A master bibliography of books and articles on Corinthian archaeology, history, and religion is available at the Corinthian Studies Zotero Library. The collection, which is up to date through 2015, contains nearly 3,000 items relevant to the archaeology, history, and religion of the Corinthia from prehistoric times to the modern day. You can search and browse the collection at Zotero, or download the most recent version of the library as an .RIS file for import into your own bibliographic program. Need to learn more about the collection and how to use Zotero? See below for a discussion as well as this original blog post about Zotero.
Recent Scholarship and News
For more recent scholarship on the Corinthia, check out the Corinthiaka blog. Click on the categories Corinthian Scholarship (Monthly) (for publications and conference papers), Corinthiaka (blog posts and news stories), and Bibliography (for lists, reviewed articles, and resources).
New Testament & Religion Scholarship in Zotero
A developed bibliography of New Testament and Religion scholarship is available through Zotero. The online collection includes all articles published in Urban Religion in Roman Corinth (2005), Corinth in Context (2010), and Corinth in Contrast (2013), as well as relevant Corinthia bibliography from the first two of those books. The bibliography also includes references from several commentaries and New Testament introductions. The collection is by no means exhaustive but it is a good list of bibliographic references relevant to Greek and Roman religion, New Testament, Judaism, early Christianity, and Islam. It includes about 2,000 entries.
Within Zotero, all religion articles and books have the master tag .RELIGION; the New Testament items specifically are also grouped in a sub-collection called “New Testament”. Many items are tagged with keywords such as “commentary”, “1 Corinthians” and “2 Corinthians”. So, you can find recent commentaries on 1 and 2 Corinthians by selecting the two tags “.RELIGION” and “commentary”.
Articles and books are tagged according to 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 a chapter tag does not pull in entire commentaries on 1 Corinthians, which obviously have something to say on that chapter.
How to Use Zotero
Zotero is a tool for collecting, managing, and sharing bibliography. Developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, Zotero “automatically senses content” while you browse and allows you to create a library of citations to books, articles, dissertations, websites through simply clicking the mouse.
The Corinthian Studies Zotero Group is devoted to scholarship on the history, archaeology, natural environment, and religion of the city and region. As of October 29, 2020, the Corinthian Studies online group library contains 2,890 bibliographic items related to Corinthian studies. Download version 3 of the RIS file here (see description below), which was minted in 2016:
The library is divided into four main collections : Archaeology and History, Christianity & Judaism, Geology, and Religion, and tagged accordingly (.ARCHAEOLOGY AND HISTORY, .CHRISTIANITY & JUDAISM, .GEOLOGY, .RELIGION). These show up in the Tags area to the lower left of the Zotero Library. An item may belong to both categories in the case of – for example — archaeological and historical scholarship that is directed to or clearly relevant to New Testament studies, or New Testament scholarship that informs the history and archaeology of Corinth.
You can access the library items through Zotero in two ways:
Accessing through the Online Group Library
The easiest way to access the items is through the web-based Corinthian Studies Group Library at the Zotero site. You can search the library as a whole, or search the collections within the library. This is the easiest means of accessing the library and requires only that you visit the Corinthian Studies group library and run a search or browse through the collections. The library is searchable via author names and words in article and book titles. You can also use the list of tags at the bottom left of the screen to find relevant items. You can also click on the column headings to sort by different fields. And you can click in the little arrow in the upper right corner of the screen (below the Search box) to display additional fields like date, type, and publication.
Because the search feature of the website does not tap into page numbers, abstracts, or notes associated with the records, it may be preferable to use the tag categories. In fact, the visitor using the Zotero library online should experiment with a combination of direct searches in the search box, tagging, and browsing by subfolder. Combined the master tag (.RELIGION) and another tag (commentary) to select commentaries on religious texts.
Download RIS file to access on your own computer
To experience the full search power of Zotero, you may want to download the stand-alone version 5.0 with connectors for Google Chrome and Safari, and spend half an hour watching the screencast tutorials to familiarize yourself with the tool. After you have done that, right click on the following link (Corinthian Studies RIS file) and save the file to your computer. You should then be able to import the file directly into your Zotero library with all records. Note that this file does not contain the collection folders but only the records themselves. So you will import them as an unsorted list. (If you use EndNote, you can also import the RIS file into that program).
The stand-alone version of Zotero looks like this:
Should you use the web-based version or the stand-alone? It depends on the needs of your research project. If you are looking for something very specific, or want to grab as many as possible, go with the stand-alone. A keyword search on “water,” for example, returns 10 items in the web-based version, 20 items in the stand-alone and extension versions. The difference is that the latter accesses abstracts and thereby returns more entries.
I will periodically cut new versions of the RIS file and will create links to it on this page (at the bottom), reflecting major revisions or additions in the library.
If you would like to help develop the collection, email at the address above. Thanks to (former) Messiah College history students for help in keying entries: Rachel Carey (2014), Josh Krosskove (spring 2012), and Andrew Henry (2009-2010). Notes on versions follow.
Version Notes:
Version 3_3-3-16 (March 3, 2016) contains 2,758 items. The RIS file is available to download and import: right click on CorinthianStudies_v.3_3-3-16.ris and save to your computer. You may import this into bibliographic programs such as Zotero and EndNote. The RIS file includes references from:
1. ARCHAEOLOGY COLLECTIONS: All of the entries from the bibliography of Corinth XX (2003), the Isthmia Library document (no longer online), and Corinthia-related references from the forthcoming Hesperia supplement on the Isthmus of Corinth.
2. PROJECTS: The publications of the Corinth Computer Project, Eastern Korinthia Survey, OSU Excavations at Isthmia, University of Chicago Excavations at Isthmia, Saronic Harbors Archaeological Project, and Kenchreai Cemetery Project.
3. NEW TESTAMENT and RELIGION: All articles published in three recent works related to archaeology, history, religion, and the New Testament: Urban Religion in Roman Corinth (2005), Corinth in Context (2010), and Corinth in Contrast (2013), as well as relevant Corinthia bibliography in the first two of those books. Material from a number of commentaries of 1 and 2 Corinthians is also included.
4. CORINTHIAN MATTERS: All Corinthianmatters bibliography collected on the Corinthianmatters website between 2010 and 2015.
5. A JSTOR search on keywords Corinth, Corinthia*, Kenchreai/Cenchreae, Lechaion/Lechaum, and Isthmia/Isthmus, from 1800-2012.
6. WORLDCAT: A WorldCat search on keywords Corinth, Corinthia*, Kenchreai/Cenchreae, Lechaion/Lechaum, and Isthmia/Isthmus for 2010, 2011, 2013, 2014, and 2015.
**Note that there are mistakes and errors in this bibliography: articles listed as book sections that should be listed as journal articles; missing book editors; book editors mistakenly added as full authors. Zotero intuits bibliography from web pages but sometimes the metadata is incorrect. We have corrected the problems we have seen, but have not corrected thoroughly. This library in its first version is a useful starting point, but you should double-check the details of the bibliographic entries when using them in publications or papers.
Corinthian Matters 