Acta conciliorum non leguntur – Nobody reads council acts. Eduard Schwartz's famous dictum is slowly being overtaken by recent scholarly interest, no longer only of theologians and historians of the Church, but also of historians of late antiquity. The fact that the first English translation of the Acts of Chalcedon appears in a series for historians is testimony to this development; it will surely spark many more studies into the riches of this material. With a distinctly historical rather than theological interest, new questions and scholarly perspectives open up. Yet, every examination must confront a number of difficulties of principle and of methodological and hermeneutical challenges arising from the character and the transmission of the body of conciliar records and documentation. In the case of the First Council of Ephesus and the acts associated with it, the complexity of the textual tradition, even more than the sheer volume of information, compounds this difficulty – so much so that their editor considered them to be more challenging in this respect than those of the Council of Chalcedon. Council acts are highly complex, elaborate products. In the Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum seven (sub-) volumes of various Greek records and five of Latin translations and collections are concerned with the First Council of Ephesus.

Their editor Eduard Schwartz's principal insight was that the collections in which we find them are what he called publizistische Sammlungen, that is to say collections with a propagandistic purpose, a ‘spin’ we might say in an age of modern media manipulation.