Christianity Today Award of Merit winner
Because the Catholic Epistles focus on orthodox faith and morals, the Fathers drew on them as a means of defense against the rising challenge of heretics. Many of the Fathers saw in these letters anticipatory attacks on Marcion and strong defenses against the Arians. They did so quite naturally because in their view truth was eternal and deviations from it had existed from the beginning.
Above all, the Fathers found in the Catholic Epistles a manual for spiritual warfare, counsel for the faithful in the cosmic struggle between good and evil. In them was sound instruction in the ways of self-sacrifice, generosity, and humility, through which the cosmic forces could be defeated.
Allusions to these letters go back as far as Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Tertullian, but the first commentary derives from Clement of Alexandria. Didymus the Blind was the next significant Greek-speaking commentator, though his commentary is fully extant only in Latin translation. Many of the comments from the early centuries have been passed on to us through Latin catenae, or chain commentaries, in which a later commentator collected comments from a variety of sources and chained them together in a fashion much like that of the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture in English. Among Latin commentators on these letters, pride of place must be given to Bede the Venerable.
This volume opens up a treasure house of ancient wisdom that allows these faithful witnesses, some appearing here in English translation for the first time, to speak with eloquence and intellectual acumen to the church today.
Volume EditorGerald L. Bray (Ph.D., University of Paris--Sorbonne) is director of research for the Latimer Trust, based in London, and a research professor at Samford University, teaching in the Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama. He is the author of The Doctrine of God, Biblical Interpretation: Past and Present and Creeds, Councils and Christ. He is the editor for Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture volumes on Romans, 1-2 Corinthians and James--Jude. A priest of the Church of England, Bray has also edited the post-Reformation Anglican canons and serves as a coeditor of Ancient Christian Texts.General EditorThomas C. Oden, formerly the Henry Anson Buttz Professor of Theology at The Theological School, Drew University, Madison, New Jersey, is the general editor of the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. The author of numerous books, including a highly regarded three-volume systematic theology, he also serves as a general editor for Ancient Christian Texts and as director of the Center for Early African Christianity.
Thomas C. Oden (1931-2016), was the general editor of the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture and the Ancient Christian Doctrine series as well as the author of Classic Christianity, a revision of his three-volume systematic theology. He was the director of the Center for Early African Christianity at Eastern University in Pennsylvania and he served as the Henry Anson Buttz Professor of Theology at The Theological School of Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. Oden was active in the Confessing Movement in America, particularly within the United Methodist Church and was president of The Institute for Classical Christian Studies. He suggested that Christians need to rely upon the wisdom of the historical Church, particularly the early Church, rather than on modern scholarship and theology and said his mission was "to begin to prepare the postmodern Christian community for its third millennium by returning again to the careful study and respectful following of the central tradition of classical Christianity."