The Sayings of the Desert Fathers

The monks and nuns of the Egyptian desert in the fourth and fifth centuries left the cities for Scetis, Nitria and the Cells. Their sayings speak of prayer, silence, humility, work with the hands and the battle with one's thoughts, often in a single sentence or a short story.

The Greek alphabetical collection arranges the fathers by the letters of their names. This first volume gives the letters Alpha to Lambda, with the collection's prologue: seventy-two fathers from Antony the Great to Longinus, in four hundred fifty-two sayings. The Greek text is that of the Patrologia Graeca, newly read from the 1864 printing. In keeping with the natural method, the notes in the margin are entirely in Greek. Harder words are explained by the words they come from, by words of like meaning, or by a short sentence from the New Testament, the Septuagint or other early Christian and Greek writers.

With eleven engravings by Bloemaert, Sadeler, Tempesta, Callot and Luyken, an index of names and an index of words.

This reader is written for those who have completed a first year of New Testament or Koine Greek and want to grow in fluency through comprehensible input drawn from authentic Christian texts. It suits independent learners, homeschool families, classrooms, and Orthodox and Catholic Christians who wish to meet the Fathers and saints in their own language.