This podcast is dedicated to providing 21st century listeners with access to the writings of first century Christians. These historic works provide insight into how some of the earliest followers of Christ encouraged one another, interpreted the Bible, lived in community, and faced adversity. By hearing their words, carried through the centuries, we can be encouraged in our own walk with God. While these works are of less value and less complete than Scripture, they still provide a setting of silver for understanding the teachings of Christ and His apostles.
In many ways this podcast was created for selfish reasons; I have wanted to read the writings of the earliest Christians but, between work, kids, and chores have not had the time to sit down and read through their works. I realized, however, that while cooking, driving to work, mowing the lawn, or cleaning dishes that I had plenty of time to listen. If I can listen to podcasts on politics or current events then I could also hear the words of Christians from nearly 2000 years ago.
Fortunately, the staff and volunteers at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library have converted many of these writings into an XML format. Echoing the 1865 editor of the source material, Arthur Cleveland Coxe, I am performing the humble task of providing a brief summary and transcribing the documents to an audio format.
The audio files were created using Google’s text-to-speech service. When listening to the audio, I’ve been simultaneously impressed at the ability of artificial intelligence, armed only with probabilistic models, to replicate human speech. There are, of course, plenty of moments that make clear that, as image bearers of God, humans are still far superior. I would love to have this recorded professionally but, due to time and budget constraints, the awkward computer voice will have to do. In testing and preparing this audio my soul has been refreshed in hearing for the first time the faith of my spiritual forefathers. I pray that you would similarly find value in this albeit imperfect rendition of these texts.
Finally, the hope for this project is to continue creating audio for many more works available online at CCEL.org. Given the enormous amount of text to process, if you know how to set up a python environment and would like to contribute please let me know!