Rome · c. 340, in its received form c. 710

“The Creed of the Apostles.” A symbolum was a token, one half of a broken object matched with its other half to prove who you were. The name “of the Apostles” is found in a letter of the Council of Milan to Pope Siricius, c. 390, and a legend later gave one article to each of the twelve apostles. The creed is a summary of the apostles’ faith, not their composition. This page sets its earliest form, the Old Roman Creed, beside the received text that finally replaced it.

The Old Roman Creed in Greek and Latin, the received Latin text, and the English of the 1662 Prayer Book

Tap a word to light up its counterparts and open its dictionary entries, Scripture echoes and Reformed reception. The green words were added after the Old Roman Creed. Drag the column names to reorder them, or switch columns on and off.

Columns
Show Reformed reception
not in the Old Roman Creed of c. 340

Reformed reception

How the Church of England’s Articles received the Apostles’ Creed. Tap an underlined phrase to see the words of the creed behind it; tap a word in the creed to find the Articles that echo it.

Greek: the creed of Marcellus of Ancyra, sent to Pope Julius I about 341, our earliest text of the Old Roman Creed, as printed in J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, and in Wikipedia’s article on the Old Roman Symbol. Where that text used Latin letters inside Greek words, they are corrected here. The final “life everlasting” is in Marcellus but not in Rufinus’s Latin.

Latin, Rufinus: the creed of Aquileia, quoted by Rufinus in his Commentary on the Apostles’ Creed (c. 400), from Migne’s Patrologia Latina 21 as transcribed on Latin Wikisource. Rufinus says the Roman church added nothing to the creed, and that Aquileia had “descended into hell”, which Rome did not. The Old Roman Creed in Latin is otherwise reconstructed from his text and from Marcellus.

Latin, received text: as in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the form first quoted by Pirminius between 710 and 714 and spread by Charlemagne. English: the Apostles’ Creed in the Order for Morning Prayer, Book of Common Prayer 1662, as printed on the Church of England’s website (Cambridge University Press text). The Articles are quoted from the same site.

Dictionaries: Greek words link to Liddell–Scott–Jones on Logeion and to Wiktionary; Latin words to Lewis & Short on Logeion, Whitaker’s Words and Wiktionary; English words to Wiktionary and Webster’s 1828 dictionary. Bible links go to BibleGateway in the KJV and Vulgate. Alignment is by sense and was prepared for this page.