The Biblical Heritage in Ancient Latin Christian Literature: Advancing Intertextual Mapping Through Sentence Embeddings

This study presents an interdisciplinary methodology for detecting biblical references in Latin patristic literature through an innovative combination of rigorous philological approach and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. Focusing on one of the most influential ancient Christian commentaries on the Bible, Augustine of Hippo’s De Genesi ad litteram, and its relationship with Latin biblical texts (specifically, Jerome’s Vulgate and pre-Vulgate versions), this research introduces a token-based classification system for intertextual references, enriched with semantic annotations and supported by the INCEpTION platform. The first section shows how this numerical classification system accounts for exact matches, lemmatized forms, roots, synonyms, and other forms of semantic parallels (here referred to as “structures”), capturing a wide spectrum of textual similarity. To enhance automatic retrieval of these intertextual connections, we fine-tune BERT-based language models for Latin, incorporating contrastive learning and hard negative mining. In the second section, experimental results show that finetuned models significantly outperform baseline models at various levels of textual similarity. This work highlights the utility of computational models in overcoming the traditional dichotomy between explicit quotations and implicit allusions, embracing multiple intermediate nuances of similarity and offering a scalable approach to the study of intertextuality in ancient writings.