Eerdmans Bible Commentaries

Pitts acquires a large collection of biblical commentaries as ebooks

Pitts Theology Library has just purchased online access to a collection of dozens of biblical commentaries from Eerdmans. This acquisition brings valuable resources that have long been appreciated in the library’s print collection to an online audience.

The collection includes ebooks curated for New Testament and Old Testament research, which range from standby foundational works to recently-published scholarship in these areas. 

The New Testament collection features the Pillar New Testament Commentary and the Two Horizons New Testament Commentary, while the Old Testament collection includes the International Theological Commentary and Illuminations Commentary series. The New International Commentary, Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible, Eerdmans Critical Commentary, and the Two Horizons Commentary contain works on both the New and Old Testaments. 

In addition to providing access for current Emory students, Pitts has also added these resources to Emory’s collection of research databases for alumni, meaning that all Emory alumni can access them as well. Alumni who haven’t used alumni research databases yet should contact the Emory Alumni Association for access. Current Emory students should make sure to join the Alumni Association before graduating for the easiest way to maintain access to these library resources after they graduate.

This new content is located on the Theology and Religion Online (TARO) platform, which is also the home of the Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary and Commentaries. Current Emory students, faculty, and staff can access the full TARO collection directly here, or they can search for individual titles in the library catalog


When using these resources, don’t be afraid to think beyond exegesis papers! These commentaries include material intended for work in systematic theology, biblical archaeology, and preaching, as well as historical and textual criticism. To help you get the most out of them, our reference librarians are available for individual consultations. Schedule a time to meet with Dee Roberts or Brady Beard for a 30-minute session tailored to your specific research project.

By Caitlin Soma, Acquisitions & Periodicals Coordinator

Pitts acquires a Franciscan manual for late medieval preachers

Pitts recently added to its growing collection of incunables (books printed before 1501) a 1479 lexical manual for preachers and clergy. The Latin book, titled Mammotrectus super Bibliam (“Nourisher on the Bible”), printed by Nicolas Jensen in Venice, contains etymological and grammatical explanations of words found in the Bible, along with the liturgical hours, arranged in the order of the Bible and the church year. Its author, John Marchesinus, was a Franciscan friar in Italy, likely living in the late 13th or early 14th century, who lamented the lack of education amongst clergy and the poor quality of preaching that resulted from it.

The first word in the title, mammotrectus, denotes “mother’s milk” (i.e. nourishment regarding the Bible), and the term had been used by Augustine in his commentary on the Psalms. Marchesinus himself explains the term to mean “led by a pedagogue.” This work would become one of the most important Franciscan books of the late Middle Ages.

Are you interested in seeing this and other rare books in the Pitts Special Collections? You can make an appointment any time the reading room is open. You can also learn about the Pitts incunable collection by checking out the Spring 2023 exhibition, “This Sacred Art,” curated by Pitts’ Head of Special Collections Brandon Wason.

By Armin Siedlecki, Head of Cataloging and Rare Book Cataloger

Pitts supports Open Access publishing

Open Access publishing follows several practices to make academic research more accessible to more people. As you might expect, publishing has costs, and in the most common form of academic publishing, those costs fall on the institutions and individuals who hold subscriptions. In other words, while scholars can publish their works without charge, readers pay to read the scholarship. Over the last several decades, Open Access (OA) advocates have pushed for new ways of investing in and supporting academic research. Some solutions include charging publishing fees to authors to offset publishing costs and a variety of access structures that may allow for individuals to read but not share Open Access publications. Pitts staff prefer the Gold OA model. In Gold OA, institutions and individuals pay article processing fees (APCs) through various means (including grant funding, endowments, funders, etc.) to provide access and licenses through Creative Commons.

As part of Pitts Library’s dedication to supporting Open Access publishing, the library recently partnered with the journal AABNER (Advances in Ancient, Biblical, and Near Eastern Research) to support their Open Access publishing model and expand access to this scholarship. All patrons can find all articles published with AABNER on their website, and if you look carefully, you will spot the Pitts Theology Library logo there as well. AABNER is indexed by Index Theologicus, ensuring that researchers can find AABNER articles. Be sure to consult AABNER for your next Bible and ancient world project! You can find other Open Access journals at The Directory of Open Access Journals and on the Pitts Online Resources for Research LibGuide.

Written by Brady Beard, Reference & Instruction Librarian

The archives of the African Orthodox Church held at Pitts Theology Library

The constitution and canons of the African Orthodox Church

Year after year, one of the most frequently requested and most commonly researched collections in the Pitts Special Collections is the archives of the African Orthodox Church (AOC). This collection contains the records of the African Orthodox Church in South African, founded in 1924, as well as the personal papers of Archbishop Daniel William Alexander (1883-1970. The library’s finding aid for this collection can be found online and patrons can contact the Special Collections department to view these materials in person.

The African Orthodox Church originated in the United States, growing out of ideas of black separatism, and it spread to Africa where it played an important role in independence movements in Africa. Alexander was the central figure in the founding and spread of the AOC church in South Africa. Alexander was born in Port Elizabeth, Cape Province, South Africa, in 1883, and he attended Roman Catholic schools as a child. He later served with the British in the Second Anglo-Boer War until 1900. After his time in the military, he joined the Anglican church in Pretoria and began to study for ordination. However, for reasons unknown, around 1920, he left the Anglican Church, moved to Johannesburg, and became associated with the independent religious organization founded by J. M. Kanyane Napo, known as the African Church. In 1924, Alexander, once again dissatisfied with his religious associations, made a formal break from the African Church with a group of likeminded individuals, who elected Alexander as their head.

This photograph shows McGuire (seated center left) and Alexander (seated center right) in the US at the time of Alexander’s consecration.

Around this time, Alexander had read about George Alexander McGuire (1866-1934) in the newspaper, The Negro World. McGuire had emigrated from Antigua to the United States and served as a priest in the Protestant Episcopal Church until 1918. McGuire’s experience in the Episcopal Church had been tainted with discrimination against him and his fellow Black clergy, so he severed his ties with the church and founded the African Orthodox Church. Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) then used his periodical The Negro World to disseminate the news of the church and its operations across the Atlantic and throughout Africa, where Alexander read of McGuire. So, on September 24, 1924, Alexander asked to be affiliated with the African Orthodox Church. After review, Alexander was invited to America. On September 11, 1927, Alexander was consecrated by McGuire in Boston. Alexander returned to Kimberley, South Africa, and to his parish after his consecration. From this base, Alexander traveled across South Africa and set up parishes wherever he found local interest. All the while, Alexander continued to correspond with McGuire in America until McGuire’s death in 1934.

In this manuscript document, Alexander commits to the African Orthodox Church under McGuire’s leadership.

Alexander continued his ministry and outreach with the African Orthodox Church until 1960, when the affiliation between Alexander’s churches in South Africa and the AOC in America contentiously ended. Alexander had invited members of the US church, including Patriarch James I, to visit South Africa to consecrate two new bishops, Surgeon Lionel Motsepe and Ice Walter Mbina, to provide an established succession. We do not know the reasons, but Alexander and the Americans had a disagreement and James I ordered him to resign his position as archbishop in favor of the two newly consecrated bishops. Alexander refused to relinquish leadership. He maintained that he and McGuire had agreed that the American church only had power over the African church in spiritual but not temporal matters. Before the matter could be resolved, both James I and Motsepe died. Alexander was reconciled by the new patriarch, Peter IV, and he agreed to submit to Mbina. However, in 1963, Alexander broke away from Mbina and the African Orthodox Church in the US. He formalized the autonomy he believed McGuire had intended for the African church by naming his body the African Orthodox Church of the Republic of South Africa

Alexander died in May 1970 at the age of 88. He remained the Patriarch of the African Orthodox Church of the Republic of South Africa until his death. The archives of the African Orthodox Church (records dating from 1880-1974) could be considered the papers of Archbishop Daniel William Alexander. Practically all the correspondence was either sent or received by Alexander, and a large amount of the other manuscript material is in his handwriting. The library has worked to separate items that document the life of Alexander from items that document the history of the church, but researchers will find that there are many “gray area” items that include both. Because of items such as these, the personal papers of Alexander have been treated as a part of the Church’s archives and not as a separate collection.

by Emily Corbin, Special Collections Reference Coordinator

Don’t reshelve those books! Missing books and why Pitts wants to do the work for you

The Pitts staff and student workers are well-versed in magic, but magic isn’t how we find books when they go missing from the stacks.

A Pitts reshelving cart on the first floor, where patrons have (properly!) placed books when they were finished with them.

When a patron cannot find a book where the online catalog says it should be, the Pitts staff and student workers undertake four official searches, spaced across varying time intervals – one, seven, twenty-eight, and fifty-six days – to find the missing book. Over time, we have learned the most common reasons a book ends up somewhere it shouldn’t be, and we use that knowledge to search efficiently. Often an item is missing due to its being misshelved in the wrong place. Someone may have stashed away material for their work, or someone may have misread a call number when putting a book back. We assume the latter when first searching the stacks, and we try to reconstruct the error in a logical way. For example, errors in shelving might result from swapping an s for a 5, reading HC as HG or HQ, dropping numbers from long sequences of numbers in the case of BS1575.568, or some other understandable mistake. So, for example, if we can’t find a book with a call number HM851 .B3645, we may start our search in the HN851 section.

Student workers use charts to report the progress in searching for books reported missing.

To maintain shelving accuracy and catch misplaced books before our patrons do, our circulation student workers are perpetually checking the order of the material on the shelves, and they are regularly reviewing the shelving done by their peers. As a library patron, you can help too! Please support our efforts to keep books where they belong by putting items you remove from the shelves on a reshelving cart, which are spread throughout the library, rather than returning it to the shelf. It’s always possible that the book may not belong in the gap you found. By leaving the books on the reshelving carts you provide staff with material to hone our shelving skills, and you also provide us with accurate data on the use of our materials. So even though you may want to help us out by reshelving the books, you actually help us more by placing them on the reshelving carts and letting the Pitts experts take it from there!

By Yasmine Green, Collection Management Coordinator

The whiteboard in the circulation office guides student workers through the process of finding a missing book.