In 2013 Kregel published A Reader’s Lexicon of the Apostolic Fathers. This is a work that two of my former interns, Brittany Burnette Terri Moore, and I edited. It was a six-year project and included proof-reading from 100 students. You can read my blog about this publication here.

When the book came out I felt that it was one of those tools that would be best utilized as an electronic book. The reason is that although most of the glosses are from BDAG (Lightfoot, Holmes, and Lampe were also used, as well as a few Apostolic Fathers commentaries), one had to search hard in that lexicon (and other sources) to find the appropriate gloss for that particular place in the AF. What Brit, Terri, and I did was to give the contextually-appropriate gloss for each word in the AF that occurs 30 times or less in the New Testament. (We indexed to the frequency of New Testament words because we assumed that most students who started reading the AF would have first been acquainted with NT Greek.)

So, I contacted both Logos and Accordance to see if they might be interested in having this work in their line-ups. They began working with Kregel.

Just a few weeks ago, Accordance released its version of the Lexicon. It’s available here.

Logos has it available as a prepub file; you can find it on the Logos website  here.

There are of course differences in how each program works, though both Logos and Accordance are available on Mac and PC. I think the biggest difference is that Logos does not have Michael Holmes’ 3^rd edition of his Apostolic Fathers (Greek and English), while Accordance does. The Reader’s Lexicon is indexed to Holmes’ 3^rd edition.

I am grateful to Kregel for working with these major biblical software companies to get this book out in electronic form. My hope is that more and more students of the Greek New Testament will enrich their understanding of early Christianity by reading these fathers in their own language.