Many stories and legends about John the son of Zebedee have survived from antiquity. He was known as one of the twelve disciples of Jesus Christ, as the “Beloved Disciple” and author of the Gospel of John, and even as the recipient of the divine revelation in the Apocalypse. Later traditions, such as the Greek Acts of John, told of how John traveled to Ephesus and converted people to Christianity. John was an important figure to Catholic Christians, to Gnostic Christians, and to Manichaeans. He also found a distinct place among Syriac Christians who preserved their own story about John’s acts in Ephesus. William Wright first introduced the History of John in 1871 using two manuscript witnesses. Since then, more witnesses have been discovered, but little work has been done on this native Syriac apocryphon. The present volume brings together all of the known Syriac witnesses to the History of John with a new translation and includes, for the first time, a critical discussion of the history, provenance, and importance of this text for the study of Syriac Christianity and Christian Apocrypha more generally.

The book comprises an annotated critical edition and a detailed study of Kitāb al-Sawād al-a‘ẓam by al-Ḥakīm al-Samarqandī (d. 342/953).

The chapters in Torah is a Hidden Treasure pertain to authorship in Seder Eliyahu Rabba and Pirqe deRabi Eliezer, natural law and Israel’s statutes, Masorah and midrash, as well as a definition of midrash. The Hebrew Bible and midrash is researched in the interpretation of Israelite tribes, the Ten Commandments and the Covenant Code, and in Rashbam’s Bible commentary and its exegetical devices.

One of the distinctive characteristics of the writings of Ambrose of Milan is his frequent and lengthy borrowings from the works of Philo of Alexandria. He treated the 1st-century Jewish philosopher as an authoritative predecessor and made use of his works to a far greater extent than any other Church Father did. This study seeks to fill a lacuna in the current scholarship by investigating Ambrose’s use of Philo in his collection of letters, focusing on a set of three letters concerning the topic of the Genesis creation account (Ep. 29, 31, & 34 [PL#43, 44, & 45]). In all three cases, Ambrose fielded questions on the Six Days of Creation (Hexaemeron) by drawing upon Philo’s treatise De opificio mundi. Each of these letters is undeniably Philonic and yet uniquely Ambrosian. This study seeks to clarify why Ambrose found Philo to be particularly valuable in spite of his Jewishness and also to investigate how Ambrose interpreted, adapted, and ultimately re-created his source.

The Journal of Language Relationship is an international periodical publication devoted to the issues of comparative linguistics and the history of the human language. The Journal contains articles written in English and Russian, as well as scientific reviews, discussions and reports from international linguistic conferences and seminars.

A long-awaited and essential tool for the study of one of the earliest texts of the Christian Apocrypha and an important text in Syriac literature, theology, and history.