A long-awaited and essential tool for the study of one of the earliest texts of the Christian Apocrypha and an important text in Syriac literature, theology, and history.

The Church venerates among its saints several Early Christian women whose teaching and wisdom contribute to the depth of our theological heritage. Their inspired voices can be heard at work witnessing: in the New Testament, in the early centuries of the Church Fathers and throughout the Byzantine era. Readers will find this volume bringing female leaders from the Early Church to life from the traditional ancient sources and sharing their experience of the presence of God. Their remembered advice to followers still illuminates issues of faith and justice which bind us together as Christians today.

Fragmentary material comprises a significant part of the manuscript tradition of the New Testament. Whether it be tattered papyrus documents, the abbreviated citation of biblical texts in early Christian writings, or the scattering of once-whole manuscripts, the story of the New Testament is a gathering of fragments—in all their forms—in the hopes that “nothing may be lost.” This volume is a result of the Twelfth Birmingham Colloquium on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament, wherein presenters were invited to approach the theme of “fragments” from any philological or philosophical framework. Chapters discuss the possible forgery of a biblical papyrus, the dismemberment of a sixteenth-century lectionary manuscript, and the Arabic text of Romans preserved in a fragmentary bilingual codex. Elsewhere, software tools are employed to re-assess the readings of manuscripts digitised in decades past and to re-evaluate the stemma of a family of manuscripts. Further contributions consider the fragments of the biblical text contained in patristic commentaries and Byzantine catenae. The wide-ranging scope of the research contained in this volume reflects the need to examine these pieces of the past so that the shape of research in the present accurately illustrates the tapestry that is the history of the New Testament texts.

The Life of Theodotus of Amida is that rare thing: a securely dated eye-witness account of life under Arab Muslim rule in the first century of Islam, and one of the few extant texts from seventh-century North Mesopotamia. It is imbued with local color and contemporary detail, revealing an intimate knowledge of the terrain, its inhabitants and officialdom, as well as the precariousness of the lives of those living in the borderlands between the Byzantine and Islamic empires.