Dionysius of Alexandria (d.264) Dionysius had a man in his congregation who had been taking the eucharist with the congregation for a long time, but he hadn’t received a proper Christian baptism first, having been baptized initially by heretics. This created quite a conundrum! Should he be denied communion until …

Eusebius of Caesarea Eusebius, as an historian, wrote a lot about what other people had to say. But he also wrote down his own thoughts. How does Eusebius describe bringing the eucharist—thanksgiving—as an offering to God? By hymns and prayers: a sacrifice of praise. Who does he cite? Malachi. David in …

Cornelius of Rome (250) The writing that we will examine from Cornelius of Rome comes to us from the historian Eusebius: Cornelius complains about two things that Novatus did to corrupt the ancient liturgy. First, he corrupted (4) the consecration (or epiclesis) by replacing the blessing with an oath to …

Ephraim the Syrian Ephraim the Syrian was from Edessa, where he died in 373. Edessa is very close to where it is alleged that a Eunomian Bishop Julian of Cilicia, a heretic, wrote Apostolic Constitutions in c375-380. Athanasius also died in 373, but he was far away in Alexandria. As …

Athanasius of Alexandria While we have a number of letters of Athanasius’ work, the Sermon to the Newly Baptized is a fragmentary work that does not appear to have been translated into English, other than the quotation above. Here is the quotation in text form: To understand what Athanasius is …

Apostolic Constitutions (c.375-380) In Part 15: Athenagoras of Athens, we began a discussion on the Apostolic Constitutions, written two centuries after Athenagoras. There we discovered that the unbloody sacrifice is the eucharist of a pure heart and unreprovable mind. This is precisely what we’ve seen in our series so far: the sacrifice that …

Athenagoras of Athens (133-190) Athenagoras is one of the earliest patristic writers that we examine in this series. He wrote sometime in the middle or late second century, well before the innovations of the late 4th-century. Here is what he had to say on the topic of sacrifices. I’ve reproduced …

Let’s take a short break from the examination of the patristic era writers to look at a timeline of the patristic writers, to give you an idea who was writing when. The images below are from Mike Cook, pastor of the Columbia River Foursquare Church. See his charts here. The …

Aphrahat the Persian Sage What more can be said about this? It’s basically just a repetition of scripture itself with some minor flourishes. Aphrahat was repeating the same metaphor that Jesus used: “this is my body” and “this is my blood.” For sake of argument, let’s assume that Aphrahat viewed …