[B-Greek] citation of church fathers in UBS
jdemail at charter.net
jdemail at charter.net
Fri Mar 24 15:13:44 EST 2006
Matt,
As you may have gathered from earlier responses, there is not yet any one-stop shopping for patristic biblical citations, nor is there likely to be any time soon.
The closest thing is to do a series of carefully thought out proximity searches in databases such as TLG, PHI, and the Patrologia Latina database, but some allusions and reminiscences will always evade such searching; and I don't know what to do about Syriac, Coptic, etc. Biblia Patristica is nowhere near complete. Indexes based on ANF and NPNF (and don't neglect the added indexes in the Hendrickson reprint of vol. 10 of ANF, or the topical index to the set published by Hendrickson as A Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs) will of course cover only the documents in those collections, and on the basis of older translations of mostly outdated primary text editions. So you have to spend multiple hours in the library scouring the indexes in volumes of Sources chretiennes, GCS, CSEL, etc. (i.e., critical texts) and also of translations, like the huge French collection of Augustine translations, and in English, series such as ACW and CWS and others from New City, SVSP, etc. There must be dozens of flukey things out there that could help you--I remember one set called Sunday Sermons of the Great Fathers, for example. New things are coming out all the time, such as the new series from IVP (ACCS) and Eerdmans (The Church's Bible); if one of those volumes is available for whatever passage you're researching, that would be a huge jumpstart. But then however you happen to find pointers to texts, you have to go the the primary texts themselves in the best available critical editions to check the wording, and you have to grasp what the text as a whole is doing before you can say too much about the function of this or that little snippet of quotation within it. (Could paraphrase Westcott/Hort: knowledge of whole treatises, particular writers' citation habits, related corpora, and entire eras must precede judgments about individual citations.) I'm getting exhausted just thinking about it. But dive in, and have fun!
James Ernest
j.d.ernest at bc.edu
On 3/23/06, Matt Rondeau <mrondeau at mhc-oxford.org> wrote:
Hello,
I'm currently writing a textual criticism essay on John 12:28, and I was
wondering if anyone could help me in regards to locating specific instances
where the church fathers quote from a particular verse. For instance, John
12:28 has a note of Augustine 1/3 meaning that he cites the aforementioned
verse 3 times, and once he agrees with this particular variant. My problem
is that I can't seem to find where Augustine actually cites this verse, or
any other fathers for that matter. It seems that I would have to read every
work written by them to find the citations. I've checked the Loeb series,
but many of them don't have scripture indexes. Any help is greatly
appreciated.
Matthew Rondeau
More information about the B-Greek
mailing list