Searchearlychristianwritings.online

Welcome!

If you are interested in what the first Christians after the New Testament time had to say, this website might be for you. Here you can read many of their writings and search them for Scripture references or words.

In my experience, many Christians like to identify themselves with the early Church — be it for their unity, martyrs or their success in evangelism. Yet their writings and opinions remain largely unknown and might even be very unlinke what we expect them to be.

Why are the Early Christians important?

Let me tell you shortly how I came to think about the Early Christians. It was mainly the segmentation of today’s Church and the multitude of theological beliefs that made me sceptical towards the origins of Christianity and - in consequence - the origins of the New Testament. If the Apostles passed on a well-defined faith, it would have been preserved in the Early Church. If, on the other hand, a very diverse faith can be found from the beginning, what we define as the true doctrines is basically a matter of preference and religious imprint. A universally taught doctrine cannot be universally replaced by an erroneous one in just a few decades, surely not in times of slow communication. Even today, we see many churches preserving doctrines for centuries almost without change.

So naturally, I wanted to find out more about the first Christians after the New Testament. By Early Christians I refer to professing Christians roughly until the fourth century. The fourth century marked a change in some respects because Christianity transformed from a persecuted religion to the official religion of the Roman Empire. I was very surprised to find out that a great amount of writings from that period is extant, covering many theological questions that are still debated today, valuable spiritual insights and clear teachings on many important lifestyle issues.

The Early Christian writings should not be regarded as inspired or infallible. However, they bear great weight in our understanding of the Bible for several reasons:

  1. They document the faith orally passed down by the Apostles. By their contradicting or harmonizing with each other, we can see for ourselves if their understanding of any scriptural subject was universal or gradually invented by influential teachers.
  2. Apart from their universal agreement, any testimonies should bear special weight if the author was closely related to the Apostles themselves. We have a few extant writings from personal disciples of the Apostles, plus many more writings who's authors were just one or two links away from the Apostles. Additionally, we can find some snippets of oral tradition — meaning orally passed down teachings of Jesus or the Apostles — which are not found in the Bible. These should be examined carefully and can enrich our understanding of the Bible.
  3. If we don't trust the Early Christian writers, we should be alarmed that it was they who compiled the New Testament Canon. God's providence surely guided the process, but how likely is it that He used heretics for this critical task?
  4. They lived in a much closer time and culture to the New Testament, and many of them spoke Koine Greek as their mother tongue. Their linguistic understanding should bear considerable weight compared to any scholar living more than a millennium later. Additionally, their Scripture quotations give valuable insight into text corruptions of later manuscripts because, often times, they are older than most extant Scripture manuscripts themselves.

Learning about the Early Christian doctrines truly changed my faith because they provided answers that I didn't find with the same clarity elsewhere. Some of their universal teachings are considered unorthodox or heretical by many modern denominations. But I invite you to find out for yourself if what they believed really is what the Bible teaches or not.

Sources

There are many early Christian writings openly available, in particular the collection The Ante-Nicene Fathers [Wikipedia]. This great work was digitalized by the Christian Classic Ethereal Library. This website is mainly built on their texts, but I used other sources as well. You can find a link to the source of each text at the bottom of the page.

Note that I created it as a personal side project. If you encounter any issues, don't hesitate to write me an Email to contact@searchearlychristianwritings.online. I hope that this website will be a blessing to you, as these writings were a blessing to me.


God bless you

- Richard

Icon Legend

While many writings represent orthodox Christianity, some are clearly forgeries, and others are universally rejected as heresy. To make things a bit easier, you will find icons to give a simplified classification. Note that I am not a scholar, and I haven't even read most of the writings myself. However, I have tried to follow the editor's assessments as best as I could. The meaning of the icons is this:

Commentary by one of the original editors, like introductions. Not actually early Christian text.

This work is usually regarded as genuine. It does, however, not necessarily mean that the author presents universally held opinions.

Genuinity is very debatable, you should judge for yourself.

There is evidence or a high probability that these works are forgeries, or they are counted as universally rejected heresies. In case of doubt always, do your own research.

This section is recommended as especially valuable or interesting, either in my own opinion or in someone's whose opinion I value.

Received recommendations by the community - that is, readers like you - through the Recommend button at the bottom of the reader. While I truly appreciate your recommendations, let me say: 1. Changes in the rating system can happen in the future. Please don't be frustrated if your recommendations should get lost at some point. Though I try to preserve everything, data loss or incompatibility with future updates can happen. 2. Please do not recommend any caption more than once. Though there is a basic mechanism to prevent you from doing that (by storing part of your IP address), I can not effectively stop it.

📜You will find this icon at the start of some footnotes. It means that I either created this footnote myself or edited something (usually a small syntax change in a scripture reference).


September 2024


December 2023

Minor usability improvements:

November 2023

I moved the website to a faster server, and this caused way more trouble than I hoped. I'm sorry for the long downtime once again! Greetings from Richard.

July 2022

After trying a few more, I found another text search engine that seems to work well enough. You can now filter by author or volume if you want to find something more specific. I left the old text search available if something should not work again.

Correction May 2022

Unfortunately, this search engine kept crashing, so I switched back to the old one. I apologize that the last update caused a lot of trouble and server downtime. I'm still working on a new search engine.

Update May 2022

The Ante-Nicene-Fathers set is a huge work, and it would probably take years to read through all of it. One primary goal of this website is to help you find the writings you are most interested in without reading everything. In this update, I have added a few more features which I hope you might find helpful at some point.

Update April 2022


Update November 2021

This update involved a great amount of work and will hopefully bring a better overview of the Early Christian Writings. The new features are:

Update October 2021

Added the Top 20 most quoted verses, chapters and books of the Bible.