So I was flipping through a mail-order Christian book catalog the other day (I won’t say which one), and found a page entitled “Reference Resources.” And as I glanced over the books, I realized not only that I have all of them (I splurged, back in seminary), but that you have all of them. Because they’re on the Internet.
To highlight all the wealth available on the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, I thought I’d list only the “Reference Resources” books CCEL makes available on their site. If you don’t have ’em, get ’em. Or at least bookmark their site, so you can get ’em some other time. They’ll really come in handy.
The Early Church Fathers. Hendrickson Publishers sells a 38-volume set of the Early Church Fathers for $1,100, though I tend to find it for $300. And CCEL has ’em for free. These are the writings of nearly all the great Christian thinkers for the first 700 years of Christendom; the first third of our history, centuries before the universal church split into Orthodox and Catholics. If you wanna know what the earliest Christians thought of this, that, and the other, these are the guys to check.
History of the Christian Church, by Philip Schaff. An eight-volume, in-depth study of Christian history till the Swiss Reformation, written by one of the editors and translators of the Early Church Fathers.
- Apostolic Christianity (AD 1-100).
- Ante-Nicene Christianity (AD 100-325).
- Nicene and Post-Nicene Christianity (AD 311-600).
- Mediaeval Christianity (AD 590-1073).
- The Middle Ages (AD 1049-1294).
- The Middle Ages (AD 1294-1517).
- Modern Christianity: The German Reformation.
- Modern Christianity: The Swiss Reformation.
Commentary on the Whole Bible, by Matthew Henry. People tend to buy the abridged version, ’cause it’s much cheaper. But Henry wrote a six-volume set. This is a devotional commentary, meaning Henry was no historian nor original-languages scholar; he was a Presbyterian pastor who read the bible and wrote down what he thought of it. If you want a grammatical-historical commentary, I point you to the next items. But Matthew Henry’s commentary is perfectly good for devotions.
Word Pictures in the New Testament, by Archibald Thomas Robertson. This is a grammatical commentary: Robertson goes through the Greek text of the New Testament, and shows you all the stuff we can miss, or lose, in translation.
Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible, by Robert Jamieson, Andrew Robert Fausset, and David Brown. This is a historical commentary, which goes through the text and explains it in greater detail. Usually sold as a big, thick, one-volume commentary, and not as detailed as the International Critical Commentary, but it does the job.
Works of Flavius Josephus. Josephus was a first-century Jewish historian, who wrote among other things a history of ancient Israel (which includes a few interesting bits of Jewish mythology), and a history of the Jewish War (when the Romans invaded Jerusalem in the year 70 and destroyed the temple). It fills in some blanks in our knowledge.
Works of Philo Judaeus. Philo was a first-century Egyptian Jewish philosopher, who tried to combine Jewish thinking with Greek thinking. He’s a useful source of what the Jews of Jesus’s day might think, and he was an obvious influence to many Christian thinkers who tried to combine Christian and Greek philosophy the same way.
Anyway, that barely scratches the surface of CCEL’s resources. Browse the site. Save some money. And if you can afford to be generous, donate a little to help them keep it online.