Reputable/Good Books about the Early Church Fathers

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DeusEstBonus

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I would really love to learn more about the church fathers and their writings. I know this has been asked several times before on the forums but they seem to be from many years ago and since then maybe some better books have emerged. If any of you could suggest some books on the early church fathers, preferably some that have quotes/some of their writings in them, that would be great! I am very new to learning about the church fathers and barely know anything about them- so if you have any suggestions that are somewhat of an introductory level please list them!

I saw that Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI also has some sort of series on the church fathers as well- let me know if you’ve read them and if they’re worth looking into!
 
You will get a variety of opinions here. John Bergsma and Brant Pitre just published The Catholic Introduction to the Bible: Old Testament In this book, they make frequent use of The Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture from InterVarsity Press. This is a big collection of excerpts from the writings of the early church fathers.

Each volume has a rather scholarly overview which includes a statement about which of the fathers’ writings were selected for the commentary on each of the books of the Bible. In some cases, there were few writings that survived the centuries of time or there were not many writings found for certain books.

It’s hard to imagine that any of the fathers were overlooked, so you have selections from Cyril of Alexandria, Ambrose, Augustine, Tertullian, Origin, and these are just a few of the names. There are selections from Western and Eastern fathers.

From a financial standpoint, this is not an introductory level entry point. But, from the viewpoint of reading, these are very manageable. The selections of writing themselves are from much larger collections, which are cited. There might be some excerpts from writings that were freshly translated.

These volumes are commentaries, so the selection of writings closely match as much as possible the scripture which is being examined.
 
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I made a chart of the Church Fathers, which includes a short biography and a list of their works. The listed works are also linked to the NewAdvent website where you can read the books online. Here is the link:


If you want short Youtube videos of the fathers, you can go here as well:


I recommend accessing the website through a computer rather than a cellphone, because the chart is wide.

Hope that helps.
 
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Jimmy Akin’s book above is supposed to be very good. The Four Witnesses by Rod Bennett is very readable. Mike Aquilina has a very good intro also, called The Fathers of the Church.

Jergens’ Faith of the Early Fathers is a Catholic reference set of books. Basically, if you need a quote about X subject, you go and look it up in the index in the back of Volume III, and you can find all sorts of things in all 3 volumes. (Obviously the Volume I index only covers Volume I, the Volume II index covers I and II…) But yeah, it’s a book of miscellaneous quotes, from various Fathers in chronological order.

Same thing with the Bible commentary series mentioned above – it’s just bits of quotes. Handy, useful, but eventually, you really need to read the context of the quotes to understand the Fathers’ thoughts.

If you want to start reading the Fathers in bigger chunks, for cheap, you can read translations of most of the important works on New Advent or Tertullian.org (which is run by Roger Pearce, a very nice UK evangelical computer guy). Archive.org and Google Books have plenty of other works, too.

When you get to the point that you need to compare translations with the original languages, or you need something that hasn’t been translated, there are all sorts of series collecting the Fathers en masse. Migne’s Patrologia Latina and Patrologia Graeca are probably the easiest to get online, because they are public domain; but he didn’t have the benefit of modern scholarship, and sometimes the printers messed stuff up.

Roger Pearce has a blog with links to pretty much all the public domain Fathers’ series books, but you will need to go to a university or seminary library (or use interlibrary loan, or have university ebook access) for the more recent ones.

I don’t want all this to sound forbidding. The Fathers can be very fun!

Remember, it’s not like they’re dead and gone. They are alive in Christ, and they will be happy to teach you. They also lived the Christian life in a very worldly world. If you poke around a bit in their writings, you will be surprised how relevant and helpful they are. They all have very distinct personalities and talents, and you will soon find them becoming old friends.
 
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The Fathers of the Church by Mike Aquilina would be a good introduction.

And Pope Benedict XVI also has a book called The Fathers.
 
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