Editors' Notes

The editorial team of the Journal of Early Christian Studies is pleased to present this special issue of papers that respond to Everett Ferguson's major study, Baptism in the Early Church: History, Theology, and Liturgy in the First Five Centuries (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009). Professor Ferguson, one of the founding editors of JECS, was instrumental in facilitating the transition from the pioneering independent journal The Second Century to a publication sponsored and guided by the North American Patristics Society, to whom he has devoted years of service and leadership. This issue represents a small measure of our appreciation for Everett's many contributions to NAPS, this journal, and the North American community of scholars of early Christianity. I am grateful to Jeffrey Peterson, this issue's guest editor, for his tireless and generous work to make it possible for us to honor Everett Ferguson in this way.

David Brakke, Editor

In the fall of 1985 I was Everett Ferguson's student in a class on "Backgrounds of Early Christianity," a survey of the history and culture of ancient Israel, Greece, and Rome with an emphasis on aspects of those civilizations relevant to understanding the early Christians. It was my first guided tour through much of that terrain, and I asked a number of questions. After a while, I noticed a pattern to the answers. "I don't know very much about that," Professor Ferguson would say, as he removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose (thus accessing the database, I later concluded). Then he would begin to talk, sketching the state of the question, citing the principal sources and the standard bibliography, mentioning a recent work that might prove to modify the consensus in this respect or that, perhaps expressing interest in a forthcoming study. By the end of the semester, I found myself wondering what it would be like if Professor Ferguson fielded a query on a subject about which he knew a great deal.

The answer came a quarter of a century later, with the publication of Baptism in the Early Church. The fruit of decades of research, the volume exhaustively surveys the literary and material evidence for baptismal practice and theology in the first five centuries of Christian history, advancing the thesis that the baptism of penitent believers by immersion was the norm in the ancient church.

In recognition of this significant contribution to scholarship, a symposium featuring evaluation of the work from various perspectives was organized as part of the annual Christian Scholars Conference on June 4, 2010 at Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee. Several institutions of higher education lent their support (both moral and financial) to that gathering. I especially wish to express appreciation to Jeff Childers, Mark Hamilton, and Jack Reese of Abilene Christian University; Stanley Reid of Austin Graduate School of Theology; D. Newell Williams of Brite Divinity School; David Fleer and John Mark Hicks of Lipscomb University; Mark Matson of Milligan College; Allison Garrett and Richard Wright of Oklahoma Christian University; and Randall Chesnutt and Darryl Tippens of Pepperdine University.

The present volume includes three papers presented in Nashville (those of Patout Burns, Carl Holladay, and Robin Jensen) along with two others (by David Bentley Hart and Frank Senn) that illustrate the value of Ferguson's meticulous historical scholarship to liturgists and theologians as well as historians. I am grateful to Thomas Finn for the paper he presented in Nashville, which could not be included here. I thank David Brakke for accepting this collection of essays for the Journal of Early Christian Studies.