Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] A new thread the Apostolic Fathers in a Nutshell by Bart Ehrman now that I've completed the New Testament in a Nutshell series, with posts summarizing each of the 27 books, explaining their major themes and emphases, when, why, and by whom they were written, giving suggestions for further reading, questions to reflect on, and summaries of the summaries. It's time to move on.
[00:00:27] And where better to move to than the early Christian writings from outside the New Testament, some of which were considered to belong to the New Testament by various church leaders and authors for centuries?
[00:00:39] Really?
[00:00:40] Yeah. One of our earliest manuscripts of the New Testament, this is Codex Sinaiticus from around 375 CE, includes the shepherd of Hermas and the Letter of Barnabas.
[00:00:51] Another Codex Alexandrinus from around 400 CE includes 1st and 2nd Clement.
[00:00:58] Some church Fathers thought that the Didache should belong, or the Apostolic Constitutions, or the Apocalypse of Peter or and so on. But what are these books?
[00:01:09] One thing we can say about all of them, they are less well known among the general populace than the books of the New Testament, and so it seems helpful to provide some posts about them.
[00:01:20] I'll begin by turning our attention to a collection known as the Apostolic Fathers, about which I've blogged before, but never in a systematic way.
[00:01:28] In this post I will explain what this collection is, what books belong to it, and why it matters.
[00:01:35] Are you interested in being knowledgeable about early Christian history and literature after the New Testament? The Apostolic Fathers are a logical place to start.
[00:01:47] I'll start with a 50 word description of the collection as a whole.
[00:01:51] The Apostolic Fathers is a collection of 10 or 11 authors and writings traditionally ascribed to proto Orthodox Church leaders who were allegedly companions of the Apostles of Jesus but were actually writing in the next generation, including the Didache, first and Second Clement, the Letter of Barnabas, Ignatius Polycarp, Papias, and the shepherd of Hermas.
[00:02:16] Now I could unpack the description by providing a bit more detail.
[00:02:21] Nearly all of the writings of the New Testament were produced in the second half of the first century, between 50 and 100 CE, starting with the writings of Paul around 49 to 62 CE or so.
[00:02:35] There are some exceptions. Second Peter is often dated to around 120 CE or so, and some scholars date the Book of Acts then as well.
[00:02:44] Possibly the Gospel of John was also after 100 CE.
[00:02:49] The Apostolic Fathers were traditionally thought to be orthodox writers who knew one or more of the apostles, who therefore spoke with a secondary level of authority on matters of Christian belief, ethics and practice writing sometime during the first half of the second century.
[00:03:08] Today, however, a couple of the Apostolic Fathers, that's First Clement and possibly the Didache, are considered late first century texts.
[00:03:16] Therefore before some of the later writings of the New Testament.
[00:03:20] Others are almost certainly later than the mid second century, such as Second Clement and the Epistle to Diagnitus.
[00:03:29] The collection as a whole was not considered a canon of books, that is to say a set collection, until relatively modern times. Starting with a publication of French scholar J. Cotellier in 1672, it's never been deemed an authorized collection. They came to be grouped together during debates between Protestant and Roman Catholic scholars and theologians who wanted to show on both sides how early Christian doctrine and practice developed historically.
[00:03:59] To that end, it was considered useful to know which writings from after the New Testament could best represent the true form of the faith.
[00:04:09] Hence a desire to have a second level of authorities, Friends of the Apostles, to help understand the primary level of authority, the apostles themselves.
[00:04:20] Given its rather random nature as a collection, different modern scholars include or exclude one or more of the books that others consider part of the group.
[00:04:29] A generous numbering, which I favor, puts them at around 10 or 11, depending on whether a very short fragmentary quotation of a lost apology by an obscure figure named Quadratus should be included or not.
[00:04:43] The term Apostolic Fathers, then, is simply a convenient term for these writings, even though they are quite different from each other. They include actual letters, a tractate, a church manual for how to organize and run the church, a homily, a martyrology, an apocalypse, and an apology.
[00:05:02] Then too, the New Testament contains a number of different genres, and like the Apostolic Fathers, each book was originally circulated separately, not with other books that were also later considered part of the canon.
[00:05:16] The more significant irony is that the original grounds for collecting these books together in the modern period are now known to be flawed.
[00:05:25] It's quite clear that some of these authors were in no way directly connected to the actual apostles, the unknown authors of the Letter of Barnabas, the letter to Diognetus, the shepherd of hermas, second clement, etc.
[00:05:38] And in fact, a good case can be made that none of the authors actually knew an apostle they were writing later.
[00:05:46] Still, it's a worthwhile collection to use, since each of these books are earlier witnesses to the kinds of Christianity that later became dominant with the triumph of Orthodoxy, as opposed to, say, gnostic writings of the period.
[00:06:01] I will be devoting posts to each of these books and authors, but here at the outset, I will name and describe them very briefly.
[00:06:10] First, Clement is a letter from the Christians of Rome to the Church of Corinth that attempts to intervene in a coup of Church leadership there.
[00:06:18] The book was allegedly, but probably not actually written by the Bishop of Rome, Clement, appointed to his post by Peter.
[00:06:27] Second, Clement is a homily, that is to say a sermon written later by a different author that gives moral directives and numerous ethical exhortations based on expositions of biblical passages.
[00:06:42] The Letters of Ignatius are a collection of seven letters written by the Bishop of Antioch Ignatius, who'd been arrested for Christian activities and is sent to Rome for trial and execution.
[00:06:53] These letters are actually written by him en route to his martyrdom.
[00:06:59] Polycarp's Letter to the Philippians this is a letter by the Bishop of Smyrna Polycarp, to the Church in Philippi, which had requested him to send a collection of Ignatius letters that he had collected.
[00:07:11] This is a cover letter for the collection in which he warns the Philippians against heresy and he addresses a problem raised by the financial malfeasance of one of its leaders.
[00:07:23] The Martyrdom of Polycarp is an account of the arrest, the trial and the martyrdom of Polycarp, sealed above, allegedly by an eyewitness. This is our first description of a Christian martyrdom from after the New Testament. You can see the martyrdom of Stephen in Acts, chapter 8.
[00:07:43] The Didache is an early anonymous writing. The full title is the didache of the 12 disciples and it claims to represent the views of the apostles about Christian ethics, church rituals, that's baptism and Eucharist and so on, and treatment of itinerant preachers and prophets who could cause potential difficulties for the community by abusing their authority.
[00:08:09] The Epistle of Barnabas is a tractate written to show the superiority of Christianity over Judaism, claiming that Jews have always misunderstood their scriptures because they were misguided by an evil angel to interpret them literally and have never been the people of God, so that the Old Testament is a Christian, not a Jewish book.
[00:08:30] Papias, a collection of quotations of the writing of Papias, an early 2nd century author whose books are now lost but was sometimes cited by later orthodox writers.
[00:08:42] In these quotations, Papias reports what he has heard from the followers of the disciples of Jesus about the teachings of Jesus, the death of Judas and the authorship of the Gospels.
[00:08:54] Quadratus. This is a short quotation from what may have been the first apology produced by a Christian, an otherwise unknown Christian author named Quadratus, who gives startling proofs for the truth of the Christian message.
[00:09:08] The Epistle to Diagnitus, an apology that seeks to demonstrate the superiority of Christianity by ridiculing the religions of both pagans and Jews and showing the moral and logical supremacy of Christian teachings and ethics and the shepherd of Hermas. This is a lengthy apocalypse that describes a number of visions given to a Hermas, a member of the Church in Rome in the early 2nd century and interpreted by an angelic being identified as a shepherd. As a whole, the various visions show the need for Christians to repent before the predicted end should come.
[00:09:46] I'll continue the thread by going through each of these works, starting in my next post with the Book of First Clement.
