Paper Abstracts

Scholars have long recognized and studied the Syrian Church Father Aphrahat’s close relationship to Late Antique Jewish thought and practice. However, few studies have sought to articulate the systematic theological vision behind Aphrahat’s Demonstrations. Far from being primarily polemic texts, I argue that the Demonstrations gradually deploy the metaphor of the construction of the temple to present a soteriological narrative, for which the purity laws of the Hebrew Bible are an indispensable component. The purity laws, for Aphrahat, are an article of faith and inform how the Christian bolsters the life of faith through worship and asceticism.

Ephrem the Syrian uses military metaphors consistently and in great number. This, I suggest, reveals an essential aspect of his anthropology: to be human is to be “cast into battle” (de Eccl. 3:1). Biblical characters and near-contemporary saints appear in Ephrem’s writings as war heroes, their lives retold and reinterpreted as battles. I claim that, in doing so, the preacher-poet calls his congregation into a new imaginary of battles, weapons, and comrades-in-arms. By transposing the locus of bravery, feats of valor, and display of strength to the realm of the spirit, Ephrem creates a new, distinctly Christian heroic ideal.

The mystery of Christ’s Transfiguration in the Syriac tradition presents a remarkable, though an overlooked topic in academic research. Ephrem, for example, speaks of the change of clothed humanity, Pseudo-Macarius emphasises the inner glory of the body of Christ, Jacob of Serugh introduces a unique epistemological interpretation, while Isaac speaks of a cosmic transformation. The distinctiveness of this thought is apparent also on the lexical level, as the Syriac term for change ܫܽܘܚܠܳܦܳܐ (šwaḥlāpā, √ܚܠܦ) is semantically independent of the Greek verb μεταμορφόω. In this way, Syriac authors in general do not rely on Greek philosophy or metamorphic literature, but primarily on Biblical images.

This paper will argue that the theological interpretation of plague victims in the early Islamic tradition was the product of a confessionalizing imperative. Faced with Syriac speaking Christians who consistently interpreted recurrent outbreaks of bubonic plague as a divine punishment for communal sin, early Muslim thinkers were compelled to discover an alternative theological meaning for plague deaths in their own community. The solution was to accept the Christian understanding of plague as a divine punishment for Christians, but to refigure its providential significance for Muslims. The result was an entirely new figure: the Muslim plague martyr.

My paper analyzes the historical and religious significance of 8^th Century Chinese Syriac Christianity’s name change from Persian Sutra Religion to Da’qin Luminous Religion. Da’qin Luminous Religion, or Da’qin Jǐngjiao, is composed of two Chinese terms, namely Da’qin and Jǐngjiao. Da’qin is a legendary place according to Chinese geography, and Jǐngjiao means the Luminous Teaching elucidating the Chinese cosmological Dao. However, Jingjiao Christians transform these two Chinese names with Christian meaning to represent their Eastern Syrian identity and doctrine. Their dialogue through the Chinese religious expressions and intellectual discourse in the Tang cultural milieu inevitably led them to become Chinese Christians.

This paper will focus on the debate on the merits of Arabic and Syriac between the eleventh-century bishop Elias of Nisibis and the Muslim vizier Ali al-Maghribi found in the sixth session of Kitab al-Majalis. In an attempt to demonstrate that Elias sought to vulgarize these views on language and respond to Arabization in all its forms, the analysis will include previous Syriac writings on language, as well as examples from material culture.

Syriac Orthodox saints' lives have been preserved through manuscripts and oral transmission for many centuries within the Syriac community, especially in the homeland. But today, most believers live outside the homeland. In this paper, I will show that translations of hagiography into German connect the youth, which does not know the former homeland anymore, with the traditions and places of the saints. I explore the implications of this translation project in Europe and its success in fostering such connections. What does it mean for youngsters learning about saints of the church and rendering the gained knowledge to their surroundings?

With attention to early Syriac Christian ideas concerning virginal practice as a pathway to human fulfillment and resurrection, this paper will explore the case of the female virgin martyr in the Syriac tradition as human par excellence. However, to retain such a status, this paper argues that in the martyrdom literature, these "Daughters of the Covenant" blur the categories of being (human, non-human animal, and divine) in the struggle against their persecutors to assure their salvation. It is in death that the Bnāt Qyāmā also becomes the Iḥidāyā, which is to say of the same uniqueness of Christ. Paradoxically, in death the female virgin martyr becomes the most human she can be, now permanently donned with the robe of glory.

In the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius, ethnic difference is the result of theological error and corruption, and women—specifically mothers—have a disproportionate impact on their lineage, transmitting the corruption of their ancestors from their bodies to the next generation. This differs from the reproductive models operative in the texts with which this author aligns himself, including Methodius of Olympus’ Symposium. This paper will explore the ways in which this apocalypse weaves together ethnicity, theological error, (non-)normative sexualities, and female bodies to offer an alternative model of sexual reproduction for Syriac Christians in the seventh century CE.

This paper analyzes Bar Hebraeus’s ranking of angels in his Candelabra V with sensitivity to his use of sacerdotal imagery for the angelic hierarchy. I show that Bar Hebraeus’s understanding of the ranks of angels is as priests organized in three celestial churches, continuous with the human church. This organization impacts his understanding of the roles of angels and hierarchy. I track the sources he draws on to interpret the Dionysian hierarchy, as well as which factors, such as his political situation and his Aristotelianism, might be influencing his understanding of the ranks of angels.