Gateway to the Syriac Saints: A Database Project

Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent, Marquette University

Syriaca.org has created an open-access digital research portal for the study of Syriac saints and hagiographic texts 1 . It is a two-volume database entitled The Gateway to the Syriac Saints.

The first volume, Qadishe or “saints” in Syriac, is a digital catalogue of saints or holy persons venerated in the Syriac tradition. Some saints are native to the Syriac- speaking milieu, whereas other texts come from other linguistic or cultural traditions.

The second volume, the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Syriaca Electronica or BHSE is a digital reference catalogue on Syriac hagiographic texts. The BHSE contains the titles of over 1800 Syriac stories, hymns, and homilies on saints. It organized according to text and includes authors’ or hagiographers’ names, the first and last lines of the texts, bibliographic information, and the names of the manuscripts containing these hagiographic works. We have also listed modern and ancient translations of these works.

All of the data in the Gateway to the Syriac Saints has been encoded in TEI, and it is fully searchable, linkable, and open.

Introduction: Syriac Hagiography

Hagiography is the genre of the lives of the saints (Hinterberger in Efthymiadis, 2014; Harvey 2008). It emerged in the late antique period as a literary form to commemorate Christians whose lives were seen and promoted as models of sanctity. The study of Syriac hagiography offers scholars an important window into the cultural and religious history of the Middle East, and it brings together a wide array of literary forms, including prose and poetry (Insley and Saint-Laurent, forthcoming 2017). Broadly defined, Syriac hagiographic literature includes 1) apocryphal Acts, 2) metrical homilies and liturgical hymns on saints, 3) extended Lives or Vitae, 4) shorter episodic vignettes, sayings’ material, or miracle stories contained in larger collections, and 5) martyr romances or passions.

The production of saints’ lives blossomed in late antiquity alongside the growth of the cult of the saints. Scholars have attended to hagiographic traditions in Greek and Latin, but many scholars have yet to discover the richness of Syriac hagiographic literature: the stories, homilies, and hymns on the saints that Christians of the Middle East told and preserved. It is our hope that our database will give scholars and students increased access to these traditions to generate new scholarship.

Over 1,200 works of hagiographic literature are extant in the Syriac language. The corpus of Syriac hagiography comprises texts that were composed originally in Syriac as well as translations from other languages of the late antique world like Greek (Brock, 2008; Brakke, 1994; Draguet, 1980). Syriac hagiography developed in the context of the liturgy and alongside cults to local saints: vignettes of holy persons would be read on their feast days (Taylor, 2012).

Syrian monks produced and translated many of the texts that survive. An interest in monasticism and asceticism is an outstanding feature of Syriac hagiography. Many Syriac hagiographic texts honor monastic saints and connect theses heroes to the foundations of particular monasteries (Debié, 2012). The monasteries of Tur Abdin (a region in South-east Turkey and center of the Syrian Orthodox world) produced important hagiographic cycles on their founders (Palmer, 1990), and later hagiography that comes from this region also gives us important evidence about the encounters of Christians and Muslims in the early days of Islam (Tannous, 2012).

Syriac hagiography has a rich manuscript tradition with major collections now in Berlin, London, Paris, and the Vatican (Bingelli, 2012b). The oldest extant Christian manuscript, BL Add. 12150, is dated to 411 CE and was produced in Edessa (Bingelli, 2012b; Wright, 1871, II). It contains a list of names and dates for the commemoration of western martyrs, together with a list of Persian martyrs and their feast days.

The critical study of Syriac hagiography began when Assemani published the Acta Sanctorum Martyrum orientalium et occidentalium in 1748, a collection of Syriac hagiographic texts from the Vatican library (Bingelli, 2012a). Paul Bedjan (d. 1920), a Chaldean Catholic from Iran, later published a seven-volume series of saints’ lives in the Syriac language: the Acta Martyrum et sanctorum syriace (AMS). Through the efforts of orientalists François Nau and E. W. Brooks, many Syriac saints’ lives were published in Patrologia Orientalis and Revue de l’Orient chrétien. The Bollandist Paul Peeters produced the Bibliotheca hagiographica orientalis (BHO), which contained an annotated index of saints’ lives and manuscripts from the Oriental linguistic traditions.

J.-M. Fiey wrote an important guide to the Syriac saints, Saints syriaques, published posthumously in 2004. His book lists about 400 saints from the West and East Syriac traditions, including modern saints. Saints syriaques is organized according to holy person rather than hagiographic text. Fiey provides a brief description of each saint along with pertinent primary and secondary material. It is a natural starting point for scholars interested in Syriac hagiography. Sergey Minov of Oxford/Hebrew University has also built an important on-line bibliography for Syriac studies, A Comprehensive Bibliography on Syriac Christianity, (http://www.csc.huji.ac.il) (Minov, 2015).

Saints and their Lives in the Syriac Tradition

The majority of hagiographic materials are saints’ Lives and short episodic vignettes contained within larger hagiographic collections. In 360, Athanasius of Alexandria composed the first extended hagiographic narrative in Greek, The Life of Antony of Egypt (βίος καὶ πολιτεἰα; PG 26: 835-936). This text became a ‘best-seller’ in the late antique world, and its form was canonized as the literary exemplar for describing the life of a saint. It was translated into several ancient languages including Syriac. Subsequent late antique hagiographers imitated Athanasius’ narrative structure that depicted 1) the saint’s childhood; 2) conversion; 3) asceticism; 4) miracles; 5) extraordinary death; 6) communal commemoration (Insley and Saint-Laurent, forthcoming 2017).

In the sixth century, Syriac-speaking Miaphysites (dissidents of the Council of Chalcedon) composed hagiography on those who became leaders of the nascent Syrian Orthodox church. One of the most important collections of Syriac hagiographic texts is John of Ephesus’s Lives of the Eastern Saints (Brooks, 1923-25; Harvey, 1990; Saint- Laurent, 2015). His stories commemorate ascetics who lived in northern Mesopotamia, in monasteries near the city of Amida. 2 John’s collection of hagiography is also an important source for understanding the relationships between Chalcedonians and their opponents.

Syriac martyr passions comprise another important part of the corpus of Syriac hagiography. These stories feature an account of the saint’s virtue, arrest, dialogue with a judge, torture, death, burial and distribution or enshrining of relics. Examples of Syriac martyr passions include the Life of Febronia of Nisibis and the stories of the Edessan martyrs.

The Life of Febronia (AMS V, 573-615; Brock and Harvey, 1998; Saint-Laurent, 2012) is a hagiography that describes a monastic scholar, Febronia. She lives in community with her fellow nuns in the city of Nisibis (modern-day Nusaybin, Turkey). Her beauty attracts the attention of Roman guards, who have come to persecute Christians and convince them to sacrifice to the Roman gods. Febronia refuses the sexual advances of the Roman senators, and she is tortured and killed. A cult to Febronia develops and spreads from Nisibis to Constantinople and even to Sicily. The city of Edessa also promoted local martyr traditions around which cultic devotions grew. These Edessan martyr stories include the Martyrdom of Shmona, Guria, and Habib and the Acts of Sharbel, Babai, and Barsamya (Burkitt, 1913; rep., 2007). Syriac martyr passions identified martyrdom as betrothal to Christ (Brock and Harvey, 9).

The Acts of the Persian martyrs is a vast body of largely understudied hagiographic texts from the East Syriac tradition that flourished in modern-day Iran and Iraq (Brock, 2009; Smith, 2014). These texts are important literary artifacts from Christians living under Sasanian rule. The account of the martyrdom of Simeon bar Shabba, for example, is one of the longest late antique Christian narratives in any language (Smith, 2014). More than the 2/3 of the Persian martyr acts were set in the reign of Shah Shapur II (d. 379), remembered as a time of great trial and conflict (Smith, 2014). Many of the Persian martyr texts, although set in the fourth century, were written several centuries later. The story of the Martyrs of Mount Berʿain, for example, was written in the seventh century, but situated 318/9, at the start of Shapur II’s reign (Smith, 2014; Brock and Dilley, 2015). Some stories, although vital to East Syrian Christian memory, might have been purely fictive (Smith, 2012), as is true of hagiographical literature from other linguistic traditions.

Syrians wrote not just prose but also verse to commemorate saints. There are two main categories of verse in Syriac literature: metrical verse homilies called memre (memra, sing.) and liturgical hymns known as madrashe (madrasha, sing.). Memre and madrashe on saints show how stories about saints were retold in new literary forms for liturgical purposes. They are important sources for the creation and diffusion of saints’ portraits in Syriac religious memory.

Sebastian Brock wrote an important article in which he expounded on the various types of hagiographic memre in Syriac literature (Brock, 2012). He explains that the genre of Syriac hagiographic memre comprises several forms, ranging from verse homilies rich in narrative details to those that are largely panegyric. Often memre are imaginative expansions (or exegeses) on earlier hagiographic texts (Brock, 2012). Jacob of Serugh, for example, composed a verse homily on the forty martyrs of Sebaste (AMS VI, 663-673), and it is clear that he used a Syriac translation of the Greek hagiography on these saints to compose his verse (Brock, 2012). Jacob also wrote hagiographic memre with the characteristics of panegyric, as exemplified in his memra on Sts. Sergius and Bacchus (AMS VI, 650-661) (Brock, 2012). In these, the narrative element is not as strong. Instead, the homily contains general praise for the virtues of the saint or saints. Other panegyric memre in Syriac borrow rhetorical elements and schema from the Greek encomium (Brock, 2012).

Madrashe, in contrast to memre, are poetic hymns sung antiphonally in the context of the Syriac liturgy. Hagiographic madrashe are found in the West Syrian (Syrian Orthodox or Maronite) Fenquitho, a collection hymns for Sundays and feast days (Brock, 2012). Ephrem the Syrian perfected the Syriac madrashe. Many of Ephrem’s madrashe commemorate saints, as demonstrated in his cycle of hymns known as the Hymns on Nisibis. This collection contains madrashe on Sts. Abraham Qidunaya and Julian Saba (Griffith, 1994; Brock, 2012).

Syriac poets also composed a type of madrasha called the dialogue poem or sogita, which features disputes between characters, sometimes saints, who antiphonally debate matters with each other. These debate poems show the intersection of hagiography and exegesis. Sebastian Brock edited and translated a sogita that featured a debate between Saint Marina - an ascetic who lived in a monastery disguised as a male monk - and Satan (Brock 2008a). Many other such hagiographic dialogue poems have yet to be published.

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Syriac-speaking Christians shaped their hagiographic tales according to the models and ideals of holiness that were particular to their own anxieties, theological and political values, and even geography. Scholars of late antiquity can discover features and idioms particular to Syriac hagiography through comparing Syriac sacred stories to their counterparts from the Greek- and Latin-speaking worlds. Much can be learned by studying and contrasting different versions of a single saint’s life that circulated in different eras. Often, later versions of a saint’s life will reflect the community’s higher elevation of the saint described in the text (Saint-Laurent, 2015).

Literary similarities among hagiographic texts are apparent even to a casual reader. Hagiographers imitated the motifs, themes, and narrative structure found in biblical stories, other hagiographies, and even stories and myths from non-Christian precedents (Greek, Latin, Mesopotamian, or Iranian). The literary similitudes in tales about monks, martyrs, or missionaries are not coincidental. Rather, conventions for depicting different types of saints and motifs for demonstrating their divine authority were transmitted and canonized. Hagiographers took these patterns and reshaped them according to their individual interests, impressing their stories with the marks of their own culture, community, and ideological agendas. In this way, they crafted new stories adorned with literary relics or spolia from earlier texts.

Late antique hagiography is also a fertile ground to study ancient translation history and theory. For instance, the Syriac version of Athanasius’s Life of St. Antony shares many features with the Greek account, but the symbols of holiness that the story used to describe St. Antony are distinctly Syrian. Even if hagiographic tales contain little historical data, they are nevertheless vital literary artifacts that speak of a semitic culture at the crossroads between East and West, between Byzantium and Persia. The corpus of Syriac hagiography, therefore, offers important insights into the literary and religious history of Christianity in the Middle East.

New Digital Resources: Gateway to the Syriac Saints

At this juncture, it should be apparent that Syriac hagiography represents a dynamic sub-field within late antique literature. In the past twenty years, scholars have shown a greater interest in producing critical editions and translations of Syriac hagiographic texts, but many remain unknown or unavailable to non-specialists. While print guides and bibliographies provide a starting point for study, they do not reveal connections and relationships among saints and their lives. It is our claim that digital tools can be an immeasurable help in illuminating these links among texts, authors, and communities.

To meet this need, Syriaca.org has created a two-volume database entitled the Gateway to the Syriac Saints on persons and hagiographic texts. Through linking data on saints, hagiographers, and the locations and texts associated with them, our database can generate new knowledge for scholars and show both the interconnected similarities as well as the unique traits of these saints. Each volume is organized around a different element, either persons (saints) or works (texts about them). Both volumes are also part of larger databases within Syriaca.org on “Syriac Works” and “Syriac Persons,” respectively. We have not created two data models for each of these volumes, but rather we are using two existing data models. For works, we are using an adaptation by LAWDI (Linked Ancient World Data Institute) of FRBR (www.loc.gov/cds/downloads/FRBR.PDF). For persons, we are using our own adaptation of TEI module 13 (Names, Dates, People, Places).

We have encoded our data in TEI-XML (Text Encoding Initiative): http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml. The TEI is a consortium in the field of digital humanities that has developed standards for encoding texts, and we have found that TEI XML works well for translating our text-based data into machine-readable form that can be accessed by other databases and institutions. We have used TEI for both our data and metadata, and we have created our own schema for this data. One can find this here: https://github.com/srophe/srophe-eXist-app/tree/master/srophe-app. We have released our data under a Creative Commons license (CC-By), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. This articulates free access to the world’s cultural heritage. It allows for the copying and redistributing of data, metadata, and schemas in any format, and it also permits our users to adapt, reuse, and build upon our material. That is especially important to us, since the reuse and development of our data by other projects ensures that our work will have an afterlife beyond our individual project. The only thing required of the user is to give appropriate credit to our work and to specify if he or she makes changes to the data. CC-BY thus allows for the free use of and access to our data, while requiring users to attribute our data citation back to us, since citation and provenance are key foundations to good scholarship and the production of new knowledge.

We have created a linked social network of Syriac saints and their stories, joining the persons commemorated in Syriac tradition with the lives that described them, the communities and locations that venerated them, and the manuscript traditions that preserved and transmitted them. Entries in the database have been issued Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) so that other libraries or databases can interact with our data and link their databases to ours. Such sharing and open-access is vital to our project. We have created our own URIs based on the best practices developed by New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World in their Linked Ancient World Data Institute (http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/7/).

In order to solve the issue of search and display, syriaca.org has used eXist-db. Members of the Syriaca.org research and editing team, Nathan Gibson, Winona Salesky, and David Michelson, have recently expounded on the utility of eXist-db at a symposium on Cultural Heritage Markup given by the Balisage Series on Markup Technologies:

eXist-db provides a native XML database, for storing, processing and searching our TEI files. eXist-db provides a number of configurable indexing methods for searching XML documents, including a full text search backed by the Apache Lucene search framework. An advantage to using Lucene for full text searching is the level of control it can give to the developer through a wide variety of available text analyzers. Lucene also allows for the creation of custom analyzers as needed, as well as customizable weighting of elements in the index. In eXist-db multiple analyzers may be defined and used with different indexes. 3

We hope that Syriaca.org’s databases will make contributions both to the study of Christianity in Late Antiquity as well as Syriac Studies more broadly defined. There is at present no digital or print tool that brings together so many different aspects of Syriac saints and hagiography in one place, with free and open access. We anticipate that this will be a helpful pedagogical tool for teachers to show students (through visualizations) the networks among ancient peoples and places in the Syriac world, many of whom were connected by real or imagined lineages delineated in hagiographic texts.

Following is a summary of the contents of Qadishe and BHSE:

1. Holy persons venerated in the Syriac tradition, their lives, dates, friends, associates, and outstanding traits.
2. Syriac Hagiographic texts: apocryphal narratives, Lives, hagiographic hymns and homilies, and shorter hagiographic vignettes.
3. Short excerpts from the saints’ lives or hymns and homilies on these saints.
4. Bibliography on critical editions of texts when these have been produced.
5. Ancient translations of hagiographic texts that were originally written in other languages of antiquity, like Greek and Armenian.
6. Translations of these texts into modern languages.
7. Manuscript information linked to Syriaca.org’s Digital Catalogue of Syriac Manuscripts in the British Library and A Union Catalogue of Syriac Manuscripts and E-Ktobe, a French database of Syriac manuscripts. The data model for the manuscripts is “msdescription” module 10 of the TEI, (http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/MS.html) based on a modified version of a TEI schema developed by Elena Pierazzo for Arabic manuscripts as part of Fihrist: http://www.fihrist.org.uk/about with some changes to make the schema conform to Syriac description.
8. Geographic data on the places associated with the saints or the production of their lives – linked to Syriaca.org’s Syriac Gazetteer. In later stages of our project, users will be able to visualize geographic networks with the Gazetteer.
9. For sample entries from this database, please see our development server: http://wwwb.library.vanderbilt.edu/q/index.html.

Concluding Remarks

It has become a commonplace for scholars in Syriac studies to note how much work in our field remains to be done. Research desiderata range from historical investigations to raw philological and text critical work on unpublished or unedited texts. Translations of these edited works into modern languages will help scholars to integrate Syriac material into their research and courses. As syriacist Sebastian Brock noted in 2008, hagiographic material remains a ‘little tapped’ resource (Brock, 2008b). Syriaca.org’s Gateway to the Syriac Saints will provide a research tool for scholars and students to see at a glance what work remains to be done to advance our field. Indeed, data in the BHSE suggests that approximately 500 hagiographic texts on saints have never even been edited. Of those that have been edited, many have not been translated into a modern language. Thus Syriac scholars interested in hagiography need not suffer from a lack of new material to explore. Because our database will be “community-built,” editors and users will be able to make suggestions, corrections, and updates pertaining to our data on an on-going basis, ensuring “quality control.”

Finally, we would be remiss if we were not to mention the relevance of our database for the preservation of the Syriac heritage, whose modern-day descendants, churches, and artifacts face on-going risks of persecution or destruction on account of wars in the Middle East and aggression against Christians. Groups like ISIS are harming and driving people out of areas (like Northern Iraq) that are important centers for Syriac–speaking Christianity. The artifacts of the modern Syriac churches, both literary and architectural, are under tremendous threat of destruction. Syriaca.org, therefore, has a further obligation, as we see it, to use the work, scholarship and technology behind our database to preserve the endangered heritage of the Syriac Christians.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

• Amar, Joseph, ed. and trans, 2011. The Syriac Vita Tradition of Ephrem the Syrian. CSCO 629–30. Louvain: Peeters.
• Assemani, Stephen. E., ed., 1748. Acta sanctorum martyrum orientalium et occidentalium. Vol. I-II. Rome: J. Collini.
• Athanasius, Saint. The Life of Antony. The Life of Antony and the letter to Marcellinus, 1980. Robert Gregg, trans. New York: Paulist Press.
  La vie primitive de S. Antoine conservée en Syriaque, 1980. René Draguet, ed. and trans. CSCO 417-418/Scr. Syr. 183-184. Louvain: Secrétariat du CorpusSCO.
• Bedjan, P., ed., 1890–97. Acta martyrum et sanctorum [AMS]. 7 vols. Paris and Leipzig: Harrassowitz. Reprint, 1968. Hildesheim: G. Olms. Reprint, 2009. With new introduction by C. Detienne. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press.
• Brock, Sebastian P., trans., 2009. History of the Holy Mar Maʿin, with a guide to the Persian Martyr Acts. Persian Martyr Acts in Syriac: Text and Translation. Edited by A. Becker. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press.
• Brock, Sebastian, trans., 2015. The Martyrs of Mount Ber‘ain. Introduction by Paul Dilley. Persian Martyr Acts in Syriac: Text and Translation 4. Edited by Adam Becker. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press.
• Brock, Sebastian, ed. and trans, 2008a. “St Marina and Satan: a Syriac Dialogue Poem.” Collectanea Christianana Orientalia 5, pp. 35-57.
• Brock, Sebastian P. and Susan Ashbrook Harvey, trans., updated edn., 1998. Holy Women of the Syrian Orient. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Burkitt, Francis C., 1913. Euphemia and the Goth with the Acts of Martyrdom of the Confessors of Edessa, Shmona, Guria, and Habib. London and Oxford: Williams and Norgate. Reprinted, 2007. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press.
• Drijvers, H. J. W, trans, 1963. Acts of Thomas. In New Testament Apocrypha. Edited by W. Schneemelcher, 2: 322-411. Philadelphia: Westminster Press.
• Harrak, Amir, trans., 2005. The Acts of Mār Māri. Writings from the Greco-Roman World 11. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature.
• Jacob of Sarug, 1995. A Metrical Homily on holy Mar Ephrem. Edited and translated by Joseph P. Amar. PO 47. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols.
• John of Ephesus, 1923-25. The Lives of the Eastern Saints. Edited and translated by E. W. Brooks. PO 17, pp. 1–304; PO 18, pp. 513–698; PO 19, pp. 153–282. Paris: Firmin-Didot.
• Klijn, A. F. J., trans., 1962, ed. rev. 2003. Acts of Thomas. Supplement 5 to Novum Testamentum. Leiden: Brill.
• Nau, François, ed. and trans., 1913-14, 1917. “Résumé de monographies syriaques.” Revue de l’Orient chrétien 1, pp. 270-276, 379-389; 19, pp. 113-134, 278-289, 414-440; 20, pp. 3-32.
• Smith, Kyle, trans., 2014. Martyrdom and History of Blessed Simeon Bar Sabbaʿe. Persian Martyr Acts in Syriac: Text and Translation 3. Edited by Adam Becker. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press.
• Teaching of Addai, 1876. Edited by George Phillips. The Doctrine of Addai, the Apostle, Now First Edited in a Complete Form in the Original Syriac. London: Trübner and Co.
• ____. Syriac text and translation by George Howard, 1981. The Teaching of Addai. SBL Texts and Translations 16, Early Christian Literature Series. Scholars Press: Chico, CA.

Secondary Sources

• Bingelli, André, 2012a. “Introduction.” In L’hagiographie syriaque, edited by André Bingelli. Études Syriaques 9. Paris: Geuthner. pp. 3-8.
• Bingelli, André, 2012b. “Les Collections de Vies de Saints dans les Manuscrits Syriaques.” In L’hagiographie syriaque, edited by André Bingelli. Études Syriaques 9. Paris: Geuthner. pp. 49-75.
• Brakke, David, 1994. “The Greek and Syriac Versions of the Life of Antony.” Le Muséon 107, 1-2: pp.
• Bremmer, Jan, 2001. Apocryphal Acts of Thomas. Louvain: Peeters.
• Brock, Sebastian P., 2012. “L’hagiographie Versifiée.” In L’hagiographie syriaque, edited by André Bingelli. Études Syriaques 9. Paris: Geuthner. pp. 113-126.
• Brock, Sebastian P., 2008b. “Saints in Syriac: A Little Tapped Resource.” JECS 16, no. 8, pp. 181–96.
• Brown, Peter, 1971. “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity.” JRS 61, pp. 80–101.
• A. M. Butts, 2011. “Syriac Language,” in Gorgias Encyclopedia of the Syriac Heritage. Gorgias Press: Piscataway, NJ. pp. 390-391.
• Debié, Muriel, 2012. “ «Marcher dans leurs Traces » : Les Discours de de L’Histoire. ” In L’hagiographie syriaque, edited by André Bingelli. Études Syriaques 9. Paris: Geuthner. pp. 9-48.
• Efthymiadis, Stephanos, ed. 2011, 2014. The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography, 2 vols. Farnham, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
• Fiey, J-.M, 2004. Saints syriaques. Edited by L. Conrad. Saints syriaques. Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 6. Princeton, NJ : Darwin Press.
• Gardner, Iain, Paul Dilley, and Jason BeDuhn 2014. Mani’s Wisdom at the Court of the Persian Kings: Studies on the Chester Beatty Kephalaia Codex.
• Harvey, Susan Ashbrook, 1990. Asceticism and Society in Crisis: John of Ephesus and the Lives of the Eastern Saints. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Harvey, Susan A., 2008. “Martyr Passions and Hagiography.” In The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, edited by Susan A. Harvey and David G. Hunter. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 603-627.
• Healey, J. F., 2005. Leshono Suryoyo: First Studies in Syriac. Piscataway: Gorgias Press.
• Insley, Sarah and Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent, forthcoming in 2017. “Biography, Autobiography, and Hagiography.” A Companion to Late Antique Literature, Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World. Edited by Edward Watts and Scott McGill. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
• Palmer, A., 1990. Monk and Mason on the Tigris Frontier: The Early History of Tur Abdin. Cambridge : University of Cambridge.
• Payne, Richard, 2009. “Christianity and Iranian Society in Late Antiquity, ca. 500–700 C.E.” PhD diss., Princeton University.
• Peeters, Paul, 1910. Bibliotheca hagiographica orientalis. Subsidia Hagiographica 10. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes.
• Saint-Laurent, Jeanne-Nicole, 2012. “Images de Femmes dans L’Hagiographie Syriaque.” In L’hagiographie syriaque. In L’hagiographie syriaque, edited by André Bingelli. Études Syriaques 9. Paris: Geuthner. pp. 201-224.
• Saint-Laurent, Jeanne-Nicole Mellon, 2015. Missionary Stories and the Formation of the Syriac Churches. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Saint-Laurent, Jeanne-Nicole Mellon, Forthcoming in 2016. “Syriac.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Ancient Mediterranean Religions. Edited by Eric Orlin. London: Routledge.
• Schilling, Alexander M., 2008. Die Anbetung der Magier und die Taufe der Sāsāaniden: Zur Geistesgeschichte des iranischen Christentums in der Spätantike. CSCO 621. Louvain: Peeters.
• Smith, Kyle, 2012. “Constantine and Judah the Maccabee: History and Memory in the Acts of the Persian Martyrs.” Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12. pp. 16-33.
• Tannous, Jack, 2012. “L’hagiographie Syro-Occidentale à la Période Islamique.” In L’hagiographie syriaque, edited by André Bingelli. Études Syriaques 9. Paris: Geuthner, pp. 225-245.
• Taylor, David G. K., 2012. “Hagiographie et Liturgie Syriaque.” In L’hagiographie syriaque, edited by André Bingelli. Études Syriaques 9. Paris: Geuthner. pp. 77- 112.
• Walker, Joel, 2006. Legend of Mar Qardagh: Narrative and Christian Heroism in Late Ancient Iraq. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Wright, William, 1870-1872. A Catalogue of the Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum acquired since the year 1838, I-III. London: British Museum, Department of Oriental Printed Books and Manuscripts.
• Zanetti, Ugo., 1993. “Projet d’une Bibliotheca Hagiographica Syriaca.” In A Festschrift for Dr. Sebastian Brock, 1995. Aram 5, pp. 657-670.

Digital Resources:

• André Bingelli, et al., eds. 2015. E-ktobe [database on Syriac manuscripts]. [online] Available at: http://www.mss-syriaques.org/ [Accessed 29 May 2015]
• Carlson, Thomas A. and David A. Michelson, eds., 2014. The Syriac Gazetteer. In Syriaca.org: The Syriac Reference Portal, edited by David A. Michelson. [online] Available at: www.syriaca.org [Accessed 29 May 2015]
• Johnson, Scott. F and Jack Tannous, 2015. Syri.ac: an annotated bibliography of Syriac resources online.[online] Available at http://syri.ac [Accessed 9 August 2015]
• Minov, Sergey, 2015. A Comprehensive Bibliography on Syriac Christianity. [online] Available at: http://www.csc.org.il [Accessed 29 May 2015]
• Saint-Laurent, Jeanne-Nicole Mellon and David A. Michelson, eds. forthcoming in 2015. Qadishe: A Guide to the Syriac Saints. In Syriaca.org: The Syriac Reference Portal, edited by David A. Michelson.
• Saint-Laurent, Jeanne-Nicole Mellon and David A. Michelson, eds. forthcoming in 2015. Bibliotheca Hagiographic Syriaca Electronia: A Guide to the Syriac Saints. In Syriaca.org: The Syriac Reference Portal, edited by David A. Michelson.

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• 1 I am grateful to David Michelson for assistance in editing this paper. I am grateful especially to Winona Salesky for her outstanding programming work that has made the Gateway to the Syriac Saints possible. Finally, we are grateful to Fr. Ugo Zanetti and Claude Detienne for the data from the BHS that they have entrusted to syriaca.org.
• 2 Because of aggression from Chalcedonian bishops, Miaphysite (Syrian Orthodox) monks and bishops had to ordain new leaders for their communities throughout Mesopotamia and Syria. John commemorated these ascetic heroes and heroines in his collection, with noteworthy lives of John of Tella, Jacob Baradaeus, Simeon of Beth Arsham, and John of Hephaestopolis. Amida is modern-day Diyarbakir in South-east Turkey.
• 3 Please see http://balisage.net/Proceedings/vol16/html/Gibson01/BalisageVol16-Gibson01.html.

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