The Fathers on the Gospels

Each entry opens with a short reading in plain words — a faithful summary of how the Fathers understood the passage, not a quotation. Where the tradition allows, the entry also lets the Fathers speak for themselves: 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.

These pre-1900 translations are public domain and free to read online: the Nicene & Post-Nicene Fathers (First and Second Series) 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 St. Thomas Aquinas in J. H. Newman’s 1841 translation, where a Father survives only through it.

The site is bilingual. Each entry opens with the Gospel passage itself, in both languages: the King James Version in English and, in Albanian, the public-domain New Testament of Kostandin Kristoforidhi (Tosk, 1879) — Orthodox, and still used in the Church of Albania. The Albanian commentary is a fresh translation — in many cases the first rendering of these Fathers into Albanian — and the names of the saints follow the usage of the Orthodox Autocephalous Church of Albania.

Some Fathers survive only in copyrighted modern editions, which are cited but not reproduced: Blessed Theophylact’s Explanation of the Holy Gospels (Chrysostom Press).

Origen’s exegesis is foundational and quoted throughout the Byzantine catenae, though several of his speculative opinions were condemned at the Fifth Ecumenical Council (553); the tradition reads him with that caution.