History

This study provides background on wisdom forms, the key Qumran sectarian texts, and wisdom studies related to the Dead Sea Scrolls. 4QInstruction includes poetic discourses, hymnic material, and short wisdom sayings and admonitions. A major focus is placed on the admonitions, which are discussed in terms of their structure, wisdom forms, and setting. The admonitions are expressed in biblical wisdom forms, showing a familiarity with and acceptance of traditional Hebrew wisdom, including a focus on traditional themes. Yet, when read from the sectarian perspective, 4QInstruction reinforces the guidelines and theology of the key Dead Sea Scroll documents.

Jules Leroy, the French art expert, spent several months touring the Near East in search of Early Christian remains. During this time he visited most of the monasteries in Egypt, Syria, the Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq.

The Apology of Aristides is the earliest Christian apologia to have survived in its entirety. It was written as a defense of the new Christian way of life against its many rivals and opponents, and details some of its leading ethical precepts. Long thought to have been lost, this early second-century work was rediscovered in a Syriac translation in a seventh-century manuscript preserved in the monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai. This volume contains not only the standard edition of the Syriac text with critical notes, but also the first English translation and a study of surviving fragments in Greek, which were subsequently identified in the 'Life of Barlaam and Josaphat' (an early Christian reworking of the life of Buddha).

Luke, once Assistant Governor of Jerusalem for the British Mandate government, hopes "to make these singularly interesting peoples better known to English readers, and to win for them additional sympathy in the difficult times through which they are passing."

This book is a compilation of letters, narratives of journeys and local traditions, and various documents pertaining to the Archbishop of Canterbury's Mission to the Assyrian Church of the East.

Shirin, the beloved wife of the Persian shah, Chosroes II (b. 628), pulled political strings behind the scenes and supported the Christian minority in Iran.

De Pretis’s book focuses on the epistolary features of Horace’s First Book of Epistles, reading them from points of view related to the epistolary form: the weight of the addressee; the dialogue between literary genres; the poet's self-representation; temporality; and the power of the author. These issues also pertain to literature as such, since all literature can be regarded, to a certain degree, as "epistolary." But the extent and consistency with which the Epistles explore epistolary aspects, can only be explained in terms of their generic affiliation.

Gertrude Bell, the well-known explorer and archaeologist, began her extensive travels in the Near East in 1892. In her trips, she surveyed and photographed the areas which she visited and investigated archeological sites.

This is an expert description of the Syrian Orthodox Church and all the more important for being practically the only book of its kind, even now. Parry is among the best writers in the genre of ecclesiastical tourism.

This book is an illustrative description of the Holy Land, with direct references to Biblical passages. It is designed for general and popular reading rather than for the professional student.

Patricia Crone reassesses one of the most widely accepted dogmas in contemporary accounts of the beginnings of Islam: the supposition that Mecca was a trading center. In addition, she seeks to elucidate sources on which we should reconstruct our picture of the birth of the new religion in Arabia.

A stirring collection of fifteen articles, many of which have been previously published by the author who is a feminist Jew. The author unabashedly confronts difficult biblical and midrashic texts, without taking an apologetic stance.

Lady Annie Brassey (1839-1887) possess a keen eye for human interest and narrative detail that propelled her to international fame as a travel writer. This book presents a daily diary of two voyages to Constantinople aboard her family yacht in the mid 1870s. Here, the modern reader may glimpse the natural wonders, cultural distinctions, and political circumstances of such countries as Portugal, Spain, Morocco, Italy, Greece, and Turkey during that time period. Readers will also find an excellent example of the nineteenth-century European fascination with the "Orient."

Born as a Greek Ottoman in Istanbul, Demetra Vaka Brown (1877-1946) moved to America where she became a journalist and novelist, revisiting Turkey to write several books about the twilight of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of the Turkish Republic. She based this, her first book, on experiences from 1901, when modernization had made inroads into Ottoman domestic life and the harem was becoming a thing of the past. Her reflections on life in the harem suggest the conflicted nature of her allegiances: Vaka is nostalgic for the Ottoman life that was rapidly disappearing, but she also enjoys the freedoms of a professional American woman.

As Anna Bowman Dodd (1855-1929), a New York travel writer and journalist, journeyed to Istanbul with the American Ambassador to France she embarked on a detailed account of the city and its people. Interested in documenting the changes in Turkey brought about by the "embrace" of modernity and progress, she considers Turkish women's rights, harems and marriage, the management of the household, education, slavery, the Sultan's reign, and nationalist movements in the last days of the Ottoman Empire. She caters to the American market for Orientalism but is also reflexive about its employment, both invoking and undercutting stereotypes as she addresses the "Eastern Question."

Born into the Ottoman Muslim elite, Zeyneb Hanoum and her sister Melek Hanoum were given a Western-style education by their progressive father, who expected them subsequently to live the segregated lives of Ottoman ladies. Rebelling, the sisters collaborated with the French author Pierre Loti, hoping that harnessing European intellectual support would speed up Ottoman social reform. Fleeing Istanbul in 1906 for fear of imperial reprisals, the sisters traveled in disguise to Europe, hoping to find "freedom" in the West. With Zeyneb Hanum's letters punctuated by Grace Ellison's introduction, commentary, and footnotes, this book challenges Orientalist stereotypes and documents the vibrant engagement between Eastern and Western women at the fin de siècle.

Hester Donaldson Jenkins (1869-1941), a professor at the American College for Girls in Constantinople from 1900-1909, wrote enthusiastically about the Young Turks who seemed to promise new freedoms for Ottoman women. Jenkins uses her own observations of Constantinople, her students, and their families to construct an account of a "typical" Turkish Muslim woman's life cycle at this turning point in Ottoman history. She directs her comments toward childhood, education, marriage, polygamy, and divorce, in order to correct Western misapprehensions. In its confidence in the bright prospects of American influence and Ottoman reform, this book captures an optimistic moment in which social progress seemed to be thriving.

A prominent novelist, social activist, journalist, and nationalist, Halide Edib Adivar (1882-1964) was one of Turkey's leading feminists in the Young Turk and early Republican period. Memoirs is the first book in her two volume English-language autobiography, published in 1926, while she and her second husband Dr. Adnan were in exile in London and Paris having fallen out of favor with Mustafa Kemal's one-party regime. Edib describes her childhood, her confrontation with her first husband's polygyny, her divorce, and her entry into political and literary writing. Edib's account of her private life provides a unique example of a woman's individual and personal struggle for emancipation and gender equality.

Selma Ekrem grew up among the progressive Ottoman Muslim elite. Ekrem benefited from having an unconventional mother, who did not insist on her daughter's veiling. The book covers the family's sojourns outside Istanbul when her father was governor in Jerusalem during the 1908 Young Turk revolution and then governor of the Greek Archipelago Islands, where the whole family was held captive when their island was taken by the Greeks during the Balkan Wars. Returning to Istanbul just as World War I broke out, Ekrem attended the American College for Girls. Frustrated at the restrictions of Turkish female life, Ekrem traveled to America and countered prevalent stereotypes by lecturing on Turkey.

The Last Assyrians is a film on the survival of the Aramaic-speaking Christians (Assyrians, Chaldeans, Syriacs). The U.S. edition is the English version.

This book aims to provide a brief, yet very informative description of every Holy Land site mentioned in the Bible. Relying on the extensive research of the Palestinian Exploration Fund, Tristram's work afforded a new and vividly descriptive perspective on the Holy Land.

This is a revision of E.M. Yamauchi's dissertation. It includes a collection of the earliest Mandaic texts, which are magic scrolls and inscribed bowls, dating from about 600 CE, together with transcriptions and translations, a grammar, and a lexicon.

This book, on the pneumatology of Origen's Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, illustrates the centrality of the Holy Spirit for his theological project. As both God's exitus into the world and humanity's reditus to God, the Spirit forms the crucial link between Origen's doctrine of God and his spiritual anthropology. Origen's images for the Holy Spirit, understood in the context of second century concepts of 'spirit,' convey the intersection of theology and anthropology in his thought. This book explores Origen's understanding of the multiplicity of spirits found in the Scriptures, with particular emphasis on the Holy Spirit as pivotal to God's outreach into the world.

Early lists of bishops, identified by Walter Bauer as "literary propaganda," mark critical points in the development of the doctrine of the apostolic succession of bishops. This study delves into the political struggles surrounding the lists and the doctrine they served to define. Ecclesiastical politics in each case reflects the threat to the bishop's authority and clarifies the meaning of apostolic succession in the Church's development. This social history approach, examining the function of the literature within its historical circumstances, reveals how theology developed from politics. The development is as gripping politically as it is illuminating theologically.

This volume collects together for the first time the most influential papers of the late scholar of Georgian and New Testament textual critic, J. Neville Birdsall. Professor Birdsall wrote on Greek witnesses to the New Testament text, the Georgian version of the New Testament, palaeography, patristics, and the theory of textual criticism. The collection fully demonstrates the author’s standing as one of the most learned and wide-ranging New Testament textual scholars of modern times.