When we released the 16th edition of the Theological Journal Library last fall, I described it as “800 Years of Scholarship in the Palm of Your Hand” (I recommend that post to you as a good summary of the benefit of adding journals to your Accordance Library). And yet some of you have been waiting patiently for a missing century or so of that scholarship. Fortunately, we can finally announce that the full Bibliotheca Sacra Archive has now been added to TJL 16. If you have already purchased this journal collection, all you have to do is to go to Easy Install in Accordance to download the additional volumes dating all the way back to 1844!
Many may not realize that Bibliotheca Sacra is the oldest theological journal in the United States, and it is still being produced today. “It was founded at Union Theological Seminary in 1843, and after publishing three issues moved to Andover Theological Seminary (now Andover Newton Theological School) in 1844, to Oberlin College in 1884, and to Xenia Seminary in 1922. Dallas Theological Seminary (then the Evangelical Theological Seminary) took over publication in 1934” (source: Wikipedia).
The opening paragraph of the inaugural February, 1844, issue of Bibliotheca Sacra stated that the journal would be published quarterly, each volume would consist of 800 pages, and the cost would be $4/year, “payable in advance” (the price has gone up since!). The next paragraph outlines the scope of the journal:
It will embrace the subjects, which are included under Theology in the wider acceptation of that term, namely, Biblical Literature, Doctrinal Theology, and the History of the Church, including that of the principal doctrines of Christianity. Particular prominence will be given to Biblical Literature, in respect to which there is a large and constantly increasing amount of valuable materials. Certain collateral subjects will receive a share of attention, particularly classical philology and mental science.
A couple of years ago, my wife gave me a digital version of National Geographic–every issue of the magazine, going all the way back to 1888. I found it fascinating to read articles about people and geography from the previous two centuries–even if some of that information is out of date now. I found the same fascination with some of the articles from the earliest days of Bibliotheca Sacra. I admit that sometimes I can be biased towards more recent scholarship, but going through the oldest issues in the BibSac archives reminded me that there is no expiration date on competent insight into theology and biblical literature.
Accordance users have always recognized the benefit of having all volumes of a particular journal title together in one file. This makes for easy searching in a specific journal across thousands of articles. Of course, putting nearly 170 years’ worth of articles together would make for one extremely large file and test the limits of computers with less memory installed. Therefore, we have divided the Bibliotheca Sacra Archive into two files: 1844-1880 and 1881-1933. And of course, the TJL 16 also includes issues from 1934-2012, which was already available. See the TIP at the end of this post for searching all BibSac volumes at once.
The Bibliotheca Sacra Archives has been thoroughly examined and tagged by our developers so that you can perform searches by the following specific fields: Titles, English Content, Scripture, Greek Content, Hebrew Content, Transliteration, Manuscripts, Arabic Content, Authors and Page Numbers.
Again, if you have already purchased the Theological Journal Library, 16th edition, you can simply launch Easy Install to download the BibSac archives. If not, you can purchase or upgrade to the complete set of journal titles.
Tip: If you want to search across all 168 years of Bibliotheca Sacra, create a Research Group with all three BibSac Accordance modules
