Editors' Note

We are pleased to launch a new journal, the Journal of Early Christian Studies, and enlist your participation in this ambitious enterprise. For several years, the growing membership of the North American Patristics Society has championed the notion that scholars of the early Christian era should have access to an American journal that covered the entire period from C.E. 100-700 and that included new subject matters and new methodologies. Hence members of the North American Patristics Society voted to pursue the establishment of a journal of our own. At the outset of our deliberations, we did not yet have in mind to incorporate any existing journal into our project, but in subsequent discussions, members of the Society learned that the board of The Second Century: A Journal of Early Christian Studies wished to pursue the merger of their journal, now in publication since 1981, with ours. Thus the Journal of Early Christian Studies represents a consolidation of the interests of NAPS members with those of the board and readership of The Second Century. We thank the staff of the Journals Division of the Johns Hopkins University Press for its willingness to take on the publication of the Journal, and for their helpfulness throughout; special thanks are due to Marie Hansen, editor of the Journals Division of the Johns Hopkins University Press, who encouraged the project from its outset and has seen it through to a successful conclusion. The Journal will be published four times a year.

As plans proceeded, the Journal Committee of the North American Patristics Society in consultation with Everett Ferguson, editor of The Second Century, agreed on an editorial arrangement to ensure that the Journal would cover a wide spectrum, both chronologically and substantively, of patristic studies. Serving as editors with us are Sidney H. Griffith, Charles Kannengiesser, Patricia Cox Miller and Robert L. Wilken. An advisory board will assist us in locating and reviewing manuscripts. Its members include David Dawson, James Goehring, Thomas Halton, Susan Ashbrook Harvey, David Hunter, Adam Kamesar, Frederick Norris, Carolyn Osiek, William Schoedel, Willy Rordorf and Robert Sider. Book review editors will be Michael Slusser and L. Michael White. The enthusiasm with which all editors and advisors have agreed to assume their tasks is a heartening sign that our launching of a new journal is a timely project.

The editors hope that the Journal of Early Christian Studies will publish traditional articles of the highest caliber, but will also become a showcase for work in newer fields, such as women's studies and literary theory, that were not incorporated into the older "patristics." We also hope to include articles using some of the newer methodologies, as well as those that employ traditional historical and philological scholarship. We intend to recognize the growing importance of early Christian traditions outside the orbit of Greek and Latin patristics, and hope that we will receive many manuscript submissions on themes pertaining to the "Oriental" wing of early Christianity. We would like to include articles that explore how the various religions of late antiquity intersected with and influenced each other, and how disciplines such as archaeology and art history illuminate our textual studies. We also intend to publish a substantial number of book reviews in the Journal, building on the tradition established by the newsletter of the North American Patristics Society, Patristics, which in recent years was so successfully edited by Frederick Norris. Thus we aim for a broad publication program that incorporates the new with the old.

We are eager to solicit your manuscript submissions, which should be sent to Professor Elizabeth A. Clark, Department of Religion, Duke University, Box 90964, Durham, NC 27708-0964. At present, we are not setting precise page limits on manuscripts, but expect that most submissions will be in the 25-55 page range, counting double-spaced footnote pages. We have developed a style guide that is available from Elizabeth Clark. Final versions of manuscripts must conform to the style guide, but manuscripts submitted for review need not. We will maintain the standard policy of most scholarly journals that each manuscript we consider seriously will receive two reviews...