How to Start Reading the Early Church? - Dean Taylor

Lesson Transcript

Okay, so I have a question. This is a bit of a drip off the rabbit trail a little bit, but I'm guessing there's a lot of people listening be like, "Hmm, that's really interesting. I would like to immerse myself in the first 150 years of early church writings." Is there like a set did you buy online or something, or you just like because I'm guessing they start Googling stuff, you'll just get drowning in the in the forums and whatever. Where do you actually go to get this stuff? Like, I want to read the Didiccay.

Where do I go to get that? Um, now, you know, it's funny. Back in the day it was so hard. You know, when I was first studying with Dave or so, I mean, literally I drove two hours to get these things, you know. Nowadays they're on my phone, you know. Um, the Anti-Nicene Fathers, A-N-T-E, before Nicaea would be the first 300 years of the church, which takes us up to the time of Constantine. That's a set like as big as an encyclopedia set, which is really intimidating. Really intimidating. Right?

So where's the— So I would say that I would say, um, start with the Didiccay, which you can just Google and find in a second, um, and then read the Apostolic Fathers. And that will be the Apostolic Fathers are the first 100 years. Okay. Um, and then I would suggest reading the Apologist, which takes his past, uh, Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, which is basically all of volume one of that Anti-Nicene Fathers and the Shepherd of Hermas that's a part of an Apostolic Father into volume two.

Do you have like a list you give to your students for this class? Yeah. Can we have that and put it in the show notes? Absolutely. Yeah. As a matter of fact, if you would like to study, we do it online. Uh, you just read it. You read the stuff for yourself. Because I think that is the important piece that gets lost in these conversations is we almost start throwing quotes at each other to see who can come up with the best quote. And I've gotten kind of burned out with that, honestly.

And it's like, you know what, let me go the other day, you know, at a friend, hey, just go read some Athanasius yourself, you know, and see what he says about the Incarnation. He's like, oh, this is refreshing. Now I have to read all these different opinions flying around. Let me just sit down and read it. It's a short little book. And I was like, oh, that was really interesting. I learned a lot that I didn't know before. And I think there's a lot of value in that.

While also saying, obviously, early church writings are not the level of scripture or something, of course. That's right. But it does give us some nice color to the picture that you do lose if you're reading it just as secondhand quotes in a book somewhere. I mean, yeah. We are riddled by a secondary source and apologetics, some apologists for this. And they'll take this quote here from the 250s, you know, and then take it over here and say, oh, this is this, and trace it over there and put that on Ignatius.

And the next thing you know, you're like, wow, the early church were Greek Orthodox, for crying out loud. You're like, okay. Well, then you go back and you say, okay, let's how about let's do it the other way. Let's start with the Fathers. Practically, how long does it take to actually read through all those writings from the first 150 years? Well, in my class, I do one semester, and that's, you know what, a three-month period. And we dig deep into it. And we look at the different things.

Well, I bet you could do it in a month. So if someone were to actually wanting to dedicate some time to it, it's not like this see, I think that's another piece, too, where this can get so overwhelming. Okay, okay, yeah. You know, and it's like, well, no, like you go ahead and start reading through this stuff. And not that you'll immediately have all the answers. Of course not. But you will have some context and some frameworks and some things you probably didn't have before. Yeah.

And yeah, it'll take, you know, a couple of weeks. But it is actually possible. You don't have to go get a PhD. I think that's what scares people off a little bit. It's like, oh, this is just way too, you know, too much. And so I'm not even going to care about it. And now I'm just kind of like, whatever. And then you end up not caring about maybe something that's really, really important. You are so right. And what's nice is, and why we stress reading the Apostolic Fathers first, it's simple. Yeah.

It keeps coming back to a simple faith. It hits heavy on a life that needs to be walking in repentance and following Christ. But that's what it keeps hammering. Yeah. And I think this is yeah, because this exact same you know, when you have these other groups saying the same thing, same writings, you know, but coming with a radically different interpretation, it does kind of make sense to, hey, you know what, just go back and read all that stuff yourself in the source material.

When I started reading with Dave or so, he would always say over and over again, read this yourself. So I got that from him. And I try to let the text speak. So every one of these texts, I don't summarize it. I don't give them a paragraph. My students read the entire thing. Okay. So I think it's important because what you do is I would take a quote on here where it goes into about the sacrifice or something. You say, see, they were basically, you know, Tridentine Mass, you know, Roman Catholics.

You're like, wow, you're right. But then if you actually read the Didiccay, you're like, hey, wait a minute, man. And what I'm finding in you know, I got this from Mr. Russell. Actually, we were doing that documentary series with him. And he was saying how one of his students was reading some of this old source material they hadn't read before. And they're like, this is really good. This is really good. Like, this is it's really interesting.

And it does give us you know, maybe it's not going to answer all your questions and fix everything in life, of course. But it some more tools in the toolbox. Yeah. You know, and I think that's so I feel like maybe we took a bit of a diversion there. But I think it's an important piece where people can get a little overwhelmed with there's just so much out there. And it's like, actually, at the end of the day, you could boil it down to these texts that you could read on your own in a couple of weeks.

Because a volume and a half, you were talking maybe, you know, a book that big and the other one that big. And you're done. And you could actually just go there first before you just get completely overwhelmed with the thousands of years of interpretations and ideas that have been piling on top. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah, that's making sense. And that's so important. Remember, we're supposed to hold the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. Mm-hmm.

Um, so this faith that's delivered to the saints, um, it's good to get into it and to read it. Yeah, yeah.