Introduction to This Volume

How this book is arranged

This is the hundredth volume of a series that gathers the writings of the early Church. The first volumes of the series follow the writers in order of date; this volume belongs to the later part of the series, which gathers the church orders and the decisions of the early councils, which do not belong to any one author. This volume holds the earliest church orders, the canons of the councils from Ancyra in AD 314 to Laodicea, and the first four books of the Apostolic Constitutions.

Within each work the text is divided into chapters and numbered sections, so that any passage can be found again and cited. The small bold figures in the text are the section numbers.

The translations

The text is in English only. Wherever a modern English version has been prepared for SermonIndex it is used here; otherwise the book prints an older public-domain translation. In both cases the wording is the translator’s own: older translations have not been altered beyond dividing them into sections. The sources for every work are listed at the back of the book, together with the licence under which each text is released. All the works in this volume are printed in older public-domain translations. The Didascalia, the Testament of Our Lord and Maclean’s handbook were read by machine from scans and have not been proofread against the printed books, so a misreading may remain. Greek words that the editors of the councils quote in their notes are given in Latin letters.

In this volume

The church orders are handbooks of rules and prayers for the life of a local church: how a bishop is chosen and ordained, how converts are baptized, how the Eucharist is celebrated, what the widows and the deacons are to do. This volume prints the Apostolic Tradition, which is attributed to Hippolytus of Rome, the Didascalia Apostolorum, the Testament of Our Lord, and Arthur Maclean’s handbook that explains how the orders are related to one another.

The second part of the volume gathers the canons and decrees of the councils of the fourth century, from the council of Ancyra in AD 314 to the council of Laodicea: Ancyra and Neocaesarea, the first ecumenical council at Nicaea, Gangra, Antioch, Sardica and Laodicea. The councils are printed in the translations of the nineteenth-century series, with the ancient epitomes of the canons and the notes of the editors. The volume closes with the first four books of the Apostolic Constitutions, the large collection of church law and worship that was put together in Syria about AD 380 and that rewrites the Didascalia and the other earlier orders.

Dates and authorship

The dates of the councils are those given in the sources. The dates of the church orders and of the Apostolic Constitutions are approximate and are debated by scholars. Each work begins with a short introduction that says what is known and what is uncertain.