Overview of the project

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The BiblIndex project is led by Sources Chrétiennes – HiSoMA in Lyon. It is mainly funded by the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), to which most of the team members belong. It has received additional funding from the Rhône-Alpes Region (2006), the French National Research Agency (2011-2015), the Digital Scientific Library (2015-2016), the Association des Amis de Sources Chrétiennes and the Montcheuil Foundation (2018-2020) and from Yves Oltramare (2023). It is currently part of the Equipex Biblissima+ (2022-2029).

BiblIndex aims at building an exhaustive online index of biblical quotations and allusions in early Christian literature, both Western and Eastern texts, which is meant to eventually cover the whole of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. This is not about a binary and one-way connection between a canonical corpus and a corpus of authors quoting verbatim: more precisely, BiblIndex seeks to give a full account of the complex links existing between a corpus of biblical texts – evolving collections of books originally written in various languages and translated early in their history, while still in progress of composition – with a corpus of ancient and medieval authors, who refer to the Bible (while commenting on, meditating on, and translating it) as a fixed entity yet at the same time contribute, through their quotations and spiritual or liturgical reminiscences, to the form and concept of ‘the text’. Quotations from ancient authors show these biblical texts in the process of development and reception. Reassembling this hitherto scattered patrimonial treasure, BiblIndex aims at providing a federative tool – as objective as possible – intended for scholars and researchers, as well as for a wider audience, to help understand the acculturation process of the Bible in both the East and West, and to enhance studies in exegesis and history of the biblical text.

Access to the data is completely free.

At present, BiblIndex  consists of a comprehensive inventory of biblical quotations and allusions in early Greek and Latin Christian literature, providing bibliographical information about the edition used for each patristic work; it gives no access to the texts themselves. Each entry on the website offers a series of numbers indicating the chapter and verse of the biblical text, its location in the patristic writing and the corresponding page and line numbers in the reference edition. For example, Genesis 1:27 is quoted in Basilius, Asceticon parvum 2, 44, on page 15, line 10 of CSEL 86 (1986). Links between the Bible and the patristic texts have been found by scholars who have read them carefully and sometimes provided a comment on their selection. This data is merely the first step of BiblIndex.

The project is based on the resumption of Biblia Patristica, printed indexes of biblical quotations in the writings of Greek and Latin Church Fathers from the first centuries published by a CNRS team, the Centre for Patristics Analysis and Documentation (CADP) in Strasbourg between 1965 and 2000. The CADP entrusted Sources Chrétiennes with its database and further unpublished data, which include the following:

1. The 270,000 entries contained in the seven published volumes of Biblia Patristica, along with a supplementary volume for biblical references from Philo of Alexandria, covering the first three centuries, along with part of the fourth: the data has been verified by scholars.

Biblia Patristica, Index des citations et allusions bibliques dans la littérature patristique, Éditions du CNRS : 1. Des origines à Clément d'Alexandrie et à Tertullien , 1975 – 2. Le troisième siècle (Origène excepté), 1977 – 3. Origène, 1980 – 4. Eusèbe de Césarée, Cyrille de Jérusalem, Épiphane de Salamine, 1987 – 5. Basile de Césarée, Grégoire de Nazianze, Grégoire de Nysse, Amphiloque d'Iconium, 1991 – 6. Hilaire de Poitiers, Ambroise de Milan, Ambrosiaster, 1995 – 7. Didyme d'Alexandrie, 2000 – Supplément. Philon d'Alexandrie, 1982.

2. Around 100,000 additional references, prepared by the Centre for Patristics Analysis and Documentation for the planned 8^th volume, included in the database inherited by Sources Chrétiennes, unverified but in electronic form.  They come from the works of Athanasius of Alexandria, John Chrysostom, Theodoret of Cyr, Procopius of Gaza, Jerome, but also from Spuria and dubia related to the authors of the other published volumes.

3. Approximately 600,000 handwritten references on handwritten documents from the archive boxes entrusted. They have been fully transcribed into digital form, but have not yet been verified. Furthermore, new material has been prepared by the Sources Chrétiennes team since 2011. Since the beginning of 2023, this data has been gradually added to the database which can be accessed online.

Today (03.2024), the corpus available online is composed of the following:

1. Works of Philo of Alexandria, and all the Greek and Latin works from the first three centuries;
2. A large part of the fourth-century writers’ work, including exhaustive processing of Eusebius of Caesarea, Cyril of Jerusalem and Epiphanius of Salamis; Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa and Amphilochius of Iconium; Hilary of Poitiers, Ambrose of Milan and Ambrosiaster; and Didymus the Blind.
3. Exhaustive processing of John Chrysostom and Jerome;
4. Partial processing of Athanasius, Theodoret of Cyr, Procopius of Gaza, Cyril of Alexandria, Augustine;
5. A corpus of Byzantine hagiography from the ninth to the tenth century;
6. Partial processing of Bernard of Clairvaux, exhaustive processing of Isaac of Stella.

An exhaustive and regularly updated list of the authors and works searchable on the website is available on the "Searchable corpus" page.

The database includes biblical texts written in different ancient languages (Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Syriac) and modern languages (French, English). A multilingual concordance between Bibles has been created, allowing the user to visualize the biblical text in a synoptic presentation to compare it with the quotations found in the patristic texts. Precise correspondence between verses or part verses, allowing cross searches, were manually established by the BiblIndex team.

The database also includes a nomenclature for patristic sources, providing bibliographical information about the authors and works available in the search form. For each work, a reliable critical edition (if available) has been selected as a basis for finding a quotation.

A prototype geovisualization interface displaying chronological and geographical data on authors and works has been developed for BiblIndex by the Steamer team of the Grenoble Informatics Laboratory (LIG).

Samuel Gesche developed a stand-alone JAVA lemmatizer for biblical and patristic ancient Greek and a pre-tagging software prototype devoted to automatic retrieval of literal but inaccurate quotations of the Septuagint in an ancient Greek corpus sample, which helps the analyst to identify biblical quotations and thus find further references in the corpus.

On the 2^nd-4^th of June 2014, an international workshop took place in Lyon, co-organized by HiSoMA and the GCDH (Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities), devoted to computer-aided processing of intertextuality in ancient languages. The proceedings were published in the Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities. In partnership with the eTrap team (electronic Text Reuse Acquisition Project) of the GCDH, experimentations with Marco Büchler’s TRACER tool customised for the BiblIndex corpus have been carried out.

We aim at developing a collaborative platform for the benefit of the academic community, providing a common workspace for both biblical and patristic scholars, and constituting workgroups organized by authors or corpus. We hope that each BiblIndex website user might become a contributor.

The next stage of development, in addition to the considerable expansion of the corpus, would be to move BiblIndex from a simple and isolated reference index to that of a collaborative platform giving access, directly or indirectly, to biblical and patristic texts. In this way, two hitherto compartmentalized areas of research would be brought together: namely, the editing of the critical text of the Bible in its different versions, and the history of its reception.

In the meantime, any informational feedback or simple remarks are welcome: Please use our contact form.