Methodological Issues in Biblindex, An Online Index of Biblical Quotations in Early Christian Literature

Résumé En

Biblindex, http://www.biblindex.org, is a new online tool for patristic studies developed mainly by Sources Chrétiennes in Lyon (France): it is an index of biblical references found in Christian literature, both Western and Eastern texts, at present covering the three first centuries, along with part of the fourth. The eventual goal is to cover the whole Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, in order to renew the study of the interpretation and history of biblical texts.Biblindex seeks to link: a corpus of Bibles, collections of scriptural books which were originally written in the various languages of the Ancient East and translated early in their history. Quotations in ancient authors show these texts in the process of development; a corpus of ancient and medieval authors, who refer to the Bible as a fixed entity yet at the same time contribute through their quotations to the form and concept of ‘the text’.Following a presentation of the first stages of this project, started in the sixties, and a presentation of the data available, this paper discusses methodological issues regarding the analysis of new works from scratch, considering first the nature of a Father’s Bible and then describing the way of selecting and characterising a reference to this Bible in a patristic text. These include how to define the difference between allusion and quotation, how to distinguish and typify the Church Fathers’ ways of introducing and changing the biblical texts or how to decide where a quotation begins and where it ends. Through a few case studies, the solutions offered by Biblindex are presented and submitted for discussion.