The Ostraca of the Coptic Museum, written on pottery pieces, limestone flakes and wood, present the lives of ordinary people in their interactions with one another, and includes their economic and personal affairs. This volume is a catalog of the 1,127 ostraca in the museum.

Jacob of Edessa was a seventh century polymath who witnessed the coming of Islam. In this collection of papers, specialists discuss the life and works of this figure with emphasis on the cultural landscape of the seventh century. Contributors include Sebastian P. Brock, Richard Price, Andreas Juckel, Alison Salvesen, Theresia Hainthaler, Amir Harrak, and Khalid Dinno.

This collection of essays offers an innovative exploration by an Asian theologian on various issues and themes that engaged the early teachers of faith. It gives special focus to the ongoing relevance of these issues for Christian theological discourse and praxis today.

This comprehensive study offers a critical, comparative analysis of the sources available on Bardaisan and a reinterpretation of his thought. The study highlights the profound points of contact between Bardaisan, Origen, and their schools; the role of Plato’s Timaeus and Middle Platonism in Bardaisan’s thought, and Stoicism. Bardaisan’s thought emerges as a deeply Christian one, depending on the exegesis of Scripture read in the light of Greek philosophy. Positive ancient sources present him as a deacon or even a presbyter, as an author of refutations of Marcionism and Gnosticism, and as a confessor of the faith during persecution.

An alternative, fallibilist model of moral reasoning rooted in the American Pragmatic tradition. Additional resources drawn from Chinese philosophy, Jain epistemology, modern philosophy of mathematics, and the Gadamerian hermeneutical tradition serve both to corroborate the argumentation and to provide examples of continuities in reasoning that cross the boundaries of disparate traditions.

An emerging consensus maintains that the exile was not as extensive as the Old Testament claims. However, that it held singular importance for the book of Jeremiah is beyond question. Modine argues that Jeremiah represents a range of options for understanding and responding to the events surrounding the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple. This volume reads the diverse contents of Jeremiah as a kind of dialogue between competing perceptions of the exile. The author argues that coherence is to be found precisely in the incoherent, as it reflects the communal trauma of exile.

The epistemology of the mid-fourth-century Christian scholar in Persia, Aphrahat, presumes that the human mind and the task of biblical interpretation are caught up in a dynamic experience of Christian spiritual transformation. In short, for the Persian Sage, good Bible interpretation requires nothing less than the total person—inner and outer, in community and before God. In Aphrahat’s Demonstrations, we encounter a scholar who not only presents this remarkably integrated set of ideals but is also an impressive practitioner of them.

This article contributes to the knowledge of Jacob of Edessa’s (d. 708) Old Testament revision by editing twenty texts (a total of 80 verses) from the Book of Isaiah and comparing them with the Greek recensions of the Septuagint, with the Peshitta, and the Syrohexapla. Two special features are introduced to set out Jacob’s revision technique in some detail: 1. comparison with an earlier undeveloped stage of Jacob’s revision extant in Ms Add 17,134 of the British Library; and 2. the distinction (by different colours and fonts) of the ‘traditions’ involved in the definite stage of his revision. Both features point to the emphasis given to the Peshitta in translating the substantial Greek text of the Old Testament.

The Christian era in Syriac and Arabic sources does not always correspond with the western calculations. Until quite recently the members of the Syriac churches used the era of the Seleucids (of Alexander the Great; East and West Syrians) as the era of the creation of Adam (Melkites). The use of the Christian era became more common from the 16th century, due to the closer contacts between the Oriental and the Latin churches.

Christianity reached China in its Syriac guise in the seventh century. Christian documents written in Chinese which have come down to us from the period of the Tang Dynasty contain a large number of proper names which are, or appear to be, transcriptions of Syriac names. In this paper, originally published in Malphono w-Rabo d-Malphone: Studies in Honor of Sebastian P. Brock, the author provides a list of the transcribed proper names with their modern and reconstructed Middle Chinese pronunciations, together with the suggestions made by scholars in the past for the original forms of these names.