Publications/Oct 20, 2016

Jacob of Sarug’s Homilies on Praise at Table

Jacob of Sarug’s Homilies on Praise at Table lead image

Jeff W. Childers, ed. and trans. Jacob of Sarug's Homilies on Praise at Table. Texts from Christian Late Antiquity 46. Gorgias Press, 2016.

From Gorgias Press

Part of a series of fascicles containing the bilingual Syriac-English editions of Saint Jacob of Sarug’s homilies, this volume contains his homilies on Praise at Table. These homilies offer a glimpse into the efforts of one late antique author to construct distinctly Christian meaning from the experience of communal meal-sharing. The Syriac text is fully vocalized, and the translation is annotated with a commentary and biblical references. The volume is one of the fascicles of Gorgias Press’s The Metrical Homilies of Mar Jacob of Sarug, which, when complete, will contain all of Jacob’s surviving sermons. Recognized as a saint by both Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian Christians alike, Jacob of Sarug (d. 521) produced many narrative poems that have rarely been translated into English. Of his reported 760 metrical homilies, only about half survive.