Passage list from early Church Fathers' works.

God bless:

Reading NT281 on quotations of Church Fathers as witness to the NT, it is mentioned that in theory one could try to reconstruct the NT from the quotings of it from the Church Fathers.

I found an article that says that maybe only 46% of NT can be reconstructed that way:

https://theosophical.wordpress.com/2012/01/17/modern-myth-all-but-11-verses-of-the-nt-could-be-constructed-from-the-writings-of-the-early-church-fathers/

Then from wikipedia I got the name of some of the important early Fathers:

Clement of Rome,[91] Ignatius of Antioch and Polycarp of Smyrna.

Question is how would be the workflow to retrieve the quotations of NT verses / passages in their writings and get them into a passage list using L6?

Thanks ahead of time for any ideas and / or suggestions.

Peace and grace.

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DMB

I'll leave passage lists to others, using a search.

But, you probably need to distinguish 'apostolic fathers' from 'church fathers'. The first group is early 2nd century and quotes little of the NT ... mainly Paul. The authors you mention are in this group.

Church fathers are subsequent and use the NT extensively.

MJ. Smith

Question is how would be the workflow to retrieve the quotations of NT verses / passages in their writings and get them into a passage list using L6?

1. Get the following resources into Logos

2. Add any additional documents that have been found since these series were compiled.

3. Verify that all of the above have been tagged for Biblical references as chapter and verse divisions were centuries away when these were written.

4. Verify that all the references use the same verse mapping or can be converted to the same verse mapping.

5. Since Logos currently doesn't support series in the Concordance tool, select a similar academic tool that can handle the volume of data on the platform available to you ...

Okay, enough tongue in cheek ... what one would actually do is build up a list from the literature of most interest to you and over the years add additional information based on your sense of where the "missing verses" might most likely be used. However, there is another line of thought that is more relevant to the argument.

1. Anyone providing an exact number of verses is immediately suspect because a comprehensive search has never been done and even critical texts of the Church Fathers is still very limited.

2. The site that the article references is a Muslim site, well researched (I often use it's tables myself) but with a Muslim mind set on the necessity of a single manuscript tradition so that the criteria for "reconstructing the New Testament" are such that no educated Christian would believe them to be achievable ... or if achievable no way to know the criteria has been met. The site also adds a limitation "church fathers of the first three centuries" which is not what is claimed but what the research they are repeating covered - collated by hand so obviously limited.

3. The point of author's saying that the New Testament would be recreatable is not that x out of y sentences/clauses/phrases would be retrieved but to give a sense of how broadly and frequently scripture quotes appear in the Church Fathers.

4. What is interesting is to run a concordance to find the scripture use of particular individuals to help understand what is either a reflection of what was available to them or of their particular interests and theological bent.

In my library which has duplicates, the Beatitudes are referred to 1, 685 times in 248 resources. Acts 2:38 is used 101 times in 64 resources.

Dave Hooton

Question is how would be the workflow to retrieve the quotations of NT verses / passages in their writings and get them into a passage list

This depends on the tagging done by Faithlife, but you can search the 37 ECF volumes for:

{Milestone <Bible ~ Matt-Rev>}

This will show the quotations from the NT (739) but you would have to compile the Passge List manually. As for judging coverage from that...

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/831859#Comment_831859

Dave, are you implying that all quotations from the Bible are marked with a milestone? That is very useful information.

Dave Hooton

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/831861#Comment_831861

Dave, are you implying that all quotations from the Bible are marked with a milestone? That is very useful information.

It is less onerous than looking for references with <Bible ~ Matt-Rev> for the purpose of this thread. But amongst the 67,893 results I did spot some quotations, so the milestone search is not foolproof.

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/831865#Comment_831865

Okay, I thought the quotations were what he was looking for.

Hamilton Ramos

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/831859#Comment_831859

Thanks to all for your input: Denise, MJ, Dave.

Helpful, but I am so behind in the readings, that I will get to this later on.

For now I am exploring the concept of "trustworthiness" with respect to codex Vaticanus.

Could it be that is an extant one from the 50 done under Eusebius' supervision for Constantine?

Thanks. Peace and grace.

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/831869#Comment_831869

From Wikipedia:

[quote]

It is speculated that this commission may have provided motivation for the development of the canon lists and that Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus are possible surviving examples of these Bibles

using as its source McDonald & Sanders, The Canon Debate

I cannot envision a way to actually prove this theory - its a matter of the weight of the evidence for or against.

Steven Michael Morrison

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/831854#Comment_831854

I have been compiling a list of quotes of verses and fractional verses, excluding allusions, and I get just under 63%. I see a little over 65,000 quotes. My data is at https://www.biblequery.org/Bible/BibleCanon/EarlyChristianNTQuotes.xls

Dave Hooton

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1019986#Comment_1019986

I have been compiling a list of quotes of verses and fractional verses, excluding allusions, and I get just under 63%. I see a little over 65,000 quotes. My data is at https://www.biblequery.org/Bible/BibleCanon/EarlyChristianNTQuotes.xls

Steven,

This is an old thread from an old version of Logos. You will get a bigger audience if you post to the General forum, with additional description to establish the context.