Purpose

Confessional Bibliology preserves a public record of material corrections and revisions. The purpose is not to make change appear suspicious. Responsible scholarship improves when stronger evidence, clearer distinctions, or a discovered error requires it. The safeguard is that material change should be visible rather than silently erased.

What Belongs in This Record

An entry is required when a published item receives a change that affects:

• a factual or bibliographic claim;
• a quotation, translation, transcription, or original-language form;
• a manuscript, versional, patristic, or printed-edition statement;
• the description of another person’s position;
• a doctrinal conclusion or material qualification;
• the classification or endorsement of a resource;
• the relation between an older article and a later study that supersedes it;
• a downloadable file’s substantive content, source base, rights statement, or version.

Routine spelling, punctuation, formatting, and broken-link repairs need not receive separate public entries unless they could affect the meaning or citation of the item.

Required Fields

Each substantive revision entry should identify:

1. affected title and permanent URL;
2. original publication date;
3. revision date;
4. previous and new version, where versioning applies;
5. nature of the change;
6. reason for the change and supporting source;
7. responsible editor;
8. whether the conclusion changed;
9. whether the older item remains current, has been qualified, or is superseded;
10. the archived or replacement link, when available.

The entry should be precise enough for a reader to understand the significance of the change without requiring the site to reproduce an entire obsolete article on this page.

Correction Categories

• Typographic: a non-substantive error that did not affect meaning.
• Citation: a locator, bibliographic field, link, or attribution was corrected.
• Transcription or translation: source wording or a rendering was corrected.
• Historical: a date, witness, event, or evidentiary description changed.
• Doctrinal or exegetical: an argument, qualification, or conclusion changed.
• Editorial classification: a resource label, status, or relationship to another item changed.
• Rights or file integrity: a file, license, source-copy statement, or checksum changed.
• Supersession: a later work now replaces the earlier item as the site’s current treatment.

Current Ledger

The controlled revision ledger begins with the 2026 research-library rebuild. The rebuild established permanent page keys, revision fields, the Correction Safeguard, and the Archival-Continuity Safeguard. Legacy archive changes that can be documented from WordPress revision metadata or dated editorial records will be added retrospectively; no undocumented date or reason will be invented.

At the time of this page’s editorial completion, no legacy correction entry had yet been verified for import into the new ledger. This statement is intentional: an empty controlled ledger is more truthful than a complete-looking history reconstructed from guesswork.

How Superseded Work Is Handled

An older article normally keeps its URL. A dated editorial note should explain that a later treatment refines, corrects, or supersedes it and should link to the current page. The old title and metadata should describe its real subject rather than conceal its historical place in the archive.

Deletion is reserved for legal necessity, duplicate technical records, private information, or material that cannot responsibly remain public. Where possible, a withdrawal notice preserves the bibliographic record.

Reporting an Error

Use the Contact page to report an error. Please provide:

• the page URL;
• the exact sentence, quotation, or field at issue;
• the proposed correction;
• a primary or reliable source with a precise locator;
• your name and preferred contact method if a reply is requested.

Submission does not guarantee acceptance, but every documented correction should be evaluated on its evidence rather than the submitter’s agreement or disagreement with the site.

Relationship to Other Policies

This ledger implements the Corrections and Revisions policy, Editorial Standards, Resource and Endorsement Policy, and Text Modernization and Rights.

Source Record

• “The Correction Safeguard: Correct Errors Conspicuously,” master corpus record 0784
• “The Archival-Continuity Safeguard: Preserve the Record of Change,” master corpus record 0789