Peter Kirby

Hello,

My two passions are computer programming and ancient Christian writings. This morning and yesterday, I have been working on both.

<a href="http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/e-catena/" target="_blank">http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/e-catena/</a>

Basically, I extracted the references to the NT from the footnotes in the _Ante-Nicene Fathers_ and arranged this information in the canonical order so that the patristic citations are easily found for any given biblical verse. See the web page for more detail.

A few questions. Will you find this useful? Do you have suggestions for improvement? Would you like to see a similar thing for the Old Testament?

best,
Peter Kirby

CX

Outstanding work, Peter! I have long sought just such a reference. Thank you for the effort. I suppose I have 1 or 2 possible suggestions. It would be terribly useful to be able to search by date or list by date. Which is to say the date the allusions were made. Additionally, it might be useful to somehow illustrate how certain we can be that a given patristic reference is actually a reference to the text in question or simply reflects a "common language" used by early Xian writers.

Jayhawker Soule

That is incredibly cool!

Peter Kirby

I have made an Access databse of the cross-reference info. At 15k, it is a very small download, but it could prove very useful just the same.

<a href="http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/e-catena/database.zip" target="_blank">http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/e-catena/database.zip</a>

The main difference between this Access database and the HTML pages is that the preceding sentences are not quoted. You have to look them up from the CCEL URL and the footnote number. (Or, especially if you order your queries by NT book, you can surf through the e-Catena HTML pages for your query results.)

The advantage is that you can make complex queries. Two are already included: "Gospels in Apostolic Fathers" and "Paul in Irenaeus."

Of course, you must have Microsoft Access, included in Microsoft Office, to use the database.

The link to the database download is also on the main e-Catena page:

<a href="http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/e-catena/" target="_blank">http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/e-catena/</a>

CX, would you be interested in helping me to improve the database by compiling date information for the various titles? I could do the programming modifications necessary if someone could help me to compile the info on when each of the documents in the Ante-Nicene Fathers were written.

best,
Peter Kirby

Iasion

Congratulations Peter,

an excellent and useful piece of work, thanks

Its funny,
I've noticed a few people who share the common interests of computers and NT (or bible) study - an interesting phenomenom.

I've been tinkering with a similar project - I have downloaded all the early works I can get - including your site, the fathers, much from Perseus etc. I have about 900 files totalling about 150M now and I use a simple text search program to research various issues.

Its a crude method though, I wish I had a program which could search more intelligently - I wonder if anyone knows of any smart text indexing and cross-referencing programs?

regards,
Quentin David Jones

Iasion

Greetings again,

A quick glance suggests the majority of the NT can be found in these allusions on your pages.

Did you get a final figure of actually how much?

Apologists often say something like 99% of the NT can be recovered from the Fathers - I was always sceptical of that claim - your site seems to be the very FIRST attempt to get a real answer.

Quentin

Peter Kirby

Hello,

The claims of 99% may be based, if it is based on anything, on a definition of "Church Fathers" that extends their dates well into the Middle Ages.

In terms of chapters, only Acts 25 is without noted parallel in the Ante-Nicene Fathers.

In terms of verses:

There are 7958 verses in the New Testament. This figure is accurate and comes from a line-count of the Nestle-Aland line-per-verse text file.

There are 4202 verses noted in the e-Catena project. This figure may be an overestimate because some allusions may be imaginary. But it is more likely to be an underestimate because (1) some allusions may go unmentioned in the ANF; (2) some works were not known to the ANF editors; (3) and, most importantly, allusions which span several verses are noted only for one in the e-Catena project.

Thus, at least half of the verses in the New Testament have cross-references in the Ante-Nicene Fathers. A more accurate assessment would have to be undertaken by hand; certainly the e-Catena project gives anyone who would like to investigate this a head-start. It would be useful to have separate figures for the amount of the NT with parallels in 200 CE, in 250 CE, in 300 CE, in 350 CE, and in 400 CE. This brings us back to the suggestion of CX that dating information be attached to the works in the Ante-Nicene Fathers. I would want help to do that.

Also, it is possible that works discovered since the ANF, such as the Proof of Irenaeus and the Nag Hammadi Library, could be formatted to CCEL specifications and be added to the database. But I don't know who would do it; possible cross-references are not readily available for the NHL and would have to be developed.

best,
Peter Kirby