Series

24-volume set

T&T Clark's Edinburgh translation of the Fathers down to A.D. 325, published between 1867 and 1873 under Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, both ministers of the Church of Scotland. Conceived partly as a Protestant counterweight to Pusey's Library of the Fathers, it cast a wider net — Origen, Arnobius, the Clementine literature, the Apostolical Constitutions, and the early liturgies. A supplemental twenty-fifth volume edited by Allan Menzies followed in 1897 and is not part of the original set.

10-volume set

The American reorganization of the Ante-Nicene Christian Library, issued from 1885 by the Christian Literature Company of Buffalo without authorization — American law then gave foreign works no copyright protection. A. Cleveland Coxe rearranged the twenty-four Edinburgh volumes into eight, in chronological order, and added his own prefaces and running notes; volume 9 (1896) is fresh supplementary material and volume 10 (1897) a bibliographical index, both edited by Allan Menzies. Reprinted by Eerdmans from 1951 and by Hendrickson in 1994. Nearly every modern citation of “ANF” means this edition rather than the Edinburgh original.

10-volume reprint

Eerdmans's mid-century reprint of the American Ante-Nicene Fathers, issued from 1951 and for decades the set most working libraries actually held. The contents are Coxe's ten volumes unchanged — the same translations, prefaces, and notes.

10-volume reprint · ISBN 9781565630826

Hendrickson's 1994 reprint of the American Ante-Nicene Fathers, still the edition most readily bought new and commonly sold alongside the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers as a thirty-eight-volume shelf. Again Coxe's ten volumes unaltered.

45-volume set

The original Victorian translation of Calvin's biblical commentaries, issued in Edinburgh between 1844 and 1856 as forty-five volumes — thirty on the Old Testament and fifteen on the New — and forming part of the fifty-one-volume Calvin Translation Society set that also held the Tracts and Beveridge's Institutes.

45-volume reprint

Eerdmans's mid-twentieth-century American reprint of the Calvin Translation Society commentaries, following the original set volume for volume — forty-five books in blue cloth with matching gray dust jackets and sewn bindings. They were issued over some twenty years rather than sold as a set, so a complete run, jackets intact, has to be assembled piece by piece.

45 volumes in 22 · ISBN 9780801024405

Baker Book House's edition of the Calvin Translation Society commentaries, binding the original forty-five volumes into twenty-two — catalogued by libraries as "45 volumes in 22". It takes up less shelf space and cost less to print. First issued with sewn bindings in brown boards, it has been reprinted three times, most recently for the 500th anniversary of the Reformation.

26-volume set

A twenty-six volume library of Christian thought from the Apostolic Fathers to the English Reformation, each volume newly translated and furnished with introductions, notes, and indexes. Issued between 1953 and 1969 under general editors John Baillie, John T. McNeill, and Henry P. Van Dusen. Originally published in hardback with dust jackets, before ISBNs were in general use; Westminster John Knox sells the set today in paperback.

26-volume set

The London issue of the twenty-six volume Library of Christian Classics, published by SCM Press alongside The Westminster Press's American edition between 1953 and 1969. Same volumes, same general editors — John Baillie, John T. McNeill, and Henry P. Van Dusen — in hardback with dust jackets, and, given the dates, mostly without ISBNs.

48-volume set

A Library of Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church, Anterior to the Division of the East and West — the great translation series of the Oxford Movement. Edward Bouverie Pusey planned it in 1836 and announced it in a prospectus he signed jointly with John Keble and John Henry Newman; its aim was to put the Fathers into English and furnish an evidential base for High Church Anglican claims. The first volume, Pusey’s revision of Augustine’s Confessions, appeared in 1838; the last, Cyril of Alexandria on St John, in 1885. Newman withdrew on his conversion to Rome in 1845, after which Pusey and Keble were the senior editors and Charles Marriott — Newman’s successor at St Mary’s, Oxford — carried the heaviest editorial and translating load. The set runs to forty-eight volumes and leans on two Fathers above all: sixteen volumes of Chrysostom and twelve of Augustine, with five of Athanasius and four of Gregory the Great on Job. It was issued in Oxford by John Henry Parker and in London by Rivington. Its translations were later revised for Philip Schaff’s Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers — Schaff negotiated permission from Pusey’s heirs and from T&T Clark before reusing them, and his British co-publisher, James Parker & Co., was the successor to the very house that had first issued the Library of the Fathers.

55 vols + New Series (56–)

The major English edition of Martin Luther, co-published by Concordia Publishing House and Fortress Press. The original fifty-five volumes appeared between 1955 and 1986 — general editors Jaroslav Pelikan (vols 1–30) and Helmut T. Lehmann (vols 31–55). Since 2009 Concordia has issued a continuing New Series, numbered from volume 56.

28 volumes in two series

Philip Schaff's Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, published in New York between 1886 and 1900 as one library in two series of fourteen volumes. Series I is given wholly to two figures — Augustine in its first eight volumes, Chrysostom in the remaining six — and leans on existing British work: the Augustine volumes reuse Marcus Dods's T&T Clark translations, the Chrysostom volumes revise the Oxford Library of the Fathers. Series II, edited with Henry Wace and co-published in Oxford by James Parker & Co. (successor to John Henry Parker, who had issued the Library of the Fathers), ranges far wider: the church historians, the Cappadocians, Jerome, Ambrose, Leo, Gregory the Great, and the Seven Ecumenical Councils. Unlike the Ante-Nicene Fathers, which pirated T&T Clark's Edinburgh translations outright, the NPNF was legitimately arranged — Schaff negotiated permission from Pusey's heirs and from Clark, and wrote that he would not have attempted the project otherwise. Each series is numbered I–XIV in its own sequence, so a citation must say which series it means.

28-volume reprint

Eerdmans's reprint of both series of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, issued from 1952 and for decades the set most working libraries held. The contents are Schaff's twenty-eight volumes unchanged.

28-volume reprint

Hendrickson's 1994 reprint of both series, commonly sold together with the Ante-Nicene Fathers as a thirty-eight-volume shelf. Again Schaff's twenty-eight volumes unaltered.

65 numbered volumes (1977– ), plus a Longer Works sub-series

St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press’s series of accessible translations of the Church Fathers, running since 1977 and now the most widely used English introduction to patristic writing. Where the Victorian libraries concentrated on the Latin West and the pre-Nicene church, the Popular Patristics Series leans East — Chrysostom, the Cappadocians, Ephrem the Syrian, Maximus the Confessor, John of Damascus, Symeon the New Theologian, and Gregory Palamas — and many of its texts appear here in English for the first time. Small, inexpensive, and freshly translated, the volumes are meant for readers rather than specialists. It was edited for decades by John Behr and, since 2020, by Bogdan Bucur; a handful of the longest texts appear in a companion “Longer Works” sub-series. Several early volumes were later re-translated and renumbered — the original PPS 2, 20, and 22 are now PPS 57, 55, and 54 — and their vacated numbers reused for new titles.

15-volume set

The Works of Aurelius Augustine, Bishop of Hippo: A New Translation — the first attempt to put the whole of Augustine into English, edited by Marcus Dods and issued by T. & T. Clark of Edinburgh between 1871 and 1876. It belongs to the same Edinburgh enterprise as the Ante-Nicene Christian Library: a stable of Scottish scholars Englishing the Fathers for a Victorian readership, with Dods — later Principal of New College, Edinburgh — as general editor. Fifteen volumes appeared; a sixteenth, a life of Augustine promised from Principal Robert Rainy, was never written. The set was ordered by the pace of its translators rather than any logic of contents, which is why the Confessions, finished last by J. G. Pilkington, stands near the end as volume XIV, and why Peter Holmes’s Anti-Pelagian Works are spread across volumes IV, XII, and XV. Its translations proved durable: a decade later Philip Schaff took them over, lightly revised, for the first series of his Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers — Dods on the City of God, Pilkington on the Confessions, Haddan on the Trinity — which is how most readers have met them since. The Edinburgh title pages name London, Dublin, and New York houses too, but only as distribution agents; copies under the Scribner’s imprint are the authorized American issue. Years for volumes I–XII are approximate first-edition dates — later impressions exist.

40+ volumes

A complete modern English edition of Augustine of Hippo — sermons, letters, treatises, and expositions — from New City Press; the fullest Augustine available in English.