Passage list from early Church Fathers' works.

Hamilton Ramos said:

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

• Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Latina (221 vols.) 

• Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Graeca (167 vols.)

• Patrologia Syriaca (vols. 1–2) and Orientalis (vols. 1–14, 16)

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

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

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 said:

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.