Introduction to This Volume

How this book is arranged

This is the hundred and eleventh 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 apocryphal and pseudepigraphal writings: the writings put under the names of famous Fathers, and the early church orders and papal letters. This volume holds the writings put under the names of Cyprian, Ignatius, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Melito, Hippolytus, Chrysostom and others, the Statutes of the Apostles, and the letters in the names of the early popes.

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 translations are of many kinds: the Ante-Nicene translations as collected in the Writings-Database, Wikisource transcriptions, Horner’s Statutes of the Apostles and Mingana’s Syriac text read by machine, and works transcribed for Roger Pearse’s collection. Page numbers and footnotes are left out, and a misreading may remain. Greek, Hebrew and Latin words in the editors’ notes are left out or, where a Greek word occurs in the text itself, given in Latin letters.

In this volume

This last volume of the apocrypha holds works that were written under the names of the great teachers of the church, and that the church did not at the time accept. There are letters of Ignatius and sayings of Irenaeus, treatises put under the name of Cyprian and Hippolytus, the Doubtful Letters of Sulpicius Severus, and the Statutes of the Apostles.

The papal decretals at the end were forged in the ninth century and were taken for authentic for six hundred years, until scholars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries showed that they were not. They are printed here so that the reader can see what was claimed in the name of the early bishops of Rome. They are not history, but they are evidence for what the church of the ninth century wanted to believe about its own past.

Dates and authorship

None of these books is part of the Bible. Some were written by Jews before the time of Christ, some by Christians in the first centuries, and some much later, and many carry the name of a patriarch, an apostle or a Father who did not write them. Some of them contain stories that the Church never received and teaching that it rejected. They are printed here so that a reader can see what they say and judge them against the Scriptures, as the Fathers themselves did. The writings in this volume are put under names that are not their authors’; the papal letters were forged in the ninth century.