The New Testament and Other Early Christian Writings: A Reader

Along with the ever expanding world of New Testament and patristic scholarship in the last thirty or so years comes the challenge of keeping up with all such publications; the exception to this rule might well be the published titles intended for use as textbooks for the undergraduate and graduate level. Maybe an integral part of the problem is just in producing a scholarly work for use in both levels rather than just one or the other. Bart D. Ehrman’s recent work The New Testament and Other Early Christian Writings: A Reader seems to apply itself quite easily for use with undergraduates as well as graduates, and as a companion to his 1996 work, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings.

Ehrman’s stated intent is to make available in one classroom text not only writings that became canonical Scripture, but also other Christian books written at approximately the same time but not included, for a variety of reasons, in the Christian canon. This Reader, then, possesses all of the earliest Christian writings from the ancient world, so that the student in an imagined course has the entire New Testament, the letters of Ignatius of Antioch and other “Apostolic Fathers,” other early non-canonical Gospels, Acts, Epistles and Apocalypses, including even Nag Hammadi material such as the Gospel of Thomas. Only documents written by Christians from the first hundred years of the church (ca. AD 30–130) are included, in clear and readable English translations. Each document comes with a brief introduction, and the entire reader has a general introduction to early Christian writings with attention given to the question of how some of these writings came to be collected into the canon of Scripture. The complete text of each book or fragmentary writing is included, except for The Shepherd of Hermas and the Apocalypse of Peter, where the selections provided give an adequate idea of their content and style.

What seems to be missing from this collection are other works that might be more representative of, say, something like Gnosticism. Including the Gospel of Thomas as representative of a gnostic document, rather than of impassioned encratism, might have also required other Nag Hammadi tractates such as Exegesis of the Soul or Hypostasis of the Archons, if the point is to read an obviously gnostic text. But Exegesis and Hypostasis do not fall into the criteria of providing only early Christian texts, and from only AD 30–130. Ehrman even includes such fragments as Papyrus Egerton 2, The Preaching of Peter and The Fragments of Papias, which are all useful to have along with longer, complete early Christian works, though I question the usefulness of including such a hotly debated fragment as Morton Smith’s Secret Gospel of Mark. Nevertheless, Ehrman’s Reader provides a very accessible primary text for use by students, scholars and general readers, and is well-suited for courses in New Testament and early church history.