After some delay, I have finally finished the digitization of The Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus, which can be found here.  It is a fascinating liturgical and ecclesiastical piece written at a time when the church still felt fierce persecution and the spiritual gifts were believed to still be active.  It seems to have been, roughly, assembled into the form we have today around 200-230 AD by someone or a body of people associated with the Roman Church.  It is disupuated about whether Hippolytus himself had a hand in creating it, but I believe he did.  Much credit is due to Roger Pease whose own method of presenting digitization projects I have copied.

I learned some lessons through this project:

* Never digitize a document with old optical character recognition software
* Digitizing other languages is hard
* Digitizing other languages that are written in non-latin characters is even harder
* Digitizing footnotes is hard
* Digitizing sidenotes is even harder

Here is one of the many passages in The Apostolic Tradition that made me pause:

If a catechumen should be arrested for the name of the Lord, let him not hesitate about bearing his testi­mony; for if it should happen that they treat him shame­fully and kill him, he will be justified, for he has been baptized in his own blood. -The Apostolic Tradition 19

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 1st, 2009 at 11:43 am and is filed under Digitization, Hippolytus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.