Abstract Dawid bar Pawlos’ Letter on Dots is an eighth-century text that purportedly describes the introduction of some of the dots used in Syriac writing. It also sheds light on the life of a certain Rāmišoʿ of Beṯ Rabban, apparently the same man as the master of pointing named in MS BL Add. 12138. However, most studies of Syriac dots either neglect or completely discount this letter as a reliable source, since it suggests that Miaphysite scribes had a direct influence on East Syriac reading traditions. This article provides a more critical analysis of the letter, first examining the problematic state of its extant manuscripts, and then evaluating the text to determine its historical plausibility in the context of seventh-century northern Mesopotamia.
Abstract Anti-Chalcedonian Christians like John of Tella, Severus of Antioch, Philoxenos of Mabbug, and John Rufus were concerned about orthodox Christians mingling with heretics. This essay argues that John of Tella combined narratives of heresy with those of bodily purity and pollution, such as those related to menstruation, to frame heretics as dangerous to orthodox Christians not only in their beliefs that could lure an unsuspecting Christian to accept heretical views, but in their very bodies whose proximity brought the threat of contamination. John integrated expectations of bodily purity and doctrinal orthodoxy in ways that suggested that heresy could physically contaminate, while Severus tried to calm his congregants’ fears about the same. The spread of COVID- 19 and the global responses to it have heightened our awareness of the dynamics of fear and anxiety that can be produced by threats of physical contamination. The global pandemic in 2020 thus helps to clarify the power that the rhetoric of these sixth-century anti-Chalcedonian texts had to confront the spread of what John of Tella implied was the dangerous physical pollution of Christian heresy.
Abstract During the revision of the Antioch Bible, the question of how ګﻪﻌףּ ڪ﷼ should be translated arose. Currently, different translators have offered different solutions. This essay will trace the history of the term from the original translators of both the Old and New Testaments, through the commentators, and then through the lexicographers. The essay will offer a solution to the problem going forward.
Abstract Whereas early Syriac writers make only a restricted use of adjectives in -aya, in seventh-century authors large numbers are to be found. The present contribution aims to chart this development by providing an alphabetical listing of these forms and their attestation both in Syriac authors and in translations from Greek.
Abstract Daniel King’s book The Earliest Syriac Translation of Aristotle’s Categories may be considered the first critical edition of a Syriac translation of Aristotle’s works. Thus, it raises a number of questions of textual criticism that may be discussed against the background of D. Gutas’ research in the field of Graeco-Arabic studies. This article provides a critical review of the book and a description of the new online publication of the anonymous Syriac translation of Aristotle’s Categories in the HUNAYNNET database.
Abstract The recently published Syriac Revelation of the Magi has proven to be a remarkable addition to the corpus of early Christian apocryphal literature. This unique amplification of the traditional Nativity narrative recounts the Magi’s encounter with a “star-child” who leads them from their homeland in the far east to the birth of Jesus at Nazareth, where the polymorphic nature of Christ is revealed along with his message of universal salvation. Interestingly, the Revelation of the Magi contains several important points of contact with early Manichaean texts. This paper will examine what those shared motifs might tell us about the common milieu out of which both Manichaeism and the Revelation of the Magi might have emerged.
Abstract Over the last nine years, a forty-seven-person digital humanities project has explored the feasibility of computer assisted paleography for Syriac. That is, could one use big data, visual analytics, and recent advances in the digital analysis of handwriting to better understand Syriac manuscripts and Syriac manuscript culture? Last June we launched the public-facing part of our project titled the “Digital Analysis of Syriac Handwriting” or DASH (dash.Stanford.edu). DASH consists of digital page images from 90% of the world’s surviving Syriac manuscripts securely dated to before the twelfth century, as well as 90,000 individually trimmed letters from these manuscripts. In addition to introducing this tool to scholars of Syriac, this article presents a series of novel visualization tools that can also serve as a starting point for digital paleography projects in other linguistic traditions.
Abstract This paper extends Andreas Juckel’s important 2009 article, “Research on the Old Syriac Heritage of the Peshitta Gospels: A Collation of MS Bibl. Nationale Syr. 30” (Hugoye 12.1, 41-115). The research herein is based on collating the text of Acts contained in this noteworthy Syriac Biblical manuscript against the standard Peshitta text and forty-two other Peshitta manuscripts and more than one hundred fifty Syriac patristic sources. The collations show that the text of Acts in BNS30 has approximately 230 non-orthographic variant readings, of which 117 are unique variants not found in other Peshitta, Harklean or Christian Palestinian Aramaic MSS of Acts. There are approximately 51 agreements with the Harklean version. This paper shows that the statistical textual profile of Acts in MS Bibl. Nationale Syr. 30 is consistent with Juckel’s findings regarding the Gospel text of this manuscript. It also provides analyses of selected readings and a complete collation of the manuscript.
Abstract This paper introduces some overlooked witnesses to the Syriac translation of the Euthalian Apparatus found in apocryphal narratives about Paul. The narratives entitled the “History of Paul”, the “Martyrdom of Paul the Apostle and the Discovery of His Severed Head”, and “The History That Should be Placed at the Beginning of the Book of Paul the Apostle” preserve portions of the prologue to Paul’s Epistles attributed to Euthalius. These narratives circulated independently from New Testament manuscripts where the Euthalian Apparatus typically circulates as paratextual material. They are clearly dependent on the Euthalian prologue and are valuable witnesses for understanding the development and use of the Apparatus in Syriac. These three narratives appear to preserve an early version of the Euthalian Apparatus prior to the insertion of the martyrium Pauli in the fifth century.
The article offers a description of the composite East Syriac manuscript preserved in Alqosh (Northern Iraq). Two originally independent parts of the manuscript contain works dealing for the most part with philosophy, logic, grammar and lexicography and were produced in 19th century Alqosh. Whereas the exemplar of one of these can be determined with certainty (British Library, India Office 9), that of the second part is more elusive. This previously unknown manuscript not only provides new textual evidence for a large number of texts, but is also of significant historical importance as a document attesting to the revival of interest in the study of philosophy and grammar in the Chaldean milieu during the modern period.
This article offers the editio princeps and translation of the Armenian translation of an invocational prayer of a now lost memra of Jacob of Serugh on Good Friday and the destruction of Sheol. This text is different from the Armenian homily on Good Friday which was recently edited and translated by Edward G. 1 This article grew out of research that began during the first two years of a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of History at Ghent University (2016-2018), funded by the Research Foundation of Flanders (Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek Vlaanderen, FWO), and continued at the Center for the Study of Christianity at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where I took up a one-year postdoctoral research fellowship in 2018-2019. I am thankful to Edward G. Mathews Jr. for offering his advice and corrections to the edition and translation. Thanks are also in order for the reviewers for their generous feedback and suggestions for improvement, especially of the translation. As always, any remaining errors are entirely my own.
The Syriac palimpsest folios listed under Add 17.137, no. 2 in Wright’s Catalogue of the Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum have been described as deriving from the Obsequies of My Lady Mary. This attribution has never been questioned afterwards. Although a specimen consisting of only one column of a single folio was published a few years ago, the remaining text on the folio and the other five have been left unedited. It was recently understood that under this sub shelfmark number two divergent manuscripts are hidden. One manuscript surviving only in two folios contains the Obsequies and is written in an elegant Estrangela script (ca. 5th cent.), while the other, in a much bolder script type, shows Jacob of Serugh’s Homily on the Presentation in the Temple (ca. 6th cent.), one of the few palimpsest and earliest text examples of this author. Only the folios with the Obsequies are edited here, which offer noteworthy textual additions and a selection of diverse variants that are not accounted for by the Christian Palestinian Aramaic and much later Ethiopic transmissions.
