Introduction

This site is an attempt to catalog the available works on the Psalms from Christian authors who lived during the first several centuries of the church: the ante-Nicene period (ca. AD 100–325), late antiquity (325–476), and the early Middle Ages (476–799). While making no claims to be fully exhaustive, it nevertheless aims to be detailed and comprehensive. In doing so, it provides what is—at least to my knowledge—a more extensive and up to date directory of such information than any other work published in English.

Some preliminary notes on the project are in order. First, I acknowledge my indebtedness to two exceptional resources: Handbook of Patristic Exegesis: The Bible in Ancient Christianity, by Charles Kannengiesser (Leiden: Brill, 2006); and The Harp of Prophecy: Early Christian Interpretation of the Psalms, edited by Brian E. Daley and Paul R. Kolbet (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015). The bibliographies in these volumes inspired me to assemble my own catalog and provided the foundation upon which I constructed this resource.¹ Using their lists as a starting point, I substantially revised, reformatted, and corrected their work, and then added a significant number of missing entries, including recent works published after their own. Also helpful was the online resource, “The Psalms Bibliography Project," begun in 2015 by Psalms scholar Andrew C. Witt. Regrettably, the project appears to have been abandoned at some point—which is in part why I have decided to create this one.

Second, a word should be said about the scope of this project. As noted above, this bibliography is not exhaustive; indeed, a complete catalog of all early Christian works on the Psalms is impossible due to the unfortunate but inescapable reality that many of these works failed to survive the course of history. There are important commentaries that, though circulated and valued in antiquity, are accessible to us today only in fragments or in the citations of later writers (e.g., the first ever Christian commentary on Psalms by Hippolytus of Rome). Additionally, the works of numerous authors were lost to posterity after their orthodoxy was questioned or denied (e.g., Origen, Diodore of Tarsus, Theodore of Mopsuestia). Consequently, this catalog is concerned only with surviving works—whether fragmentary or fully intact. Notwithstanding this limitation, such a project remains open-ended, for the list continues to grow with the publication of new critical editions, the redesignation of formerly pseudonymous or misattributed works, and even the finding of hitherto undiscovered texts and manuscripts.² And of course, if you are aware of any sources that I missed, please do not hesitate to leave a comment on the relevant page or to email me directly.

Thirdly, a few practical matters deserve mention. Concerning the lifespan of each author, an effort has been made to provide dates agreed upon by at least two sources. Often, a figure’s date of death is well-established while their date of birth remains uncertain; thus, it is only when both dates are preceded by circa (ca.) that an individual’s lifespan is approximated. Occasionally, only the period of a writer’s “flourishing” (floruit; fl.) can be determined. Note also that references to individual psalms predominantly employ the numbering of the Greek and Latin Psalters—the textual traditions with which nearly all these ancient authors were working. Especially when the works referenced are fragmentary, I have included comments following the entry with notes about the contents or other relevant information. Finally, there are a number of sources and series referenced repeatedly throughout the bibliographies. In order to conserve space and limit redundancy, I have employed a number of abbreviations for the most common and meaningful ones. A table with these abbreviations can be found on the “Abbreviations” page.

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1. For the bibliographic sections which reference early Christian writings on the Psalms, see Kannengiesser, Handbook of Patristic Exegesis, 287–91; and Daley and Kolbet, The Harp of Prophecy, 307–309.↩
2. An exciting and recent example is the 2012 discovery of twenty-nine Greek homilies of Origen in a twelfth-century Byzantine manuscript by an archivist at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich. For a recap of the discovery, as well as an introduction to the homilies and an English translation, see Homilies on the Psalms: Codex Monacensis Graecus 314, trans. J. W. Trigg, FC 141 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2020).↩