Introduction to This Volume
How this book is arranged
This is the thirty-fourth volume of a series that gathers the writings of the early Church in order of date, from the generation after the apostles down to the eighth century. This volume holds The Desert Fathers, Sayings, Histories and the Paradise of the Holy Fathers, from the period about AD 330 – 600.
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. The modern English version prepared for SermonIndex is used for Apophthegmata Patrum: Sayings of the Desert Fathers, from the Sahidic Coptic (Desert Fathers (anonymous)) and Works of Shenoute: translated selections from the Sahidic Coptic (Shenoute of Atripe); the other works are printed in older public-domain translations.
In this volume
The sayings and histories of the monks of the Egyptian desert were handed down in Coptic, Greek and Syriac, and they were gathered into collections from the fourth to the sixth century. The authors of most of them are unknown.
Shenoute was abbot of the White Monastery near Atripe in Upper Egypt, and one of the greatest writers in the Coptic language. He lived into the fifth century.
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers are short answers given by the old monks to those who came asking for a word. They were gathered in the fifth and sixth centuries, and many of the sayings were remembered long before they were written down.
Dates and authorship
Dates are approximate and are debated by scholars. Each work begins with a short introduction that states what is known about its author and its date, and what is uncertain.