Early Church Fathers update posted!

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by tfjern

Does anyone know or can take a guess regarding this question: how does the new BWW 8.0 "edition" of ECF compare with the one offered by www.logos.com (a company notorious for typos) and the online one at www.ccel.org/fathers.html (2nd Ed.)?

We now have three ECFs to choose from, and it would be nice to know which of the three has the fewest errors (through scanning, OCR-ing, etc.). Just curious.

---

I would expect - I do not have access to it - that the Logos edition is formatted and content coded in a strict way, also behind the scenes. It should integrate nicely with all the other Logos resources. This requires quite a lot of work. Whether this is worth the price for it, each potential buyer has to decide for himself. If you need to search for Greek and Hebrew words, then perhaps the Logos edition is necessary? Then again, if you really want to work with the Greek and Hebrew, then you would have to use the critical original language editions anyway, wouldn't you?

The CCEL edition is fine, but it does not integrate in BibleWorks or Logos. If you have purchased BibleWorks, then ECF is available for free. The Logos edition is $250, 2/3 of the price for the whole BW8 package. Amazing! :)

I really couldn't say which edition has the fewest errors. But having spent a lot of time with it lately, I can tell you a bit about it.

The BW edition is licensed from CCEL. The original text was provided to CCEL from Logos. CCEL performed two or three proofs on the content after they received it from Logos. (Perhaps Logos performed further proofs on their own after they provided the files to CCEL, I don't know.) We converted the CCEL text to our format. We corrected a number of errors, though the CCEL files are in pretty good shape.

One major difference between the CCEL and our text concerns Scripture references. In the CCEL files, if there are multiple refs together, only the first one is tagged as a Scripture ref. We tagged every one of the refs contained within their original tags.

One benefit to the CCEL files that we did not include in our files is the linking to the page images of the printed ECF. We tried to include everything else contained in the printed text, except for the index. The various indexes didn't seem to be as important in an electronic work as they are in a printed work.

We also included all of the footnotes and page numbers. (I think I heard of at least one electronic edition of the ECF that does not contain the footnotes and might not have the page numbers, but I don't remember what edition that was.)

I found in my conversion work that there are numerous errors in the printed text, as well. In a work this large there will certainly be errors. If you are doing scholarly work in a key passage, you will want to consult the printed edition and check to be sure that it is accurate, as well. Of course, at that level you would want to look at the critical editions of the original language text (not Migne's edition, if a critical edition is available).

There are still errors in the ECF. I expect that on a work this large, there will always be errors in it. But the text looks pretty good. It is certainly very usable. Most typos will be easily seen as typos, so that isn't a concern. For all except the highest-level academic uses, I expect that the electronic edition of the ECF will be an excellent choice.

I expect that each of the ECF versions would be very useful, though I can't comment on the accuracy of any of them except for what I worked on. It really comes down to what works best for you.