The Martyrdom, and the later History, of Simeon bar Sabba’e narrate the death of the bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon who was killed around the year 340 C.E. at the beginning of King Shapur II’s “Great Persecution” of Christians in Sasanian Persia.

Georg Graf publishes here an edited Arabic text and German translation of a “Treatise on the Eucharist” attributed to Abu l-Hasan al-Muhtar ibn Butlan. Graf supplements the text with an introduction and brief notes.

This volume contains long excerpts of the 12th/13th cent. Church of the East author Shem‘on Shanqlawaya’s Chronicon, here given in Syriac and in German translation.

In this set of homilies Ephrem (306-373) invites the reader into a world of symbolic interpretation filled with imagination brimming beneath the surface of word-plays, alliteration, and typological comparisons. These hymns thrust the reader into the middle of a context in which Christians and Jews maintain competing practices of a Passover service to the extent that Ephrem feels the need to distinguish between the symbol and the reality. These homilies are presented in their Syriac original alongside an annotated English translation.