The Antiquities of the Christian Church

Seiyaku's Caveat Lector

The original spelling has been faithfully preserved — quirks, wobbles, and all — including a delightful disregard for consistent capitalisation. Words like ‘Christian’, ‘Church’, and ‘Gospels’ pop up as ‘christian’, ‘church’, and ‘gospels’, perhaps in a bid to promote humility... or just to test your patience.

Spelling is largely in American English (don’t say we didn’t warn you), and the grammar occasionally takes creative liberties that wouldn’t pass a modern spell-check — let alone a publishing house. This is particularly surprising, considering the author seems to assume the reader is not only fluent in Latin, but also comfortable enough with Greek and Hebrew to casually skim past them. (Don’t worry — we’ve mercifully omitted the ancient languages.)

Footnotes labelled 1, 2, 3, etc., often float unmoored in the text, like forgotten luggage on a train platform. Some chapters boldly introduce “Section I” and then stop there, as if the rest of the sections got lost in the post sometime in the 19^th century. Still, given the occasional mis-spellings and other oddities, we suspect these are simply the typographical equivalent of a shrug, and no earth-shattering wisdom has gone missing.

In any case, we’re confident you’ll overlook these charming imperfections and focus on what matters: the extraordinary wealth of knowledge within — eccentric formatting and all.