Review: THE ANTE-NICENE FATHERS VOL. 1 ed. by A. Cleveland Coxe

The Ante-Nicene Fathers was a set first published in the 1800s. It consists of all of the available Christian writings from before 325AD, in an English translation. ("Ante" means "before" and "Nicene" refers to the Council of Nicea in 325AD.)

This is the version produced by the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, and includes not only the early Christian writings, but also the introductions and over 3200 notes. Unfortunately, many of the notes are in other languages, or extremely obscure. They generally add little. The various introductions, although well-written, are also hardly necessary.

What was remarkable about this volume was how easy it was to read. Victorian translations of much older works tend to be intentionally archaic, but that's not the case here. It's obviously old, but not so that it's hard to understand.

Some of the writers here were personally taught by the apostles, and the rest were only a generation or two removed from them. It's important to know what the Christian faith is like under its many hundreds of years of interpretation, and for that reason I recommend it.