Early Christian Reader

this is a collection of the 27 "canonical" New Testament "books" as well as some other very early "christian" writings. All writings are given introductory treatments dealing with date, setting, author, meaning etc. Notes are given throughout the text as well. NRSV for the New Test. text. The position in this work is not conservative by any means. It is rather critical, but if you can stomach this, and discern past it, there is still plenty of good food for thought in the intro's and in the notes. The authors are to be commended in my opinion for trying to treat the earliest Christian writings as what they really are- ancient literature. They try to help one understand these writings as such by treating them in their ancient historical and literary times. I applaud their efforts even if I do think they have erred just a bit towards too much skeptical criticism of certain aspects of New Test. study. But I think that it's still very much a good study tool for gaining some perspective that is sometimes curiosly downplayed in conservative New Test. studies. A terrific volume to use with this, and one that is more conservative, but very sane, while still aiming to study the New Testament as ancient literature is Early Christianity And It's Sacred Literature by Lee Martin McDonald.

Tom Robinson and I, the co-authors, thought we should clarify what might seem puzzling from the website: there is also a paperback called An Early Christian Reader (1990), with our names as authors. Is it the same thing? No. That paperback is an entirely different product. Here is the background. Tom and I had an idea for useful textbook for our (university) students in Christian origins. It would be a reader that presented the early Christian texts in something like historical order, and included non-New-Testament texts. So we quickly produced a manual for our classes, with a local business run part-time by a professor. It was hurriedly done, laid out on Tom's Macintosh, and its main use was in our classes. Over years of using that resource, and in light of student feedback, we agreed that we should take the time to prepare a much larger and more useful text with an established publisher in the field. And so we did. This Hendrickson hardcover is an altogether new work, going much further than the 'trial run'. It uses the NRSV translation. It has much fuller introductions to each text and each group of texts. It includes a number of texts that are not in the NT. It is nearly 200 pages longer. Supporting material at the back, including colour maps, is fuller and more accessible. The book is professionally edited and, in hardcover, a far more valuable investment for students and instructors as well as the self-taught.