Church Fathers Who Quote the New Testament
QUESTION: I am curious about the early patristic evidence for the various Gospels and other New Testament writings. As I understand these are helpful in establishing the dates for many of these works. Related to this is, when early Church Fathers quote passages from NT writings, are they usually verbatim or do they often differ from the canon that was eventually established? Perhaps my question is a bit broad, but feel free to narrow or expand as time allows. RESPONSE: This is a good set of questions, and I may make two or three posts on it, depending on how it goes. As it turns out, it is an issue I’ve long been interested in. In fact, when I started doing serious research in the textual criticism of the New Testament – back when I was in the last year of my Master’s Program – this was the one topic I was most interested in: the Patristic evidence for the text of the NT. (Patristic = Writings of the Church Fathers.) I told my [...]