PREFACE

A decorative horizontal divider with a central floral motif and curling flourishes.

CHAPTER ONE

ON THE NAME AND PERSON OF THE PERSIAN SAGE

1. The discovery of Syriac manuscripts. Various testimonies of writers regarding the author. — 2. The author's name. — 3. On the location and origin of Aphrahat, and the geographic situation of the monastery of Saint Matthew. — 4. On the time the author wrote. Contemporaries of Aphrahat: his death. Should he be numbered among the martyrs of this age? — 5. Aphrahat's condition: did he lead a monastic life? Was he a bishop? On the religious status and episcopal see of the monastery of Saint Matthew.

1. Among the manuscripts from the monastery of the Mother of God, or the Scetensian monastery in the desert of Nitria, which were acquired at great expense and brought to the British Museum between the years 1838 and 1851, William Cureton found the original text of the works of Aphrahat (also called Jacob, the Persian Sage—already noted by Rosen and Forshall in their Catalogue¹). He indicated this in his Spicilegium syriacum Syriac Gleanings, and in the preface to the most ancient codex of the four Gospels², and proposed to the University of Oxford that it be printed at the Clarendon Press. As this was not achieved, Cureton did not finish the project, and after some years, yielding to fate, he entrusted the work to his friend, the very illustrious William Wright. He undertook the task and completed it, publishing the Syriac text of the Homilies of Aphrahat the Persian Sage in London in 1869³. Thus, Aphrahat was restored to his own rights—

¹ Rosen and Forshall, Catalog of Oriental Manuscripts Preserved in the British Museum, Part I, London, 1838, no. lvi, p. 86.
² W. Cureton, Spicilegium syriacum, containing remains of Bardesan, Meliton, Ambrose, and Mara Bar, Serapion, London, 1855, p. 102; Remains of a very ancient recension of the four Gospels in Syriac, hitherto unknown in Europe, discovered, edited, and translated, London, 1858. See Preface pp. vii, and especially lii and liii, in note.
³ W. Wright, The Homilies of Aphraates, the Persian Sage, edited from Syriac manuscripts of the fifth and sixth century in the British Museum, London, 1869.