“The quotations from the LXX. in the Greek Fathers are an almost unworked field.” So wrote Dr Hatch in 1889, and the remark is still true. Indeed, this field can hardly be worked with satisfactory results until the editor has gone before, or a competent collator has employed himself upon the MSS. of the author whose quotations are to be examined. The ‘Apostolic Fathers’ can already be used with confidence in the editions of Lightfoot and Gebhardt-Harnack; the minor Greek Apologists have been well edited in Texte und Untersuchungen, and it may be hoped that the Berlin edition of the earlier Greek Fathers will eventually supply the investigator with trustworthy materials for the Ante-Nicene period as a whole. But for the present the evidence of many Ante-Nicene and of nearly all later Greek Church-writers must be employed with some reserve. In this chapter we shall limit ourselves to the more representative Christian writers before Origen.

1. The earliest of non-canonical Christian writings, the letter addressed c. a.d. 96 by the Church of Rome to the Church of Corinth, abounds in quotations from the O.T.; and more than half of these are given substantially in the words of the LXX. with or without variants.