Welcome to the CAFE repository! This project aims to provide a modern translation of the Apostolic Fathers' texts, filling a gap where openly licensed translations have become outdated. Our goal is to make these important early Christian writings more accessible to contemporary readers.
This repository includes the following texts:
- 1 Clement
- 2 Clement
- Barnabas
- Didache
- Diognetus
- Ignatius of Antioch's letters:
- To the Ephesians
- To the Magnesians
- To the Trallians
- To the Romans
- To the Philadelphians
- To the Smyrnaeans
- To Polycarp
- Polycarp's Letter to the Philippians
- The Martyrdom of Polycarp
Our translations aim to be clear, natural, and accurate. After many trials with a variety of models (I have experimented with Claude, Mixtral, Llama3, and Gemini), these first drafts were generated using GPT-4o. As a sanity check I have run semantic similarity tests across the translations and the original texts (LaBSE). The 15 most dissimilar lines did not warrant any particular attention, which is a promising sign. Apart from the challenge of LLMs being unreliable, though, translation is as much an art as it is a science. There are bound to be errors and areas worth improving in these translations, but having a starting point to build upon is a valuable first step and already makes these texts more accessible.
Users can navigate the repository to find the texts they are interested in. The line numbering corresponds to the source texts available from the Apostolic Fathers GitHub repository. Feel free to download, read, and use these translations for study, teaching, or personal enrichment.
This project is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license. You are free to share and adapt the material as long as appropriate credit is given and any changes are distributed under the same license.
We welcome contributions and feedback! There are undoubtedly errors that we will address as they are identified. Please submit issues for any errors you find or improvements you suggest. We also encourage you to make pull requests (PRs) for direct contributions to the project.
Thank you for your interest and support in making the Apostolic Fathers' writings accessible to modern readers!