Sources & method
Source basis: Each hosted writing names its date, translator, source link, and manuscript survival notes where available. Sources
Era
The Apostolic Fathers
c. AD 90–160
The generation with a living link to the apostles — the letters, manuals, and martyr-accounts of the church's first century and a half outside the New Testament.
The Didache
The church's oldest manual — the Two Ways, baptism, the meal, the traveling prophets.
c. AD 50–120 · 17 sections
1 Clement
Rome writes to a divided Corinth, within living memory of the apostles.
c. AD 95–96 · 59 sections · 61 paragraphs
2 Clement
The earliest surviving Christian sermon — its lost ending recovered from a Constantinople library in 1873.
c. AD 120–160 · 20 sections · 23 paragraphs
The Epistle of Barnabas
An anonymous letter reading all of Hebrew Scripture as a cipher for Christ — bound with the New Testament in Codex Sinaiticus.
c. AD 70–132 · 21 sections · 24 paragraphs
Ignatius — To the Ephesians
Written under guard on the road to martyrdom.
c. AD 105–115 · 22 sections
Ignatius — To the Magnesians
Urges unity under a bishop young enough that some doubted him.
c. AD 105–115 · 16 sections
Ignatius — To the Trallians
Warns against the teaching that Christ only seemed to suffer.
c. AD 105–115 · 14 sections
Ignatius — To the Romans
The letter that begs Rome not to save him.
c. AD 105–115 · 11 sections
Ignatius — To the Philadelphians
A plea against schism, written from personal experience of one.
c. AD 105–115 · 12 sections
Ignatius — To the Smyrnaeans
The first time anyone wrote the words "the catholic Church."
c. AD 105–115 · 14 sections
Ignatius — To Polycarp
One bishop to another, weeks from death.
c. AD 105–115 · 9 sections
Polycarp — To the Philippians
The disciple of John writes to Paul's church.
c. AD 110–140 · 15 sections
The Fragments of Papias
The lost work of a bishop who knew the apostles' hearers — surviving as quotations, including the earliest account of how Mark and Matthew were written.
c. AD 95–140 (as quoted by later writers) · 10 sections · 14 paragraphs
The Martyrdom of Polycarp
The earliest martyrdom account outside the New Testament.
c. AD 155–160 · 23 sections · 25 paragraphs
The Shepherd of Hermas
A Roman book of visions and parables — the Church as an aging woman, one more repentance for the baptized, and an incomplete place in Codex Sinaiticus just after the New Testament.
c. AD 90–150 (composed in stages) · 116 sections · 124 paragraphs