Back to the Library
The Church Fathers · 414–442
The Festal Letters
Cyril of Alexandria · c. 376 – 444
Read elsewhere
What it is
Twenty-nine annual letters announcing the date of Easter and the beginning of the Lenten fast to the churches of Egypt, each expanding into a treatise — on fasting, on the incarnation, on why Jews and Greeks read the same signs differently.
Why it lasted
An unbroken run of one bishop's public teaching across twenty-eight years, which no other see has left. They also fix the Alexandrian Easter computation that the whole church eventually adopted.
Scripture it works from
Where to read it
Public domain and free to read in full, though not held here. The archives below have it.
These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.
Read next