St. Cyril of Alexandria is best known for his role in the Christological controversies of the fifth century. In recent decades, scholars have been attending more carefully to his exegetical legacy. Most of Cyril's work takes the form of biblical commentary rather than doctrinal treatise. Indeed, during his long career he wrote commentaries on nearly every book of the Bible. Less attention, however, has been given to Cyril's pastoral work as the Patriarch of Alexandria, perhaps because his commentaries and doctrinal treatises do not reveal much about his daily pastoral duties. Here the Festal Letters are especially helpful. Twenty-nine in all, these letters cover all but three of Cyril's years as a bishop. The first twelve were published in 2009 ((Fathers of the Church 118(). The present volume completes the set. Festal letters were used in Alexandria primarily to announce the beginning of Lent and the date of Easter. They also served a catechetical purpose, however, allowing the Patriarch an annual opportunity to write pastorally not just about issues facing the entire see, but also about the theological issues of the day. Thus, in these letters we catch a glimpse of Cyril the pastor writing about complex theology in an uncomplicated way. These letters also illuminate other realities of the ancient church in Alexandria, especially the relationship with the Jewish community and the rising influence of asceticism.

Philostorgius (born 368 C.E.) was a member of the Eunomian sect of Christianity, a nonconformist faction deeply opposed to the form of Christianity adopted by the Roman government as the official religion of its empire. He wrote his twelve-book Church History, the critical edition of the surviving remnants of which is presented here in English translation, at the beginning of the fifth century as a revisionist history of the church and the empire in the fourth and early-fifth centuries. Sometimes contradicting and often supplementing what is found in other histories of the period, Christian or otherwise, it offers a rare dissenting picture of the Christian world of the time.

Rufinus of Aquileia's History of the Church, published in 402 or 403, is a translation and continuation of that of Eusebius of Caesarea. Eusebius's history tells the story of Christianity from its beginning down to the year 325; Rufinus carries the story forward to, the year of the death of Theodosius I. Rufinus demonstrates both a superb understanding of Eusebius's text and a tendency to translate it freely or even to misrepresent it when he judges that it does not do justice to the unity of faith and order which he is convinced is an essential element of the church's constitution. He excises and rewrites passages liberally, but he retains in his translation Eusebius's revolutionary citation of sources, a historiographical method which would eventually prove so fruitful in the literature of the Latin church. Despite the changes he felt he had to make in his translation, he was deeply influenced by Eusebius's original when he composed his continuation. Just as Eusebius begins with a statement of Christian faith and a demonstration of its existence beyond the bounds of the Roman empire, continues with the story of its mission, persecution, divisions, and salvation despite its deprivation and suffering, and concludes with its secure establishment by the devout emperor Constantine, so Rufinus continues the story with the statement of faith of the Council of Nicaea, the account of its spread outside the Roman empire, the divisions and persecutions it suffered in his own time, and finally the victory over paganism of the orthodox emperor Theodosius. Rufinus's history was an immediate success. It was the first Latin Christian history, and as such it exerted great influence over his own generation and for a thousand years thereafter when the general ignorance of Greek in the Latin church made Eusebius's original practically unavailable to it.

Amidon offers the first English translation of Books 10 and 11 of Rufinus' Church History. Books 1-9 comprise a Latin translation of Eusebius' history. Books 10 and 11 are Rufinus' own continuation, covering the period 325-395. As the first Latin church history, this work exerted great influence over the subsequent scholarship of the Western Church.