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Syriac at the 2018 SBL/AAR Annual Meeting (Denver)

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For anyone interested in Syriac and attending the SBL/AAR annual meeting this year in Denver, I have compiled a list of all the presentations that deal with Syriac (from what I can tell from the titles).

If anyone has a paper that deals with Syriac that’s not on this list, I’d be happy to add it. Just contact me on Twitter (@jedwardwalters) or email me at: jwalters [at] rc [dot] edu.

List of papers with session info:

SBL Sessions (and Supplementary Groups)

S17-109 – Aramaic Studies  11/17: 9:00-11:30 AM – 708 (Street Level) Convention Center (CC)

  • Cody Strecker, Baylor University: “Ephrem the Syrian’s Acrostic Theology”
  • Ethan Laster, Abilene Christian University: “Toward a Pre-Chalcedonian Dating of John the Solitary”

S17-116 – Christian Apocrypha  11/17: 9:00-11:30 am – 111 (Street Level) Convention Center (CC)

  • James E. Walters (yours truly), Rochester College, “The (Syriac) Exhortation of Peter: A New Addition to the Petrine Apocryphal Tradition”

P17-135a – Linguistic, Literary, and Thematic Perspectives on the Qur’anic Corpus (IQSA) 11/17: 9:00-11:30 am – 709 (Street Level) Convention Center (CC)

  • Marijn van Putten, Leiden University, “The Absence of Syriac Borrowings in the Qurʾān

S17-142 Pseudepigrapha 11/17: 9:00-11:30 am – 703 (Street Level) – Convention Center (CC)

  • Eric Crégheur, Université d’Ottawa – University of Ottawa, “The Pseudo-Ephrem: A Status Quæstionis”

S17-242 – Religious World of Late Antiquity 11/17: 1:00-3:30 pm – Centennial Ballroom H (Third Level) Hyatt Regency

  • Erin Galgay Walsh, “Vanishing Women, Lingering Voices: Wrestling with Representations of Gendered Speech in Greek and Syriac Poetry”

S17-334 Pseudepigrapha 11/17: 4:00-6:30 pm – 303 (Street Level) – Convention Center (CC)

  • Liv Ingeborg Lied, MF Norwegian School of Theology, “Reading 2 Baruch on Easter Sunday: Imagining a Multi-medial Encounter with 2 Bar 72:1–73:2 and Challenging the Scholarly Narrative of Ancient Jewish Writings”
  • Daniel M. Gurtner, Southern Seminary “Second Baruch from Greek into Syriac: An Examination of Translational Features and Their (Potential) Implications”

S1-124 – Ethiopic Bible and Literature 11/18: 9:00am-12:00pm – Mineral Hall C (Third Level) – Hyatt Regency (HR)

  • Gavin McDowell, Université Laval, “Jubilees in Syriac: The Evidence of the Dictionary of Bar Bahlul”

S18-136 – Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew 11/18: 9:00-11:30am – Mile High Ballroom 2A (Lower Level) – Convention Center (CC)

  • Johan M. V. Lundberg, University of Cambridge, “Accents, Prosody, and Syntax: A Comparison of Biblical Hebrew and Syriac Masoretic Traditions”
    Srecko Koralija, University of Cambridge, “Object Marker(s) in Hebrew-Syriac Language Contact”

S18-213a – Digital Humanities in Biblical, Early Jewish, and Christian Studies

Joint Meeting with A18-238 – Traditions of Eastern Late Antiquity

11/18: 1:00-3:30pm – 106 (Street Level) – Convention Center (CC)

  • James E. Walters, “The Digital Syriac Corpus: A New Digital Resource for the Study of Syriac Literature”

S18-221 – History and Literature of Early Rabbinic Judaism 11/18: 1:00-3:30 pm – Capital Ballroom 2 (Fourth Level) – Hyatt Regency (HR)

  • Daniel Picus, Brown University and Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos, Florida State University, ““Your Brother’s Blood Drips from Your Hand”: The Punishment of Cain in Rabbinic and Syriac Christian Interpretation”
  • Miriam-Simma Walfish, Harvard University and Maria E. Doerfler, Yale University, “The Wisdom of Jepthah’s Daughter”
  • Krista Dalton, Kenyon College and Erin Galgay Walsh, Duke University
    “The Afterlives of Isaiah 58:7 in Early Christian and Rabbinic Literature”
  • Ophir Münz-Manor, Open University of Israel and Jeffrey Wickes, Saint Louis University, “Jacob of Sarug and Yannai on the Tower of Babel”

P1-233 – International Syriac Language Project 11/18: 1:00-3:30pm – Directors Row E (Plaza Building-Lobby Level) Sheraton Downtown (SD)

  • Ignacio Carbajosa, Universidad San Dámaso, “Two Ancient Syriac Peshitta Versions of 1 Maccabees: Which One Is the True Peshitta? What Is the Other One?”
  • Philip Forness, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, “The Books of Maccabees in Syriac: A Context for Their Translation”
  • Eric J. Tully, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, “Peshitta Ruth: Insights from Translating the Mosul Text for the Antioch Bible”
  • Binyamin Goldstein, Yeshiva University and Abraham J. Berkovitz, Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion, “Translating 4 Ezra: Problems and Prospects”
  • Bradley J. Marsh, Jr., University of Oxford, “Jacob of Edessa’s Witness to the Book of Daniel in Greek: A Survey”

S18-311 – Book History and Biblical Literatures – 11/18: 4:00-6:30pm – Centennial Ballroom A (Third Level) – Hyatt Regency (HR)

  • Adam Bremer-McCollum, University of Notre Dame, “Two Languages, Two Scripts, and Three Combinations Thereof: A Personal Prayer-Book in Syriac and Old Uyghur from Turfan (U 338)”

S19-132 – New Testament Textual Criticism 11/19: 9:00-11:30am – Capital Ballroom 4 (Fourth Level) Hyatt Regency (HR)

  • Ian N Mills, Duke University, “‘Unripe Figs’: Isho’dad’s Diatessaron and the Original Language of Tatian’s Gospel”

S19-138 – Religious Competition in Late Antiquity / Christian Apocrypha 11/19: 9:00-11:30am – Mile High Ballroom 4F (Lower Level) Convention Center (CC)

  • Jacob A. Lollar, Florida State University, “What Has Ephesus to Do with Edessa?: The Syriac History of John, the Cult of the Dea Syria, and Religious Competition in Fourth-Century Syria”

P19-225 – International Syriac Language Project 11/19: 1:00-3:30pm – Granite C (Third Level) Hyatt Regency (HR)

  • Jeff Childers, Abilene Christian University, “”The Word Will Not Wait:” Specialized Vocabulary in Syriac Divinatory Texts (Hermeneia)”
  • David J.A. Clines, University of Sheffield, “Denominative Verbs in Classical Hebrew”
  • Cynthia L. Miller-Naudé, University of the Free State and Jacobus A. Naudé, University of the Free State, “The Syriac Contribution to Understanding Rare Lexemes in the Greek of Ben Sira”
  • Jonathan Loopstra, Northwestern College – St. Paul, “Reading Basil’s Hexaemeron in Grecized Syriac: Athanasius II of Baladh and Early Syriac Lexicography?”
  • Srecko Koralija, University of Cambridge, “Historical and Methodological Considerations in Making Syriac Lexica”

AAR Sessions

A17-434 – Study of Islam Unit 11/17: 5:30-7:00pm, Convention Center 507

  • Reyhan Durmaz, Brown University, “Stories, Saints, and Sanctity between Christianity and Islam”

A17-438 – Traditions of Eastern Late Antiquity 11/17: 5:30-7:00pm, Hyatt Regency Capitol 7

  • Laura Locke Estes, Saint Louis University, “‘Babes Who Need Milk’: Portraying Muslims as “Jews” in Eastern Christian Polemic”

A18-119 – Middle Eastern Christianity 11/18 9:00-11:30am, Convention Center Mile High 1F

  • Jessica Mutter, University of Chicago, “By the Book: Religious Conversion in Early Islamic Syria and Iraq”
  • Henry Clements, Yale University, “Protestant Foxes and Catholic Wolves in the Late-Ottoman Syriac Heartland”
  • Basil Bas, Marmara University, “From Benjamin David to Abdulahad Davud: the Story of a Chaldean Christian’s Conversion to Islam in the Early 20th Century”

A18-424 – Qur’an Unit and Traditions of Eastern Late Antiquity 11/18: 5:30-7:00pm, Convention Center 403

  • Nathan Hershberger, Duke University, “Patient Apocalypticism and the Syriac Tradition: Political Theology in Ephrem the Syrian, Mar Qardagh, and Giwargis Warda”
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Introducing the Oxford-BYU Syriac Corpus – A Presentation at the #msuglobaldh Symposium

Today I’ll be giving a lightning talk presentation on the Oxford-BYU Syriac Corpus–a new digital archive for Syriac texts–at Michigan State University for the MSU Global Digital Humanities Symposium. The full schedule for the event can be found here.

The presentation will be live-streamed, which can be viewed here. My talk is scheduled for 1:30 pm (EST).

Here is the abstract for my presentation:

Introducing the Oxford-BYU Syriac Corpus: An Archive for the Preservation of Syriac Texts

The Syriac language is an ancient dialect of Aramaic, spoken widely throughout the Middle East in the 4th-7th centuries CE. Following this period, Syriac continued to be spoken primarily by Christian communities along the Silk Road, from the Mediterranean Sea to India and China. Moreover, Syriac survives today as a liturgical language for multiple ecclesiological bodies, and there are modern dialects spoken in Turkey, Syria, Iran, Iraq and diaspora communities around the world. Given the geographic and temporal range of the Syriac tradition, it is no surprise that there is a rather large corpus of Syriac texts produced between late antiquity and the late modern period; however, most of these texts remain unavailable to heritage communities of the Syriac tradition, either because the manuscripts are held in library collections in Europe or because of lack of access to critical editions available to scholars in research institutions.

The Oxford-BYU Syriac Corpus seeks, in part, to remedy this lack of availability of texts by creating an open access repository of Syriac texts. The current corpus consists of a collection of several hundred texts, which have been transcribed either from print editions or manuscripts by scholars and students at Oxford University and Brigham Young University, and these transcribed texts are in the process of being converted to TEI for use in the corpus. In the next stage of the project, we envision people from anywhere in the world being able to contribute to this corpus by transcribing texts and encoding them using training materials and templates that we will create. We hope that this corpus will serve as an enduring archive of the Syriac language, which will aide in the preservation of the Syriac heritage among global diaspora communities.