This page has links to resources and projects I’ve compiled in an effort to organize information for my own study. I make these tools and resources available hoping others find them a useful blessing. Please contact me with with any questions, concerns, or suggestions.
Church Council Canon Search Tool (beta)
There are a few websites that publish information on the proceedings and canons of church councils. However, when I developed an interest in searching the history of canons on specific topics, I was unable to find such a tool. I first built a spreadsheet to do this and now have a prototype for a searchable table on this site. It currently has all the text from Philip Schaff’s “The Seven Ecumenical Councils,” from the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (NPNF) series. It is in the public domain and you can read it here. I hope to add other sources and translations to the online search tool as I confirm there aren’t copyright issues.
Catalog of Christian Texts
When I began to study church history and read the early church fathers, I started with the same series most others do. Philip Schaff’s classic Ante-Nicene Fathers (ANF) and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (NPNF) are public domain and easily accessible online. As I learned more, my inquisitive nature led me to research manuscript and transmission histories and to look for newer translations. Now, I look for texts far beyond what is in the Schaff series but it is often quite a challenge.
Paradoxically, I still consult the ANF and NPNF regularly but I also have stacks of other books. I invest more money on books than spend on clothes. I have links to websites, PDF’s scattered electronically, and a Logos library with more than 2,000 3,400 3,800 titles. And I still want more. Unfortunately, what sounds like a massive library is only a fraction of the texts written in two millennia. Far more texts are lost than those that survive. Relatively few are translated into English and many are under copyright and inaccessible to laypeople and amateur researchers.
It is a challenge to simply find a list of writings from a particular ancient author. Knowing which ones are translated into English and how many different translations exist, can be incredibly frustrating. In an effort to make English translations easier to locate, I built a searchable index. The index has basic details and links to all the versions I know of for each text. The catalog is a work in progress and will grow slowly, as I have time to work on it.
Logos resources: Personal Books
If you use Logos Bible Software, you may have come across the Personal Books tool. It allows you to import .docx (Word) files into your library. This is mostly useful for public domain texts and/or documents you may have written yourself. Unless you learn the syntax and tag a document, a Personal Book will not link to other resources in your library as books as do books you purchase from Logos.
The Logos website has a page where you can find a quite a few user contributed Personal Books but even between those and the extensive number of texts they have for sale, you may still occasionally come across one that isn’t available. I have a few that I am working on in order to learn the syntax and experiment. As I complete them, I’ll list them here for download.