A New Bibliography for 1 and 2 Corinthians

It’s easy these days to locate books and articles related to St. Paul’s letters to the Corinthians. Bibliographies have proliferated online and lists of select commentaries and introductions are a dime a dozen. See, for a few examples, the bibliographic lists compiled on Bible.org, BiblicalStudies.org (with some PDF documents), Baker publishing group, the United Methodist Church (see Part IV), and Leaven (2 Corinthians).

Here at Corinthian Matters, we’ve been slowly building our New Testament collection in the Zotero Library. During the fall, Megan Piette, a history major at my school, invested hours and hours into adding hundreds of relevant New Testament entries. She keyed all articles published in three recent works related to archaeology, history, and the New Testament: Urban Religion in Roman Corinth (2005), Corinth in Context (2010), and Corinth in Contrast (2013). More impressively, she entered all relevant Corinthiaka listed in the bibliography sections of Urban Religion in Roman Corinth and Corinth in Context. Finally, she mined the references sections of a couple of commentaries and New Testament introductions. The collection is by no means exhaustive but it is a good one that includes 526 items representing major commentaries, books, and articles. Kudos to Megan for making this happen.

Thanks to batch tagging in Zotero (see my post from Thursday), I was able to categorize all of these under the master tag .NEW TESTAMENT and create a subcollection called “New Testament”. In addition, I tagged items with keywords such as “commentary”, “1 Corinthians” and “2 Corinthians”. So, if you want to find recent commentaries on 1 and 2 Corinthians, just select the two tags “.NEW TESTAMENT” and “commentary”. The search pulls up 33 items.

I also tagged articles and books that deal with specific chapters in 1 and 2 Corinthians. So if you’re interested in relevant material on 1 Corinthians Chapter 13 (the famous love chapter), simply select the tag “_1 Cor. 13”. This is a critical component of the library because the search feature of Zotero does not work as well — since articles and abstracts use different ways of referencing the texts, e.g., “I Corinthans XIII”, “1 Cor. 13”, “First Corinthians Chapter Thirteen” etc…

Note that this tag does not pull in entire commentaries on 1 Corinthians, which obviously have something to say on that chapter.

There are lots of holes in this bibliography, and we need another round of thorough tagging, but this is a start to providing a useful bibliographic collection related to the Corinthian correspondence and St. Paul’s Corinth. We’ll keep building the Zotero Library until some better online tool takes its place.

I invite readers with a background in New Testament studies to comment below on other accessible online bibliographic resources that can guide an interested person in locating relevant books and articles. If you have articles and books that you believe should be included, you may send them to me here.