Thursday, March 25, 2010

Catena on Jonah almost done

I am just about finished with the catena on Jonah, all I need to do is revise it with a commentary that I am getting in, which is the commentary by Haimo of Auxerre. The catena already has extracts from about 20 different Fathers of the Church. There are complete commentaries on Jonah that I made good use of, that is from St. Jerome, St. Cyril of Alexandria, Theodoret of Cyrus, and Theodore of Mopsuestia. I found 7 great extracts from St. John Chrysostom that contributed very well to the project. I can't say that I favored any one commentator, they all provided extracts of equal quality to form one really good commentary on Jonah. I have never read Haimo's commentary on Jonah so I am not sure how many extracts that will come from him, but I am holding out until I get it, which it should be in tomorrow.

After I finish I plan to start back on Acts, and Ishodad of Merv's commentary should be in so I can throw it into the mix of what I already have. The Acts catena is going well, I have found some helpful quotes from Oecumenius from his commentary on Acts, but unfortunately it has not been completely translated into English, and I am only relying on others who have quoted from him and translated what they quote. I would dearly love to have access to his commentary in English, as well as the commentary by Theophylact. I am astonished that the Ancient Christian Commentary did not even asknowledge Oecumenius, Theophylact, or Ishodad of Merv's commentaries on Acts. They did not make much use of Cramer's Catena on Acts. I translated a few extracts from it, but I don't have the time nor the skill to translate the Greek in a reasonable amount of time in order to get the Acts catena done this decade. In my opinion Oecumenius is an excellent Bible commentator. His commentary on Revelation is one of the best I have read, I like it even better than St. Andrew of Caesarea.

Saturday, March 20, 2010

Bible Catena Project

I have started a new project of putting together Bible commentaries. These are catenas, that is, Bible commentaries that are made up of citations from the Church Fathers and Doctors of the Church and woven together to form a verse by verse commentary on the books of the Bible. I've done similar projects in the past, but now I am focused on making them more of running commentaries and not so much as separate excerpts like I did in the past, but to be much like the way St. Thomas did in his Catena Aurea. I have begun working on Acts and have gotten to chapter 5, but I have put it on hold until I get another commentary from Ishodad of Merv to use, it is coming in the mail and should be in in a couple of weeks or so. I am now working on Jonah and hope to have it finished by the time the Ishodad's commentary comes in.

The project has just gotten underway a month ago, but I am providing everything that I do online. The site is found here