2 Clement below.
[9]. Cf. Lightfoot, AF 1.1.129–35.
[10]. Text in B.M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 313.
[11]. B. D. Ehrman, “The New Testament Canon of Didymus the Blind,” Vigiliae Christianae 37 (1983): 1–21.
Second Clement
[1]. Alistair Stewart-Sykes (From Prophecy to Preaching: A Search for the Origins of the Christian Homily, VCSupp 59 [Leiden: Brill, 2001]: 174–87), however, argues that the setting is more likely one of instruction (perhaps in a prebaptismal context) than worship: “it [is] not a typical homily, but is wedded much more closely to catechesis” (p. 174). Furthermore, he suggests that the real foundation of the document is not the quotation from scripture in chapter 2, but the congregation’s “hymnic confession” of faith that comprises chapter 1 of the document (pp. 178–82).
[2]. T. Baarda, “2 Clement 12 and the Sayings of Jesus,” in Logia: Les Paroles
de Jésus—The Sayings of Jesus, ed. J. Delobel (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1982), 529–56.
[3]. Andrew Gregory and Christopher Tuckett, “2 Clement and the Writings That Later Formed the New Testament,” in The Reception of the New Testament in the Apostolic Fathers, vol. 1 of The New Testament and the Apostolic Fathers, ed. Andrew Gregory and Christopher Tuckett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 251–92.
[4]. W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), 121, 146.
[5]. E. J. Goodspeed, The Apostolic Fathers (New York: Harper & Bros., 1950), 83. This proposal, widely attributed to Harnack (who certainly popularized it), seems to have originated with Hilgenfeld; cf. Lightfoot, AF 1.2.196.
[6]. Cf. Eusebius, Church History 4.23.9–11.
[7]. C. C. Richardson, ed., Early Christian Fathers (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1953; repr. New York: Macmillan, 1970), 186–87. Cf. earlier, and on similar grounds, Vernon Bartlett, “The Origin and Date of 2 Clement,” Zeitschrift für neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 7 (1906): 123–35.
[8]. Lightfoot, AF 1.2.194–208, esp. 197–99, 202.
[9]. K. P. Donfried, The Setting of Second Clement in Early Christianity (Leiden: Brill, 1974), 1–48.
[10]. Helmut Koester, Introduction to the New Testament, vol. 2, History and Literature of Early Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), 236; in the second edition (New York: W. de Gruyter, 2000), he expresses himself with more certainty: 2 Clement “is . . . the first tangible evidence” of what he now describes as “vernacular catholicism” in Egypt (p. 243).
The Letters of Ignatius
[1]. Harry O. Maier, The Social Setting of the Ministry as Reflected in the Writings of Hermas, Clement and Ignatius (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1991).
[2]. W. R. Schoedel, Ignatius of Antioch (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), 10–14.
[3]. Cf. Lightfoot, AF 2.2.435–72; cf. 2.1.30 (“within a few years of A.D. 110, before or after”). W. H. C. Frend (The Rise of Christianity [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984], 124) has adopted the Eusebian date of approximately 107–108, while Helmut Koester (Introduction to the New Testament, vol. 2, History and Literature of Early Christianity, 2nd ed. [New York: W. de Gruyter, 2000], 284) places it in the second half of Trajan’s reign (ca. 110–117).
[4]. Somewhat vaguely in his Church History (3.36), more specifically in his Chronicle (texts in Lightfoot, AF 2.1.145–46, 2.2.449).
[5]. Those who deny their authenticity (see the discussion below) tend to date the letters toward the middle of the second half of the second century.
[6]. So W. R. Schoedel, “Polycarp of Smyrna and Ignatius of Antioch,” ANRW 2.27.1 (1993): 347–58; Charles Munier, “Où en est la question d’Ignace d’Antioche? Bilan d’un siècle de recherches, 1870–1988,” ANRW 2.27.1 (1993): 380, 484. Cf. already in Lightfoot’s own day Adolf von Harnack: “The Epistles of Ignatius and Polycarp were probably written after the year A.D. 130; that they had been composed so early as A.D. 100 or 118, is a mere possibility, which is highly improbable, because it is not supported by any word in the Epistles, and because it rests only upon a late and very problematic witness” [i.e., Eusebius] (A. Harnack, “Lightfoot on the Ignatian Epistles: II. Genuineness and Date of the Epistles,” The Expositor Third Series, 3 [1886], 192).
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