Library Resources
St. Anthony is building a set of online resources and tools for current students, instructors, and alumni to use in their studies, whether for the ministry or for personal and professional spiritual enrichment. It provides no guarantees for third-party resources. Resources will be added continuously.
Various Language Text, Primary Source Sites (for research and reading)
This digital library is the work of William Carey and contains Latin texts only claimed to be in the public domain. Texts range from Christian, medieval, and ancient.
Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL)
CCEL is a digital library of hundreds of classic Christian books selected for edification, education, and study. It contains out-of-date and expired copyrighted English translations of early Church fathers, including apologetic, commentaries, and theological works. Search by titles, author, genre, language, etc. The works can be searched by title, author, language, genre, topic, and format. CCEL texts are stored in our own Theological Markup Language, which is an XML application. Texts are converted automatically into other formats such as HTML or PDF, which can be read online or downloaded. Two collections worth visiting:
-
Early Jewish Writings: English translations (dated) of TaNaK (Old Testament), Deuterocanonical, Pseudepigrapha (not all Jewish), Philo of Alexandria (philosopher), Flavius Josephus (historian), and Talmud (introduction and links to tractates)
-
Early Christian Writings: English translations (dated) of early Christian writings (not all Christian) from first four centuries, including New Testament, Gnostic, Apostolic Fathers, Gnostic, Church Fathers, apocryphal/pseudepigraphical works.
Since 1985, Perseus, affiliated with Tufts University, has collected original language texts and translations related to the history, literature, and culture of the Greco-Roman world. It includes a searchable database.
Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft Academic Online-Bibles
The German Bible Society offers free online access to the following biblical texts:
-
Hebrew text of the Old Testament (Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia)
-
Greek text of the New Testament (Novum Testamentum Graece, NA28 and USB5)
-
Greek text of the Old Testament or Septuagint (eds. Rahlfs/ Hanhart)
-
Latin text of the Vulgate (eds. Weber/Gryson)
-
In addition, the site also provides the texts for the German translation (Luther Bible rev. 1894), English King James translation, and English Standard Version (ESV).
A website that provides online access to the biblical text and study tools in many languages, including commentaries, lexicons and concordances, atlases, encyclopedias, and more.
Inscriptions: Inscriptiones Christianae Graecae
A digital collections of Greek and early Christian inscriptions in Asia Minor and Greece from the second to fourth centuries CE. The database has more than 4,200 inscriptions. Here is an introduction. To open the database, use this link.
This website created by the Israel Museum contains an overview of the project to digitize the Dead Sea Scrolls and contains digital copies of some of the larger scrolls: Great Isaiah Scroll, Temple Scroll, War Scroll, Commentary on Habbakuk, and the Community Rule scroll.
Digital Library Sites
Online Seminary Library
Seminary Bookshelf (Subscription)
The Seminary Bookshelf is a subscription-based digital library boasting 1.3 million e-books from the last 25 years with 125,000 published within the last five years. The collection was created by a group of 70 seminaries and curated by religious professionals. Some of the holdings are available in open access on other sites through links in the Seminary Bookshelf. The monthly subscription is $10 after the seven-day free trial.
Open Access Journals
Religions is an international, interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed, open access journal on religions and theology, published monthly online by MDPI.
Particularly Jewish Sites
The Ancient Jew Review (AJR) is a subscription-free digital journal devoted to the study of Ancient Judaism. AJR incorporates peer-reviewed scholarship, including academic articles, essays on new research and trends, pedagogical methods and materials, and reviews of recent
publications from a wide range of fields, including Roman history, Persian history, biblical studies, ancient Christianity, rabbinic Judaism, and the Second Temple.
Torah.com is an academic website, featuring original essays on the Torah and holidays from more than 450 scholars whose expertise includes history, archaeology, ancient Near Eastern studies, Egyptology, Semitic languages, textual criticism, and literary approaches. Essays can be searched by author and topic. Torah.com is the leading educational platform for Torah (Pentateuch) study informed by contemporary scholarship and the flagship website of Project Torah and Biblical Scholarship, a nonprofit educational enterprise founded in 2012 to provide accessible academic scholarship of Judaism’s sacred texts. The project also publishes TheGemara.com, a site for accessible academic scholarship on the Talmud.
General Academic and Reference Sites
This free site offers digital access to 23 million articles and papers. More than 161 million academics and researchers. To access the material, you will need to create an account.
The Ancient World Online (AWOL) is an open access site founded by Charles E. Jones, Pattee Library librarian for Classics and Humanities at Penn State University. The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but it also includes other kinds of networked information as it becomes available. For example, the site also offers extensive alphabetical listings of open access journals; monograph series; and language textbooks, open educational resources, and primers in ancient studies.
This digital library was founded in 1999 by the Very Rev. Dr. Robert S. Munday and contains hundreds of English languages works, including dictionaries, general encyclopedias, and specialized encyclopedias.
Google Books is a service from Google that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition, and stored in its digital database through careful consideration of and respect for copyright law globally.
Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines.
The Wright Library at Princeton Theological Seminary is temporarily offering links from publishers to academic content, online teaching resources, and content addressing the coronavirus pandemic. The resources are listed alphabetically and include open access to numerous collections, texts, artwork, and more.
Named after the famed printer, Johannes Gutenberg, who introduced the printing press to Europe, this online library offers visitors free access to more 60,000 e-books and articles, including some useful for research. The site’s search engine allows one to browse the catalogue by author, title, subject, language, type, popularity, and more categories; by subject alphabetically (see “Bookshelves”); and by books frequently downloaded. Unfortunately, Project Gutenberg has blocked German visitors from accessing the site due to copyright issues.
ResearchGate is a professional network of scientists and researchers. More
than 20 million worldwide members share, discover, and discuss research. The site is free and allows visitors to search by subject area and keywords (e.g., Gospel of John) to locate specific researchers, projects, and publications that might be helpful to one’s research areas and efforts. Note: an academic e-mail (usually with appropriate academic suffix, such as .edu) is usually required to establish a free account.
Theological Sites
Open Access Digital Theological Library
This free site offers digital access to 198,000+ books, 10 million articles, 6,200+ journals, and more.
Biblical Studies Sites
ATLA Website on Religion (WOR)
The ATLA WOR library guide website offers bibliographies, journals, liturgies, reference resources, software, texts, and websites for the study of religion. Information is classified by five categories: world religions; sacred text; intersections between religious and important topics, such as capital punishment; teaching/learning; and collecting/connecting (development of the guide). Of particular interest might be the sacred text subpage on biblical literature, which offers resources for general biblical literature, the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and cognate literature. This subpage is available at https://atla.libguides.com/WOR/biblical-literature.
The website offers free theological resources in three areas: full-texted rare and out- of-print books, monographs, and articles; detailed bibliographies for each book of the Bible for seminary level students and ministers; and a cross-linked repository for seven theological websites known as the “Theology on the Web.” More details and links in each area are available on the website.
Biblical Studies Online is an informational website that provides both biblical scholars and the interested public open access to quality biblical scholarship as it comes available online. The predominate media featured on the site include video and sound recordings and hyperlinks to free New Testament and free Old Testament materials. The site makes it easy for visitors to distinguish worthwhile scholarly material from online resources that might be inaccurate or even misleading. To search for online Biblical Studies resources, visitors can click on a category in which they are interested or use the search-box in the column on the right side of the site. Visitors can register to follow this blog and to receive notifications of new posts via e-mail.
The website includes open access (OA) articles of past editions of two important technical exegetical publications: Biblica and Filología Neotestamentaria. Biblica is a research journal that appears four times a year and is dedicated to biblical studies on the Old and New Testament,
intertestamental literature, and fields of research, such as exegesis, philology, and history. The articles date from 1998-2016 (vols. 79-97). Filología Neotestamentaria is a collection of journals that deals with every aspect of New Testament Greek philology, namely textual criticism,
grammar, semantics, lexicography and eventually semiotics and its relationship with Classical or Hellenistic Greek. The OA articles date from 1994-2013 (vols. 7-26).
Bible Odyssey is a website devoted to bridging the literary gap between the religious and academic study of the Bible and its history. It was created by the member scholars of the Society of Biblical Literature, the oldest and largest society devoted to the critical study of the Bible. It provides articles that share the latest biblical and literary research on key people, places, passages of the Bible, making it convenient for those searching for foundational, referred material. In addition, it offers these resources for basic research and teaching: audio, image, map, timeline, and video galleries; bibliographies; important translations, and a glossary of terms. The site’s listing can also be browsed from A-Z.
Torrey’s Resource Pages for Biblical Studies
The website offers links to collections of resources in three general areas: texts and translations related to the Bible, especially to the New Testament; sources and studies related to the social world of the New Testament; and studies related to Philo of Alexandria. Visitors will find a plethora of resources, ranging from the traditional, such as links to gnostic and Qumranic texts, to post-modern, such as post-colonial studies of the New Testament. According to its own description, the website is “intended as a resource for serious, scholarly studies of early Christian writings and their social world.” It is compiled and owned by Torrey Seland, professor emeritus and former dean of studies at the School of Mission and Theology in Norway.
Oxford Biblical Studies Online
Oxford Biblical Studies Online offers thousands of reference articles and resources collected from Oxford University Press’s print publications and more. Some items are accessible online for free, others require an individual or institutional subscription. Note especially the “Tools and Resources” button on the right of the navigational bar for a listing of important items: see especially the Internet resources, thematic guides, commentary guides, interviews, and reference works.
Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) Central is a research platform that allows visitors to search and identify the content of scholarly books, book reviews, conference papers (abstracts), and journal articles (abstracts). Visitors to the site can search by subject, content (see previous listing above), meeting (annual and international), and year. They can then use the information to obtain the content through individual scholars, publishers, libraries, library services, and institutions of higher education.
Each November from 1971 through 2003 the Society of Biblical Literature published a collection of papers that would be presented in the sessions (or seminars) at that year’s Annual Meeting: the SBL Seminar Papers. The contents of the collection were determined not by theme or topic but by which papers were submitted to SBL early enough to be assembled into a volume and printed for distribution at the Annual Meeting.
Over the thirty-three years of the Seminar Papers’ existence, SBL published forty-one physical volumes (two volumes each for 1971–1975, 1978–1979, and 1998) containing 1,126 papers that filled 19,849 pages. Nearly 20 years after the last volume was published, SBL is happy to announce that all 1,126 papers have been digitized and are openly available for anyone to read online or download. All forty-one volumes can be accessed as a part of the Pitts Theology Library Digital Collections.
Dissertations, Theses
ProQuest is a collection of databases that provide access to thousands of journals, magazines, newspapers, dissertations, and other publications. Some of the publications, esp., dissertations, are open access (full text). Other databases provide previews, abstracts, and publication details only. The site provides a quick and convenient way for researchers and faculty to search and find publications pertaining to a research subject or identified text.
EThOS is the UK’s national thesis service which aims to maximize the visibility and availability of the UK’s doctoral research theses. The site features about 500,000 records relating to theses awarded by 120 institutions. About 260,000 of these also provide open access to the full text thesis, either via download from the EThOS database or via links to the institution’s own repository. Of the remaining 220,000 records dating back to at least 1800, three quarters are available to be ordered for scanning through the EThOS digitization-on-demand facility. Users ordering a copy through digitization on demand might experience a turnaround time of up to six weeks. There may also be a charge for the scanning process. Details are provided in each record. Every month the site adds about 3,000 new records and 2,000 full text theses become accessible. The site’s search engine allows for easy access to hundreds of theses (based on a search of the phrase “Gospel of John”).
Textual Criticism
TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism
TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism is a peer-reviewed electronic open access journal dedicated to study of the Jewish and Christian biblical texts. The site offers full-length scholarly articles, shorter notes, project reports, and timely reviews of works/books in the field of biblical textual criticism. Articles on any aspect of the textual criticism of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures (including extracanonical and related literature) are featured on the site and contributions that transcend the traditional boundary between Hebrew Bible and New Testament textual criticism are encouraged. Articles discussing the relationship between textual criticism and other disciplines are also offered through the online publication.
Podcasts
This website provides podcasts about the New Testament and Christian origins by Mark Goodacre, Frances Hill Fox Professor of Religious Studies, Duke University. He offers condensed comments and interviews from an academic perspective for everyone interested in historical approaches to the New Testament.
This site by Ian Mills and Laura Robinson, former graduates of Duke University offers episodes that review influential works of New Testament scholarship.