Try Origen for size--known by many as the father of Arianism
Though not an Arian per se, the particularly way he viewed the Trinity certainly could have led to the development of Arianism.
I don't think this is a fair assessment of the thought of Origen. Yes, he was off in areas, but we must see that Arius himself was a student of Origens and his views were in opposition to Origen's.
Actually, Athanasius was just as much influenced by Origen. What Arianism and the later Nicene "orthodoxy" had in common was the emphasis on the separate "hypostases". The debate between them then was whether the 2nd and 3rd were eternal or created.
But earlier fathers did not express the Godhead quite this way. Even right before the Nicene Council, the Bishop of Rome himself, Dionysius, "was clearly shocked at the Origen-inspired doctrine of the three hypostases", as suggested by Dionysius of Alexandria, "which seemed to him to undermine the divine monarchy", and he implied they were "virtual tritheists, splitting the indivisible oneness of the Deity into 'three powers, three absolutely separate hypostases, three divinities'" (Kelley,
Early Christian Doctrines, p. 134).
It also seems that there was a great change in the church between the apostles and the earliest fathers. This has been called "the lost century".
Jesse Lyman Hurlbut
The Story of the Christian Church p.41
We would like to read of the later work of such helpers of St. Paul as Timothy, Apollos, and Titus., but all these...drop out of record at his death. For 50 years after St. Paul's life a curtain hangs over the church through which we strive vainly to look; and when at last it arises, about AD 120, with the writings of the earliest church fathers [Justin], we find a church in many aspects different from that in the days of Peter and Paul
William J. McGothlin
The Course Of Christian History
But Christianity itself had been in [the] process of transformation as it progressed and at the close of the period was in many respects quite different from the apostolic Christianity -
Samuel G. Green
A Handbook of Christian History:
The 30 years which followed the close of the New Testament Canon and the destruction of Jerusalem are in truth, the most obscure in the history of the Church. When we emerge in the second century, we are, to a great extent, in a changed world
William Fitzgerald
Lectures on Ecclesiastical History:
over this period of transition, which immediately succeeds upon the era properly called apostolic, great obscurity hangs... -
Philip Schaff
History of the Christian Church
The remaining 30 years of the first century are involved in mysterious darkness, illuminated only by the writings of John. [assuming John wrote in the 90's, which is also denied by preterists to fit in with their AD70 theory] This is a period of church history about which we know least and would like to know most.
This has always been of interest, but recently, it came to light again as I debated the preterists, who say that the Kingdom began in AD70; a teaching we do not really see immediately afteward; as the early fathers continued to wait for a return of Christ. The destruction of Jerusalem, I have learned has a lot more significance than we have realized. This probably does figure into what happened to the writings, doctrine and practice of the Church. It was after this that the Church began its ascent to the later "Catholicism", with bishops becoming exalted, and baptism and communion taking on mystical significance.
So while we can look to the fathers to get an idea of what the original teaching was, still, we must realize that even by their time, a lot had already changed. Actually; we have the original teachings in the New Testament; but it all boils down to the correct
interpretation of them.
