Moral, Ascetic, and Ritual Dimensions to Law-Observance in Aphrahat’s Demonstrations / Adam Lehto
Abstract Writing to counter the critique of a much larger Jewish community, and to instruct fellow ascetics in their chosen path, the fourth-century Syriac author Aphrahat develops a notion of law-observance that serves both ends: God’s law of righteousness, which is more fundamental than the Mosaic law, has been summed up in Christ’s teaching on love for God and neighbor; but a commitment to this way of love also calls for ascetic renunciation. In addition, the few references to ritual should be understood, like Aphrahat’s teaching on ascetic practice, as an attempt to bring this...
Read MoreTHE SYRIAC CHANT TRADITIONS IN SOUTH INDIA / Joseph J. Palackal
The Syriac (Aramaic) liturgy and liturgical chants that originated in the Middle East found their way into South India through immigrant Christians sometime before the fifth century. Continuous contact between the “Syrian Christians” (descendants of Hindu converts and immigrant Christians)1 in India and the Persian Church kept the chant tradition rejuvenated in the subsequent centuries. Due to divisions and varying ecclesiastical allegiances starting from the sixteenth century, there are now two liturgical and three chant traditions among the Syrian Christians. The Syro-Malabar...
Read MoreThe Holy Spirit as Feminine in Early Syriac Literature / Sebastian Brock
In his Commentary on Isaiah.(1) Jerome quotes from a passage in the Gospel according to the Hebrews where Jesus proclaims that ‘my mother the Holy Spirit has taken me . . . [and conveyed me to Mount Tabor]’. No one should be scandalised on this matter, comments Jerome, in that ‘Spirit’ is feminine in Hebrew, but masculine in ‘our language’ (Latin) and neuter in Greek, ‘for in the deity there is no gender’ [in divinitate enim nullus est sexus]. The aim of this paper is to explore some of the repercussions of this grammatical feature of the Semitic languages in the history of...
Read Moreكنيسة أنطاكية السريانية الأرثوذكسية عبر العصور / قداسة سيدنا البطريرك مار إغناطيوس زكا الأول عيواص
تأسيس كنيسة أنطاكية الكنيسة السريانية الأرثوذكسية هي كنيسة أنطاكية، تأسست في فجر المسيحية، يوم كانت أنطاكية عاصمة سورية وإحدى العواصم الثلاث في الدولة الرومانية. دخلت المسيحية مدينة أنطاكية على يد بعض تلاميذ السيد المسيح الذين تشتّتوا هاربين من أورشليم بسبب الاضطهاد الذي أثاره اليهود ضدهم بعيد استشهاد اسطيفانس رئيس...
Read MoreBAR HEBRAEUS ܒܪ ܥܒܪܝܐ
One of the major motifs of my poetry, is the exploration of the historical evolution, adoption and transformation of elements of Hellenic culture in literary traditions of non-Hellenic areas that have been touched somehow by Greek civilization. For while it is often claimed that ours is the parent of Western civilization, I would argue that in fact it is the Middle Eastern civilizations that are united closer to us in kinship and which have drawn more heavily on the corpus of our tradition, whereas with the West, it is more precise to refer to an adoptive, rather than a sanguinary...
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