My LORD’s BibleThe Apostolic Fathers and Early Martyr Acts
The first generations of Christian writing after the apostles, and the martyrs who died for it.
The Apostolic Fathers are the earliest Christian authors outside the New Testament — men who knew the apostles or their students, writing between roughly AD 95 and AD 160. Their letters and treatises show the church in the decades right after the New Testament: how it worshipped, what it taught, how it read the apostles' letters, and how it faced persecution.
This collection includes the Didache, 1 and 2 Clement, the seven letters of Ignatius of Antioch, the Epistle of Polycarp and the Martyrdom of Polycarp, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, and the Epistle to Diognetus, with the surviving fragments of Papias and the Apology of Aristides, one of the earliest defenses of the faith. It also carries early martyr accounts: the Martyrdom of Ignatius, the Passion of the Scillitan Martyrs (AD 180), and the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas (AD 203), which preserves Perpetua's own prison diary.