Introduction to This Volume

How this book is arranged

This is the hundred and fifteenth volume of a series that gathers the writings of the early Church. It is an addendum, and it gathers the writings of the Syriac-speaking churches that were not printed in the volumes before it. The first part is the rhythms of Ephrem the Syrian, verse homilies on the faith, on the Nativity and against the Jews. The second part is three Demonstrations of Aphrahat the Persian Sage. The third holds two books of treasures, the Book of the Cave of Treasures, which tells the story from Adam to Christ, and a collection of Syriac miscellanies. The fourth part holds the life of the catholicos Mar Aba, a Syriac chronicle of the years 754 to 813 and an account of the Persian capture of Jerusalem in the year 614. The last part is the Book of the Bee by Solomon of Basra and two late Syriac poems.

The introductions, the descriptions of the parts and the headings were prepared for SermonIndex with the help of artificial intelligence. The texts themselves are the translations, and were not rewritten.

Translations and texts

The English is that of older translators, nearly all of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and is printed as the website prints it. Most of these texts were read by machine from scanned books and have not been proofread against the printed pages, so a misreading may remain. Footnotes, and words in Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic and Latin, are left out of this book, as are the translators’ long introductions; the reader who wants them should go to the printed edition.

Dates and authorship

Ephrem died in 373 and Aphrahat wrote in the 340s, and these are among the oldest Christian writings in Syriac. The Cave of Treasures was put together in the sixth century or earlier from older material, and the Book of the Bee is of the thirteenth century. The rhythms of Ephrem are verse in the original and are printed here in the prose English of Morris, with the refrains.