The collection known as ‘the Apostolic Fathers’ is an artificial one, first put together under that title in the latter part of the seventeenth century by J. B. Cotelier. Membership of this group of texts is usually determined by date (the text can be dated roughly between the late first and middle second centuries) and by association (the authors either knew or had contact with someone who knew one of the Apostles), though the latter is very difficult to establish in most cases. Because of the rather vague nature of the criteria and the enigmatic nature of the texts themselves, particularly as this relates to questions of date and authorship, membership of the collection has varied. The collection is often seen as a kind of bridge from what, with hesitation, one might call the New Testament period, to the age of the Apologists, beginning with Justin, Aristeides and others. In truth some of the texts included may have been written before the latest works in the New Testament and some may in fact be apologies and of a later date than the first apologists. In the volume under discussion, a welcome addition to the Cambridge Companions series, a maximalist position is taken with eleven different texts the subject of discussion, including a fragment (the Apology of Quadratus) and a set of fragments (belonging to Papias).

The book divides itself into broadly two sections. The first concerns what the editors call ‘the generative traditions, contexts, and backgrounds’ to the Apostolic Fathers. So we have essays which discuss the wider Roman period in which the Apostolic Fathers were written (Michael J. Svigel), the Jewish background (Philip Alexander), second-century diversity (David Wilhite), the Jesus Tradition in the Apostolic Fathers (Stephen Young), the text of the New Testament as this is illuminated in the Apostolic Fathers (Paul Foster), the reception of Paul and Peter, and James in the same (Benjamin Edsall), the Apostolic Fathers and the state (Andrew Gregory), an essay on ideas of the Church and understandings of church order (David Downs) and finally an essay on church mothers (Clare Rothschild). The essays lay out the ground carefully and thoughtfully. By and large the contributors are cautious in the conclusions they draw. Philip Alexander's essay on Judaism helpfully presents the evidence for post-70 Judaism, which is minimal, stressing the need not to assume rabbinic leadership of an apparently unified Jewish polity, and pointing out how indirectly at least the Apostolic Fathers, though nearly all assuming a separation between Jews and Christians, illuminate aspects of post-70 Jewish piety in their concern with the Jewish temple and fasting, and in their indirect witness to what he terms ‘a common Judaism’. Wilhite thinks that the Apostolic Fathers witness to a kind of moderate diversity within Christianity, even if he feels that diversity of doctrine has been overplayed. Young and Foster write complementary essays. The former emphasises the importance of oral transmission in accounting for the admittedly fragmentary transmission of Jesus tradition, noting, however, the stable manner in which this tradition was transmitted in contrast to traditions about other figures like Judas. The latter is clear that the Apostolic Fathers have nothing to contribute to the history of the text of the New Testament but give evidence, collectively, again in highly fragmentary form, of the use of a broad swathe of texts which were to find their way into the New Testament. Edsall's contribution, which takes on a subject not usually considered in discussions of the Apostolic Fathers, plays up the different uses to which the figures of Peter and Paul are put (authoritative, moral and hortatory). He notes in passing that the presentation is a smooth one, never alluding to the tensions between Peter and Paul witnessed in the New Testament. He also asks why it is that James, the brother of Jesus, who appears such an important figure from the Acts of the Apostles, never features in any of the Apostolic Fathers. Here, somewhat tentatively, he alludes to the possibly non-representative character of the Apostolic Fathers (a question which is begged by the very artificiality of the collection and hovers as a kind of cloud above the whole volume), and the possibly Jewish Christian profile of James in a set of texts which generally take a negative view of non-Christian Jews. The latter view, as he notes, hardly accounts for James's presence in a plethora of other works, including the Gospel of Thomas, which hardly eschew anti-Jewish elements. Gregory's contribution on the political stance of these authors draws attention to the consistent presence of their sense of difference from the wider non-Christian world, but also emphasises their cautious approach to critiquing that world. Rothschild's essay is a kind of gender-based corrective to the designation ‘Apostolic Fathers’ and a reminder of the importance of women in the earliest and later history of the Christian Church, though nearly all of this evidence is not derived from the Apostolic Fathers themselves. Downs gives a clear-headed account of the by no means unified evidence for church order in the Apostolic Fathers.

The second section is taken up with introductory essays to the individual texts of the collection, though three chapters combine a number of related texts into one chapter (cf. Peters on 1 and 2 Clement; Hartog on the Epistle of Polycarp and the Martyrdom of Polycarp; and Bird and Mackerras on Diognetus and the Fragment of Quadratus). Without exception all the essays are clear and thoughtful presentations of the major issues surrounding these works as these relate to the so-called introductory questions of textual witness, date, authorship, provenance and purpose, and all such discussions are appropriately cautious, as establishing much that is secure in this area of the study of the Apostolic Fathers is very difficult, a point emphasised by the editors in their short introduction. Complex subjects such as the problem of the date of the Ignatian epistles, the criteria for the establishment of genuine fragments from Papias (Stephen Carlson), the unity or lack of it of the Didache (Clayton Jefford), the sources of Barnabas (Reidar Hvalvik), the genre and structure of Hermas (Dan Batovici) and Polycarp's reference to Ignatius’ letters (Paul Hartog) are presented with skill, learning and lucidity; and each author gives his or her reader a good sense of the content of each text. The scholarship, as far as this reviewer could tell, was up-to-date; and the presentation of sometimes involved theories about individual texts, whether these relate to the origins of 1 Clement, the angel and spirit Christology of Hermas, or the purpose of Diognetus (Michael Bird and Kirsten Mackerras) are all dealt with in a careful measured way.

Although this book is only introductory in the sense that all Cambridge Companions are, the present reviewer emerged from reading it with a renewed sense of the fascinating nature of the Apostolic Fathers. Diverse in content, form and tone, and deeply enigmatic, precisely because so much about their origins remains opaque, they touch upon all the major issues of the study of early Christianity in often intriguing ways, though they barely allow the prudent scholar to arrive at any firm conclusions on these matters, in the end doing little more than making plain to us in complex ways the true nature of our ignorance, as we acknowledge how little we know about Papias's significant five-book work, The exposition of dominical sayings, or we wonder to what extent we can generalise from Barnabas's presentation of the interpretation of Torah to Ignatius’ presentation of the threefold ministry. The editors, not least in their decision to combine dedicated discussion of individual texts with engagement with more wide-ranging subjects, have succeeded in making it clear why these texts remain so intriguing and merit much more study than they have in fact received, especially when compared with the contents of the New Testament in whose shadow, perhaps wrongly, they are traditionally studied.