Invitation to Syriac Christianity

Michael Philip Penn is Teresa Hihn Moore Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University. He is author of When Christians First Met Muslims: A Sourcebook of the Earliest Syriac Writings on Islam, Envisioning Islam: Syriac Christians in the Early Muslim World, and Kissing Christians: Ritual and Community in the Late Ancient Church.   Scott Fitzgerald Johnson is Joseph F. Paxton Presidential Associate Professor and Chair of Classics and Letters at the University of Oklahoma. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018. He is author of Literary Territories: Cartographical Thinking in Late Antiquity andThe Life and Miracles of Thekla: A Literary Study and editor of The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity, among other volumes.   Christine Shepardson is Lindsay Young Professor and Department Head of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee. She is author of Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem’s Hymns in Fourth-Century Syria and Controlling Contested Places: Late Antique Antioch and the Spatial Politics of Religious Controversy and coeditor of Dealing with Difference: Christian Patterns of Response to Religious Rivalry in Late Antiquity and Beyond.   Charles M. Stang is Professor of Early Christian Thought and Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. He is author of Our Divine Double and Apophasis and Pseudonymity in Dionysius the Areopagite: “No Longer I.”

Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note on Translation, Transliteration, and Nomenclature
Maps by David A. Michelson and Ian Mladjov

Introduction

PART I. FOUNDATIONS

1. Origin Stories
2. Poetry 
3. Doctrine and Disputation

PART II. PRACTICES

4. Liturgy
5. Asceticism
6. Mysticism and Prayer

PART III. TEXTS AND TEXTUAL TRANSMISSION

7. Biblical Interpretation
8. Hagiography
9. Books, Knowledge, and Translation

PART IV. INTERRELIGIOUS ENCOUNTERS

10. Judaism
11. Islam
12. Religions of the Silk Road

Appendix A. Translations and Editions
Appendix B. Biographies of Named Authors
Appendix C. Glossary
Index