Introduction to This Volume

How this book is arranged

This is the hundred and fourteenth volume of a series that gathers the writings of the early Church. It is an addendum: it gathers writings that were not printed in the volumes before it. The first part holds the letters of Dionysius of Alexandria and the council that met at Carthage on the baptism of heretics. The second part holds short anonymous pieces, the Marcionite and anti-Marcionite prologues, the Passion of Saint Saturninus, and the text of Acts as the fifth-century Codex Bezae gives it. The third part is the Festal Epistles of Athanasius, his Easter letters, from the Syriac. The fourth part is the sermons of Leo the Great, bishop of Rome. The fifth gathers shorter writings of the fourth to the seventh century, and the last part is the Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith of John of Damascus.

The introductions, the descriptions of the parts and the headings were prepared for SermonIndex with the help of artificial intelligence. The texts themselves are the translations, and were not rewritten.

Translations and texts

The English is that of older translators, nearly all of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and is printed as the website prints it. Most of these texts were read by machine from scanned books and have not been proofread against the printed pages, so a misreading may remain. Footnotes, and words in Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic and Latin, are left out of this book, as are the translators’ long introductions; the reader who wants them should go to the printed edition.

Dates and authorship

The Festal Epistles of Athanasius survive in Syriac, and Burgess’s English has the notes of its editor mixed into the text in places, which are left in where they could not be told apart from the letters. The prologues to the Gospels and to Paul’s letters are anonymous and their dates are disputed. The dates given are those of the authors, and the volume runs from the third century to the eighth.