Methodology

This site is only worth using if you can check it. This page explains how, and where the checking stops.

Four authority tiers

Tier A — normative and official

Scripture as received and used by the Orthodox Church; the dogmatic definitions, creeds and received canons of the ecumenical councils; synodal documents of the OCA and of the autocephalous Orthodox churches. Tier A establishes what the Church confesses.

Tier B — official catechetical and jurisdictional

The OCA's The Orthodox Faith and comparable official catechetical material; official resources of the jurisdictions in the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops; official seminary resources. Not every page on an official domain carries the same weight, so each source record states its document type.

Tier C — primary historical and patristic

Works of the Fathers and other early writers in identified editions; council acts, letters and canonical collections. Tier C establishes what a particular author or council actually says. It does not by itself establish the Orthodox position.

Tier D — historical scholarship

Peer-reviewed work, critical editions and major reference works, used for dates, manuscripts, authorship, transmission and genuine scholarly disagreement.

Wikipedia, OrthodoxWiki, blogs, apologetics sites, quotation collections and the output of language models may help find a lead. They are never the authority for a claim, and they are not recorded as citable sources. Memory is never a source.

Three verification routes

A doctrinal claim should be checked against an OCA tier A or B source, an independent official Orthodox source or received council, and the relevant primary evidence. A historical claim should be checked against the best primary evidence, a reputable scholarly treatment, and an official Orthodox account of the event's reception. A canonical claim should be checked against an identified translation, a second translation or critical apparatus, and an official Orthodox explanation of canonical tradition.

The evidence labels

Every substantive page carries one or more labels — Dogmatic definition, Received Orthodox teaching, Individual patristic opinion, Disputed history, and the rest — with a definition available on hover or focus. The full list with its definitions is in the project's label documentation↗ (opens in a new tab).

A material limitation of this build

The environment in which this site was assembled could reach code hosting and package registries but could not reach oca.org, goarch.org, antiochian.org, assemblyofbishops.org, ccel.org, tertullian.org, archive.org, Wikisource, or any other content host. Requests to those hosts were refused by the network egress policy.

The consequence is stated plainly rather than papered over. The tier C primary layer is real: the conciliar texts, canons and patristic works in the archive were extracted from public-domain editions actually obtained and checksummed. But the tier A and tier B route could not be travelled. No page on this site has been confirmed against an OCA or other official Orthodox source, because no such source could be opened.

Therefore no record in this build carries source-audited. Records grounded in the archive carry primary-verified; the rest carry awaiting official-source verification. Each record lists what a maintainer with network access should open to finish the job, and the coverage report collects them.

The quotation check

Every quotation on this site names an archived work and a locator within it. Before the site can be built, an audit script searches the archived text for the exact words. If they are not there, the build fails and the page does not ship. Nothing is published on the strength of a remembered quotation.

That check is mechanical and proves only that the words exist. Whether a passage means in context what a page uses it to mean is a human judgement, recorded in each record's verification routes and open to correction.

Corrections

Every page carries a link that opens a prefilled GitHub issue naming the page. The form asks for the disputed sentence, the correction proposed, a supporting OCA source, a supporting independent Orthodox or primary source, and rights information if replacement text is involved. Unsourced corrections cannot be accepted, which is the same rule this project applies to itself.

Where this build actually stands

The quotation check

Every quotation on this site names a work in the archive and a locator inside it. Before the site can build, npm run audit:content searches the archived text for the exact words of each quotation. If the words are not there, the build fails and the page does not ship. In this build 27 quotations were checked this way.

That check is mechanical, and it only proves the words exist. Whether a passage means in context what a page uses it to mean is a human judgement, recorded in each record's verification routes and open to correction.