Reseña del libro "The Apostolic Fathers Companion (en Inglés)"
Ten documents. Six or seven hands. Seventy years.They arrive bound together under one title, in one typeface, and the packaging quietly implies that they agree with each other. They do not.The Apostolic Fathers Companion is a guide to the earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament, the letters and manuals produced by the generation that followed the apostles, between roughly 95 and 165. It is written for the reader who already owns a translation and stalled somewhere inside it.What this book doesIt works in three movements. First it separates the documents by hand, by city and by decade, because Rome in the 90s and Antioch in the 110s were not the same church having the same conversation. Then it reads each one in turn. Finally it sets them side by side on the questions where they visibly differ.Every document opens with the same fixed profile: who wrote it, when, from where and to whom, in what language, how much of it survives, whether it was ever treated as scripture, and what it is routinely confused with.The documents coveredThe Roman letter to Corinth, known as First Clement, and why the letter itself names no authorSecond Clement, almost certainly the oldest Christian sermon surviving outside the New TestamentThe seven letters of Ignatius of Antioch, written under military guard on the road to his executionPolycarp to the Philippians, and the presbyter who disgraced himself over moneyThe Martyrdom of Polycarp, the earliest surviving account of a Christian martyrdom outside scriptureThe Didache, a working church manual nobody knew existed until a Greek bishop opened a codex in 1873The Epistle of Barnabas, described as it is rather than softenedThe Shepherd of Hermas, the most popular of these documents in the early church and the one modern readers abandon soonestThe Epistle to Diognetus, whose only manuscript burned at Strasbourg in 1870Papias and Quadratus, who left no surviving books and matter anywayWhere they disagreeChurch order and the office of bishop, the eucharist, baptism, martyrdom, what they treat as scripture, how they expect the world to end, and what happens to a Christian who fails after baptism. Each question gets its own chapter and a table comparing every document on it.How it handles the sourcesIt reproduces no translation, modern or public domain. Every passage is located by the chapter and verse divisions that are standard across every edition in print, so you can check any claim in this book against the copy already on your shelf, whichever one that is.Where specialists disagree, the range is given and the positions are named rather than one being quietly chosen for you. The sentence in Ignatius that produced the phrase catholic church gets a full treatment and is not resolved in anyone's favour. Where Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant traditions have historically read a passage differently, all the readings are set out and identified.Also insideA map of the eastern Mediterranean as it stood in 117, with the cities these letters travelled betweenTimelines that show proposed dates as ranges rather than as false certaintiesA chart comparing every document on every disputed questionAn account of which manuscripts carry which text, and why two translations of the same sentence can differReading orders for a weekend, a month and three monthsA glossary, a cast of names, and a plain statement of the sources usedNo prior reading is assumed and no Greek is required. You will need a copy of the texts, and any edition will serve.
