Eastern Christian Texts – serie

The Armenian Church Synaxarion is a collection of saints' lives according to the day of the year on which each saint is celebrated. Part of the great and varied Armenian liturgical tradition from the turn of the first millennium, the first Armenian Church Synaxarion represented the logical culmination of a long and steady development of what is today called the cult of the saints. This book is the second in a twelve-volume series-one for each month of the year-and is ideal for personal devotional use or as a valuable resource for anyone interested in saints.

A distinctive feature of Christian culture in early Islamic Syria and Palestine was a renewed interest in literature on martyrs, which represented a potential reaction among some Christian communities to the rise of Islam in the region. The adaption of this early Christian genre to the new circumstances of political domination during the early Middle Ages offers a revealing, yet until now largely unexplored, window onto how Christians responded culturally to Islamic imperialism. This bilingual edition of three martyrdoms provides a new opportunity to understand this historical phenomenon. These writings, composed at the Mar Saba monastery in the Judean Desert and attributed to famous members of that community, share a common high literary style, although each portrays Christian martyrdom at the hands of the Muslims very differently. This parallel-text edition offers the only English translations available of these important works, making it an invaluable resource for both students and scholars of religious history.

Ephrem the Syrian is the most important poet and theologian of the Syriac Christian tradition. His numerous hymns, homilies, and commentaries were highly influential for later generations, and his poetry continues to be broadly used in the liturgies of Syriac Christian churches. This new translation of twenty poems, the only edition of Ephrem that features a text in vocalized serto script with a facing translation, offers a broad and varied introduction to Ephrem's work. Arranged according to his concept of salvation history, this book will allow readers to further explore his poetry in both its original language and in a contemporary English translation.

Under the title "The Reformation of Morals", the 10th-century Syrian Orthodox scholar Yahya ibn 'Adi offered encouragement to the effort to promote moral perfection, especially among kings and other members of the social elite: his tract, on the social virtues and vices, gives extensive advice about the cultivation of the former and the extirpation of the latter. While there are many echoes of Hellenistic moral philosophy in his presentation, the topical profile of the work and the language the author uses reveal his participation in the Baghdad circle of philosophers and intellectuals - both Christian and Muslim - who were responsible for much that has come to be regarded as typical of the classical culture of the Islamic world. In fact, this text has occasionally been attributed to one or another famous Muslim author. It now stands as an important Christian contribution, in Arabic, to a strand of moral philosophy that is an integral component of the intellectual tradition of the world of Islam.

How do intellectual traditions interact? This is the fundamental question driving this book, which explores a case study set in the early Islamicate world: the Treatise on Divine Unity According to the Doctrine of the Christians by the Christian-Arabic theologian and philosopher Yaḥyā ibn ʿAdī (d. 974). The book attempts to contextualise the treatise and its intellectual environment by exploring the interplay between philosophy, Christian theology and Islam. This volume includes a revised Arabic text of Samir’s 2015 edition, collated with the manuscript Tehran, Madrasa-yi Marwī 19, recently discovered by prof. Robert Wisnovsky.