Organization of the Literature.

This voluminous literature breaks conveniently for us at the Council of Nicaea in 325, for the actions there taken so colored the subsequent literature that it can hardly be mistaken; every page of it bears their stamp. An even more practical terminus is afforded by the Church History of Eusebius, published in A.D. 326, for that book is in no small degree a history of early Christian literature as well as of the march of events, and Eusebius gives us information on not a few books that he had examined but are now lost: It is safe to say that no book is more in the hands of the student of early Christian literature than the “Church History” of Eusebius, long available in English in the annotated edition of A. C. McGiffert, and more recently in the translations of Lawlor and Oulton (1927-28) and of Lake and Oulton (1926, 1932).

Again, a convenient break in the literature of these first three Christian centuries can be noted with Irenaeus of Lyons, who about A.D. 185 wrote his principal work, the “Refutation of Gnosticism” (also known as “Against Heresies”). He begins a new period in Christian literature because with him the self-consciously orthodox Christianity of the Catholic Church is clearly set forth in contradistinction from the sects.

What has come down to us from Christian writers before Irenaeus can be grouped in four volumes of unequal but moderate size: the New Testament, the Apostolic Fathers, the early Greek apologists, and the uncanonical gospels, acts, and apocalypses (along with a few Gnostic works of various kinds). But these four groups of books are not to be thought of as absolutely separate or successive. The Apostolic Fathers overlap some of the New Testament books in date, and some of the apologies are earlier than some of the Apostolic Fathers. Uncanonical gospels, acts, and apocalypses are scattered over the years from A.D. 100 on, so that some of them are close to the later books of the New Testament. In purpose, too, the various groups of writings often coincide. The purpose of I Clement is not totally different from that of I Peter. Both Ignatius and the author of the Johannine gospel and epistles are opposed to Docetism and to Judaizing. There are apologetic materials in the New Testament as well as in the writings of the later apologists. This situation is not surprising when we bear in mind the continuity of the Christian church.

To a considerable extent this earliest Christian literature before Irenaeus reproduced literary types already developed and standardized in books that we find in the New Testament-letters, apocalypses, gospels, and acts. Most of them were anonymous or pseudonymous; they provided the popular background against which arose the products of more self-conscious Christian leaders who wrote under their own names.