The Fathers on the Gospels

The Fathers on the Gospels is an Orthodox patristic commentary on the Gospels, in English and Albanian. Beside each Gospel passage it sets the voices of the Fathers who first expounded it (St. John Chrysostom, St. Cyril of Alexandria, Blessed Augustine, and many others), so that Scripture is read as the Church has always read it, with the mind of the Fathers. Much of the Albanian here is the first time these Fathers have been given a voice in the language at all.

Each entry opens with the Gospel passage itself. A short reading in plain words then gives a faithful summary of how the Fathers understood the passage, not a quotation. From there the Fathers speak for themselves, as far as the tradition allows: brief excerpts under In their own words, and, for a growing number of passages, a full patristic commentary. Every such quotation is taken word for word from a public-domain translation. Nothing is paraphrased, and any omission inside a quotation is marked with an ellipsis.

The site is bilingual throughout. Each Gospel passage appears in the King James Version and, in Albanian, in the public-domain New Testament of Kostandin Kristoforidhi (Tosk, 1879), which is Orthodox and still used in the Church of Albania. The Albanian commentary is a fresh translation, and the names of the saints follow the usage of the Orthodox Autocephalous Church of Albania.

The pre-1900 English translations quoted here are public domain and free to read online: the Nicene & Post-Nicene Fathers and the Ante-Nicene Fathers at CCEL and New Advent; R. Payne Smith’s Commentary on Luke of St. Cyril of Alexandria at Tertullian.org; and the Catena Aurea, the “Golden Chain” compiled by Thomas Aquinas in J. H. Newman’s 1841 translation, where a Father survives only through it.

The collection is still growing. It began with the miracles and parables of Christ, and is reaching outward toward the whole of his earthly life: the Nativity, the Baptism, the teaching, the Passion, and the Resurrection. In time it may offer, in Albanian, a continuous reading of the Gospels in the light of the Fathers.

Some Fathers’ commentaries survive only in copyrighted modern editions, which are cited but never reproduced: Blessed Theophylact’s Explanation of the Holy Gospels (Chrysostom Press).