Archaic Christianity

Today I read an interesting article from the latest issue of Themelios (which can be found here in PDF). Not only does it use a nice serif font for the article text (I wonder what it is) but the article itself is interesting. If you are interested in the early church's thinking on Christianity and violence, it is certainly worth your read.

I was reading in Irenaeus' Against Heresies last night and ran across this interesting little tidbit (you can read the text in context here):

Finished with my first reading of Τοις Εγκεκλεισμενοις Επισκοποις, "To the Imprisoned Bishops". I didn't find much of it difficult. It did take a while, however, simply because I was not familiar with much of the vocabulary.

Last time we talked about the text of chapter 1 of Ignatius' letter to the Ephesians. Now we'll talk about the ideas. To stir up your memory, here is the text:

There are a number of things one must do to become a great Christian thinker. One must study, be godly, and be able to communicate. But those criteria are easy to come up with, despite being hard to fulfill. Another criterion, much less appreciated, is the ability to insult the idiots those of inferior thinking that you may be dealing with at the moment.