St. Basil was one of the most popular of the Greek Fathers amongst the Syrian churches, and his De Spiritu Sancto was twice translated into Syriac. The first version, made in the late fourth/early fifth centuries, survives the three manuscripts of the fifth-seventh centuries and is edited and translated here for the first time. It is a paraphrastic text and so is of theological interest in its own right. Its biblical citations are also noteworthy. The second translation, made in the seventh century, survives only in fragments and these have been collected from florilegia manuscripts and edited in parallel with the Greek text. Introductions to the two volumes explore the Syriac manuscript traditions of this work and their significance, and investigate St. Basil's contacts with Syriac-speaking Christians and the theology of the first Syriac version. Unusually, a detailed orthographic index of textual variants is also included.

Basil of Caesarea (c. 328-378) was the great father of Christian monasticism in eastern Anatolia, whose influence spread into all the Greek, Latin and Syriac speaking churches. Basil’s counsels for ascetics in community are collected in his Asketikon. The earliest version, the Small Asketikon, did not survive in the Greek, but only in a Latin translation (The Rule of Basil), and in a Syriac translation (The Questions of the Brothers). Silvas presents the first ever edition of the entire Syriac translation, drawn from five manuscripts, the oldest from the late 5th century. The introductory study shows how the Syriac translator was himself a warm-hearted spiritual father who made his own authorial contributions to the Questions of the Brothers.

This book examines doctrinal conflicts concerning the dual nature of Christ in the period after the Council of Chalcedon by considering the life and works of Philoxenos of Mabbug (c.440-523), a Syriac theologian whose surviving corpus amounts to some 500,000 words.

Papers presented at the Eleventh International Conference on Patristic Studies held in Oxford 1991 (see also Studia Patristica 24, 25, 26 and 28). The successive sets of Studia Patristica contain papers delivered at the International Conferences on Patristic Studies, which meet for a week once every four years in Oxford; they are held under the aegis of the Theology Faculty of the University. Members of these conferences come from all over the world and most offer papers. These range over the whole field, both East and West, from the second century to a section on the Nachleben of the Fathers. The majority are short papers dealing with some small and manageable point; they raise and sometimes resolve questions about the authenticity of documents, dates of events, and such like, and some unveil new texts. The smaller number of longer papers put such matters into context and indicate wider trends. The whole reflects the state of Patristic scholarship and demonstrates the vigour and popularity of the subject.

Marshalling previously untapped Christian materials, Bar-Asher Siegal offers radically new insights into Talmudic stories about Scriptural debates with Christian heretics.

For a long time the Diatessaron has drawn the interest of modern scholars. Some of the problems related to the Syriac Harmony of the Gospels have been solved. Others still remain in dispute. The Syriac Commentary on the Diatessaron, attributed to Ephraem (306-373), is one of the most important witnesses to the wording of the Harmony. Unfortunately, most of the surviving Syriac folios of the text have been discovered only recently. Consequently, no detailed study on the Commentary has been undertaken yet. It is the aim of this study to present this scholarly demand. This Oxford dissertation deals with the questions of the difficult process of the Commentary's transmission and analyses both the Trinitarian and Christological understanding of its author. By way of a comparison with the "genuine" Ephraem, this study argues that the Commentary in its present form is a compilation from the hand of one of his disciples. However, it serves as an important source on the theological discussions in the Edessa of the late fourth and early fifth centuries.

This book examines the importance of the past, both real and imagined, in constructing contemporary culture in the period AD 500-1000. It goes beyond 'history-writing' in a narrow sense to examine philosophy, theology, liturgy and jurisprudence as vehicles for tradition and the imagination of a past 'golden age'. The papers straddle the Roman-Persian frontier and go well into the Islamic period: together, they push the boundaries of late antiquity' into the varied language traditions: not just Greek, but also Syriac, Armenian, Coptic and Arabic.

The School of Nisibis was the main intellectual center of the Church of the East in the sixth and early seventh centuries C.E. and an institution of learning unprecedented in antiquity. Fear of God and the Beginning of Wisdom provides a history both of the School and of the scholastic culture of the Church of the East more generally in the late antique and early Islamic periods. Adam H. Becker examines the ideological and intellectual backgrounds of the school movement and reassesses the evidence for the supposed predecessor of the School of Nisibis, the famed School of the Persians of Edessa. Furthermore, he argues that the East-Syrian ("Nestorian") school movement is better understood as an integral and at times contested part of the broader spectrum of East-Syrian monasticism. Becker examines the East-Syrian culture of ritualized learning, which flourished at the same time and in the same place as the famed Babylonian Rabbinic academies. Jews and Christians in Mesopotamia developed similar institutions aimed at inculcating an identity in young males that defined them as beings endowed by their creator with the capacity to study. The East-Syrian schools are the most significant contemporary intellectual institutions immediately comparable to the Rabbinic academies, even as they served as the conduit for the transmission of Greek philosophical texts and ideas to Muslims in the early 'Abbasid period.

This late ancient Christian treatise, preserved in Syriac and falsely attributed to Athanasius of Alexandria (d. 373), exhorts female virgins to be "holy in body and spirit" (1 Cor. 7:34) and to abstain from "all that is in the world - the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches" (1 John 1:16). Drawing on themes developed in the de virginitate literature of the fourth and fifth centuries, the author instructs virgins on their proper physical deportment and use of the five senses, but he incorporates into his work exhortations to purity and repentance originally addressed to a wider audience of male and female ascetics and perhaps even laity. Most likely a translation of a Greek original composed between the fifth and ninth centuries, the treatise is of interest also for its frequent and inventive use of the Bible in support of the ascetic ideal.

Papers presented at the Twelfth International Conference on Patristic Studies held in Oxford 1995 (see also Studia Patristica 29, 30, 31 and 33). The successive sets of Studia Patristica contain papers delivered at the International Conferences on Patristic Studies, which meet for a week once every four years in Oxford; they are held under the aegis of the Theology Faculty of the University. Members of these conferences come from all over the world and most offer papers. These range over the whole field, both East and West, from the second century to a section on the Nachleben of the Fathers. The majority are short papers dealing with some small and manageable point; they raise and sometimes resolve questions about the authenticity of documents, dates of events, and such like, and some unveil new texts. The smaller number of longer papers put such matters into context and indicate wider trends. The whole reflects the state of Patristic scholarship and demonstrates the vigour and popularity of the subject.