Kevin Edgecomb at Biblicalia, the Bombaxo blog, just posted a remarkable passage from John Chryssavgis’s book The Way of the Fathers (a book I have not read). The post ends with this lovely line: “To become famili-arized with the Church Fathers and Mothers is to belong to the same family (cf. Matt. 12:49-50) in our own culture and age.” Read the whole thing.

The world has never known comfort as we know it today. Millions of us have grown used to luxuries that the ancient emperors never dreamed of, and we’ve come to consider them necessities: motor travel, aspirin, and a warm shower, to name just three.

Compare these to the ordinary miseries endured by citizens in the ancient world. Most lived in cramped, smoky tenements with no ventilation or plumbing. If one of those rooms caught fire, the blaze could consume whole city blocks in minutes; and this was a fairly regular event.

Life expectancy was around 30 for men and lower for women. Hygiene was minimal. Medical care was more dangerous than disease, and disease often left its victims disfigured or dead. The human body was host to countless parasites, and tenements were infested by pests. The bodies of the dead were often left to rot in the town sewer, which usually ran down the middle of the street.

Ancient sources say that the stench from a city could usually be detected from miles away. And country life was worse.

This was the world of the early Christians, the Fathers of the Church, and yet they are as joyful a group as you’ll ever meet. The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar described the Fathers in this way: “Greatness, depth, boldness, flexibility, certainty, and a flaming love — the virtues of youth are marks of patristic theology.”

Those words do not describe most of us on days when we’re troubled by a hangnail, a malfunctioning air conditioner, or a high pollen count.

Yet Balthasar’s description, as a general statement, is all the more amazing when you consider the discomforts our Fathers faced every day — not to mention their mortal peril from persecution.

Then as now, happiness depended more on a person’s disposition than on his circumstances. What was it that filled the Fathers with such constant joy? “I greet you in the blood of Jesus Christ,” said St. Ignatius Antioch, “which is eternal and abiding joy.”

Jesus’ blood — poured out in His suffering and self-giving, poured out in baptism, poured out in the Mass — was the source of the early Church’s joy. Christians shared His blood and His body, and so they didn’t worry so much about indulging the limitless hungers of their own sensuality. Remarkably, though they suffered extreme deprivation, they exhorted one another to still-greater fasting, so that they might live more perfectly the life of Jesus Christ, sharing in the cross of Christ, His outpouring of love.

They knew something that we perhaps have forgotten. Though they had few comforts in life, they knew they were destined to lose even the few they had.

We should take heed. If we feed our every desire and indulge our every habit as a need and a right, then our losses will leave us bitter and estranged from God. Time, age, illness and “doctor’s orders” can take away our taste for chocolate, our ability to enjoy a cold beer and even the intimate embrace of a loved one. Only the blood of Christ is everlasting joy. “And what else is it to live happily,” said St. Augustine, “except to know that one has something eternally.”

The Fathers were ready to leave everything behind, and do it joyfully. Even today we meet Christians who are able to remain serene amid extreme suffering and even when facing death. It’s not just a matter of temperament. It is the coursing of the blood of Christ, shed for them, the blood of Christ that they’ve taken as their own life’s blood, even as their earthly life drains away.

Like their Fathers in faith, they’ve tasted from the fountain of eternal youth, and that’s all they need to live joyfully amid difficulties.

Today, the media map out many paths to joy. The shelves of the bookstore promise much in The Joy of Cooking, The Joy of Sex, and even The Joy of Linux. The soda machine near my house boasts “The Joy of Cola.” But all joys that pass are false. All joys that pass leave us in sadness, unless they, like the everyday lives of the Fathers and martyrs, are washed in the blood of the Lamb.

My son tells me that the audio files should work for you now. Thanks to all of you who emailed to let me know they were unintelligible. (That’s actually a step up for me.)

Oxonian Kyle Potter, aka Captain Sacrament, has entirely too much fun with those who attempt a low-church reading of the Fathers.

Bob Jones University keeps a collection of sacred icons. Who knew?

Some years ago I had a desperate need for St. Cyril of Alexandria’s Commentary on John. It’s among his most frequently cited works, but it’s extremely hard to find. As far as I know, there’s been only one edition in English, published in the Oxford Library of the Fathers series in 1870s and ’80s. Few copies survive, and those that do are usually kept in the inaccessible, protected vaults of university and monastery libraries. But I finally finagled a copy through interlibrary loan — and it arrived with its pages still uncut! It’s spine was brittle and papers crumbling, but it had never been opened, never been read, in more than a century of life on a library shelf. It took an entire day, but I managed to cut the papers and photocopy both enormous volumes without destroying them. I read the commentary hungrily, and I still go back to it often. Cyril is an Alexandrian somewhat allergic to allegory, yet keen to examine the types of Christ in the Old Testament. His is a theological exegesis, and he pays special mind to the Trinity, the Incarnation, the sacraments, and the divinization of man.

I’m thrilled today to note that volume 2 of the Commentary is now available online at The Tertullian Project’s own library of the Early Church Fathers. TTP is a knockout of a site for the Tertullian-obsessed, but it is also home to transcriptions of rare editions of Origen, Eusebius, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose, and Pseudo-Dionysius, not to mention many lesser-known ecclesiastical writers — and the most notorious of the anti-Christian writers, like Porphyry and Julian. While there are countless online transcriptions of the famous Edinburgh edition of the Fathers — and in endless varieties of format — The Tertullian Project has turned its attention to the older series, the unusual series, and the odd translations and studies that were not part of any series.

Where I live, it’s a cold, gloomy, rainy day today — a perfect day to spend browsing The Tertullian Project. But even if you spend a sunny day on this site, it’ll be a day well spent.

Thanks to Michael Barber at Singing in the Reign for restoring Judas Iscariot’s good ol’ bad reputation. The so-called Gospel of Judas appeals to anti-Christian impulses because it promises a complete reversal, an overturning of Christian faith and values. It calls good evil and evil good. It makes a joke of the Mass, while it turns history’s greatest villain into a sainted pope and evangelist. Michael Barber, though, turns it all right-side up again, as he explains the Old Testament background to the New Testament’s Passion story.

Michael is a great young scholar, a doctoral student at Fuller, with a remarkable command of the ancient languages. But he writes like the best journalists, so ordinary folks can understand — and make use of — his arguments. He is a teacher of the first rank. You can tell that by listening to his tapes or reading either of his two books, on the Psalms and on the Book of Revelation. They’re all available on his blog, as are his three excellent posts on the Gospel of Judas. Don’t miss them.

Rick Brannan, an Evangelical, is just starting a blog-study of the Didache, the first-century Christian manual of discipline and liturgy. It looks promising. A little familiarity with Greek will help, but it’s not necessary, as Rick is providing line-by-line translation.

I like the fact that Rick provides a guide to pronouncing the title. Our St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology promotes a book in the Didache catechetical series, and people don’t know quite what to do with the name. Often they reach back into high-school French and ask about “the Di-DAWSH series.”

Will you have escargot with that?

Remember the excitement you felt when you first found the works of the Fathers? Relive those days with Deacon Alex Jones, in his memoir of discovery, No Price Too High. Jones was a Pentecostal pastor when he started reading the Apostolic Fathers. These men, so clearly living in continuity with the Apostles, made him long for continuity with them — communion, actually, and of a sacramental sort. The book’s hard to put down. And, never mind the title, it’s really quite affordable!

A correspondent points out what should be obvious. This so-called “news” (about the Gospel of Judas) should hardly be “exploding myths,” especially for tenured professors at Princeton. As Dr. Pagels herself points out, Irenaeus duly recorded the document in the late second century. And many, many Fathers were eager to note the wild diversity of heresy. A short list of those who published exhaustive catalogs of the polymorphous perversity of the Gnostics: Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Tertullian, Ephiphanius, and John of Damascus. All of their works have been in print, in English, in multiple translations, since the end of the nineteenth century. And they’re all online, too.

Maybe the Gospel of Judas is different, though, in that it really does take the matter to the omega point, overturning everything once and for all. The Orwellian summary might be: Judas is Peter. As freedom is slavery, and war is peace.

How far out of the mainstream these nuts were is clear from the first lines of the document, where Jesus laughs out loud at the Apostles as they said Mass. This is certainly not the Church of Ignatius, Polycarp, and Irenaeus. Nor is it the Church of the Abitina martyrs, who said, “We cannot live without the Mass.”

This is not your Fathers’ oldsmobile. The Gnostics were trying to distance themselves from historic Christianity, and they did it by mocking the one unmistakable sign of the Great Church: the Eucharist. We should wish them, once again, all the success they enjoyed the first time around.

Only the New York Times and National Geographic could be surprised — or distracted from 1970s sitcom reruns — by the publication of yet another Gnostic gospel. Isn’t it obvious yet why these things never caught on in their own day? They’re prolix, pretentious, elitist, and, unlike orthodox Christianity, genuinely misogynist and sexually repressive. They multiply angelic presences and wars among deities. And their “Jesus” weaves hither and yon in his wise utterances, ranging in tone from the fortune cookie to the acid trip.

And yet people who get apoplectic over the literal sense of Genesis 1-3 warmly welcome the Gnostic creation story, which claims to reveal the names of numerous archons to whom cosmic governance was delegated by the creepy creator. I mean, read the texts — this was Pokemon for second-century grownups.

Today’s rant is occasioned by the coverage of National Geographic’s publication of the Gnostic Gospel of Judas. The text has been lost for the better part of two millennia. But it presents nothing new or exciting. It’s the apocryphal same-old same-old.

As I read the text, I wondered if it was all a hoax, penned by my favorite satirist Chris Bailey. He, after all, has a track record of parodying the Gnostics. Then the New York Times reported with the usual breathlessness about how these documents “are exploding the myth of a monolithic religion and demonstrating how diverse — and fascinating — the early Christian movement really was.” That priceless quote comes from Princeton’s Elaine Pagels, who has turned the Gnostic gospels into a cottage industry.

Did anyone ever really think that ancient Christianity was monolithic? Could anyone think that, after reading Aphrahat side by side with Tertullian, Gregory of Nyssa, and Melito of Sardis? Can anyone think that about any age of Christianity? I say this as a former newspaper journalist who regularly had to run from Tridentine Masses to Charismatic conferences before covering the local centering-prayer group.

The only people who believe in a drab, dull, monolithic Christianity are modern secularists, who uniformly think of themselves as diverse and interesting. What they believe about early Christianity is fantasy. What they know about modern Christianity is laughably wrongheaded. In the words, again, of Chris Bailey, it’s “Pat Robertson dressed as a nun with a ruler in his hand.”

There was, of course, a kind of diversity in ancient heresy. But this came mostly because every man was his own pope (and I do mean man; Mary Magdalene was exalted among the Gnostics, but only after their “Jesus” turned her into a male!). They couldn’t keep a church together because someone was always getting a new and more “interesting” revelation.

Yet even the Gnostics attest to the existence of a Great Church — a catholic and orthodox Church that was not uniform, but was indeed universal. Their documents everywhere attest to their sense of rebellion, their sense that they were outsiders. Gnosticism failed not because of oppression, but because it lacked credibility — and, actually, any other interesting quality.

Oh, and here’s another surprise: Judas, in his newly rediscovered “gospel,” says he wasn’t really guilty! Still, even this is not news, since it was translated, in the 1960s, into powerful poetry by Eric Burdon and the Animals, and later interpreted profoundly by Joe Cocker: “I’m just a soul whose intentions are good. O Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.” O Lord, indeed.

The Gospel of Judas will be buzz for its fifteen minutes of fame, but we shouldn’t be fazed. The lure here is the same as the lure of The Da Vinci Code and other neo-Gnostic hashes. Their message is simple: “You’ve been lied to; you’ve been duped by the establishment. Now here’s a scientist to lead you to truth.

“Pay no attention to the Pokemon archons along the way, and the anti-woman doctrines, and the horror of sex. We’re taking care of those. This is all scientific. Really.”

Tonight’s the night — or, on the West Coast, today’s the day — Bob Lockwood reviews my book The Mass of the Early Christians on Catholic Answers Book Club. You can see tiny shots of the book cover, plus Bob’s mug, right here. You can read more details on the book and see a bigger (ancient-screen-saver-sized) photo of the cover, sans Bob, by clicking here. For a screen-saver-sized shot of Bob, see here. Please note that I did NOT file the Bob Lockwood screen-saver among the images of late antiquity. (We Boomers aren’t there — yet.) Bob, by the way, has written the handbook on evangelizing Baby Boomers. If your kid or your parents (or your neighbors or co-workers) fall into that category, buy Bob’s book!

I’m amazed — and heartened — by the popularity of pictorial paleochristianity. I posted some days ago “The Hottest Desktops of the 4th Century”, and the suggested sites got swamped. Here’s another beautiful source of “windows to the other world” — and to the world of the Fathers. Some of these go way back.

I was pleased to receive several emails in response to the post on John Henry Newman. I’d mentioned that Newman’s enduring appeal for people like me is his ability to tell a story. He explains the role Athanasius played in the development of Christian doctrine, and he does it not by weaving a chain of quotations, but by writing an international thriller on the Alexandrian’s action-packed life. And he does the same for lots of others: Ambrose, Basil, Gregory, Augustine…

So one Newman fan asked me: Who’s doing that kind of writing today? Who’s teaching the doctrine of the Fathers in an intellectually serious way, by telling stories drawn from the real histories of Christianity’s earliest saints and scholars?

A short answer: David Scott is. His most recent book, The Catholic Passion: Rediscovering the Power and Beauty of the Faith, provides a beautiful retrieval of the Fathers’ understanding of Catholic faith. Scott takes the words of the Fathers and applies them to our lives. Some people teach patristics by re-packaging the theology of antiquity; Scott, like Newman before him, does it by telling riveting tales. And The Catholic Passion is NOT just a roundup of the usual suspects. Yes, we meet celebrities like Augustine, Ignatius, Justin, and Origen, but we also meet Origen’s father Leonides. We meet Didymus the Blind, Synesius of Cyrene, and Romanos the Melodist. Chapters run the range of Catholic doctrine. And every sentence is the purest of poetry.

It’s complete, scriptural, and readable enough to serve as an adult catechism. I think it’s the perfect text for RCIA or parish adult-education groups. Get to know David by visiting him here.

Got this from a devout visitor to the site:

“I love it! if Hunter S. Thompson had a soul and was a really inspired scholar of the Fathers of the Church, this is what he would write.”

I can’t help but imagine the old guy in the ruins of an Egyptian monastery, dipping hallucinogenic locusts in wild honey and reading Origen aloud to the snakes. Fear and Trembling on the Pilgrim Trail.