Hitti has written a brilliant history of a land into which more historical and cultural events were crowded than any area of equal size. Syria has invented and transmitted to mankind such benefits as monotheistic religion, philosophy, law, trade, agriculture, and our alphabet.

John became bishop of Tella in 519, but left for exile only two years later when Justin I enforced the Council of Chalcedon which Syrian Orthodox Christians refused to accept. John became one of Justinian’s most dangerous ecclesiastical opponents by ordaining thousands of deacons and priests who formed the first generation of the Syrian Orthodox hierarchy. In the present text John lays out his faith in a way which gives an inside view of how a non-Chalcedonian bishop of the sixth century located himself and his co-religionists within the Christian tradition and how he understood the foundation of the Church.

Van Rompay discusses Jacob of Sarug’s understanding of sin by interweaving a conversation with 4th-century Ephrem’s influence and Jacob's late 5th-century contemporary thinker, Narsai. Critical to this discussion is their assumption of Adam’s created capacities.

This book, the first study of its kind, contends that an authentic Phoenician solar theology existed, reaching back to at least the fifth or sixth century BCE. Through Azize’s examination, a portrait of a vibrant Phoenician tradition of spiritual thought emerges: a native tradition not dependent upon Hellenic thought, but related to other Semitic cultures of the ancient Near East, and, of course, to Egypt. In light of this analysis, it can be seen that Phoenician religion possessed a unique organizing power in which the sun, the sun god, life, death, and humanity, were linked in a profound system.