About
A free, open home for the study of the Bible and the ancient world.
Codexarium — from codex, an old hand-written book, and -arium, a place where something is kept. Literally: a place that keeps books.
Codexarium is a free, non-profit project that gathers the research behind the study of the Bible and ancient south-west Asia into one open place — where scholars’ hard-won findings are kept safe, organized so they can be compared, and opened up for anyone to explore. It is a data commons: many researchers deposit original data, and each contribution interoperates with everyone else’s.
Think of it as a herbarium — for texts
A herbarium is a place where botanists store plant specimens. Anyone can contribute one; it is kept safe forever, labeled to a shared standard, and — importantly — its label always carries the name of the person who collected it, no matter how many times it is studied later.
Codexarium does the same thing for ancient texts. Researchers contribute what they’ve gathered — careful readings of old manuscripts, estimates of when a text was written, comparisons between different versions — and each contribution is preserved, organized so it fits alongside everyone else’s, and stamped permanently with the name of the person who gave it.
What it does
- Keeps the original safe. Whatever a researcher contributes is stored exactly as given and never changed. A tidy, organized copy is added alongside it — the original itself is never edited, only added to.
- Lets findings be compared. Software, with people checking its work, normalizes everyone’s contributions into shared schemas, so material from many researchers can finally be searched and compared side by side.
- Gives lasting credit. Every time someone builds on a contribution, the person who originally collected it is credited automatically — and that credit travels with the work for good.
- Stays free for everyone. Anyone can read it, search it, and build on it at no cost. The data, and the tools that run on it, are open to all.
Why it’s needed
Today the information behind this field is scattered across many separate collections that don’t connect, and some key reference works sit locked behind expensive software. Credit for painstaking work often disappears the moment it is reused. And when scholars genuinely disagree — about when a text was written, or who wrote it — that disagreement is usually flattened into one tidy answer that hides the real debate. Codexarium is built the opposite way: open, data-native, reproducible, computable, and free.
For example
Take a single chapter of Genesis. Ask several scholars when it was written, and you may get several different answers. Most tools quietly pick one; Codexarium keeps all of them — side by side, each tied to the scholar who argued it and marked as mainstream, genuinely debated, or a minority view — so you see the whole conversation, not just a verdict.
Whose scholarship, and whose truth
Codexarium represents scholarship — including confessional scholarship — as attributed data. It records who argued what, and how widely a position is held; it does not adjudicate theological truth, and it does not present any dating or authorship as settled fact. Positions are shown as positions, tiered by consensus, and the preserved disagreement is the point.
What’s here now
Two things are live today: an interactive 3D timeline of scholarly positions on when major texts were composed and first attested, and a set of data-derived wall charts. The open platform underneath them is in active development.