Later Church Fathers in original languages

[Jon Stovell]

Currently Accordance offers the Apostlic Fathers in Greek, and the full set of the ANF and NFPF series in English, but not the original language versions of everything that ANF and NFPF translate. I would love to be able to see, for example, the works of Gregory of Nyssa in Greek or Hilary of Poitiers in Latin alongside the English translations.

[Helen Brown]

We are slowly adding the Greek texts: so far we have the Apocryphal Gospels, Christian Apologists, and part of Eusebius. This is a massive undertaking.

[Marco V. Fabbri]

Jon, I have found that I sometimes wanted to read those fathers in Greek, too.

 

The process of tagging the Greek texts is a very long one, as the texts themselves are massive (Gregory of Nyssa or John Chrysostom are good examples of that).

 

There is a workaround that I use. If you have legal access to TLG, then you can import texts from TLG into Accordance. The result will be a user module, that is, a module made by the user thanks to an in-built feature of Accordance, that automates the process. The legal side of this is that you will be permitted to use the module as long as you renew the subscription to TLG.

 

To trigger the process you will need first to purchase the "TLG import feature unlock". See http://www.accordancebible.com/store/details/?pid=TLG

 

This will give you an untagged module. There is no way Accordance could know that an inflected form belongs to a certain Greek word as found in a dictionary entry.

 

However, if you already have the English translation you would have a good shot at the Greek text you want to read.

 

I have done this for years and I am very satisfied. When a new tagged text is released, I find that in most case I had already imported it from TLG beforehand.

 

Unfortunately, there is no way to do the same with Latin texts. However, they are more easily available on the internet, as they are plain Latin text.

[RobM]

Are there any plans to add the writings of any of the Syrian Fathers (e.g., Ephrem and Aphrahat) could be added (and their texts in Syriac)??? It would be great to have Ephrem's commentaries on Genesis and Exodus as a verse-by-verse module.

[Helen Brown]

There is a workaround that I use. If you have legal access to TLG, then you can import texts from TLG into Accordance.

This import feature requires legal access to the old TLG CD-ROM which is no longer supported by TLG. It does not work with the internet access to these texts. However, Accordance does now allow you to import Unicode texts with Greek or Hebrew and will convert them automatically into our fonts. Therefore you can copy the results of your searches of the online TLG into an Accordance user tool.

 

I absolutely agree that the work of preparing and tagging texts is a massive undertaking. It needs a lot of time from expert scholars, and time usually = money. The more obscure the texts, the less the demand for them. We have to weigh a lot of factors before we embark on these projects.