Early Christian Creeds, 3rd edition

J. N. D. Kelly was a patristics scholar, and this Longman book, in its standard third edition, is his classic academic history of how the early Christian creeds developed, from pre Nicene local baptismal formulas through the fixing of the Nicene Constantinopolitan creed and the later Western Apostles' Creed. Its strength, and the reason it remains a standard reference in patristic scholarship, is Kelly's exhaustive tracing of textual variants across the surviving early manuscript and patristic citation evidence, showing the creeds as a historical process rather than a fixed text handed down whole. Its limit is that it is a history of how the creeds came to read as they do, not the confessional creeds' own fixed liturgical text, so a claim needing the exact current wording of a creed as used in worship should cite that creed's own text directly rather than this historical study.