Religion

The first edition of this much needed text is now available in Syriac with a facing English translation. The book covers the orders for the burial of deacons, priests, prelates, and nuns, followed by their respective memorial service.

In this revised and updated edition of his classic work, Robert Murray offers the fullest and most vivid picture yet available of the development and character of the culture. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers.

This book examines the religious epistemologies of Søren Kierkegaard, John Henry Newman, and William James in the light of contemporary challenges to religious faith. They defended the right of persons to embrace religious beliefs that are not strictly warranted by empirical evidence and logical argumentation. Faith must not be hampered, they argued, by the demands of reason narrowly conceived. Paul Sands notes, however, important differences in the way each relates faith to reason. Sands examines the religious epistemologies of Kierkegaard, Newman, and James in the context of two "givens" characteristic of early twenty-first century culture, namely, the intellectual hegemony of probabilism and the pluralization of the Western mind.

This study applies form criticism to the stories of the earliest rabbinic midrashim. The results shed light on the literary personalities of the individual midrash collections and the relationships of transmission in the tradition. These stories are of particular interest from an inter-religious and comparative literary point of view because New Testament studies have often referred to certain narratives in the gospels as "midrashic." The author sets forth, in positive terms, an understanding of what functions historical anecdotes serve in the tannaitic midrashim, along with a catalogue of the rhetorical conventions used to fulfill those functions.

Ephrem, the most celebrated writer of the Syriac Church, presents a wide range of theological themes and images that are characteristic of fourth-century Syrian Christianity. A significant theme that no one has yet studied in Ephrem is the concept of sickness and healing. This book presents the significance of healing theology and the ways in which the healing of man - spiritually, mentally, and corporally - is highly valued by Ephrem. The main part of the book deals with the causes of spiritual sickness and the process of healing, and the way in which Ephrem places them in the divine history of salvation.

The akītu festival is one of the oldest recorded religious festivals in the world, celebrated for several millennia throughout ancient Mesopotamia. Yet, the akītu was more than just a religious ceremony; it acted as a political device to ensure the supremacy of the king, the national god, and his capital city. Using tools of social anthropology and ritual analysis, this book presents a detailed reconstruction of the festival events and its attendant rituals to demonstrate how the festival became a propagandistic tool wielded by the monarchy and ruling classes. The akītu festival demonstrates the effectiveness of religion as a political tool.

The late Cambridge scholar F. H. Chase gives an insightful study on the Lord's prayer in the early Christian Church. The study first discusses the early Church and the Synagogue, then goes through an analytical study of every phrase of the prayer.

The story of the two women martyrs S. Perpetua and her slave S. Felicitas (d. 203 CE) have captivated generations of Christians. In this book, the late Cambridge scholar J. A. Robinson provides a study of the Greek and Latin texts of the Passio based on newly discovered manuscripts, as well as the original Latin text of the Scillitan Martyrs, another text of late 2nd century North African martyrdom.

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).

Only fragments survive of the writings of the Valentinian Gnostic teacher Heracleon (fl. 145-180 AD). The remnants can be found primarily in quotations in Origen's commentary on the Gospel of John. This study gives an edition of the surviving texts with extensive notes, biblical references, and indices. This volume is indispensable for the study of second century Gnosticism.

The Church Orders are an interesting series of manuals in The Ancient Church Orders. A. J. Maclean makes them better known to the modern reader, and explains the extent to which they throw light on early Christian worship and customs.

A translation of the Book of Worship by the eleventh-century writer Al-Ghazzali, this is a useful book which explains elements of Muslim worship for those who desire to know more. Annotations help clarify allusions and technical terms referred to in this translation.

Contains six lectures: early bishops of Edessa, Bible in Syriac, early Syriac theology, marriage and the sacraments, Bardaisan and his disciples, Acts of Judas Thomas, and Hymn of the Soul. They were delivered in 1904 by Burkitt, then lecturer in paleography, at the University of Cambridge.

In one volume, this classic in liturgical studies brings together the main types of Eucharistic liturgy of the various Eastern Christian Churches. For more than a century it has been a reference for students and scholars in comparative liturgy.

Antient Liturgies was a valuable resource at an early stage in comparative liturgical studies and continues to provide a broad overview of the diversity of early Christian worship in an accessible and convenient format for students and scholars.

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.

Walenty Potocki was a young Polish nobleman who abandoned wealth, power, and unlimited worldly prospects to convert to new religion - Judaism. Potocki was betrayed by a member of the religious community he embraced and burned at the stake by the Church he left behind in 1749. This book examines eleven versions of this remarkable man’s story and the heated, previously unpublished, correspondence between the Potocki clan and one of his early biographers. Noble Soul is the record of one man’s defining faith, and of the compelling human need for personal spiritual fulfillment.

The present work takes up the neglected quest for a theory of ritual and methodology of analysis that recognizes and traces the contours of ritual dynamic structure. The resulting fresh approach provides a controlled framework for interpreting rituals belonging to various cultures and for identifying bases of comparison between them. The first part of ritual dynamic structure builds a theory and definition of ritual and a corresponding methodology for analyzing specific rituals in terms of their activities and the meanings attached to those activities. The second part illustrates this methodology and its usefulness for comparative studies by applying it to ceremonies of cult purification in the ancient Near East.

The book takes the reader on a journey of cross symbolism. Karim covers topics from the paradise of Eden to the Crucifixion and Golgotha. He discusses the cross as a symbol of historical, sacramental, and eschatological events.

Buchan’s work is an examination of the theological use of the doctrine of Christ's descent to the dead in the works of Saint Ephrem the Syrian (ca. 306-373 C.E.). Ephrem's conception of Christ's descent to Sheol provides us with an important and distinctive vision of the significance of this salvific event. Ephrem's use of Semitic and non-Western poetic forms and structures as a mode of theological discourse, coupled with his preference for imagery and symbolism rather than definition, resulted in a variety of vivid depictions of Christ's descent to Sheol. The doctrine is shown to be an integral and multifaceted component of Ephrem's theology.

This book deals with the works of the anti-Chalcedonian hagiographer, John Rufus, and traces the basic motives behind the opposition against the council of Chalcedon in the fifth century through an attempt to reconstruct a specific anti-Chalcedonian culture. As part of the eastern monastic culture, it considered itself a counter-culture guarding purity of ascetic conduct and orthodoxy from being defiled by the perverseness of the majority. Reading John Rufus' hagiography, we find ourselves in the midst of a cosmological warfare between good and evil, where the great heroes of the anti-Chalcedonian movement enter into history as God's warriors against the rebellion of demons and heretics.

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.

A translation (from the Syriac) of the West Syriac Daily Offices, known as the book of shhimo.

Jacob of Sarug is one of the most celebrated poets of Eastern Christianity and the Syriac tradition. The Gorgias Press edition, edited by Sebastian P. Brock, contains over 100,000 lines of poetry based on Bedjan’s 1905 edition.