Most Christians are told about these texts and never get to read them. Sometimes that is because nobody has translated them; more often it is because the only English is locked inside a modern edition that costs more than a week of groceries. Either way the effect is the same — the sources get quoted at you rather than handed to you.
This shelf is our attempt to hand a few of them over. Everything here is translated from the original language for this church, from an edition we name, and published with the working shown: what the manuscript or edition actually says, where the translator had a real choice to make, and what we could not verify.
You are not asked to take our word for it. Every page carries its source, and every translation is attacked by a second reader before it goes up.
Augustine on Samuel and the Medium
Augustine asked twice, twenty-six years apart, whether the medium at Endor really brought Samuel back. He answers at length, refuses to settle it, and then in the later text corrects his own earlier leaning. Neither work has ever been in the public-domain English collections.
Ad Simplicianum, Book II
Book I of the Responses to Simplicianus is famous — it is where Augustine's doctrine of grace breaks surface. Book II is the one nobody reads: how an evil spirit can be called the Lord's, whether God can really repent, the medium at Endor, what position to pray in, Elijah's complaint over a dead boy, and the lying spirit sent to Ahab.
- From the text, never from a memory of the text. The source file is read. If we cannot see the edition, we say so and stop rather than reconstruct a passage from recollection.
- Independently of existing translations. Where a modern English version exists, it is named on the page and not used. Knowing a published rendering is a reason for more care, not a shortcut.
- Hedges are kept. Ancient writers are very often less certain than translators make them sound. When Augustine writes non est absurdum credere he means “it is not absurd to believe,” not “we should believe,” and flattening that is a doctrinal act rather than a stylistic one.
- Scripture is quoted as the author quotes it. The Fathers used their own Bibles, which often differ from the Hebrew, the Greek and our English. We render what the author actually wrote and then show you the difference, rather than quietly substituting a modern version and erasing his argument.
- Nothing publishes on one pass. A second reader is set the task of breaking the translation — re-rendering the hard clauses cold, hunting for silent decisions and imported doctrine, and checking every claim against the Hebrew, Greek and Latin we hold. Findings are logged as confirmed, changed, contested or unresolved.
- What we could not check, we say. “Not verifiable from the sources we hold” is a permitted answer here. An invented certainty is not.
The shelf grows slowly, because doing it properly is slow. Texts under consideration, roughly in order of how often people ask for them:
The remaining five questions of Augustine's Ad Simplicianum Book II — on how the Spirit came upon the prophets, on the lying spirit sent to deceive Ahab, and on what posture to pray in. Origen's homily on the medium of Endor and Eustathius of Antioch's reply to it, neither of which is in the standard English collections. The Didache and the letters of Ignatius set beside the Greek. The Cappadocians on the Spirit.
If there is a text you have wanted to read and could not get at, tell us — that is genuinely how this list gets set.
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