The Armenian Church Synaxarion is a collection of saints’ lives according to the day of the year on which each saint is celebrated. Part of the great and varied Armenian liturgical tradition from the turn of the first millennium, the first Armenian Church Synaxarion represented the logical culmination of a long and steady development of what is today called the cult of the saints. This volume, the first Armenian-English edition, is the fifth of a twelve-volume series—one for each month of the year—and is ideal for personal devotional use or as a valuable resource for anyone interested in saints.

The Armenian Church Synaxarion is a collection of saints’ lives according to the day of the year on which each saint is celebrated. Part of the great and varied Armenian liturgical tradition from the turn of the first millennium, the first Armenian Church Synaxarion represented the logical culmination of a long and steady development of what is today called the cult of the saints. This volume, the first Armenian-English edition, is the seventh of a twelve-volume series—one for each month of the year—and is ideal for personal devotional use or as a valuable resource for anyone interested in saints.

Armenian text of the Prayers attributed to Ephrem the Syrian, with the first-ever translation into a western language. Utilizing a highly developed poetic rhythm, the author manifests a profound spirituality laying his own emptiness before the inexhaustible Mercy of God.

Judean hagiographies are unusual. Some are unexpectedly structured: a saint’s life in the form of a history text. Others offer surprising content. Expected hagiographic stylizations, for example, often depict moments in which the saint is offered money for a miracle. In such cases the saint invariably refuses. Judean saints, however, accept gratitude willingly – often with cash amounts recorded. The peculiarities of these works have regularly been examined on literary and theological grounds. The monasteries that produced these texts were utterly dominated by the environment of Christian Jerusalem. Although often commented upon, the unmined implications of this reality hold the key to understanding these hagiographies. It is only by examining these monasteries’ ties to – and embeddedness within – their peculiar context that we can perceive the mindset that produced such baffling texts.