Invitation to Syriac Christianity: An Anthology fills a conspicuous gap in Syriac studies. It offers an introductory sourcebook on the Syriac Christian traditions, bringing together accessible English translations of a variety of key texts that will be of interest to teachers, students, and general readers alike. For a field that has long been cognizant of its importance to early Christian, late antique, and Middle Eastern studies but has had trouble demonstrating that importance to non-specialists, a volume like the present one was much needed. The editors should be commended for the care taken in producing it.
The book organizes its translated excerpts into four areas: foundations; practices; texts and textual transmission; and interreligious encounters. This prudent editorial choice allows the reader to follow the evolution of the premodern Syriac traditions thematically rather than through a series of individual theologians, which might have been a simpler but less elegant organizing principle.
Otherwise, the picture of Syriac Christianity and its study that Invitation provides is a fairly traditional one. The focus is religious thought, literature, and practice rather than social history, and the volume includes no texts later than the fourteenth century, the putative onset of Syriac literary decline according to an old but persistent western scholarly view. The editors’ choice of thematic focus is certainly fair enough. Almost all Syriac literature is religious in some sense; its western academic study has been weighted toward biblical studies and theology; and the title invites the reader to Syriac Christianity, not to other dimensions of Syriac Christians’ historical experiences. The result is a very coherent anthology on late antique and medieval religiosity, one enriched by the contacts with other religions and Silk Road civilizations illustrated in the book's fourth section.
Given that the introduction underlines the continued vitality of the Syriac Christian traditions into modernity, I would have liked to see the sourcebook itself reflect that perspective. Early modern interactions with the papacy and modern Neo-Aramaic poetry no doubt would have fascinated the book's intended audience, and their inclusion would have been an important contribution to pushing Syriac studies out of the staid “rise and decline” framework. But readers will yet be fascinated by the multitude of rich texts that have been included in this essential volume.
