Christian theological speculations (Jaeger 1962; H. Chadwick
1966). Indeed, the accommodation of Christianity and philosophy
became a central theme of apologetic literature, as Christians
sought to defend the sophistication of their religion against its
detractors.
The summary presented here presents nothing like a
complete catalogue of early Christian writers and their works,
but then we possess nothing like the full range of writings that
once existed. The survival of early Christian literature has been
susceptible to the vicissitudes of time just as much as the works
of classical Greek and Latin authors. In addition, many early
Christian works were actively suppressed (and destroyed) because
they came to be regarded as heretical. This was the fate suffered
by many works of Origen, perhaps the most brilliant early
Christian interpreter of scripture. In addition, many of his writ-
ings survive not in their original Greek, but in Latin translations
produced in the fourth century at a time when the orthodoxy of
Origen’s views was the subject of vigorous debate.
More conventionally orthodox works have also had a
chequered history of preservation. The letter known as the
Epistle to Diognetus, which provides interesting observations on
what it was like to live as a Christian among Jews and pagans,
would have disappeared forever had the sole surviving manu-
script not been rescued from a pile of wrapping paper in a fish-
monger’s shop in Constantinople in the fifteenth century. (This
charming story has a sad sequel: that unique manuscript was
destroyed at Strasbourg in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian
war.) Even so important a work as Irenaeus of Lyons’ five-book
polemic against the Gnostics does not survive complete in the
Greek version he wrote. For a complete text, we are compelled
to rely on a Latin translation probably prepared c. 300. For
the fourth and fifth books, we can check this Latin version against
a translation into Armenian. The only passages of Irenaeus’
Greek to survive are extracts from the first and third books
quoted by the fourth-century authors Eusebius of Caesarea and
Epiphanius of Salamis (like Irenaeus, a writer against heresies).SOURCES AND THEIR INTERPRETATION
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