Ante Nicene Fathers Greek-English

[Dave Hindley]

Hello,

I recently updated to BW8 , and perhaps my blood sugar is too low, but I cannot seem to find any searchable texts of Early Church Fathers such as Irenaeus or Tertullian. It seems that these were available in BW6.

Now I am aware that the Early Church Fathers series "edited by Schaff" (actually, he only edited the Post Nicene volumes, Donaldson & Roberts edited the Ante Nicene volumes) is in a kind of module from CCEL, but it is not the same.

What's up??

PS: Why hasn't anyone created modules with the Greek & Latin texts of these Church fathers? It seems that these sorts of things are available online, so licensing surely is not out of the question. What I wouldn't give to search Irenaeus, Tertullian, Eusebius, Origen, Clement of Alexandria, etc, in English, Greek & Latin through BibleWorks!

Dave

[Michael Hanel]

Hello,

I recently updated to BW8 , and perhaps my blood sugar is too low, but I cannot seem to find any searchable texts of Early Church Fathers such as Irenaeus or Tertullian. It seems that these were available in BW6.

Now I am aware that the Early Church Fathers series "edited by Schaff" (actually, he only edited the Post Nicene volumes, Donaldson & Roberts edited the Ante Nicene volumes) is in a kind of module from CCEL, but it is not the same.

What's up??

PS: Why hasn't anyone created modules with the Greek & Latin texts of these Church fathers? It seems that these sorts of things are available online, so licensing surely is not out of the question. What I wouldn't give to search Irenaeus, Tertullian, Eusebius, Origen, Clement of Alexandria, etc, in English, Greek & Latin through BibleWorks!

Dave

There is an English module like that on the BibleWorks blog (look under Church Fathers). Is that what you meant? That's the only thing I'm aware of. A few of us started that project but quit it after we learned that the Church Fathers would be available in another form.

As far as adding the Greek and Latin texts, by all means I would love it. I'm even willing to do it. But here's what you need to do, find versions of these Fathers and post the links here. What I have found so far is that where versions do exist, they are still copyrighted (and thus cannot be used freely) or they are in a form that is too difficult to convert. But I would love to be corrected. Show me some of the stuff you're talking about.

[Kimba]

I might help with a project like this. For fun I once wrote a program that read the entire NT (from BW) placed every word in the database in unicode than I cut and pasted an unaccented Greek text and let my tool covert it to the accented. Yes, not every word converted but the vast majority did and all those that did had to be processed and then the text was accented.

The other issues that has to be dealt with are those words that are the same but different accenting. But those can be tagged and processed by a someone.

[Michael Hanel]

It would be a fun (but difficult) project indeed. But like I said, the problem is that the available texts (that I've found) really aren't all that available. You can use some of them on the free version of the TLG, but you can't use their versions because they hold the copyright on the digitizing of the texts. You can find PDFs of Migne texts but a) those texts are ancient and hardly ever the best critical text available and b) it's a nightmare to try to OCR or type from the quality of PDFs that are available. And if I'm going to go blind, I'd like to do it using a quality text. And there are at least a couple of sites that provide PDF of the Migne text in nice Greek, but generally they seem to indicate that the text they are providing is that of TLG, not their own.

One could use Roger Pearse's website to get Tertullian made into a proper Latin version, but I must admit, because its Tertullian, I've never really been that excited to start such a project.

So that's why I said, I would be glad to learn where texts are available that can be freely used!

[bink]

Michael,

All these user-created versions under the BW Blog- are they found in BW8 or 9 or extra's we can add to our database for use? In other words, the many you've seemed to post/list there yourself... are they offered b/c we don't have them in the BW program?

I've added a few (Homer, Demosthenes, etc) at least for the experience of trying and learning how to do this. Or this Pearse file 'Other Early Church Father's'... already in BW8 and I just haven't got to it yet?

Thanks, John

[Michael Hanel]

Bink, in general the files on the BibleWorks blog are not found in any of the versions of BibleWorks. There are exceptions to this, but we try to identify them. For instance offering Tregelles in BW9 is an exception to this. So you wouldn't need that if you're using BW9. We haven't deleted files that are included in BW generally because not all people will upgrade and the user files are meant for users whether or not they make it into a BW package.

[Dave Hindley]

There is an English module like that on the BibleWorks blog (look under Church Fathers). Is that what you meant? That's the only thing I'm aware of. A few of us started that project but quit it after we learned that the Church Fathers would be available in another form.

As far as adding the Greek and Latin texts, by all means I would love it. I'm even willing to do it. But here's what you need to do, find versions of these Fathers and post the links here. What I have found so far is that where versions do exist, they are still copyrighted (and thus cannot be used freely) or they are in a form that is too difficult to convert. But I would love to be corrected. Show me some of the stuff you're talking about.

Michael,

I would recommend contacting Ben C Smith, who has ferreted out a good number of unicode Greek texts of various fathers for his "Text Excavation" webpage. His contact info is at www.textexcavation.com.

For instance, Eusebius' Church History is available in Unicode Greek here:

http://users.uoa.gr/~nektar/orthodox...a_historia.htm

The Unicode Greek of Eusebius' Church History, Preparation and Demonstration are all available at a French language site, here. Ben also seems to have figured out how to convert various fonts into unicode.

Irenaeus' Against Heresies is both Latin and Greek Fragments in W Wigan Harvey's Sancti Irenaei episcopi Lugdunensis Libros quinque adversus haereses (2 volumes). Unfortunately it is in image format only, but it seems that at very least the Latin, and perhaps even the Greek, can be scanned using something like ABBYY FineReader 10.

Vol 1 Vol 2

Hope this helps. A lot of the newer unicode resources have appeared in the last 3 years or so.

Dave Hindley

[Michael Hanel]

See I'm glad I asked because I didn't know about those sites. It seems like there are only two real issues. 1) Figuring out what the source is of the text on those sites and 2) getting permission to use the texts from them. While I do have a French reading knowledge, I certainly don't know any Russian, so contacting these people is a bit difficult. One could use them and simply "trust" that they are okay, but that really hasn't been how we've done things in the past. We generally assume things are not legit until we know different. It might be possible that we make exception and try this stuff out, but there are two things to keep in mind, a) we don't want to get BibleWorks as a company dragged through the mud because of copyright violations (even though these are user-projects) and b) we don't personally want to get ourselves dragged through the mud either, because that's not a lot of fun.

So, I'll look into this stuff, but no promises on my end. But I'm definitely glad you pointed them out. I was not aware there was so much stuff out there!

[Michael Hanel]

I've been able to make a lot more progress at this now and there is actually a version of the Church Fathers that includes Greek, Latin and English versions. It doesn't have all the texts you might want, but it's a start!

You can see it all on the unofficial BibleWorks blog.

[bink]

I've been able to make a lot more progress at this now and there is actually a version of the Church Fathers that includes Greek, Latin and English versions. It doesn't have all the texts you might want, but it's a start!

You can see it all on the unofficial BibleWorks blog.

Michael,

Are the following instructions (listed below) good/valid for downloading "Versions" such as your works on Plato, Homer, Julius Caesar, etc? I tried to copy these files to my data base (as I somehow, miraculously, did successfully for Eusebius EH) but it says these files are 'already present... want to copy, replace?'. When I go to copy/paste this the date for Plato shows "2006" but I can't find it when I open BW8. ? Is the AN-F database or many of these files I have in BW8 already? 1 step forward, 2 back. Sorry I'm a novice at all this.

john

1. Unzip the files to the \databases\ subfolder in your BibleWorks folder and restart BibleWorks. The new versions will use the version IDs CF-G for the Greek version, CF-L for the Latin version, and CF-E for the English translations.


2. In order to get the book names to show up correctly you must also add any of the missing lines to your books.bna file (which is found in the BibleWorks subfolder called \init\ and can be opened with a simple text editor like Notepad)