Friday, December 12, 2008

Accessing Early Christian Writings and related sites

I wrote about the end of the Early Christian Writings website last week (No more Early Christian Writings) in which I drew attention to a couple of archive.org versions of the site linked on Phil Harland's blog. Over on the Gospel of Thomas e-list, Michael Grondin notes that those were not the best, fully functioning archive.org snapshots because the links were not all working. With thanks to Michael, these are the best versions, now also linked by Phil Harland:

Early Christian Writings at archive.org

Early Jewish Writings at archive.org

There are other lost pages from Peter Kirby, one of which is his full text reproduction of Schweitzer's Quest of the Historical Jesus. Here is a good archive.org version of that:

Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus

Bear in mind that these archive.org captures are inevitably much slower than the original versions. I am still wondering whether it might be possible for me to grab a lot of this content, with Peter's permission, and re-host it here at the NT Gateway. I balk at it a little, though, because I am not always sure about the rights issues on some of the materials there and I have always been very careful here to make sure that I do not host anything that I am not one hundred per cent certain about.

7 comments:

  1. If you can get the necessary permission, you can use a program like "Offline Explorer" to gather the content, rather than having to save every file and page individually. I'll be happy to help in any way I can - just let me know!

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  2. What's going on? Why does Peter Kirby not want the files go online again? It cannot be a question of webspace. This is available everywhere.

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  3. As far as I understand it, it is not that Peter does not want them online but rather that he has allowed his paid-for web space and domain names to falter due to lack of interest in maintaining the sites. Re-hosting them elsewhere would in fact not be a serious problem.

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  4. It is my understanding that Peter Kirby has been sick recently, and that this may be (at least part of) the reason for the postponing of his plans to republish his web pages.

    At any rate, the announcement appears to be back up (for the moment, anyway) at www.earlychristianwritings.com.

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  5. The website has gotten its hosting back up due to the patronage of Joe Wallack (of Texas) while I was in the hospital during the months of October, November, and December. I just got my discharge from the hospital today and can once again use the Internet normally. As you can possibly imagine, there are a lot of things on my plate at this moment in time, but I still have plans for Early Writings sites, both more immediate (this month) and long term. Thank you to all who have appreciated the content, links, and have supported the site over the years. Thank you also to those who have made it so clear to me both how much the site is valued by many people and how important it is to keep it up more consistently in the future. The "trailer" stub contains the hint that the content will be coming back in the public domain, meaning that other people will be able to ensure its propagation from now until perpetuity (if not at that exact name, address and IP). I will also have one or two "blessed" mirrors, such as that of Roger Pearse, linked from the Early Writings sites, so that the average visitor can refer to them as desired. One last note, my proprietary attachment to the material is such that it is NOT public domain yet; it will be once reposted to the site; please don't attract people to reroute to a copy elsewhere before I'm able to get it back up. Thanks!

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  6. Uploading is underway...

    How do you say "better late than never, better never late" in Latin?

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