The Impact of Recent Archaeological, Historical and Literary Discoveries for the Study of Patristics

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If we take a look at the bibliographic collections, we see a huge expansion of publications on Christian antiquity in its various aspects. There are numerous factors in the exponential growth of the bibliography. 1) The creation of numerous new study centers in many countries and the dizzying increase of number of scholars. 1) Use of ancient sources, starting from the study of history, ancient languages, liturgy and theology. 2) Geographical and linguistic expansion of studies. 3) The numerous discoveries in the recent decades in the archaeological and papyrological fields. 4) Numerous discoveries and publications of unknown texts in all ancient languages (Augustine, Origen, Didymus, Chromatius, liturgical texts, Manichaeism, Melito of Sardis, Asterius, the Sophist, Bodmer papyri, Nag Hammadi discoveries, Turfan and Tun-huang texts in 22 languages, anonymous texts, and so on). 5) The expansion of the geographical space of the authors and of the ancient languages studied (Coptic, Ethiopian, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, Arabic, Sogdian, Palestinian Aramaic, Gothic, Nubian, Pahlavi, Paleoslav) began in the early 1900s. The handbooks normally did not name the ancient Christian writers who had written in languages other than Greek or Latin.