Since 2018, doctoral students and students of the master’s degree in theology and patristic sciences of the Catholic University of Lyon, as well as researchers from the Institut des Sources Chrétiennes and the Faculty of Theology of the UCLy, have been meeting four or five times a year, under the scientific responsibility of Guillaume Bady and Laurence Mellerin, to study the patristic reception of the book of Ecclesiastes in detail.
In 2013, a colloquium on this theme, the proceedings of which have been published –La réception du livre de Qohélet (Ier-XIIIe s.), Paris: Cerf, 2016-, laid the foundations for this work, giving the overall delimitations of the corpus of interpretations and the major orientations of the exegesis.
From now on, the research will be carried out in a systematic way, by analysing all the occurrences of each verse in Greek, Latin and Syriac patristic literature, identified by cross-referencing the large textual databases at our disposal (Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, Library of Latin Texts, etc.) and by exploring the scriptural indexes of published texts. Our objective is twofold: to contribute to the annotation of the BEST, for the sections concerning the Christian reception of the Scriptures; to enrich the database of the BiblIndex, project, an exhaustive index of biblical quotations and allusions in the patristic literature of antiquity and the Middle Ages. This work, essentially collaborative, gives rise to the translation of numerous texts, not yet available in French, and allows for a very rich confrontation between the approaches of different linguistic areas. The very first verses of Ecclesiastes, particularly commented on, have kept us busy for a long time; we have now reached the end of the first chapter.
The first results of the seminar on Qo 1:1 can be consulted online, duly inserted as notes on Christian Tradition in the work in progress of the BEST team, led for this book by Jean Jacques Lavoie and fr. Paul Marie fidèle Chango.
In addition, a collaborative translation of the Syriac version of the Book of the Bible is underway, directed by Jean Reynard.
The collaboration between the BiblIndex and BEST projects, which is natural given the proximity of their objectives, is bound to increase in the coming years.
Within the framework of the Equipex Biblissima+ (2021-2028), of which BiblIndex is now an integral part, systematic links between the sites will be implemented, with the aim of creating a genuine ecosystem of resources on the transmission of written heritage, particularly biblical heritage.
