How the Fathers Read the Bible: Scripture, Liturgy, and the Early Church

“You search the Scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness to me.”—John 5:39

It takes some real imagination to go back fifteen or twenty centuries to an age when ordinary people didn’t have Bibles. But if we don’t put in that work, we’ll misunderstand the early Christians completely.

The early Christians didn’t live in our world, and their encounters with Scripture happened in one main context: the liturgy. That was where they heard Scripture. And just as important, that was where they heard Scripture interpreted.

In How the Fathers Read the Bible: Scripture, Liturgy, and the Early Church, Mike Aquilina takes readers back to the first centuries of Church life to show how the liturgy became the home of—and the interpretative lens for—Scripture. Aquilina shows how, both then and now, Scripture is only understood through the life of the Church—and in particular, through the liturgy.

Mike Aquilina is executive vice-president of the St. Paul Center and a contributing editor for Angelus News. He is author of more than fifty books, including The Fathers of the Church and The Eucharist Foretold.