Who Were the Apostolic Fathers?

Between the last book of the New Testament and the great theologians of the late second century, there is a narrow window of Christian writing. This is what survives from it.

The name

“Apostolic Fathers” is a label scholars applied later — first in the seventeenth century — to a set of early Christian authors thought to have known the apostles or their immediate students. The collection was not fixed in antiquity; its exact contents still vary slightly between editions. What the texts share is a date: roughly AD 95 to 160, the two generations right after the New Testament.

Who they were

Clement of Rome, a leader of the Roman church, wrote a long letter to Corinth around AD 96 urging a divided congregation back to order. Ignatius of Antioch wrote seven letters on his way to be executed in Rome, around AD 110, insisting on the unity of the church and the reality of Christ’s flesh. Polycarp of Smyrna, said to have been a disciple of the apostle John, wrote to the Philippians; an eyewitness account of his martyrdom, around AD 155, is the earliest such record outside the New Testament.

The anonymous works

Several of the most important texts have no known author. The Didache is a short church manual — how to baptise, how to pray, how to hold the Lord’s Supper — possibly the oldest Christian document outside the New Testament. The Epistle of Barnabas reads the Old Testament as a book of Christian symbols. The Shepherd of Hermas is a long series of visions about repentance, popular enough that some early Christians wanted it in the canon. The Epistle to Diognetus is a polished defence of the faith to an outsider.

Why they matter

These writers show the church in the decades when the New Testament was still being collected. They quote the gospels and Paul’s letters as familiar and weighty. They describe Sunday worship, baptism, and the Eucharist as settled practice. They are the first outside witnesses to what the apostles’ churches actually looked like once the apostles were gone.

Where to read them

This site carries the full collection — Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, the Didache, Barnabas, Hermas, and Diognetus — in public-domain translations, with the original Greek alongside the English.