8 July, 2024
We are deeply honoured to welcome Dr Dan Batovici from KU Leuven to lead a session of the Eastern Christianity in Interfaith Contexts Reading Group.
Here are the details of this fascinating event.
Title: Finding a Home: The West Syriac Context of the Clementine Epistles on Chastity
Abstract: The two epistles De virginitate attributed to Clement of Rome seem to have been composed in Greek but only survived as a whole in Syriac. The publication of the Syriac text, known until recently from only one witness of the fifteenth century, led then to the double identification of a handful of excepts in Greek, quoted without attribution in one late-antique exegetical work, and of the fragment of one Coptic witness. The Syriac, however, remains the most interesting. Since the last edition (Beelen, 1856), a series of new witnesses have emerged that further document what was initially thought to be a fluke due to a scribal confusion: the fact that the two epistles are included as an integral part in several Syriac New Testament collections. This lecture aims to reconstruct the West Syrian context that led to this inclusion, which alone should probably be credited with the survival of the two epistles.
Speaker’s Biography: Dan Batovici is a senior research associate in the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at KU Leuven. He works broadly on the reception of early Christian literature, usually aiming to combine manuscript studies with cultural history. He is currently completing a four-year project on the Coptic, Syriac, and Armenian manuscript reception of the so-called ‘Apostolic Fathers.’
Chair: Professor Sebastian Brock, FBA, University of Oxford, UK.
Date: 8 July, 2024
Time: 17:00-18:00 BST | 9:00-10:00 PDT | 12:00-13:00 EDT
Venue: online
If you would like to join the Eastern Christianity in Interfaith Contexts Reading Group, please sign up here.
Related Sessions:
- Christian Trees
- Dialogue and Fire in a Fragmentary Syriac Martyrdom Narrative
- The Origins of the First Anti-Jewish Good Friday Hymns
- Finding a Home: The West Syriac Context of the Clementine Epistles on Chastity
- Who was Mary, the Blessed Virgin and Mother of God? A Byzantine hagiographical narrative by the ninth-century Monk Epiphanios
- Nikos Kazantzakis and Orthodox Christianity
- The Miracle of Pilgrimage: A Coptic Journey to the Holy Land During the Ottoman Period
- Setting the Stage: The Rose of Performance in Studying Late Ancient Hymnody
- Ephrem the Syrian and a New Beginning in Syriac Poetry
- A Jew Reads the Gospels in Syriac: Azariah de Rossi’s Critique of the Vulgate (1577)
- The Manuscript Project at the Coptic Monastery of St Paul the Hermit at the Red Sea, Egypt
- Mary’s Ordeal: A Syriac Narrative Poem on Many and Joseph
- Resurrection of the Human Body according to John of Dara’s Mimro I:4
- Gregory of Nyssa: On the Human Image of God
- ‘Conception by ear’ and Redemption of the Human Sensorium in Ephrem’s Thirty-fifth Madrasha on the Church
- From Edessa to South Arabia and Back: The Syriac Story of Bishop Paul and Priest John and Models of Sanctity in the Medieval Middle East
- Wrestling with Calculating-Thoughts: Mental Training according to Evagrius of Pontus
- Returning the Ticket: God and Evil in the Brothers Karamazov
- Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras: an Orthodox Dialogue with Islam
- Matta el-Meskin/Matthew the Poor: a ‘Contemporary Desert Father’ on Christian Unity
- Signs of Miraculousness: The Inimitability of Jacob of Serugh’s Teaching
- Epistolary Style in Coptic Letters from the Late Third Century to the Early Fifth Century
- Sarah and the Akedah: a Syriac Narrative Poem on Genesis 22
- The Paterik of the Kyivan Caves Monastery: Monk Polikarp in Discourse 14
- Jacob of Sarug on the Canaanite Woman (Mt 15:21-28, Mk 7:24-30): Biblical Storytelling and Models of Faith
- Commemorating the saints at Turfan: Mart Shir and Mar Barshabba
- The Opening Prayers of Saint Gregory of Narek’s Book of Lamentations
- Alexander Schmemann on Theotokos vis-à-vis Kali a Hindu Mother Goddess
- Enoch and the Fallen Angels in the Ethiopian Tradition
- Narsai on the Virgin Mary
- An Anonymous Syriac Dialogue between Mary and the Angel
- Dadisho of Qatar: Questioning the Desert Fathers
- George the Athonite on Matters of Faith and Rite, According to the Life of St George the Hagiorite
- Temple, Shekhinah and Prayer in Isaac of Nineveh’s III.VIII
- St. Ephrem’s Commentary on Genesis Ch.3
