Medieval scholars
including Aquinas compiled references from the Church Fathers in
order to illuminate scripture in collections called catenae,
from the Latin for "chains" or "links." In modern terms, a catena is
a hypertext. Since the footnotes of the public domain Ante-Nicene
Fathers already contain information on allusions to biblical
passages, the opportunity was there to take that information and
format it so that the patristic references follow the canonical
order.
Because the
electronic version of the Ante-Nicene Fathers has a high incidence
of transcription error, particularly with the chapter and verse
numbers, some of the references are off. Also, it currently only
recognizes one particular abbreviation for the name of each New
Testament book and does not pick up whatever references may exist
with different forms of the book name. Some of the fragments are of
dubious authorship; also, spurious hits are found in the longer
recension of the Ignatian epistles. Some of the allusions may be
imaginary, and some allusions may go unmentioned. Texts not
available to the nineteenth century ANF editors are not included.
Nevertheless this compilation should prove to be highly valuable.