Loading...An interest in the “church Fathers” emerged in Western Europe among humanists of the Renaissance, many of whom saw in the golden age of patristics their own forebears — cultured scholars imbued with the classics of Western Civilization, concerned with deep religious and philosophical problems. No wonder, then, that the humanists focused their attention on the writings of the “great” Fathers of the church such as Chrysostom, Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, the Cappadocians, and the like, while showing virtually no interest in their comparatively “primitive” and “uncultured” predecessors, such as Ignatius of Antioch, Clement of Rome, Barnabas, and Hermas, who on no reckoning were cultured scholars or brilliant thinkers. When a “most ancient” church Father like Irenaeus was mentioned, it was usually in order to show the unrefined nature of his theology and to censure his aberrant doctrinal views, which failed to reflect the more mature and nuanced statements of later times.
The Reformation provided some impetus for the study of Christian writings immediately after the New Testament period, but even then few scholars evinced an extensive interest in or knowledge of authors of the early second century, for reasons that, in hindsight, may seem obvious: for many Protestant thinkers, the notion of “sola scriptura” precluded the need to appeal to books immediately outside the canon, whereas most Catholic theologians were far more invested in the great theologians, councils, and creeds of later times.
It was not until the seventeenth century that the terms of the discussion shifted dramatically, as all sides began to recognize the importance of the earliest non-canonical authors for establishing the antiquity of their own views, Protestants (of various kinds) and Catholics taking their arguments beyond exegesis of the New Testament texts and the formulations of later church councils into the early years of the Christian movement. This burgeoning interest in the earliest Fathers was intensified by significant manuscript discoveries, which provided a means of revising commonly received notions of Christian antiquity. Two of particular importance involved the writings of Clement of Rome and Ignatius.
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Fascinating. In which of your books have you elaborated on the history of patristic scholarship?
I haven’t really written that much on the history of the discipline, although I have more comments on it in my Introduction to the Loeb volumes in the Apostolic Fathers.
I don’t have the Loeb Classical Library which probably answers this question. What is/are the dates of the oldest surviving manuscripts of any of the Apostolic Fathers? (i.e. are they close in time to the oldest surviving NT documents.) I suppose I should have purchased Loeb’s, but I was waiting for your edition (alright, I blew the money on entertainment).
We have fragments of the Shepherd of Hermas that go back to the 3rd century, and it is included in the famous Codex Sinaiticus (along with the rest of the NT) in the fourth. My Loeb edition is indeed out and available.
Professor Ehrman,
I apologize if this is not the correct area to ask this, but I hope you won’t mind. I was raised Catholic and other Catholics I know have said your arguments really only argue against Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, not the Catholic Church. Not sure what is meant by this but it does bring a couple of questions to my mind. You have argued against the resurrection, so how would you respond to a Catholic who says the Early Church Fathers (some of them anyway like Ignatius, Clement and Polycarp) were appointed by the Apostles and they preached the Apostles died for their faith, and these Fathers died for their faith, so the resurrection must have occurred? Or that if the resurrection hadn’t occurred, how do you explain the survival and growth of the Christian faith?
I don’t recall ever arguing against the resurrection. What do you have in mind?
We don’t know how most of the apostles died. If someone tells you they do know, ask them what their evidence is. 🙂
Neither Ignatius nor Polycarp (in their surviving letters) indicates that they were appointed by apostles. And the book of Clement does not claim to be written by Clement!