Friday, November 19, 2004

If I had $100 million spare...

One of the things I would do would be to sponser a full and complete modern English translation of all early Christian writings at least up to 500 AD, preferably 1000AD, and insist they be available for free on the web in addition to being sold as books.

I am absolutely sick of the difficultly in even finding out what each Father actually wrote, absolutely sick of the difficulty of tracking down Patristic works, sick of the fact that so many are not available over the web, sick of the fact that so many just don't have any english translation, and sick of the archaic language in the 19th century translations of the Nicea Fathers series.

Please, somebody, anybody, who has more money than they know what to do with, you could do a great service to scholars across the english world if you were to sponser making the writings of the Fathers available to all in English.

This rant was inspired by my discovery today that Origen (~220AD) wrote a commentary on Romans, and numerous homilies (sermons) on Romans to boot! Though I've read Origen's works in the antiquainted Nicene Father series, they never bothered to mention that a commentary on Romans existed... The only way to get a hold of the work seems to be to purchase it in two volumes at $40 US a pop... argh. In searching google on the subject it transpires that there are actually about 10 Patristics who wrote some sort of commentary on Romans... argh. Hmm, well I think there's nothing else for it, I'm just going to have to go ahead and purchase Origen commentary. As for Origen's supposed homilies on Romans, I can't track them down at all...

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