After the New Testament: A Reader in Early Christianity (review)

We now have a very useful reader in early Christianity in Bart Ehrman’s After the New Testament, covering the period immediately after the New Testament up to, but not including, the church history of Eusebius. Ehrman has given us two preceding companion volumes, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings and The New Testament and Other Early Christian Writings: A Reader. He explains in his preface that the motivation to produce this new work arose from teaching a course titled “The Birth of Christianity,” where no satisfactory sourcebook for the period ca. 100–300 C.E. existed. His collection presents a broad range of primary texts from the early years of Christianity, with as full a set of texts as possible, within the restrictions of providing these works in a single volume. The texts deal with a range of significant issues within early Christianity, such as evangelism, persecution and martyrdom, apologetics, heresies, apocrypha/pseudepigrapha, church offices, liturgics and ethics, arranged according to the topics themselves rather than according to the categories of systematic theology.

Attempts made in the past to produce reader sourcebooks tended to provide minimalist snippets of primary texts, which seemed to do stark injustice to the texts and their rich content. Ehrman has sought to include large selections: complete texts when possible, and lengthy excerpts when not. The excerpts may be the cause of dissatisfaction to some readers who want more of an essential text. For example, looking through what Ehrman has chosen for the First Apology of Justin Martyr shows the chapters Ehrman believes necessary for first-time readers, but more critical readers such as graduate students and instructors would want the entire work at hand. Some works are present in their entirety, like the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas. Works that have been excerpted have what is necessary for first-time readers at the college level, with the handy feature of having all of these early Christian texts in one volume for use as a classroom text.

In spite of having most of these texts in various editions I found myself excitedly looking through the selections for the intelligent topical arrangement, and looking forward to using this as a required textbook. I was especially pleased by the inclusion of sometimes neglected works such as Origen’s On First Principles, Novatian’s On the Trinity and Clement of Alexandria’s The Educator, as well as topical chapters dealing with the canon of Scripture in early Christianity and early Christian homilies. Each chapter begins with a sketch of the important historical aspects of the topic, and each individual text is introduced with brief comments concerning its historical context and significance. The topical introduction of each chapter is not a brief and passing mention, but rather an in-depth essay to the stated topic, with a brief bibliography before the primary text on good current titles for further reading.

This reader is a welcome and needed addition to the increasing titles available on early Christianity, especially since it is not an anthology of secondary scholarly opinion on the history of early Christianity, but provides the opportunity for students to become immersed in the primary sources themselves.