Research Guides: Religious Studies: Christianity in Late Antiquity

Find materials in our library

In our Catalog Advanced Search, select Subject from the drop down menu and search on terms such as

“30-600”
early church ca. 30-600
church history -- primitive and early church -- ca. 30-600
church history -- primitive and early church -- approximately 30-600
christian literature, early -- history and criticism
fathers of the church

Or search for particular persons / figures, authors or titles of works. You can also keyword search with terms like

(christian OR christianity) AND (antique OR antiquity)

Catalog Advanced Search

Find specialized literature

To find specialized literature, search the following databases

ATLA with ATLASerials (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window
A collection of major religion and theology journals selected by some of the major religion scholars in the United States.
New Testament Abstracts (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window
The database is an indispensable research and bibliographic aid for scholars, librarians, clergy and students of the New Testament and its historical milieu, containing article, review, book and software abstracts.

Index Religiosus
Internationally renowned bibliography of academic publications in the fields of theology, religious sciences, and Church history. It is a gateway to books and articles written in major European languages (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, etc.)
Bibliographic Information Base in Patristics (BIBP)
Bibliographic Information Base in Patristics is a documentary system in patristics. Even if patristic literature remains its major preoccupation, the BIBP works on all disciplines studying patristic Christianity. Until now, the priority is given to the current information from the scientific journals
L'Année Philologique: Bibliography of the Classical World
Specialized bibliographic database of scholarly works relating to all aspects of Ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, including: Greek and Latin literature and linguistics (which includes early Christian texts and patristics), Greek and Roman history, art, archaeology, philosophy, religion, mythology, music, science, and scholarly sub-specialties such as numismatics, papyrology, and epigraphy

For a broader search across article and book length literature, try Library Articles Search

Library Articles Search

Scholarly Societies and Initiatives

North American Patristics Society (NAPS)
International Association of Patristic Studies (AIEP IAPS)
North American Society for Christian Arabic Studies
Academic Centers and Institutes
List from the Center for the Study of Early Christianity at The Catholic University of America
Michigan Center for Early Christian Studies (U-M)

Resources from The North American Patristics Society (NAPS)

Resources from the North American Patristics Society (NAPS)
"Resources is an ever-growing collection of web content useful for the study of Early Christianity. You can notify the NAPS secretary if you have additional online resources that may be of interest to NAPS members." Sort by tag from the drop-down menu in the header.
Other Resources & Guides (NAPS)

Select Journals & Series

Journals

Series

As well as many other series from Brepols and Peeters

Reference Works

Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity
Clavis patrum Graecorum
Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies
Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Apocrypha
Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Biblical Interpretation
The Cambridge History of Christianity
Especially v1 Origins to Constantine -- v2 Constantine to c. 600
Routledge Companion to Early Christian Thought

Brill Encyclopedia of Early Christianity Online This link opens in a new window
Resource focused on the of history early Christian texts, authors, and ideas, bridging New Testament studies and Patristics.

Church History : An Introduction to Research Methods and Resources (Bradley & Muller)

Encyclopedia of Christianity This link opens in a new window
Standard reference for the study of Christianity past and present.

Oxford Handbook of Origen
Guide to Evagrius Ponticus (ed Joel Kalvesmaki)
The Guide provides definitive lists of Evagrius's works, of editions and translations of those works, and of studies related to his life and thought. It includes an inventory of key ancient sources that refer to Evagrius and a display of imagery from the ancient world. The Guide is updated quarterly.
Syriaca.org The Syriac Reference Portal
Digital project for the study of Syriac literature, culture, and history. primary function of Syriaca.org is to be a reference hub for digitally linking research findings. Syriaca.org's publications compile and classify core data for the study of Syriac sources, offer the scholarly community digital tools for freely disseminating that data, and facilitate further research through the creation of shared digital tools and infrastructure
Syriac Orthodox Resources
Overview of church history and practice with bibliography.
Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage: Electronic Edition
e-GEDSH is an electronic version of the 2011 edition of the Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage, published by Gorgias Press on behalf of the Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute. e-GEDSH is the result of the collaborative efforts of many scholars. The encyclopedia currently holds 622 entries written by 76 contributors. This digital edition is implemented on the Srophé App platform using TEI XML, eXist-db, and linked open data technologies.
e-Clavis: Christian Apocrypha
"e-Clavis: Christian Apocrypha (ECCA) is a comprehensive bibliography of Christian Apocrypha research assembled and maintained by members of the North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature (NASSCAL). Entries for each text include a detailed description (a summary, the various titles used in scholarship, clavis numbers, and identification of related literature), an inventory of manuscript sources (with online images where available), an extensive bibliography (including online resources), and information about the text’s use in iconography and popular culture."

Print Bibliographies

Text Collections / Corpora

Patrologia Orientalis Database (POD)
Corpus of patristic texts from the Christian East published in the Patrologia Orientalis series available online
more...less...
The Patrologia Orientalis Database (POD) is a collection of patristic texts from the Christian East, including works, recorded in non-Latin languages (i.e. Greek, Coptic, Syriac, Arabic, Ethiopic, Armenian, Georgian), that come from geographical, cultural, or religious contexts somehow linked to Rome or the Eastern Roman Empire.

Patrologia Latina Database (Chadwyck-Healey version) This link opens in a new window
Contains 221 volumes of early Christian (patristic) writings in their original Latin.

Coptic SCRIPTORIUM
Platform for interdisciplinary and computational research in texts in the Coptic language, particularly the Sahidic dialect.
Digital Edition of the Coptic Old Testament
The Digital Edition of the Coptic Old Testament is a long-term project at the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities. It fills a huge lacuna, as no modern edition of the Bible in Coptic exists. The project aims to provide a complete documentation of the manuscript evidence, digital editions of all OT manuscripts, critical editions of all OT books, corpus-linguistic analyses and translations into English, German and Arabic.
Digital Syriac Corpus
Curated digital repository of TEI encoded texts written in classical Syriac.
Sinai Manuscripts Digital Library
"The Sinai Manuscripts Digital Library is a publication of St. Catherine’s Monastery of the Sinai, Egypt, in collaboration with the UCLA Library and Early Manuscripts Electronic Library (EMEL). It hosts online the results of the Sinai Library Digitization Project, a ten-year collaborative effort to digitize the unparalleled manuscript library of St. Catherine’s Monastery."
The Migration of Faith: Clerical Exile in Late Antiquity (325-c.600)
Database on exiled clerics in late antiquity, exploring their legal circumstances, experiences, social connections, spatial worlds and memory.
The Online Critical Pseudepigrapha
The mandate of the Online Critical Pseudepigrapha is to develop and publish electronic editions of the best critical texts of the "Old Testament" Pseudepigrapha and related literature.
Bibliotheca Religiosa IntraText
Religious texts from the IntraText project, a "Full-text Digital Library offering books and corpora as lexical hypertexts on Creative Commons License"
Fourth-Century Christianity
site promoting and storing research tools and texts for the study of the Church and its environment in the Fourth Century. Provides reliable reference materials, texts and translations

Loeb Classical Library This link opens in a new window
250 ancient Greek and Latin authors in original language and in English translation.
Translated Texts for Historians E-Library This link opens in a new window
English translations of key historical sources from the time of late antiquity and the early middle ages.

Early Jewish Writings (Peter Kirby)
"...Jewish documents from antiquity with translations, introductions, and links." Source of many public domain texts of the Tanakh, Deuterocanon, Pseudepigrapha, Philo and Josephus
Early Christian Writings (Peter Kirby)
"...collection of Christian texts before the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. The site provides translations and commentary for these sources, including the New Testament, Apocrypha, Gnostics, Church Fathers, and some non-Christian references."
vHMML
vHMML makes abundant use of high-resolution images of manuscripts from libraries around the world, many of them digitized as part of Hill Museum & Manuscript Library’s mission to preserve and share important, endangered, and inaccessible manuscript collections through digital photography, archiving, and cataloging.