Announcing An Open Bibliography in Corinthian and New Testament Studies

An Open Bibliography in Corinthian and New Testament Studies

First a word on the Corinthian Studies library general. The most up to date bibliography for Corinthian Studies runs to 2,758 individual items and covers subjects from deep prehistory to the modern era. You can find other useful bibliographic lists of Corinthian Studies online, but you won’t find a more comprehensive and searchable open library than this one. You can access the bibliography in two ways:

1. On the web at the Corinthian Studies Group Library hosted at Zotero.org. Simply search the library as a whole, or search the collections within the library by keyword. This only requires that you visit the Corinthian Studies group library and search or browse through the collections.
2. As a downloadable RIS file, which can be imported into a bibliographic program such as Zotero, EndNote, or Reference Manager.

If you ask me, you should download and and install a reference managing program such as Zotero. Using software to mine the bibliography offers much more powerful and complex search capabilities than the web version. For an introduction to Zotero and further details about the Corinthian Studies bibliography, see this page. Zotero is free and easy to use. Try it.
The collected bibliography includes nearly a thosand entries related to ancient Christianity, Judaism, and New Testament Studies. As I noted a couple of years ago, there are plenty of select bibliographic lists floating about related to the Pauline mission, or the study of 1 and 2 Corinthians, but this collection has a number of key strengths that you will not find elsewhere. Some highlights for someone interested in understanding  scholarship on, say, some passage in 1 Corinthians (much of this applies to other subjects as well, of course):

• Free. It is completely free and open to public use, not locked inside a pay-to-use database.
• Comprehensive. The bibliography aims to be comprehensive. It includes articles and books from Urban Religion in Roman Corinth (2005), Corinth in Context (2010), and Corinth in Contrast (2013). It includes all relevant Corinthian studies material listed in the bibliography of Urban Religion in Roman Corinth, Corinth in Context, Corinth Volume XX, and Bridge of the Untiring Sea. And it includes works listed in a number of commentaries on 1 and 2 Corinthians, and relevant material from JSTOR and WorldCat searches (see this page for more information about coverage).
• Current. The coverage from 2010-2016 is especially good, and thereby offers up-to-date views of what scholars are saying today about Corinth and the New Testament situation.
• Open. Many of the entries include links to articles, books, and material that are partly or fully accessible online through journal websites, Google Books, Internet Archive, or Academia. Abstracts are included when available.
• Browsable. The library is divided into three main collections (I. Archaeology and History, II. New Testament, Judaism, and Early Christianity, and III. Geology) and tagged accordingly (.ARCHAEOLOGY AND HISTORY or .CHRISTIANITY & JUDAISM or .GEOLOGY). These show up as the first three tags in the Tags area to the lower left of the Zotero Library (expand the tags if you don’t see them). An item may belong to multiple categories. You can also view the most recent material from 2015 by looking at the individual folders.
• Searchable.  The collection is tagged with keywords such as “Roman,” “1 Corinthians”, and “2 Corinthians”. Much of the New Testament material is also tagged by chapter, e.g.,  “_1 Cor. 13”. This is especially useful f you are looking for some discussion of an enigmatic passage in 1 Corinthians of a recent discussion of the love chapter.
• Variety.  The collection includes articles, books, PhD theses, and sermons

The bibliography is a work in progress. There are holes and inaccuracies and the entire collection needs better tagging. But it does provide a good place to start.
And it’s worth noting that the bibliography has been created largely through my own labor, and student help funded through work studies positions at Messiah College. If you’re interested in improving the quality of the collection, I’d be glad to have your help or support.