Reading the Ante-Niceness fathers

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I’ve been reading the Ante-Nicene fathers lately. I bought them back when I wanted to research between orthodox and catholic but never got into serious reading til now.
The editors of the series were Anglican so they often throw in snide comments against “Romanism” - I mostly ignore them.

So far I’ve found the writings greatest value to be in learning how early Christians read and understood the Bible. Justin Martyr’s “Dialogue with Trypho” contrasts how Jews and Christians read the Bible, and Irenaeus in his book “Against Heresies” first exposes Gnosticism and then in books 3,4, and 5 lays down the Church’s teaching. He also writes that the true interpretation is to be found only in the Church, by studying with the presbyters.

Right now I’m on Theolphilus of Antioch and he writes a very interesting explanation of Genesis. Theolphilus takes the genealogy from Adam as history, but puts symbolic interpretations on the events of each creation day. There’s ten volumes in total so much further to go.
 
I have that collection too, a 38 volume set. I also have a collection from the Catholic University of America Press, which is very good! Keep up the reading, its great stuff!
 
COPLAND_3 said:
I have that collection too, a 38 volume set. I also have a collection from the Catholic University of America Press, which is very good! Keep up the reading, its great stuff!
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Where would I buy the collection from Catholic University of America Press? Are those extra writings? I read somewhere that the editors of the 38 volume set didn’t include some they deemed too Catholic.
 
You can buy them on Amazon. They are much smaller volumes and there are many more volumes. I hit the jackpot when I got mine. A local public library had deleted them from their shelves and I bought them for 10 cents a volume! I was able to get about 70 plus volumes. The Catholic University of America Press has published a lot more than the Hendrickson Press (38 vol.). And the CUAP has continued to publish over the years more and more of the Patristic writings such as Bible commentaries, which the 38 volume set has very little actual Bible commentaries. The footnotes of the CUAP are obviously good Catholic based notes, as well as the introductions.

The bargain price that you get with the 38 volume set is a wonderful deal! But that whole 38 volume set is all online free on the New Advent site, so there is really no need to buy it unless you prefer print. I do like the printed edition’s Scripture index which is nice to quickly find the places that the Fathers quoted Scripture.
 
Thank you. I found the individual ones. Hopefully I can find them as a set.
 
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