I wanted to let everyone here know about a project I have been working on to catalogue and make more accessible translations of early Christian writings. The focus is on first and secondary century writings (excluding those contained in the New Testament as they are so readily available already) and translations into modern English that will be accessible to non-academics. Unlike earlychristianwritings.com, I am intentionally not including obviously Gnostic or pseudepigraphal writings (unless they clearly had a significant impact on early Christianity). I am also not hosting or cataloguing commentaries on these writings unless they contain translations not available elsewhere. When work on the first and second centuries is done, I hope to continue with the third century but don't intend to ever go beyond the anti-Nicene era (somewhat arbitrarily chosen for historical convenience).
To my knowledge, this is the most complete catalogue of English translations of the first and second century Christian writings available online or in print. Where possible, translations not yet available online are being hosted there. Already there are a number of translations in modern English that were not previously available that have been posted on the site. A collaborator on this project is working on good quality audio recordings of these writings in contemporary English for people who prefer to listen rather than read. We have just released 2 Clement audio and are working on Shepherd of Hermas. As possible, free ePubs are being made available for download as time allows to make them of sufficient quality (i.e. not cheap, non-proofread OCRs of book scans).
In addition to the above, the website has a list of audio recordings of early Christian writings available online and small sections for translations into German, Spanish and French. There is also a small but growing catalogue of original language publications (mostly critical texts).
The goal of the project is primarily to encourage people to read the early Christian writings for themselves for the practical reason of evaluating the Christianity of today in light of the historical record and the unapologetic goal underlying that is to encourage people to be more faithful disciples of Jesus. However, I think the site will be useful for anyone who wants to undertake an in-depth study of the covered writings.
The site is still very much a work in progress but is now useful enough that I thought I would start letting more people know about it. Everything on the site is freely available. This is an entirely non-commercial project; there is no advertising and nothing for sale so you can be confident I'm not pointing you to this to make some money. Eventually there will probably be some print-on-demand books available of public domain modern English translations but they will be offered at cost with no royalties kept back from the cost and only for books that are also available for free download.
The project is called "Early Christian Sources" and the website is http://early.xpian.info/.
It is a lot of work to try to catalogue this many translations of this many writings so I'm sure there are still plenty of errors and omissions, so please let me know if you spot any problems.
Joel
To my knowledge, this is the most complete catalogue of English translations of the first and second century Christian writings available online or in print. Where possible, translations not yet available online are being hosted there. Already there are a number of translations in modern English that were not previously available that have been posted on the site. A collaborator on this project is working on good quality audio recordings of these writings in contemporary English for people who prefer to listen rather than read. We have just released 2 Clement audio and are working on Shepherd of Hermas. As possible, free ePubs are being made available for download as time allows to make them of sufficient quality (i.e. not cheap, non-proofread OCRs of book scans).
In addition to the above, the website has a list of audio recordings of early Christian writings available online and small sections for translations into German, Spanish and French. There is also a small but growing catalogue of original language publications (mostly critical texts).
The goal of the project is primarily to encourage people to read the early Christian writings for themselves for the practical reason of evaluating the Christianity of today in light of the historical record and the unapologetic goal underlying that is to encourage people to be more faithful disciples of Jesus. However, I think the site will be useful for anyone who wants to undertake an in-depth study of the covered writings.
The site is still very much a work in progress but is now useful enough that I thought I would start letting more people know about it. Everything on the site is freely available. This is an entirely non-commercial project; there is no advertising and nothing for sale so you can be confident I'm not pointing you to this to make some money. Eventually there will probably be some print-on-demand books available of public domain modern English translations but they will be offered at cost with no royalties kept back from the cost and only for books that are also available for free download.
The project is called "Early Christian Sources" and the website is http://early.xpian.info/.
It is a lot of work to try to catalogue this many translations of this many writings so I'm sure there are still plenty of errors and omissions, so please let me know if you spot any problems.
Joel
Statistics: Posted by joelm — Wed Jan 08, 2025 10:56 am