Every Ending Is a New Beginning. The first Christian writers, however, take issue with this pagan and philosophical world. Apologists like Minucius or Tertullian attempt to answer head-on the standard Roman accusations against their sect. Contemporary Romans suspected the Christians of immorality and found them to be cliquish. More substantial accusations were the unknowability of the divine, a strange concept of God as a single being, and a rather absurd eschatology. All these (and then some) are refuted individually in Minucius Felix's Octavius by the speaker Octavius Januarius.

Jerome, Bible Translator. It took almost two hundred years, however, for the most significant Christian writers to emerge. These were St. Jerome, the translator of the Bible, and St. Augustine, the church father. Jerome's writings show the severity of his ascetic tendencies. He was somewhat remarkable for his time in having mastered both Hebrew and Greek...