This voluminous work on Church History by Philip Schaff (1819-1893) was originally published between 1858 and 1893 in eight volumes in the USA and covers the period from the beginnings of Biblical Christianity in A.D. 1 to the History of the Reformation in Germany and Switzerland (1517-1648). Being still a popular text in North America, this work had been out of print for over a century and has now been carefully edited and reformatted for republication in three volumes, each of them containing the text of two volumes of the original edition.

Schaff's work, unlike other works in the field, covers a multitude of church history-related aspects - from church doctrine, policy, events and processes to aspects of social moral and family life, arts and more. It is a very comprehensive text, extremely well-written and readable, rich in material and sources used, and attests to the excellence of protestant German theological scholarship under the influence of emerging Historical-Critical Biblical Exegesis at his time. This first volume covers the period from the beginnings to the Ante-Nicene Fathers (A.D. 1-311).