Jaroslav Pelikan 
Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Volume 1 [PDF ebook] 
The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600)

In this five-volume opus-now available in its entirety in paperback-Pelikan traces the development of Christian doctrine from the first century to the twentieth."Pelikan’s The Christian Tradition [is] a series for which they must have coined words like ‘magisterial’." Martin Marty, Commonweal