The Third Lung: New Trajectories in Syriac Studies: In Honour of Sebastian P. Brock 33

No one mentions Syriac, – a dialect of the Aramaic language Jesus spoke –, without referring to Sebastian P. Brock, the Oxford scholar and teacher who has written and taught about everything Syriac, even reorienting the field as The Third Lung of early Christianity (along with Greek and Latin). In 2018, Syriac scholars world-wide gathered in Sigtuna, Sweden, to celebrate with Sebastian his accomplishments and share new directions. Through essays showing what Syriac studies have attained, where they are going, as well as some arenas and connections previously not imagined, flavors of the fruits of laboring in the field are offered. Contributors to this volume are: Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Shraga Bick, Briouria Bitton-Ashkelony, Alberto Camplani, Thomas A. Carlson, Jeff W. Childers, Muriel Debié, Terry Falla, George A. Kiraz, Sergey Minov, Craig E. Morrison, István Perczel, Anton Pritula, Ilaria Ramelli, Christine Shepardson, Stephen J. Shoemaker, Herman G.B. Teule, Kathleen E. McVey. Contents 6 Contributors 10 Introduction: The Third Lung 12 Part 1 Going Where We Should Have Gone 18 Ephrem and the Mariological Motif of Conceptio per Aurem 20 Seeking the Women of Ancient Syriac Christianity: Strategies of Method and Remembrance 52 Teach Your Children Well: Martyrs, Monks, and Mothers in Severus of Antioch 78 The Ladder of Prayer, the Ship of Stirrings, and the Exodus from Egypt 97 Stuck between Voice and Silence: Ephrem and the Rabbis on Prayer 121 Part 2 Digging Deeper 144 The Church’s “Third Lung”: Ancient Voices from the Syriac Orient That Speak to Today’s Western Society 146 Peshitta Parables as Oral Performance 165 Severus of Antioch on Ancient Church Customs: The Significance of Cyprian’s Letters as Quoted by Severus and Oriental Canonical Collections 184 Theodicy in the Letter of Mara Bar Serapion: Connections with Philosophical (Stoic) Accounts of Divine Retribution 204 A Monk and a Fish by the River of Babylon: An Unpublished Edifying Tale 234 Notes on Syriac Learning in South India in the Middle Ages and Early Modernity 246 Part 3 Going Where We Have Not Been 276 Bringing the Syriac Climacus to the Twenty-First Century 278 Towards a Syriac Semantic Web from the Perspective of 2020 290 Dialogue Elements in Late Syriac Poetry: The Ways of Transformation 322 Syriac Apocalypticism and the Rise of Islam 336 Christianity in Iraq and the Issue of Chaldean Identity 350 Who Says? A Social History of Syriac Use in the Medieval Islamic Period 359 Sergius Baḥīrā and a Syriac “Story of Muḥammad” 374 Index of Places 418 Index of Authors and Texts 420 Index of Bible Passages 423 General Index 426 No one mentions Syriac, - a dialect of the Aramaic language Jesus spoke -, without referring to Sebastian P. Brock, the Oxford scholar and teacher who has written and taught about everything Syriac, even reorienting the field as The Third Lung of early Christianity (along with Greek and Latin). In 2018, Syriac scholars world-wide gathered in Sigtuna, Sweden, to celebrate with Sebastian his accomplishments and share new directions. Through essays showing what Syriac studies have attained, where they are going, as well as some arenas and connections previously not imagined, flavors of the fruits of laboring in the field are offered.0