Early Christian Access To Evidence We Don't Have

In some ways, we're in a better position to judge issues pertaining to the truthfulness of Christianity than people in the ancient world were (advances in knowledge in relevant fields, the development of technology that helps us evaluate the issues, etc.). But there are other contexts in which the people who lived in the ancient world, or some subset of them, were better off than we are. One of the advantages they had that people today often underestimate is access to writings that are no longer extant.

There's a patristic document that provides many illustrations of that advantage, but that document doesn't get discussed much. I suspect few people involved in apologetics and other relevant contexts have read it. I'm referring to Jerome's Lives Of Illustrious Men. It has 135 sections, but they're short, so it doesn't take long to read. He provides brief overviews of the lives of individuals who lived during the first few centuries of Christianity, mostly Christians. The primary value of the document in this context is what Jerome tells us about what those individuals wrote. Many of the writings he refers to are no longer extant. But they were available to the earliest Christians and shaped what they believed.

You can read Jerome's entire document on one page here, but without any notes. Or you can read it with notes and with each section on a separate page here.

His list of individuals is far from exhaustive. And there are some documents he doesn't mention that were written by the people he discusses. Martin Hengel noted, "of the second-century Christian writings known to us by title, around 85% have been lost. The real loss must be substantially higher." (The Four Gospels And The One Gospel Of Jesus Christ [Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Trinity Press International, 2000], 55)