Preface

The last couple months I have been working on making available a dictionary of early Christian beliefs online. The work is now mostly finished, though we are still working on grammatical errors, etc., so please bear with us. Those familiar with “A Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs” by David Bercot will find some aspects of this work similar. Throughout the years I have heavily relied on Bercot’s dictionary. Over the last few years one of my close brothers and companions in Huancayo Peru, Anthony Hurtado, took a great interest in Bercot’s Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs, and with his limited English he labored in study to try to understand some of it’s truths. Soon he was asking me about the possibility of reproducing such a work in the Spanish language and we began to consider doing a condensed version of “The Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs” in Spanish with only the most relevant topics. Soon Anthony and I were getting together all the Early Christian writings we could find available in Spanish. Because the 10-volume set of Ante Nicene Fathers is not available in Spanish, we had to search high and low. After sifting though numerous bookstores in Lima full of contemporary Christian literature, we only came up with a couple of copies of selected writings, which just goes to show the scarce availability of such valuable materials in the Spanish language. We were also able to find some of the earliest writings on the internet, and some of the brothers in Mexico were able to find some writings as well and send them to us. Once we had all the writings we could get our hands on the work progressed quickly. Anthony and I were excited by what we found. Approaching the project from the perspective of evangelists who often face the opposition of society and the world around us helped us to bring to light aspects of the early Christian faith that may have been overlooked in Bercot’s work. Anthony’s enthusiasm and help made the project quite exciting and soon we had our work available online free to all the Spanish speaking community. More recently we have also made it available in Portuguese as well. Part of the reason I felt the necessity to take on the task again in my own language was to produce an original work of our own, free of copyrights, that could be made available online free of charge to those seeking truth. Another reason was due to the wealth of new light we found in the early Christian writings not presented in Bercot’s work. Some of the topics, while not at variance with but differing greatly from Bercot’s work, to be found in our work worth mentioning will be: the Cross, Evangelism, Faith, Fear of God, Grace, Happiness of Man, Heresies, Holy Spirit, Early Christian View of Jesus, Judging Others, Love of God, Obedience, and most importantly, the whole section on Salvation.