The series of Greek Christian writers of the first centuries AD (GCS) started in Liepzig in 1897, then moved to Berlin, and to Walter de Gruyter in 2001 and has been publishing the results of the Academy project "Greek Christian Writers", which was launched in the then Russian Prussian academy and hasbeen continued by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy. It publishes large critical editions with historically-oriented introductions and indexes of these works which originated in the Graecophone part of teh ancient Christian Roman Empire and have not been included in the other major series of editions. The objective is to provide complete coverage of the first three centuries. The present first volume and second volume present the complete German translation of the approximately 50 texts from the manuscript find of the Codex Berolinensis 8502 together with specialists in the field of Coptic studies.
Most of the texts originated in the 2nd and 3rd centuries and include for example apocryphal Gospels (such as St Thomas's gospel) and important original Gnostic documents; they form one of the most imortant manuscript rediscoveries of the 20th century and as such should be of value to both Biblical scholars and church historians.