Analecta Gorgiana

The article reviews the memoir of Rev. George Burder. The reviewer outlines the reverend’s family, his entrance to the ministry, his shift into missionary work, his preaching, and his hardships. The reviewer judges his style and persona.

This article introduces and translates “A Treatise on the Parables of our Lord” by Rev. Fredrick Gustavus Lisco of Berlin. The treatise defines and traces the history of parables. Using critical sources, he explores New Testament parables.

The article describes and critiques the authenticity of the epistles of Ignatius. The author claims that the illegitimacy of letters that speak of prelacy erodes the basis for Episcopacy and Presbyterianism.

This paper, reprinted from the Journal Asiatique, provides a handy introduction to the Sogdian alphabet used for Buddhist texts in Central Asia.

A collection of Syriac medical remedies, from a manuscript dated 1888; the origin is uncertain; the inscription mentions Galen.

This paper examines the “muscular Christianity” phenomenon in Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ and Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 short play, “Today is Friday.”

Athas challenges the past assumptions by Book of Daniel scholars, especially with regard to the symbolism in Chapter 9. This exegesis provides a theory for chronological interpretation that includes dates for calculating the seventy weeks mentioned in Daniel's vision.

Van Rompay discusses Jacob of Sarug’s understanding of sin by interweaving a conversation with 4th-century Ephrem’s influence and Jacob's late 5th-century contemporary thinker, Narsai. Critical to this discussion is their assumption of Adam’s created capacities.

Three interpretative trends address the vision at the ratification of the Sinai covenant in Exod. 24:10. Traditions relate whether God or a throne was seen, as well as the consequences for this vision for the leaders and history of the Israelites.

This study investigates how the Rabbis handled the Book of Chronicles, highlighting issues including intermarriage. While genealogical lists contain intermarriage in Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah is generally opposed. Ezra did compose some of the lists and intermarriage was acceptable only under certain conditions.

In the tradition of Schliemann's search for Troy, Clarke uses literary and topographic data to suggest site locations for the ancient cities of Gargara, Lampascus, and Pionia in the Troad.

This paper discusses the literary and physical evidence for the Lenaeum (the sacred precinct of Dionysios in Athens), a site whose location was lost.

As the oldest organized religion in Sassanian Iraq, Judaism serves as a kind of model for other religious organizations in the region. After considering the growth of Judaism in Iraq during the Sassanian period, Morony notes the connections between the Jewish and Aramaean populations as well as the intermixed ethnic communities in which Jews played a part. Social, administrative, and religious issues are all considered. Messianic expectations as they continued to develop in the Jewish community in diaspora round out this discussion of Judaism as a fully developed religion in Iraq under Islamic rule.

With a focus on the Kitāb Ādāb al-falāsifah, a book of aphorisms attributed to Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, some of the important aspects of the Kitāb are laid out, particularly those dealing with religion and the pursuit of philosophy. Although putatively, translators and scholars such as Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, opened the way for philosophical dialogue between Muslims and Christians of Orthodox churches on precepts, often based on Aristotle, which they could agree would lead to wisdom and a humane society.

In the west centuries ago manuscripts were replaced by printed books, and relegated to mostly secular libraries as a result of religious and political upheavals. In the Christian Orient such changes were slower and remain less advanced. Manuscripts have not entirely vanished from regular use, and Christian communities retain ownership of significant collections of their historic manuscripts. The vital connection between manuscripts and religious culture endures, even if attenuated by persecution, diaspora, technology, and other aspects of modernity. This essay provides an historical survey of these issues in both Europe and the Christian Orient (limited here to the Middle East, the Caucasus, and Ethiopia/Eritrea).

Originally delivered as one of the Jowett Lectures for 1906, the contents of this booklet emerged during the first quest for the historical Jesus. Somewhat surprisingly, Burkitt discovered that historical criticism increased the historical credibility of the Synoptic Gospels in his estimation. This first lecture in the series addresses the literary originality of the Gospel of Mark. Here Burkitt surveys the priority of Mark, the shared Synoptic material, and the literarily unique sections of Mark.

Anton Baumstark discusses the various, complex problems inherent in any attempt to determine the influences from other translation traditions on the form of the Christian-Palestinian text of the Pentateuch.

Anton Baumstark compares the text of a Gospel citation found in a Coptic Manichaean Kephalaia with other versions of the text in order to demonstrate that it was influenced by the Diatessaron tradition.

In the present essay, Anton Baumstark surveys several Christmas texts from the Roman Antiphonarius Officii in an attempt to find evidence of Byzantine influence. Baumstark focuses the comparison on poetic texts in the Byzantine tradition.

In the present essay, Curt Peters compares citations from the Gospel of Matthew in the Syriac translation of Eusebius’s “Theophany” in order to determine the form of the citations within the Syriac translation tradition.

Curt Peters presents the collated Arabic texts of several Gospel passages that include noteworthy variants. For each passage, Peters includes a critical apparatus with variant readings and a German translation.

Anton Baumstark compares selections from the Latin Te Deum hymns with eastern Eucharistic prayers in order to find evidence of eastern influence on the western liturgical tradition.

The article refutes many of the arguments Stephen Henry Langdon made in his article on the text “The Sumerian Epic of Paradise, Flood, and Fall of Man”. The essay concludes with the entire text laid out and a commentary.

Burgess attempts to prove the originality of the nakshatra system to the Hindus. He proves the early existence of this system and disproves the origin of the lunar zodiac system to the Chinese and the Arabs.

The Sumerian hymn K. 257 is in the Emne-sal dialect, which is the non-Semitic designation for a variation of Sumerian. The focus of the hymn is the goddess Belit. However, no conclusion was reached about her origin.