ABSTRACT
The literary vitality exhibited in the writing of the New Testament in the secondhalf of the first Christian century did not cease once that collection was completed. With no evident break, the flow of early Christian writing continued, including many of the works that would later be labelled ‘apocryphal’ and even ‘heretical’.1 Part of that stream of literary output constituted what in the midseventeenth century came to be known as the ‘Apostolic Fathers’,2 a collection of writings that was believed to have come not from the apostolic generation, but from those immediately trained by the apostles, and thus to be reflective of their faith. Several European scholars at that time took new interest in early Christian writings and seem to have seized on this idea in the same years with newly printed editions of most of these works, those of Barnabas, Clement, Hermas, Ignatius, and Polycarp. The letter of Diognetus, the fragments of Papias, and the Apology of Quadratus were added by A. Gallandi in 1765, and the Didache or Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, now part of the collection, was not discovered until 1873 and published in 1883.
