Equinox

Does anyone know of a good source of which verses of the new testament are quoted by which church fathers when? I have put together a nice excel spreadsheet of when our oldest manuscripts date to, by verse, so if a given verse comes up, I can quickly look up when our oldest manuscript of it is, and by comparing that to the likely date of writing, estimate how much time elapsed during which there could have been changes.

However, there is a hole in that thinking, and that hole is that some verses may be available in quotes by church fathers dating to before our earliest manuscript. These would be 2nd and third century quotes, since there are few 1st century church fathers, and because we have nearly all verses (except a few like John 8) in Codex Sinaiticus and Vaticanus – so 4th century and later church fathers aren’t relevant.

So, does anyone know of a table that lists which verses were quoted by which church fathers when? Also, I can upload my spreadsheet if there is a public place to put it and if anyone wants to see it.

Thanks-

-Equinox

Amaleq13

Have you check Kirby's link to e-Catena?

"There are 12,517 cross-references. By the nature of its method of compilation, this e-Catena project has a rightful claim to providing the most comprehensive collection of allusions from the Ante-Nicene Fathers to the New Testament texts."

Cheerful Charlie

I know of no "tables" as such, but there are a number of books examining that point, I have one, "Supernatural religion (or via: amazon.co.uk)" printed in 1890 that shows very few early Church fathers actually do quote known gospels etc. We don't see many real quotes until late 2nd century, early third century.
This is one of those old turn of the century books bristling with Greek and Latin, a 700 page monster. I have a few other books examining this question, but not in that sort of depth.There are many quotes that seem biblical but on close examination, are not. Since early Bible manuscripts differ in particulars, it can be a messy and contensious subject.

Ireneius seems to be one of the first who quotes from known biblical books.


CC

Toto

looks interesting, if a bit, um, old.

Reply to Supernatural Religion by Lightfoot.

mountainman

Are the Eusebian Canon Tables relevant?

mountainman

My earlier comment about the Eusebian Canon tables
probably irrelevant to your question, now that I've
read it a second time.



As far as I understand term "church fathers " meant
different things dependent upon when the term was used
during the course of the fourth century.

Specifically, in the documents of ecclesiastical proceedings
up until the time of the Bishop Cyril of Alexandria, the term
the "church fathers " actually referred to the
"Nicene fathers ".

From the time of Bishop Cyril until the present day, the
term was changed from this original useage, to mean
the "church fathers of the Pre-Nicene Epoch".

I wonder why?



Best wishes,



Pete Brown

Equinox

Thanks for the link to the Catena. That provides the information I was looking for, but not in a very manageable format. Oh well, if I really want to, I can put together a table from that. I’ll just remember that for any verse, it’s likely that there is a late 2nd to early 3rd century quote or semi- quote of it, not that it really changes much.

However, that fact – that it really doesn’t change much – made me wonder “are these quotes read from originals of the letters (of course not), or from copies of copies of the letters from church fathers?”. Thus, even if a church father has a quote of a verse, and his letter was written much earlier than our earliest manuscript of the verse in question, doesn’t that make little difference, since the oldest copy of the letter from the church father is more recent, and could have been “corrected” by a scribe to fit the verse that the scribe “knew” he really was quoting?

In other words, how old are our copies of the stuff written by the church fathers??:huh: