For the church fathers the Gospels did not serve as resources for individual analysis and academic study. They were read and heard and interpreted within the worshiping community. They served as sources for pastoral counsel and admonition for those who were committed to the Way. Although Matthew and John were generally the preferred Gospels, Luke, because of his particular interests ...

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The early church valued the Gospel of Mark for its preservation of the apostolic voice and gospel narrative of Peter. Yet the early church fathers very rarely produced sustained commentary on Mark. This brisk-paced and robust little Gospel, so much enjoyed by modern readers, was overshadowed in the minds of the fathers by the magisterial ...

The Gospel of Matthew stands out as a favorite biblical text among patristic commentators. The patristic commentary tradition on Matthew begins with Origen's pioneering twenty-five-volume commentary on the First Gospel in the mid-third century. In the Latin-speaking West, where commentaries did not appear until about a century later, the first commentary on Matthew was written by ...

While the canonical status of the Greek and Latin Old Testament texts commented on within this volume has been understood differently within Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox traditions, their longstanding use within the Christian churches makes them worthy of careful study and reflection. As noted in the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, Jerome says that the church ...

"And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, [the risen Jesus] interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself" (Lk 24:27). The church fathers mined the Old Testament throughout for prophetic utterances regarding the Messiah, but few books yielded as much messianic ore as the Twelve Prophets, sometimes known as the Minor Prophets because of the relative ...

The books of Ezekiel and Daniel are rich in imagery that is taken up afresh in the New Testament. Echoes of Ezekiel—with its words of doom and hope, vision of a new temple, and scroll-eating prophet—are especially apparent in the book of Revelation. Daniel is most notable in supplying terminology and imagery for Jesus of Nazareth's favored self-description as "Son of man," a phrase ...

Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, prophesied for four decades under the last five kings of Judah—from 627 to 587 B.C. His mission: a call to repentance. Among the apostolic fathers, Jeremiah was rarely cited, but several later authors give prominent attention to him, including Origen, Theodoret of Cyr, and Jerome, who wrote individual commentaries on Jeremiah, and Cyril of Alexandria ...

No book of the Old Testament is more frequently quoted in the New than Isaiah, and no portion of Isaiah is more frequently quoted in the New than the typologically fertile soil of Isaiah 40–66. Still, as interpreted by the fathers, Isaiah presents a message that is far more soteriological than christological, leading readers to a deeper understanding of God's judgment and salvation. ...