Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Church Fathers who quote the New Testament


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. Liz Read! Talk! 23:03, 25 November 2022 (UTC)

List of Church Fathers who quote the New Testament

 * – ( View AfD View log | edits since nomination)

Veverve and I reached the conclusion on the talk page that this list should be deleted, and replaced by a new article named Ancient works quoting the New Testament, but it would not make sense to have this list title be turned into a redirect to that new article, so it should be deleted entirely. The details are on that talk page, but I'll summarise it here:
 * This list has been mostly WP:UNSOURCED since it was created in 2008, which is a serious WP:V problem.
 * This list is probably out of scope for Wikipedia: the main motive for creating it seems to be to play a numbers game with the amount of "Church Fathers" (itself a contested term) who have allegedly quoted at least 1 part of one of the 27 books of the New Testament, no matter how small, for the purpose of Christian apologetics (WP:SOAPBOX) rather than gathering the sum of all human knowledge. Veverve and I agree that scholars generally recognise that early quotations from the New Testament, particularly before the year 450, can be extremely valuable for textual criticism of the New Testament, as well as several other things (such as early Christian theology), but
 * There is no reason to centre a list of such quotations around the authors rather than those actual quotations themselves, let alone the number of authors (implicit WP:SOAPBOX)
 * There is no reason to play a numbers game with these quotations either (implicit WP:SOAPBOX)
 * There is no reason to list all these quotations on Wikipedia, as they would number in the tens of thousands and violate WP:INDISCRIMINATE. The list at https://www.biblindex.org/en/work-editions does a far better job at that than Wikipedia ever could anyway. Any significant quotation could alternatively be used in one of the subpages of Textual variants in the New Testament on a case-by-case basis.
 * There is no reason to limit the contents of this list to just New Testament quotations by "Church Fathers", and in fact the list itself acknowledges that by including works that are known to have been misattributed to various Church Fathers (pseudo-so-and-so) and anonymous works. (So the current title always has been a misnomer, and a mismatch with the list's actual contents).
 * It would be much better to write a prose article about the importance/relevance of Ancient works quoting the New Testament in general (including but not limited to so-called patristic quotations), rather than to try to somehow salvage the contents of this one, none of which we think is reusable for our purposes. We better start from scratch, and delete this list in its entirety. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 21:13, 18 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions.  CAPTAIN RAJU (T) 21:21, 18 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Authors-related deletion discussions.  CAPTAIN RAJU (T) 21:21, 18 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Christianity-related deletion discussions.  CAPTAIN RAJU (T) 21:21, 18 November 2022 (UTC)
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 * Delete From what point of view is this? Anglican, Protestant, Roman Catholic, Orthodox? There are too many questions that would need to be answered; this has been around unsourced since 2008. Just delete it.Oaktree b (talk) 21:28, 18 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom. Veverve (talk) 21:27, 18 November 2022 (UTC)
 * I'm sorry, is the set of [Christian] Church Fathers not entirely a subset of "people who have quoted the New Testament"? Jclemens (talk) 03:17, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
 * no: many writers suche as Lactantius, Origen or Theodore of Mopsuestia quote the NT but are not Church Fathers. Veverve (talk) 14:39, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
 * You need to set the Venn diagrams up again; you're not actually disagreeing with what I wrote. :-) Jclemens (talk) 18:29, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
 * The answer to your question is 'Yes'. ;) That's why we think this title cannot continue to exist as a redirect, because it is misleading. There's no reason to focus on the Church Fathers, at least not from the perspective of textual criticism. From the perspective of church history and theology, the very category 'Church Father' is contested along denominational lines, as Oaktree pointed out, so this is probably not a good approach to this subject either. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 19:45, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
 * I'm still struggling to think of any sane sense of 'Church Father' which would exist without quoting the NT, so yes, I'm agreeing that it's fundamentally flawed list. Jclemens (talk) 20:59, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
 * From its first version there was a citation "UBS4", i.e. the 1993 edition of Novum Testamentum Graece (a standard text of the Greek New Testament published with various appendices). However, this may merely have been cited as the source of the criteria for inclusion, as the list does not appear to be based on that source. UBS4 is also known as Nestle-Aland 27th edition, which is available at Archive.org. Pages 74* to 76* thereof have a list of church fathers noted for patristic evidence (much the same as pages 80* and 81* in the current NA28), but the list in Wikipedia is much longer; therefore the NA publication of UBS4 was not the source of the list. Altaner and Quasten were listed as "Bibliography" from the first version of the page, so perhaps certain works by those scolars were used as sources for the list, or perhaps it was another publication of UBS4 such as Kohlenberger's (ISBN 9780310414001); but I agree that this means the list is effectively unreferenced. How about repurposing the page without its lists as a stub on "Patristic quotations"? – Fayenatic  L ondon 12:08, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Indeed, the list is effectively unreferenced. And as I laid out on the talk page, "patristic quotations" is not a good alternative. I proposed 4 options to Veverve:
 * Patristic quotations? (would implicitly include Hebrew Bible and Deuterocanonicals)
 * Patristic quotations of the Bible? (explicitly includes them)
 * Patristic quotations of the New Testament? (leaves out all works by non-"Church Fathers")
 * Ancient works quoting the New Testament? (proposed cap: the year 500; includes everything regardless of status of author as a "Church Father")
 * For the reasons explained above (and in more detail on the talk page), the 4th option is best. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 19:49, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
 * As I explained on the talk page: repurposing an article "List of..." by removing the list creates a contradiction, as the title indicates the article should include... a list (cf. WP:LISTNAME). Veverve (talk) 16:48, 22 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete per further reasoning provided by Veverve in above reply. ~ Pbritti (talk) 19:14, 22 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Delete per WP:LIST and WP:SOAP. Every part is either synthesis, or outright original research, or a random list of things having to do with quotations from the Bible. It's not our role to to post every interpretation of the scriptures and to debate their worthiness.Bearian (talk) 14:48, 23 November 2022 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.