Method

The whole point of this instrument is that a claim in the book can be traced to the exact primary text that proves it — not to a recollection of one.

Why it exists

Spurious Jefferson quotes and invented Chrysostom lines are everywhere, and the readers this book is written for check. One fabricated quotation in print costs the credibility of the whole argument. So the rule for this project is simple: never quote from memory. Every passage is retrieved from a real, ingested text and then re-matched against that text's own file before it is allowed to stand.

What was read

Two libraries were assembled and indexed in full: the writings of the American founding era, and the Church Fathers in both public-domain and modern scholarly translation, alongside the complete text of Scripture. Each work was parsed into passages, and each passage embedded, so that the search can find a text that makes an argument even when it never uses the words the argument is usually phrased in today.

How a passage gets here

1. Sweep. Each cell has its own seed vocabulary — including the words the period actually used rather than the words we use now — plus its Scripture anchors and its named source works. Those drive four independent searches across every passage in both libraries, and the results are fused and balanced so that neither library drowns out the other.
2. Judgment. The candidates are read by hand. Most are discarded. What survives is proposed with a written reason for why it belongs in that cell and not another.
3. Verification. Before a proposal can be recorded, the quoted words are matched back against the original source file at the stored character offsets. If the quote does not reproduce, the proposal is refused. The passages on this site carry a located in source mark for this reason.
4. Review. Every proposal is accepted, rejected, or reassigned to a different cell by a human. Nothing appears here that was not reviewed.
5. Pairing. Finally, founders passages and fathers passages within a cell are matched against each other, and the genuine convergences are labelled by hand.

On the quotations

Most of what you see is public domain and is quoted in full. 51 of the 187 passages come from modern translations that are still in copyright — chiefly the Popular Patristics, Fathers of the Church, and Philokalia series. Those are shortened here to a brief excerpt with full citation, so that you can find the passage in the published volume yourself. The working corpus behind this site is private and is not published.

Where it stands

187 passages across 6 of the 9 cells so far: 59 from the founders, 128 from the fathers, drawn from 103 works by 62 authors, with 78 cross-tradition pairs labelled. This is a work in progress and the grid is not finished; cells fill as the sweep reaches them.