I want to provide a list of some of the relevant pre-Reformation sources. I'll list them in alphabetical order, and I'll provide a link to one post on each source. Some of these sources are discussed in more than one post. Hippolytus often comes up in discussions of how the early Christians viewed prayer, for example, and I've written multiple posts about Hippolytus' views, but I'll only be linking to one of those posts here. If you want more information on any of these sources, you can search our archives for other relevant material. I expect to be updating this post, including the list below, periodically.
Before I provide the list, I want to address some background issues. I'm not trying to be exhaustive here, but I want to make some preliminary comments that should help in the process of sorting through the evidence.
It's sometimes claimed that we don't have much evidence to go by until a few centuries into church history. Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox often make such claims when their beliefs, beliefs about prayer or some other subject, are absent or uncommon during an early timeframe. They'll claim that the early absence doesn't have much significance. But prayer was a large part of the lives of Jewish and Christian believers in those earlier centuries, not just later. Think of the many prayers to God that are explicitly mentioned in both the Old Testament and the New Testament, for example. Even the church fathers of the earliest centuries of church history discussed prayer on many occasions, sometimes wrote entire treatises on the subject, and so on. Prayers to God are mentioned explicitly and often for more than a thousand years in the Bible and in the earliest postbiblical centuries. The accompanying lack of support for praying to saints and angels is a major problem for groups like Catholicism and Orthodoxy accordingly.
People like Catholics and Orthodox often cite anonymous, apocryphal, and heretical sources to support their historical claims, and the dating of those sources is often disputed in some significant way. So, it's important to be careful about the dating claims that are made. It's common for people to allege that a document was written, for example, in the second century if scholars estimate that it was written at some point ranging from the second century to the sixth century. A Catholic or Orthodox will just assume the earliest potential date and put forward that date as if it's a known fact. There's some discussion of dating issues in the links below, but I don't cover every relevant dating issue. Be careful in analyzing the claims that are made about dates.
And proponents of prayer to saints and angels often confuse categories. It's common for issues like whether angels present our prayers to God or whether saints pray for us to be cited as support for praying to angels and saints. I've even seen people cite documents in which a person speaks with an angel in the context of encountering an angel in a vision, an angelic appearance on earth, or something of the like. But the same occurs often in scripture (e.g., Daniel talking to an angel, Mary talking to Gabriel, John talking to the angel in Revelation 10:9), and I don't know of any Protestant who's ever said that the Biblical figures in those passages were sinning. What happens in those passages is significantly different than what people typically have in mind when they refer to praying to angels today. It's important to make the appropriate distinctions and not confuse one issue with another.
We should also be careful to make the appropriate genre distinctions. When a Psalm is written as if a mountain or tree is being addressed, for example, we recognize that it's unlikely that the Psalm can be cited as evidence for prayer to mountains and trees, since it's a common rhetorical device to speak as if you're addressing something you aren't actually addressing. That occurs frequently in poetry, music, grave inscriptions, etc. Just as we shouldn't take Psalm 103:22 as evidence for praying to "all [God's] works", we also shouldn't take verses 20-21 of that Psalm as evidence for praying to angels. When Protestants sing "Angels From The Realms Of Glory", that isn't evidence that Protestants believe in praying to angels. If the believers of the Old Testament era prayed to saints and angels, we'd expect to see explicit references to the practice many times in the Old Testament, just as we have such evidence for praying to God. And if Protestants prayed to saints and angels, we wouldn't expect to have to resort to something like "Angels From The Realms Of Glory" to prove it. When advocates of praying to saints and angels keep appealing to poetry, songs, grave inscriptions, and such for alleged evidence of support for their position, while they're unconcerned about and dismissive of the lack of evidence where we have more reason to expect to find it, that's a problem for their position. We need to make these genre distinctions.
On the other hand, we also need to be careful not to accept distinctions that don't make sense or are unsubstantiated. For example, it's sometimes claimed that the ancient Christians believed in a higher form of prayer that was to be offered only to God, whereas they offered a lower form of prayer to saints and angels. Thus, patristic references to how we should only pray to God supposedly are only addressing the higher form of prayer, without any intention of denying that we can pray to saints and angels in a lesser manner. That sort of distinction has to be demonstrated to have been made by the sources in question. The advocate of prayer to the saints and angels can't just assert that the distinction was made without demonstrating that assertion. Origen makes a distinction between how we should pray "more" to the Father than to the Son (Against Celsus, 5:11). Henry Chadwick's rendering of the closing sentence of section 5:4 of Against Celsus has Origen writing, "We will even make our petitions to the very Logos himself and offer intercession to him and give thanks and also pray to him, if we are capable of a clear understanding of the absolute and the relative sense of prayer." (Origen: Contra Celsum [New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003], 266) Origen distinguishes between prayer to the Father and prayer to the Son in that manner, but he also repeatedly denies that we should pray to beings like angels and saints, as I've demonstrated elsewhere (e.g., here and here). The fact that Origen made that distinction between praying to the Father and praying to the Son doesn't justify expanding the second category beyond the parameters Origen set for it or imputing to Origen a third category that he nowhere advocated. To cite another example of a false distinction we need to avoid, advocates of praying to saints and angels can't just assert without evidence that early Christian condemnations of praying to saints and angels were meant to only condemn non-Christian forms of such prayers, not a Christian form. There has to be evidence of such a qualifier in those ancient Christian sources rather than just assuming a qualifier that isn't suggested by those sources. Similarly, when the ancient Christians condemn pagans for committing abortion without any relevant qualifications, we don't gratuitously assume that only a pagan form of abortion was being condemned, whereas abortions done in a Christian manner were considered acceptable. For a good discussion of this subject in the context of the veneration of images, see The Other Paul's video here.
For more about background issues and responses to arguments for praying to saints and angels, see our collections of posts on prayer here and here. Or you can search our archives for a particular issue you have in mind. We have many posts about Matthew 27:47, Hebrews 12:1, Revelation 5:8, and other topics often brought up in discussions about prayer.
Having said all of that, here's an alphabetical list of links to some of our relevant posts:
Abercius
Athenagoras
Biblical Authors
Celsus
Claudius of Turin
Clement of Alexandria
Cyprian
Eustratius Of Constantinople's Opponents And Other Patristic And Medieval Sources
Hermas
Hippolytus
Hussites
Irenaeus
Jewish Sources (do a Ctrl F search for "post-Biblical Judaism" here)
Justin Martyr
Lactantius
Lollards
Origen
Tertullian
Vigilantius
Vigilantius' Supporters
Waldensians
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