The Most Ambitious Book Project of 2018: Patrologia Graeca

Perhaps the most exciting and ambitious project of 2018 is the end-of-year release of Part 1 of the Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca on December 26, 2018. We talked to both Rick Brannan, the profoundly-expertised-Greek-guru-resident-scholar-guy at Faithlife/Logos, and Kyle Anderson, Content Production Manager at Faithlife, about the process of getting these volumes into a searchable format previously unrealized (his actual title is Information Architect and Team Manager, Content Innovation). There is a fascinating story here concerning the intersection of ancient texts with the Internet, and the importance of making significant works both utilitarian and delightful to end users.

The Patrologia Graeca is “the largest collection ever published of the extant writings of the ante-Nicene Greek Fathers of the Early Church,” the same series upon which Philip Schaff based his translation work for Early Church Fathers. To fully grasp the significance of this monumental work, and see the ancient authors included, you need to read this.

These first 18 volumes (out of a massive 167!) will be made available on the Logos digital library on the day after Christmas, but you can still get in on the pre-order price of $399.99 before December 26, 2018.


TB: Hi Rick, thanks for talking with us about PG. Has a project of this magnitude this ever been attempted by anyone before Logos?

RB: The Thesaurus Lingua Graecae has pretty much every extant Greek author we know of, so it has PG plus scads more of classical stuff (well, minus all the Latin descriptive text found in PG). Five or so years ago, someone essentially bootlegged the PG Greek portions from TLG, reformatted them as PDF, and put them online. They’ve been pretty much excised from the web by the TLG folks. Also, there are “attempts.” One vendor has indexed page scans for years allowing navigation of the scans by author, page, and column, though with Google Books and archive.org, I’m unsure if his product is still viable. The site Documenta Catholica Omnia has done something similar. Also there is an effort to OCR the entire corpus with accuracy at an acceptable level and release the result as open source/open data (see here: https://github.com/OGL-PatrologiaGraecaDev ).

Patrologia Graeca (PG) has always been a unique project because it is huge. It is also important because for several of the works included in the series, it was the last time a Greek text of a work was published. Now, there have been attempts to publish digital editions of PG, but apart from Thesaurus Lingua Graecae (a product targeted at universities and libraries but which only encodes Greek and skips all of the introductory text, which is in Latin), all of the attempts have been facsimile based. That is, they are still just pictures of the page (PDF). One vendor, years ago, had page scans indexed to volume, page, and column, which made looking up citations easy. But it still wasn’t searchable. And, with the advent of archive sites like archive.org and Google Books, a simple facsimile version at least made the pages available, but did not make them searchable. The Logos edition aims to change this.

TB: If the PG is so important, why did it take Logos so long to attempt it themselves?

KA: The long and short answer is that it’s really expensive. At an average of 1000 pages per volume, it was simply a massive amount of material to recreate, especially when one considers having to key each of them twice and then do quality checks on all the pages.

TB: Could you describe the process of creating the volumes?

KA: Each PDF was assigned to two different teams and each team digitized it by the same process–hand keying the resource, no OCRs (software that scans PDFs and images for individual characters, to convert the characters into searchable, editable text) were used—and created two different files. The files are then compared through software to find any discrepancies between the two, fixed accordingly, and merged. The benefits of the double key strategy is minimization of errors as it doubles the accuracy.

TB: What challenges or limitations did the Logos teams face in producing the PG?

KA: The greatest challenge was in the source files themselves; they are extremely rough. There is a reason why this has never been attempted. The PDFs were created from old books which can result in letters that are unclear or illegible. Unless one is fluent in Latin or Greek it can be difficult to get the correct letters.

It is very important to mention that the PG is very much a work in progress and active reporting of words we got wrong in the keying of the resources is actively encouraged, that together we can make these amazing. We sincerely welcome typo reports and suggestions for improvement. The benefits of a digital medium is that mistakes can be fixed easily.


Get the 18-volume PG: Part 1 before the price increases after the pre-order.

Also note that the entire 167-volume Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Graeca is currently being bid on. This potentially means that you can get the entire collection at an incredibly low price, as a way of saying “thank you” for helping to fund this incredible resource to publication.

Get yourself a real digital library.

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Written by
Tavis Bohlinger

Dr. Tavis Bohlinger is Editor-in-Chief of the Logos Academic Blog and Creative Director at Reformation Heritage Books. He holds a PhD from Durham University and writes across multiple genres, including academia, poetry, and screenwriting. He lives in Grand Rapids with his wife and three children.

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16 comments
  • I have dug into this resource for years from pdf copies and found unique material that scholars are not using. It takes some knowledge of Greek get rough translations, but some of these comments are priceless. I cite PG throughout my commentary series “Study Notes on the Holy Scriptures” to support to authorship, date and place of writing, etc., of the book of the Bible. They are worth their cost.

  • I think it would be wonderful to have a digital edition of the PG available, though of course it would be best if it could be freely available in a non-proprietary format on the web. But if you do make this available as part of Logos, you should indicate where there are later and better editions that should be consulted and where later scholarship has indicated a more accurate authorship attribution. Both the Patrologies are magnificent monuments of scholarship, but of 19th-century scholarship, which means that they are sometimes wrong.

  • I bid on the entire 167-volume Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Graeca in 2012. Does this mean I can’t take advantage of the first 18 volumes published until the entire work is completed?

    • Hi Roderick, good question. You would have to buy the 18-volumes separately to access them now. If you do that, however, then you would receive dynamic pricing on the entire set when complete. Dynamic pricing means your eventual cost for the entire set would be offset by whatever you paid for the 18 volumes. Hope that makes sense.

      • Thanks so much for your reply. However; the successful bid for the entire 167 volume set that I made in December of 2012 was for $250.00! How would I possibly recoup, through dynamic pricing, any money by ordering the first 18 volumes now for even the preorder price of $399.95? Am I missing something here? Or does it boil down to the fact that the downside of getting the entire 167 volumes for the bargain price of $250 is not being able to use them until the entire set is ready, months or years after my Johnny-come-lately colleagues have been using the earlier releases (at higher prices)? Forgive me please, if I’m misunderstanding, but I thought that by bidding on these resources years ago, we were helping bring them closer to production. If that’s the case, does it seem right that we cannot take advantage of the resources AS they come to production without buying them all over again at 15 times our original bid? I’m puzzled.

  • As far as I’m concerned this set is the Holy Grail of biblical studies. When I made my bid for the complete set on December 111, 2012, I seriously doubted it would ever make it into production. I am so thrilled that Faithlife has gotten behind this! I can see its value as a sales tool to seminaries and academic institutions, though. Go Faithlife! It is the reason I decided to go with Verbum Portfolio in “8”.. I am so happy to finally have access to this work. It is well done. Keep ’em coming! Thanks again. A loyal customer since Logos 3.2.

  • Tavis Bohlinger, I have read with interest the interchange between you and Roderick Graciano. His bid situation and questions are also mine. I have active bids, which I placed years ago, on PG, PL and the Syriac etc. series. Since your full reply is not available to us who are viewing this site, could you please also send me the information that you sent to Roderick at the email address included in this comment transmission. Thank-you very much. It is an important question.

Written by Tavis Bohlinger
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