# Biblindex: An Index of Biblical Quotations in Early Christian Literature

Laurence Mellerin

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## To cite this version:

Laurence Mellerin. Biblindex: An Index of Biblical Quotations in Early Christian Literature. The Harp. A Review of Syriac and Oriental Ecumenical Studies, 2021, 37, pp.449-510. halshs-04188713

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THE HARP

A Review of Syriac, Oriental and Ecumenical Studies

Volume : XXXVII 2021

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St. Ephrem Ecumenical Research Institute (SEERI)

Baker Hill, Kottayam - 686 001, Kerala, India

2021
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THE HARP

A Review of Syriac, Oriental and Ecumenical Studies

© 2018 SEERI Publications, Kottayam
All Rights reserved

Published by
St. Ephrem Ecumenical Research Institute
(SEERI)

Edited by
Jacob Thekeparampil
Baby Varghese
Raju P. J.

With the Assistance of
Metropolitan Mar Aprem, Assad Sauma, Sebastian P. Brock,
J.P. Deschler, F.B. Chatonnet, A. Desreumaux, R.Y. Ebied,
D. Taylor, T.C. Falla, K.M. George, W. Hage, A. Harrak,
F. Cassingena, K.H. Kuhlmann, H. Teule, K. McVey,
A. Badwi, A. Schmidt, H. Suermann, M. Tamcke, J. Tubach,
L. Van Rompey, J.W. Watt, D. Winkler, Jiffy F. Mekkattukulam,
Cornelia B. Horn, Muriel Debié, Shabo Talay

Printed in India
Composed, laid out and Printed by :
Bethany Press, Kalathipady, Kottayam, Kerala, India.

All correspondences relating to the Review may be addressed to:
The Editor, The Harp, SEERI, Baker Hill,
Kottayam.686001, Kerala, India.
Telephones : 0481-2560856
E-mail: seerikottayam@gmail.com
Website: www.seeri.in

Price Rs. 500/-

## Contents

07. Editorial

09. 20th Century Metropolitans' Contributions to the Syriac Language and Literature based on Church of the East in India

*Mar Yohannan Yoseph*

31. Personal Names in the Acts of Thomas

*Jürgen Tubach*

67. Syriac Christianity in Iran and South India: Fifth to Eleventh Centuries

*Baby Varghese*

109. The Eschatological Vision of the East Syrian Qurbana

*Francis Pittappillil*

123. The End of the Syrian Orphange (German Oriental Mission Johannes Lepsius) in Dilgusha (Urmia)

*Martin Tamcke*

135. **Parole de L'Orient** Revue annuelle

*P. Joseph Obeid*

141. The Patriarch of Tur‘Abdin‘Aziz Bar SobtoAbu’l-Ma‘ani*
The sources about his life, his literary work and some first philological data from the manuscript tradition

*Roberto Bertozzi*
161. St. Paul the Apostle in the Syriac Fathers
    -Raju P. J.

175. The Persian Crosses of South India from the Point of view
    of an Ignoramus
    -Bruno POIZAT

213. A Syriac poem in Praise of SEERI and its Director
    Fr. Dr. Jacob Thekeparambil
    -Assad Sauma

233. The Syriac Language and The Church in India
    -P. S. John

243. In Memoriam
    -George Mathew Kuttiyil
    -Jacob Thekeparampil

251. The Feast of Pentecost in the Syro-Malabar Church
    -Thomas Mannooramparampil

299. Textual Study of the Christological Doctrines in the Three
    *Anaphorae* attributed to Jacob of Sarug
    -Vibin Bernad

329. A boʻuto of Mar Jacob on Contrition
    -Alain J. Desreumaux

339. Concerning the Question of Our Lord and Concerning the
    Revelation Simon Received from the Father
    -Daniel L. McConaughy &
    Jacob Thekeparampil

357. From Devotion to Polemics: Cult of the Old Testament
    Saints and Anti-Judaistic Polemics in the Syrian Orthodox
    Liturgy
    -Baby Varghese

377. The rise of a Christian identity in a Pagan Empire: the
    Christians of the Sasanian Period (3rd - 7th centuries)
    -Simon Brelaud

421. Holy Baptism in the Syriac East According to Anonymous
    Author
    -Lonappan Arangassery

453. The Early Syriac Manuscripts of *Sedre* in the British Library
    and Comparing a *Sedro* in the Mosul Fenqitho with Early
    Syriac Manuscripts
    -Stephen Plathottam

499. Biblindex: An Index of Biblical Quotations in Early Christian
    Literature
    -Laurence Mellerin

511. Book Reviews
    -Fr. Abraham Thomas
    -Fr. Dr. Jacob Thekeparampil

517. SEERI News
# Biblindex: An Index of Biblical Quotations in Early Christian Literature<fnref n="1" />

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

<footnote n="1">¹ https://biblindex.org.</footnote>
patrimonial treasure, BibINDEX 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.

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). It is currently part of the Equipex Biblissima+ (2022-2029).

Access to the data is completely free.

**Nothing but references**

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 available corpus**

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 8th 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. These data are not yet available online.

Furthermore, new material has been prepared by the Sources Chrétiennes team since 2011.

Today, 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**.

4. Partial processing of **Athanasius, Jerome, Theodoret of Cyr, and Procopius of Gaza**.

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

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>Distribution of occurrences by date and by corpus</figcaption></figure>

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Planned enlargement of the corpus

A special effort is planned to integrate the huge field of Eastern Christianity, and first of all Syriac, hitherto unexplored for biblical quotations. Syriac texts' relationship with the Bible is indeed very interesting because of the linguistic proximity between Hebrew and Syriac. Listing their quotations will enable significant progress to identify or reconstitute the origin of the versions: regarding the Old Testament, the Jewish targums and the New Testament, on the one hand, the *Diatessaron*, and on the other hand, the *Old Syriac* – Curetonian or
Sinaitic – or finally the *Peshitta* of the 4th century, which
can be compared to the Latin *Vulgate*. The ten volumes
of translation from Syriac in the Sources Chrétiennes
series, with their biblical indexes, constitute a starting
point, to be broadened, especially with ΕΦΗΡΜ's work
published in the *Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum
Orientalium*. The Syriac sources after the 5th century also
play a very important role as evidence of Greek works,
sometimes lost in their original language (e.g. *SEVERUS
OF ANTIOCH and THEODORE OF MOPSUESTIA*)<fnref n="2" />.

External resources will be added in the process of
being analysed, e.g. the quotations found in BERNARD OF
CLAIRVAUX' works (around 35,000 references); a
partnership is being considered with the Faculty of
Theology of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki<fnref n="3" />: it
has developed, thanks to a large team having worked for
more than 30 years under the direction of professors S.
Sakkos and P. Koutlemanis, a scriptural index, now
available in digital form, of approximately 350,000
references, covering the whole of Migne's *Greek*

*Patrology*; its current manager, Pr. Athanasios Paparnakis, has agreed to make it accessible via BIBLINDEX<fnref n="4" />. Another partnership is being intended with the PAVONe project (Platform of the Arabic Versions of the New Testament) of the University of Balamand (Lebanon), which lists not only all the Arabic manuscripts of the New Testament, but also the citations of the New Testament found in lectionaries and other Christian and Muslim literature of the first millennium. In addition, the scriptural indexes of the Sources Chrétiennes series not yet taken into account by the CADP will be added, initially the recent volumes whose indexes will only require a technical revision. In the longer term, links to other databases will be considered, opening up to other cultural and religious areas: Judaism<fnref n="5" />, Samaritan texts, and Islam.

The architecture is fully modelled, and much of the
data is already ready for import. Making them available

<footnote n="2">² The article of L. VAN ROMPAY, “Between the School and the Monk’s Cell : The Syriac Old Testament Commentary Tradition”, in B. T. H. ROMENY (ed.), *The Peshitta: Its Use in Literature and Liturgy*. Papers Read at the Third Peshitta Symposium, Brill, Leyde 2006, p. 27-51, gives a list of works for which processing is planned.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ See A. PAPARNAKIS, C. DOMOUCHTSIS, “Digital Greek Patristic Catena (DGPC). A brief Presentation”, in M. BÜCHLER, L. MELLERIN (ed.), *Computer-aided Processing of Intertextuality in Ancient Languages, Journal on Data Mining and Digital Humanities*, special issue, 2017.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ About 200,000 references do not duplicate the content of BIBLINDEX.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ We have heard of a number of similar initiatives for the Jewish texts of the Second Temple period and the rabbinical period: At Brown University, Michael L. Satlow has dealt with the Babylonian Talmud. In Vienna, a project was carried out on the Second Temple, but the page that hosted it seems no longer to exist. At Saint-Louis University, Matthew Thiessen started a *Biblia iudaica* project in 2013, after collecting around 12,000 quotes from the book of *Genesis* in texts from the Second Temple and from the rabbinical era. In addition, the database of rabbinical texts of the University of Bar-Ilan (Responsa Project) spotted and lemmatized a large part of the biblical quotations. The project “*The Greek Bible in Byzantine Judaism*”</footnote>
online as quickly as possible and then being able to easily
add new data are priority objectives. Unfortunately, for
years, the weakness of the technical means made available
to the project, due to insufficient funding, has slowed
down the IT development. Various searches for external
funding are in progress.

Biblical tools: Bible's parser

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.

Patristics tools: inventory of authors and works

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).

at King's College in London aims to collect textual traces of
the use of Greek biblical translations by Jews in the Byzantine
era and to provide an online corpus.

Research about text re-use

Given the scope of the work to be done to achieve
completeness and data homogeneity, obviously the ten or
so members of the Sources Chrétiennes team are
insufficient. Two directions are being explored to speed
up the process.

Firstly, the establishment of a collaborative work
platform, where each BIBLINDEX user and specialist in a
text or a field could, over the course of his/her requests,
participate in improving the data, by suggesting
corrections via a controlled validation system. Any
researcher preparing a text edition could also, in the
course of his/her work, help improve existing records or
provide new data. The models of this platform are ready
and awaiting funding to realize.

Secondly, we aim to apply to patristic works
techniques for the semi-automatic detection of
intertextuality. These quotation search assistance tools
are intended to intervene upstream of the work of patristic
and biblical scholars, to provide the latter with a pre-
marked version of the text to be analysed.

In 2013, a postdoctorate was carried out at the LIRIS
lab by Samuel Gesche<fnref n="6" />. A precise and up-to-date survey
of the field of lemmatization in ancient languages was
first established: a great deal of work is indeed underway
at various institutes. BibIndex can rely on
morphologically lemmatized versions of Greek and Latin
biblical texts; the work on Syriac texts could be done in
collaboration with the EEP project Talstra Center for Bible
and Computer (VU Amsterdam). Insofar as a detailed

<footnote n="6">⁶ See S. GESCHE, S., E. EGYED-ZSIGMOND, S. CALABRETTO, “References and Citations in Ancient Greek Documents”, 2017.</footnote>
knowledge of the linguistic system of each ancient
language is required to prepare the lemmatization tools<fnref n="7" />,
the work was carried out in close collaboration between
the computer scientists and the patristic researchers. A
lemmatizer specific to patristic ancient Greek, still to be
perfected, has been prepared. Moreover, based on a sample
lemmatized corpus (CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA, *Quis dives
salvetur* and the complete works of PHILO OF ALEXANDRIA
on the patristic side; the lemmatized text of the Septuagint
and Greek New Testament on the biblical side), a
configurable quotation detection tool has been developed.
It is currently only effective when the compared texts have
at least one common lemma. Maria Moritz (Institute of
Computer Science, University of Göttingen) resumed this
work in 2016 on the same test corpus, augmented by
samples of texts by Bernard de Clairvaux, which resulted
in a publication in 2016⁸. The use of the TRACER
software, developed by Marco Büchler in the e-TRAP
(electronic Text Reuse Acquisition Project) research
group in Göttingen, also makes it possible to identify a
number of paraphrastic allusions. It will still be necessary
to provide much training data so that the performance of
the software on the patristic texts is sufficient. We also
plan to work on semantic fields, by creating vast and

multilingual dictionaries of synonyms. The International Workshop on Computer Aided Processing of Intertextuality in Ancient Languages, organized in Lyon as a concluding conference of the ANR Biblindex in 2014, has clearly shown how promising this research field is: it brought together representatives of a large number of European projects working on intertextuality in ancient literature. The proceedings of this meeting were broadened, to give birth to a special issue of the Journal on Data Mining and Digital Humanities (JDMDH), published in 2017.

## The results visualization

Another project concerns the visualization of the quotations identified, both upstream in the interfaces used by analysts – a great deal of work has already been carried out by LIRIS for the parallel scrolling visualization of biblical and patristic texts – and downstream in those consulted by internet users – basic query forms, results forms that must allow multiple sorting, etc<fnref n="9" />. Very precise mock-ups have been produced for all of these interfaces, which are also waiting for funding to be implemented.

More specifically, the Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble (LIG) prepared models and a prototype of multidimensional interfaces¹⁰ to allow visualizations of chronological-geographical requests. To account for the characteristics of the information in terms of quality

<footnote n="7">⁷ In particular, the connection of the forms or lemmas listed with the places and contexts of their occurrences; the removal of ambiguities during lemmatization.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ M. MORITZ, A. WIEDERHOLD, B. PAVLEK, Y. BIZZONI, M. BÜCHLER, “Non-Literal Text Reuse in Historical Texts: An Approach to Identify Reuse Transformations and its Application to Bible Reuse”, in *Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing*, Austin, Texas, November 1-5, 2016, p.1849–1859.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ The site's search form has been completely redesigned: the corpus may be entered through a chosen Bible and verse numbering; the result form allows to see the biblical text corresponding to the request, and perform various operations on the data obtained, which the current form unfortunately does not allow.</footnote>
(uncertainty, incompleteness or imprecision) and density, by means of an adapted graphic and cartographic semiology, while taking into account the diversity of profiles of the end users, was very challenging. Ultimately, it will be possible to select sets of scriptural quotations that form thematic constellations, by geographical area and for a given period. The selection of zones or periods will be made by means of visual queries (clicking on a map or on a timeline using a cursor). These functionalities will bring out processes of distribution or dissemination of biblical texts that are difficult to perceive through a simple textual interface: which canon, which text, was received, at a certain time, in Antioch, in North Africa, etc.?

Interdisciplinarity is therefore at the heart of the BIBLINDEX project and requires a large number of specialists from various fields. In our HiSoMA laboratory, the focus is on the preparation of biblical and patristic texts for the subsequent phases of their visualizations.

Laurence Mellerin,
Sources Chretiennes, CNRS, Lyon
E-mail: laurence.mellerin@mom.fr

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ The design and production of this interface are based on the GenGHIS environment, generator of spatio-temporal data visualization applications, initially developed to report on historical information dedicated to natural hazards. You can formulate visual requests and consult the results through several windows, all interconnected and synchronized: a cartographic window is dedicated to the spatial part, a timeline represents the time dimension, and an information (or attribute) window displays details of each entity contained in the information system.</footnote>