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CHURCH HISTORY

Startling Discoveries from the Very First Christians!

The Early Christians Provide Us With Some Real Eye-Openers
A word from Jimmy Akin...

I first began to be aware of the earliest Church Fathers before I was even Catholic. In fact, they were part of what led me to the Church. When I was twenty, I had a profound conversion to Christ, but because I grew up in a Protestant community, I knew very little about the Catholic faith.

According to many of the sources I had available to me, the Catholic Church was a false church, and many said that Catholics weren’t even Christians. One reason was that Catholics listened to “Tradition” instead of “Scripture alone.”

A Profound Irony

At that point in my life, I was hoping to become a Protestant pastor and seminary professor, and I studied constantly to get ready for seminary.

This meant focusing heavily on Scripture, and one of the first things I learned was that to interpret Scripture properly you have to understand it the way the first Christians did.

“What did the early Christians believe?” was a question that the people I knew and I were constantly asking. It was key to understanding the Bible. Yet it was profoundly ironic the way we went about asking this question. Although we didn’t admit it, we recognized that we had to look to more than just Scripture alone to answer the question.

For example, to understand some Bible passages, you need to know Greek and Hebrew, but Scripture doesn’t contain dictionaries or grammar textbooks of these languages. You had to look outside the Bible at the way these languages were used by the first believers.

But if you’re going to do that, why stop there? Why not look at other things the first Christians had to say? What did they say about their beliefs? What did they say about the meaning of different Scripture passages?

For me and many in my circles, such questions never even arose.

Startling Discoveries Begin!

Eventually, I discovered that the early Christians had written about these things. They had written a lot! And the world of the Church Fathers opened up to me. I remember when I first began reading a book of writings by the earliest Christian authors—a group known as the “Apostolic Fathers,” because they lived just after the apostles.

It was startling to read their writings, because I quickly recognized that . . . they didn’t sound like Protestants. They sounded like Catholics.

As I made discovery after discovery in their writings, it became clear to me that I needed to start thinking about the early Church in a new way, and this was one of the things that led me eventually to become Catholic.

In the years since, I’ve continued to study the Church Fathers. I’ve written countless articles and even a best-selling book (The Fathers Know Best) about them. Yet the Apostolic Fathers have always had a special place in my heart. As the earliest Christian writers, they are the ones closest to the authors of the New Testament. Some of them even knew the authors of the New Testament, and that makes their writings especially valuable.

That’s why I’ve just recorded a brand-new, 3-CD audio set—The Very First Fathers.

The Very First Fathers

In this new audio set, I share startling discoveries I’ve made when reading books from the age of the Apostolic Fathers, including works many people have never even heard of. For example, I discuss:

• The book that may be the earliest piece of Christian literature outside the New Testament—perhaps older than the Gospels
• An apocalypse that appears older than the book of Revelation
• A letter written by a first-century pope that reveals the fates of St. Peter and St. Paul
• The writings of the martyr bishop who gave us the earliest reference to “the Catholic Church” and emphasized the Real Presence in the Eucharist
• The first Christian document written after Jesus’ prophecy of the temple’s destruction was fulfilled—and what it has to say about the temple
• The little-known author who gave us crucial information about how the Gospels were composed
• A first-century work of prophecy that may be the first recorded private revelation

I find the world of the Apostolic Fathers absolutely fascinating. There is always more to discover, and I hope you’ll enjoy The Very First Fathers.
Mar 13th 2019 Catholic Answers

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