The Cambridge Companion to the Apostolic Fathers. Edited by Michael Bird and Scott Harrower

Abstract

With a few exceptions, this is an excellent addition to the Cambridge Companions series, which according to the website furnishes ‘authoritative guides, written by leading experts, offering lively, accessible introductions to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics, and periods’. Accordingly, the volume does not intend to break new ground, but to orient readers to the Apostolic Fathers. It is divided into two parts. Following an introduction, the first nine chapters present focused essays on themes relating to the corpus as a whole, a strength of the collection not found in earlier introductions (S. Tugwell, The Apostolic Fathers [1989]; M. Günther, Einleitung in die Apostolisichen Väter [1997]; C. Jefford, The Apostolic Fathers: An Essential Guide [2005]; P. Foster [ed.], The Apostolic Fathers [2007]; W. Pratcher [ed.], The Apostolic Fathers [2010]), and an advance over R. Grant’s cursory discussion of a few of the same themes (The Apostolic Fathers [1964]). Chapters 9–17 are dedicated to each of the texts. 1 and 2 Clement are discussed together, as are Polycarp’s Letter to the Philippians and the Martyrdom of Polycarp, and the Epistle of Diognetus and the Fragment of Quadratus; Papias’s fragments are also given a chapter. The decision to group the first two pairs, perhaps based on economy of scale, is an unfortunate one: apart from the names, 1 and 2 Clement and Polycarp’s letter and the Martyrdom are unrelated. The introduction by Scott Harrower which orients readers to the Apostolic Fathers would have been strengthened by a discussion of what occasioned the creation of the collection in the seventeenth century (Clare Rothschild deftly reconstructs that background in ‘On the Invention of the Patres Apostolici’, New Essays on the Apostolic Fathers [Tübingen, 2017], pp. 7–34). Even as Harrower agrees that the collection is an artificial one, he tacitly endorses the untenable position that first warranted its creation, that the corpus deserves to be treated as a special case because its authors knew one of the 12 apostles or knew people who did (p. 2). That can be said with confidence only of Polycarp and of Papias although his fragments were not included in the seventeenth-century collection.