A Word on the Church Fathers in English

For most of Christian history the Fathers of the Church were read, if they were read at all, in Greek and Latin. A learned clergyman might own Augustine or Chrysostom in the great folio editions of the Benedictines of St-Maur, but the ordinary English reader met the Fathers only in fragments. The nineteenth century changed that. Driven by religious revival, a new historical seriousness, and cheap steam-powered printing, three enterprises set out to put the whole patristic corpus into English. They were centred on three cities — Oxford, Edinburgh, and New York — and the sets they produced still furnish nearly every English-speaking library’s shelf of the Fathers.

Their story is not one of independent labours but of a single inheritance passed from hand to hand. Oxford translated; Edinburgh translated more; New York reorganised, revised, and — in one instance — simply took what Britain had made. The lines of descent run straight through the sets a reader buys new today.

The first of the three was a party project. The Library of the Fathers grew directly out of the Oxford Movement: Edward Bouverie Pusey planned it in 1836, and the prospectus that announced it was signed jointly by Pusey, John Keble, and John Henry Newman.¹ Its purpose was frankly polemical — to make the Fathers available in English as an evidential base for the High Church claim that the Church of England stood in unbroken continuity with the ancient Church.

Issued in Oxford by John Henry Parker and in London by Rivington, the set eventually ran to forty-eight volumes, leaning heavily on two Fathers: sixteen volumes of Chrysostom and twelve of Augustine.² Its translators were “Members of the English Church,” frequently working anonymously, and the results are uneven. The project also lost its most famous hand early: Newman withdrew in 1845 on his reception into the Roman Catholic Church, leaving Pusey, Keble, and Charles Marriott — who did the heaviest editorial work — to carry it to a close only in the 1880s.

Where Oxford translated selectively and for a cause, Edinburgh set out to be comprehensive. The Presbyterian house of T&T Clark launched the Ante-Nicene Christian Library under Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson; it ran to twenty-four volumes between 1867 and 1873 and covered, in principle, every Christian writer before the Council of Nicaea.³ Sold by subscription and priced for working ministers rather than gentlemen, it was the set that first made the earliest Fathers genuinely available in English.

Alongside it, and drawing on the same stable of Scottish scholars, T&T Clark issued the Works of Aurelius Augustine, Bishop of Hippo — fifteen volumes edited by Marcus Dods between 1871 and 1876.⁴ Dods, later Principal of New College, Edinburgh, oversaw a set ordered by the pace of its translators rather than any logic of contents: the Confessions, finished last, sits near the end as volume XIV. These Edinburgh translations would prove unexpectedly durable — because others were about to adopt them.

The Fathers crossed the Atlantic through a legal loophole. Until the International Copyright Act of 1891 — the Chace Act — works by foreign authors enjoyed no copyright protection in the United States, and American houses reprinted British and Scottish books at will.⁵ The two great American patristic sets were born in exactly this window, and they took opposite paths through it.

The Ante-Nicene Fathers took the low road. A. Cleveland Coxe, working for the Christian Literature Company of New York and Buffalo, reorganised T&T Clark’s twenty-four Edinburgh volumes into ten American ones between 1885 and 1897 — without authorization, rearranged into chronological order, fitted with his own prefaces and running notes, and reset in the larger American type the copyright law’s manufacturing clause would soon require.⁶ Nothing was cut: the twenty-four volumes became eight, plus a ninth of fresh supplementary texts and a tenth of indexes, and the slim Edinburgh volumes of some four hundred pages swelled into American ones of five to eight hundred.⁷

Philip Schaff took the high road. His Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers — twenty-eight volumes in two series, 1886 to 1900 — reused the Oxford and Edinburgh translations too, but by permission: Schaff negotiated with Walter Smith, acting for Pusey’s heirs, and with T&T Clark, and wrote that he would not have attempted the work otherwise.⁸ Series I reprints Marcus Dods’s Augustine and revises the Library of the Fathers’ Chrysostom; Series II, edited with Henry Wace, ranges wider — the church historians, the Cappadocians, Jerome, Leo — and was co-published in Oxford by James Parker & Co.⁹

That Oxford co-publisher closes a quiet circle. James Parker & Co. was the successor firm to John Henry Parker, who half a century earlier had issued the Library of the Fathers.¹⁰ So the American series that revised the Oxford Movement’s translations was co-published, in Oxford, by the very house that had first printed them — Schaff’s set carrying its Tractarian inheritance in its own imprint.

The translations travelled the same way. The Library of the Fathers’ Chrysostom and Marcus Dods’s Augustine did not die with their Victorian sets; they were revised into Schaff’s first series and, through it, became the versions most modern readers have met. Only the Ante-Nicene Fathers broke the pattern of consent — and even there Coxe altered nothing of substance, merely repackaging Edinburgh’s labour in American dress.

The Victorian sets reached the twentieth century by reprint. From 1951 the Grand Rapids house of Eerdmans reissued the Ante-Nicene Fathers, and from 1952 the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers; for decades these were the editions most working libraries actually held.¹¹ In 1994 Hendrickson Publishers reset the type and brought the two out together as a thirty-eight-volume set, the form most often bought new today.¹²

None of these reprints revises anything. What a reader opens in a modern Eerdmans or Hendrickson volume is Coxe’s or Schaff’s Victorian scholarship, verbatim, more than a century on — the same translations, the same prefaces, the same occasionally antique notes.

The upshot is a curious one. When a modern scholar cites “ANF” or “NPNF,” they mean the American reorganisations of the 1880s and 1890s, not the Oxford and Edinburgh originals that stand behind them.¹³ The thirty-eight-volume Ante-Nicene and Nicene and Post-Nicene shelf has become the default English Fathers — and it is, underneath, a Presbyterian Edinburgh library and a Tractarian Oxford one, repackaged by an American Episcopalian and a German-American ecumenist, and reprinted by Dutch and New England evangelicals.

For all the projects since, most English readers still meet the Fathers in these Victorian words. The great exception is Augustine, whom New City Press has been freshly retranslating for the twenty-first century — the one major Father to have genuinely escaped the nineteenth. Everyone else, for now, we largely read as the Victorians gave them to us.