A record of the author’s investigation concerning the situation of the Syriac-speaking churches during the 1960s. The author provides statistics about parishes, schools, organizations, and cultural activities. The book lists most of the educational institutions with hundreds of photographs, as well as biographies and photos of Syriac writers and Orientalists specializing in Syriac studies.

Was there an active Jewish-Christian polemic in fourth-century Persia? Aphrahat’s Demonstrations, a fourth-century adversus Judaeos text, clearly indicates that fourth-century Persian Christians were interested in the debate. Is there evidence of this polemic in the rabbinic literature? Despite the lack of a comparable Jewish or rabbinic adversus Christianos literature, there is evidence, both from Aphrahat and the Rabbis that this polemic was not one sided.

Volume 9 includes articles by Alexander Treiger, Mark Dickens, Emmanuel Joseph Mar-Emmanuel, Khalid Dinno and Amir Harrak, and Martin Tamcke.

Book VIII of the Apostolic Constitutions has one of the most complex transmission histories of any text from the Christian Orient. Anton Baumstark describes various sources for parallel texts in order to explicate its translation history in the Oriental languages.

Paul Vetter presents the Armenian text, along with a Greek translation, of the “Gnostic Martyrdom of Peter” from the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. The article also includes an appendix in which Vetter describes the manuscripts used in the collation.

Oskar Braun provides a brief introduction to the life and career of Patriarch Timothy I, including a list of his writings with special attention to his letters and the Syriac text and German translation for five of Timothy’s letters.

Anton Baumstark presents a historical survey of the development of the exegetical methods of the Syriac Orthodox (“Jacobite/Monophysite”) tradition. Baumstark conducts this survey by detailing the influence of various exegetical works through three distinct historical periods.

Early Christian artistic renderings of the traditio legis, exhibit a variety of commonalities and differences. Anton Baumstark compares various versions of the scene and finds evidence of both a Western and an Eastern version represented in multiple sources.

Anton Baumstark presents the complete Greek text of the Liturgy of Saint Gregory the Great. The liturgy was highly influential in the Latin tradition, but as evidenced by the early translation, it also had limited circulation in the Greek tradition.

Franz Cöln presents here the Arabic text of an anonymous writing defending the beliefs of the Jacobite Church against the beliefs of other traditions. The text includes a critical apparatus and is accompanied by a German translation.