Introduction to This Volume
How this book is arranged
This is the eighty-second volume of a series that gathers the writings of the early Church in order of date, from the generation after the apostles down to the eighth century. This volume holds Lives of the Eastern Saints, Simeon Stylites, Rabban Bar-ʿIdtā and Rabban Hormizd, from the period about AD 459 – 700.
Within each work the text is divided into chapters and numbered sections, so that any passage can be found again and cited. The small bold figures in the text are the section numbers.
The translations
The text is in English only. Wherever a modern English version has been prepared for SermonIndex it is used here; otherwise the book prints an older public-domain translation. In both cases the wording is the translator’s own: older translations have not been altered beyond dividing them into sections. The sources for every work are listed at the back of the book, together with the licence under which each text is released. All the works in this volume are printed in older public-domain translations.
In this volume
Simeon was born about AD 390 at Sis on the border of Syria and Cilicia. After years as a monk he began to live on a pillar in AD 423, and for more than thirty years he stood on one at Telanissos, east of Antioch, while crowds of pilgrims came to hear him. He took part from his pillar in the quarrels of the Church, and he died in AD 459.
Rabban Bar-ʿIdtā and Rabban Hormizd were monks of the Church of the East who founded or restored monasteries in the mountains of northern Mesopotamia, near Alqosh and Mosul. Their lives were written in Syriac in prose and in verse, and were edited and translated into English by E. A. Wallis Budge in 1902.
The three lives in this volume are drawn from the monastic world of Syria and Mesopotamia: Simeon Stylites, who lived for decades on a pillar, and the East Syrian monks Rabban Bar-ʿIdtā and Rabban Hormizd. The life of Hormizd is followed by a long poem on the same saint.
Dates and authorship
Dates are approximate and are debated by scholars. Each work begins with a short introduction that states what is known about its author and its date, and what is uncertain.