The Source Library
Every primary source behind our teaching — the statutes, the papal decrees, the canon law — hosted here in its entirety, free to read and to download. Read the record for yourself.
The Act of Supremacy was an English Act of Parliament (26 Hen. 8 c. 1), passed in November 1534, that declared King Henry VIII to be "the only supreme head in earth of the Church of England." After Pope Clement VII refused to annul Henry's …
Read & download →The Statute of Uses was an Act of the Parliament of England (formally "An Acte concernyng uses and wylles," 27 Hen. VIII, c. 10), passed in the 1535–36 session and effective 1 May 1536. It executed the "use" — the medieval forerunner of the…
Read & download →The Statute of Wills was an Act of the Parliament of England (formally "An Acte howe Landes may be willed by Testament," 32 Hen. VIII, c. 1), passed in the 1540 session and operative from 20 July 1540. It restored the power to dispose of la…
Read & download →The Cestui Que Vie Act 1666 (18 & 19 Cha. 2 c. 11) is an English statute enacted in the aftermath of the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London to resolve disputes over leasehold and copyhold estates that were granted "for life" when the…
Read & download →The Cestui Que Vie Act 1707 (6 Ann. c. 72; cited in the common printed editions as 6 Ann. c. 18) is a Great Britain statute enacted under Queen Anne to combat estate fraud: guardians, trustees, and husbands who held property "for the life" …
Read & download →The Presumption of Death Act 2013 (2013 c. 13) is a United Kingdom Act of Parliament that lets the High Court of England and Wales issue a single, conclusive declaration that a missing person is presumed dead. Such a declaration is effectiv…
Read & download →> Spurious / forged document (8th c.), proven false by Lorenzo Valla in 1440 — included for historical reference only.
Read & download →Unam Sanctam ("One Holy") is a papal bull promulgated by Pope Boniface VIII in 1302, during his power struggle with King Philip IV ("the Fair") of France. It is the most sweeping medieval assertion of papal supremacy, declaring the unity of…
Read & download →Dum Diversas is a papal bull issued by Pope Nicholas V on 18 June 1452, addressed to King Alfonso V of Portugal. By apostolic authority it granted the Portuguese crown "full and free power" to invade, conquer, subjugate, and seize the lands…
Read & download →Romanus Pontifex ("The Roman Pontiff") is a papal bull issued by Pope Nicholas V, addressed to King Alfonso V of Portugal and to his uncle, the Infante Henry (Prince Henry the Navigator). It granted the Portuguese crown a perpetual monopoly…
Read & download →Inter caetera ("Among other [works]") is a papal bull issued by Pope Alexander VI on 4 May 1493, in the wake of Columbus's first voyage. It grants to Ferdinand and Isabella (the Crowns of Castile and Aragon) all lands "towards the west and …
Read & download →The Doctrine of Discovery is the body of fifteenth-century papal decrees and the nineteenth-century common-law rulings built upon them that gave European Christian monarchs a claimed legal title to lands "discovered" outside Christendom, tr…
Read & download →The Corpus Juris Civilis — the "body of civil law" — is the great codification of Roman law issued between 529 and 534 CE under the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) emperor Justinian I, compiled by a commission led by the jurist Tribonian. It gath…
Read & download →The Corpus Juris Canonici ("Body of Canon Law") is the classical body of Roman Catholic canon law that governed the Western (Latin) Church from roughly 1140 until the 1917 Codex Iuris Canonici replaced it. It is not a single statute but a c…
Read & download →The 1823 Supreme Court case that imported the Doctrine of Discovery into United States property law. Writing for a unanimous Court, Chief Justice John Marshall held that the discovery of the American continent by European nations gave the d…
Read & download →Williamson v. United States, 512 U.S. 594 (1994), is the landmark United States Supreme Court ruling on the hearsay exception for statements against penal interest under Federal Rule of Evidence 804(b)(3). The petitioner was Fredel Williams…
Read & download →The Masoretic Text is the authoritative Hebrew (and Aramaic) text of the Tanakh — the Hebrew Bible — as fixed, vocalized, and transmitted by the Masoretes, the Jewish scribe-scholars of the late first millennium CE. The Masoretes preserved …
Read & download →The Septuagint — abbreviated LXX ("seventy," for the traditional seventy-two Jewish translators) — is the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, produced in Alexandria beginning in the 3rd century BC. It was the Scripture of…
Read & download →The complete Greek text of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament in the SBL Greek New Testament (SBLGNT) — a critically edited edition prepared by Michael W. Holmes, sponsored by the Society of Biblical Literature in partnership with …
Read & download →The New Testament in the Original Greek — the critical edition of the Greek New Testament prepared by Brooke Foss Westcott (1825-1901) and Fenton John Anthony Hort (1828-1892), Cambridge scholars who worked on it for some twenty-eight years…
Read & download →This is the complete Greek text of the New Testament as edited by Frederick Henry Ambrose Scrivener in 1894 — Ἡ Καινὴ Διαθήκη: The New Testament in the Original Greek according to the Text followed in the Authorised Version (Cambridge Unive…
Read & download →The Apocrypha are the books and additions included in the 1611 Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible, set between the Old and New Testaments, that were later dropped from most Protestant printings. They were translated from the Greek…
Read & download →The Book of Enoch (1 Enoch) is an ancient Jewish apocalyptic work attributed to Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah ("Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him," Genesis 5:24). Composed in several stages between roughly the t…
Read & download →The Gospel of Thomas is an early Christian collection of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus, preserved in full in a Coptic manuscript discovered at Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945 (Nag Hammadi Codex II, tractate 2). Unlike the narrative gospels, it…
Read & download →The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church holds the largest biblical canon of any church in the world: 81 books — 46 in the Old Testament and 35 in the New Testament — as set out in the Church's own authoritative list. ("Tewahedo," Geʽez for "…
Read & download →This library is growing into a complete study archive. Still to come, so you can study from the source itself: