Customer Reviews

Early Church Fathers Protestant Edition

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. . .to any product that can make the writings of the Church Fathers more readily accessible.

But this edition doesn't get more than three! This is an electronic edition of "The Early Church Fathers" 38 volume set, edited by Philip Schaff, currently in re-print by a number of vendors. It's entitled "Protestant Edition" because it retains the vast number of notes and essays, penned mostly by 19th century Protestant scholars with serious anti-Catholic issues. So it loses one star here. The set loses a second star because it is quite dated. In the last 100 years, better, more scholarly translations have been published -- a fact recognized by Protestant and Catholic scholars alike.

NEVERTHELESS, this is a set well worth acquiring; and the electronic search features make research much less time consuming.

I enjoy this addition to my Libronix library collection. The only baffling thing about it is that it is, without explanation, missing Volume IX in the Ante-Nicene fathers collection. Totally weird, since the books are all out of copyright; otherwise, it has the entire Schaff Church Fathers collection.

WARNING: The English of this translation is 19th century style English, and in some places rather choppy and rough, but for the money, this is the most extensive collection of the Early Church fathers in English, and the largest collection available in digital format, and the only one for Libronix.