How was the past imagined by Hui Muslims in late nineteenth and early twentieth century China? Chen argues that this was a productive time for historical thought, bookended by the establishment of a robust Sino-Islamic knowledge base by Liu Zhi on one end and Republican China on the other end. This book explores histories that unify vast stretches of time and place: from genesis to the modern era, from Arabia to China. Hui historians create narratives that transform China into an Islamic space and Islam into a Chinese religion.

As part of the Gorgias Handbook Series, this book provides a political and military history of the Sasanian Empire in Late Antiquity (220s to 651 CE). The book takes the form of a narrative, which situates Sasanian Iran as a continental power between Rome and the world of the steppe nomad.

Many stories and legends about John the son of Zebedee have survived from antiquity. He was known as one of the twelve disciples of Jesus Christ, as the “Beloved Disciple” and author of the Gospel of John, and even as the recipient of the divine revelation in the Apocalypse. Later traditions, such as the Greek Acts of John, told of how John traveled to Ephesus and converted people to Christianity. John was an important figure to Catholic Christians, to Gnostic Christians, and to Manichaeans. He also found a distinct place among Syriac Christians who preserved their own story about John’s acts in Ephesus. William Wright first introduced the History of John in 1871 using two manuscript witnesses. Since then, more witnesses have been discovered, but little work has been done on this native Syriac apocryphon. The present volume brings together all of the known Syriac witnesses to the History of John with a new translation and includes, for the first time, a critical discussion of the history, provenance, and importance of this text for the study of Syriac Christianity and Christian Apocrypha more generally.

This monograph traces how ‘Jewish’ elements were introduced into and disseminated throughout the Ethiopian Orthodox Täwaḥədo Church through a series of multi-layered, socio-politico-cultural processes. Drawing on historical and literary evidence, Afework tracks the incorporation of Jewish features into the Ethiopian Orthodox Church from pre-Aksumite Christianity, before the fourth century, through the sixteenth century.