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Syriac Intellectual Culture in Late Antiquity (Oxford)
30 gennaio 2015 -31 gennaio 2015
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Partecipazione di Carla Noce (paper Session Four) e Vittorio Berti (paper Session Three) alla Conferenza Internazionale Syriac Intellectual Culture in Late Antiquity. Translation, Transmission and Influence (Oxford).
In this regard, the contemporary (Vth century) Latin and Syriac translations of Eusebius’ Historia Ecclesiastica offer a great opportunity for a close and never investigated comparison which will highlight the different linguistic and cultural patterns underlying the translations produced by Rufinus and by his contemporary Syriac colleague but also will reveal many similarities between them. The paper is not concerned in using the translations for reconstructing the original Greek text, but in trying to understand, by the analysis of some selected parallel passages, the theological, ideological and cultural identities of the Latin and Syriac contexts which requested the translations of Eusebius’Historia Ecclesiastica.
The Catholicos Mar Aba I is a prominent personality in the history of 6th century Christianity. His origins, conversion, travels, teaching and governance raise issues about the cultural life of the Syriac churches in Late Antiquity. The knowledge of his intellectual policy, never studied with a monographic approach, can only be acquired through the analysis of different sources. Mar Aba was also a promoter of Theodore of Mopsuestia’s commentary tradition in East Syrian schools. Unfortunately, only few traces of his exegetical production at the School of Nisibis are still extant. However, although all his commentaries are lost, a certain number of his explanations are included in late exegetical collections, as for example in the biblical commentaries of Isho‘dad of Merv, in the Gennat Bussame, and in the so-called “Anonymous Commentary”. This paper presents a first glimpse of Mar Aba’s biblical interpretation. It aims at clarifying in what form and by what method could his writings have been originally composed, and at connecting his teachings to what we know of his patristic background. This paper is the first achievement of a larger research on Mar Aba’s intellectual life, which I am conducting within the framework of the Italian project on the Syriac Translations of the Greek Fathers.