Primary Sources, how I love you, let me count the ways...

As part of the History of Christianity course that I am taking a large amount of the reading materials that we will be covering comes from what is called primary sources.  These are sources or manuscripts that date back to the 1st and 2nd centuries and contain in them the works of some of the early Christians.  The benefit of reading such material is that we, as students, get the opportunity to read the actual material, though not in the original language in which it was written but a translation, that the men and women of the early Church had written.  Now, I do view this as an opportunity to wrestle with the early texts and an opportunity to gain some understanding of what the Church was like in the years that followed Christ's crucifixion, however they are not an easy read.

I am counting myself among the fortunate few who have had the opportunity to read some of this material before.  While finishing my degree in Human Services at Lesley I had to have a focus, or concentration within the field.  Most of the time people would focus on counseling, social work, or art therapy, but since I wanted to finish my degree as quickly as possible I chose a different route and not have to wait for classes to be offered, which could have taken several more semesters.  Instead of waiting I designed my own focus and designed four independent studies.  One of the courses examined how faith and politics intertwine. In another course I studied how theories of human development, and more specifically child development could help in creating youth programs.  With this I did practical applications of my study within the setting of a Confirmation Class.  While those were interesting classes, it was really the other two that I took with my parish priest, Mark, that prepared me for this course I am now taking.  In our first class we examined texts from the Apostolic period up through Augustine and how the texts gave us clues as to how the early Church was formed.  We looked at how the early Church struggled with it's identity and it struggle to find one common theology from which the whole Church could be centered around.  This course helped me prepare for being able to read these difficult texts...thank you so much Mark.

In my opinion, the hardest part about reading and understanding these texts is knowing that a majority of these texts come from incomplete manuscripts and have holes that have been filled in over time.  But keeping that in mind, and getting used to the way in which these documents were written, which was often in some convoluted way, it becomes easier to understand the purpose of the document and why it was important in the formation of the Christian tradition.

As we continue on throughout the semester we will continue to rely on primary source texts as the main way in which we will learn about the practices of early Christians.   As frustrating and time consuming as it may be, it is by far better to read the actual documents then to read commentary about the document from some third party author.