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Loading...The letters of Ignatius of Antioch are among the most fascinating earliest Christian writings from outside the New Testament. I’ve long been fascinated by them and would like to introduce you to them in a series of three posts in this thread presenting the “Apostolic Fathers” in a nutshell.
The “Apostolic Fathers,” as I have indicated before, are a group of ten or eleven (depending how you count) books/authors who have long been understood to stand in the “orthodox” Christian camp before the major theological views later considered orthodox had become the overwhelmingly dominant form of Christian belief and practice some time in the third century or so – and so we call these write “proto-orthodox”; they were collected into a group of writings only in the modern period, and called “apostolic fathers” because they were each believed to have been acquainted with the apostles of Jesus themselves. In almost all instances, as it turns out, that turns out to be wrong, but we still give them this name.
They are (for the most part) our earliest proto-orthodox writers, dating from the first half of the second century, with various provisos: two of of them 1 Clement and the Didache, which I have already discussed, were written when some of the writings of the New Testament itself were being produced, around 100 CE or so); a couple of others are almost certainly
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Dr. Ehrman, off topic question.
What would you recommend to a layperson to read about the “King of the Jews” sign at Jesus’ crucifixion?
Thanks in advance.
For all issues connected with biblical accounts of Jesus’ crucifixion, I’d recommend Raymond Brown’s two-volume work, The Death of the Messiah. Extremely meticulous and thoroughly thought out.