The DiRECT project evaluates applicability of selected methods of the so called distant reading from the area of digital humanities for a socio-cognitive interpretation of early Christian texts from the first three centuries CE in primary languages. By distant reading we mean the methods enabling to explore, analyze and visualize digitalized textual data while using the tools from the area of data mining, natural language processing or corpus linguistics. For humanities scholars, these methods enable to gain a bird’s-eye-view of the content and structure of studied texts or corpora, to compare the texts or corpora between themselves, and by this way in a controlled fashion to enrich scholarly insights gained through close reading of individual texts. While these methods are becoming quite widespread in literary studies, the attempts to use them in the study of historical processes are rather rare. However, early Christianity studies are especially promising for adoption of these methods, too, as the relevant textual data are already freely available in a machine readable form. The results of intended analyses – and of the publications drawing on them – might be (1) embedded into the contemporary vivid discussions in the area of early Christian studies, where they can enrich increasingly popular social scientific and cognitive approaches, (2) approached as thematization of an important topic from the theory and history of science perspective, representing number-one specialization of the home institution of the applicants.