For those of you who read Latin, Greek, Dutch, German, French, etc., do you ever read entire primary texts of historical theology in the original language? or do you read in translation except when doing close textual analysis of a passage? If the former, where can one acquire, for example, a copy of the Latin text of the institutes or full volumes of the early fathers in Latin and Greek?

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Davidius
Husband of Emilia
Member: First Reformed Presbyterian Church of Durham (RPCNA) - Durham, NC
Student: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, German Literature and Classics

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Almost all of the early church fathers are available in the Migne edition on books.google.com

Also available on that site (just recently put up) is the Latin edition of Turretin's Institutes. The Latin original of Benedict Pictet, and many other scholastics is also available. That site plans on having every single book in the common domain available in the next seven years, approximately.

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Rev. Lane Keister
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I'm not familiar with the names of these collections like "Migne." Could you give me a more direct link from books.google.com?

Migne is the definitive critical edition of the early church fathers. It was done in the 19th century. Go to books.google.com, click on advanced book search, click on "full view," and type in "patrologiae," and the first five things you see are all from the Migne set. Once you click on one of those, there is an option entitled "other editions," which are actually other volumes in the series. So, keep nosing around there, and you will find many, many jewels. Happy hunting.

Some diligent and nice person needs to compile an index of the Migne volumes with direct links to each.

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Chris Coldwell
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When heresy rises in an evangelical body, it is never frank and open. It always begins by skulking, and assuming a disguise. Its advocates, when together, boast of great improvements, and congratulate one another on having gone greatly beyond the ‘old dead orthodoxy,’ and on having left behind many of its antiquated errors: but when taxed with deviations from the received faith, they complain of the unreasonableness of their accusers, as they ‘differ from it only in words.’ This has been the standing course of errorists ever since the apostolic age. Samuel Miller, Introductory essay, The Articles of the Synod of Dort (1841).

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OH, good grief, Chris! Did you have anyone in mind?

David,

The short answer is "yes and no." It depends on what the purpose is or whether a translation exists. The ideal way to read any text is to read it in the original language. Surely if one is going to do academic work and make definitive claims about it, one must read it in the original.

There are good English translations of many texts, but there are also poor or less than optimal translations of texts. The only way to know with certainty is to compare the translation with the original.

For less than academic purposes, yes, I read English translations.

That said, we don't require our MA (HT) students to learn Latin, though many do so anyway and increasingly they seem to want to do their research in Latin texts -- which is very encouraging. We just had a student do ground-breaking work on P. van Mastricht, mainly out of hitherto untranslated Latin texts. Another student is working on Gratian manuscipts and learning how to read MS manuscripts and doing textual criticism. That's a little more esoteric than the work most of our students are doing, however. Most of our MDiv students don't take Latin.

Of the Institutes, the modern critical edition is the Battles edn, but Muller prefers the Allen (18th c.) and there are advantages to the Beveridge. For citation purposes, however, the Battles edn is to be used.

The critical Latin edn is in vols 1-3 of the Opera selecta. This is available in most academic libraries or via ILL or via ABE et al. Scholars also cite the ediiton in the Corpus Reformatorum, esp. for the earlier editions. There is a 19th century Latin text, ed. Tholuck, which one might find used, but it's been supersceded by the Opera Selecta.

rsc

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R. Scott Clark, D.Phil
Associate Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology

"For Christ, His Gospel, and His Church"
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mmmh. No; but someone who knows thier way around Google books and knows all about Migne? Maybe? ...

I provided links concerning Migne and the index of his works on Google recently:

For a direct link to the index, see here.

I've also provided links to Wilhelmus a'Brakel's The Christian's Reasonable Service in Dutch (see here), Gisbertus Voetius' Tractatus Selecti de Politica Ecclesiastica in Latin (see here or here for Lane's helpful post on his Selectarum Disputationum), J.A. Bengel's Gnomon Novi Testamenti in Latin and English (see here), Petrus Dathenus' Psalter in Dutch (see here), Jean Crespin's Histoire des Martyrs in French (see here), Benedict Pictet's Theologia Christiana in Latin (see here), and William Ames' Theologiæ medullæ in Latin (see here), among other works.

Also see here for portions of the Corpus Reformatorum at Google Books.

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Andrew Myers
Husband of Jessica, Father of Jackson, Katie and Samuel
Member, Presbyterian Reformed Church of Northern Virginia
Warrenton, VA USA
Editor, The Matthew Poole Project

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Thanks to everyone for the insight and links.

Here's another for you, David.

Francis Turretin's four volumes of works including the 3-volume Institutes and 1-volume Disputationes (in Latin, the latter of which has not been translated into English, as far as I know -- see this thread):

Institutes, Vol. 1
Institutes, Vol. 2
Institutes, Vol. 3
Disputationes

Also,

Philip Melanchthon, Die Loci Communes (in German)

Dr. Clark (or other Latin scholar),

If someone wanted to begin learning Latin for reading Reformation era documents, what grammars, texts, or language learning resources would you recommend?

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Dennis E. McFadden, Ex Mainline Baptist (in Remission)
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First Baptist Church of Alhambra, Member, Transformation Ministries (CA)

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More reading for anyone who might be interested:

Johannes a Marck, Christianæ theologiæ medulla (in Latin)
Franciscus Junius, Opuscula Selecta (in Latin, edited by Abraham Kuyper, including Junius' Theses Theologicae)
Johann Friedrich Stapfter, Institutiones Theologiae Polemicae (in Latin)
William Ames, Bellarminus enervatus (in Latin)
Pierre Du Moulin, Bouclier de la foi (in French)

You can't go wrong with Wheelock's Latin.

Actually, I believe that Collins's ecclesiastical Latin book is the best for reading this period of Latin. Wheelock is more geared towards classical Latin. Ecclesiastical is rather different. I absolutely loved Collins's book, even though he is a papist, and every other sentence has the word "pope" in it. It is a book that can be used in self study extremely well.

I use Collins for Latin I and II. I also recommend Stelten's dictionary of ecclesiastical latin.

rsc

For those who are interested, here is (I think) the first Reformed systematic theology ever written: Le sommaire by William Farel (en français).

Thanks Andrew. That made my day. I'm always looking for things like this.

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R.Vic Bottomly
Providence Reformed Baptist Church, Tacoma, WA

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Sorry for this being slightly off the original topic.

If you want to learn or brush up on latin/greek via self study there are currently active online groups at ...

The LatinStudy List

The groups work through a chapter in either one or two weeks depending on the group. You turn in your translations for the exercises and are given back a collation with all the group members answers for each item. You can use this to help check yourself. You can also ask questions. There is a greek group that is half way through Mounce's Basic's of Biblical Greek. There are also a wheelocks latin group that is only on the 3rd chapter and a Collin's Latin group that is on unit 6 or so. So if you are motivated you can catch up to either of those.

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Kenneth Murphy
Covenant of Grace Church - Member
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