Furthermore, traditional definitions of the term father have tended
to award it only to those writers whose work was deemed to be
orthodox; anyone else was simply a heretic.
At its heart, the concept of an age of the church fathers is
based on the assumption that the apostolic period can be firmly
located within the world described in the New Testament, and
that the authors who wrote its books were exact contemporaries
of either Jesus or his immediate successors. As we saw earlier,
the reality is starkly different. Both canonical and non-canonical
scriptures continued to be written for some generations after
Jesus’ death, while the problem of what actually constituted the
New Testament was still being debated in the fourth century. As
a result, there is some vagueness about where the apostolic period
ends and the patristic age dawns. Indeed, texts that are classified
today as works of church fathers – such as the First Epistle of
Clementand the Shepherdof Hermas – were once regarded as
having a similar authority to scripture and were included in manu-
scripts of the Bible (Metzger 1987: 187–9). An attempted solution
has been to refine the basic definitions. Since the seventeenth
century, the hybrid term ‘apostolic fathers’ has been used to desig-
nate those earliest Christian authors who wrote at the same time
as, or very shortly after, the New Testament itself was being
written. Even this term, however, excludes those writings of the
period later condemned as apocryphal or heretical.
The works of early Christian writers present a great variety.
There are many letters, which, like those in the New Testament,
were written to advise Christian communities on issues of doc-
trine and discipline. For example, the late first-century First
Epistle of Clementconveys the opinions of Christians at Rome
to their brethren at Corinth about a dispute over leadership.
Similarly, Ignatius of Antioch sent letters to various Christian
communities while en routeto Rome to face trial c.110. From
the mid-third century, we possess the voluminous correspon-
dence of bishop Cyprian of Carthage, which is revealing of a wide
range of issues confronting the early church, such as the impact
of persecution and conflicts between bishops.
SOURCES AND THEIR INTERPRETATION1
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