The “Patristic Text Archive” is work-in-progress. It is primarily a tool for the project of “Alexandrian and Antiochene Bible Exegesis in Late Antiquity”. That means that the selection of texts is biased and you'll often find preliminary editions and manuscript descriptions, which are incomplete and/or have errors. But otherwise it offers anyone interested a collection of texts and translations of Christian texts from antiquity (i.e. “Patristic” is conceived in a very broad sense). At the moment the archive mainly contains Greek texts, but it is explicitly open to all languages ​​in which texts from Christian antiquity have come down to us. The archive is also a place for translations of Patristic texts into all modern languages.

In the Patristic Text Archive, all texts are published under an open Creative Commons License (CC-BY, CC-BY-SA) for use and re-use. All texts are available as XML files and are encoded in accordance with the Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange (in version P5) of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) using its own schema. Besides, all files are deposited following the CapiTainS Guidelines in order to ensure the greatest possible compatibility with other text archives. Further information is here to be found.

As far as it is not a new critical edition created in the project of “Alexandrian and Antiochene Bible Exegesis in Late Antiquity”, critical editions will be used as far as possible and, if it is legal and feasible, the text-critical information is also digitized. Where this is not possible, older and/or non-critical editions will also be made available.

Where possible, the editions in the archive also contain further annotations, such as references to the bible, to places (with links to the Pleiades Gazetteer or to the Translators Individualized Proper Names with all References list) or to persons (with links to the Translators Individualized Proper Names with all References list or the project's persons index).

Contributions to the archive are very welcome!

Patristic Textarchive. An open access archive of ancient Christian texts

published by Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The Academy research project „The Late Antique Biblical Exegesis of Alexandria and Antioch“ is part of the Academies Programme, a research funding programme co-financed by the German federal government and individual federal states. Coordinated by the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities, the Programme intends to retrieve and explore our cultural heritage, to make it accessible and highlight its relevance to the present, as well as to preserve it for future.