Introduction to This Volume
How this book is arranged
This is the hundred and sixteenth volume of a series that gathers the writings of the early Church. It is an addendum, and it gathers what Christians wrote in the lands that came under Islam, in Syriac, Arabic and Greek. The first part holds two histories: the Universal History of Agapius of Hierapolis, written in Arabic, and the Book of Governors of Thomas of Marga, the history of the monks of the East. The second part holds Syriac scholars of the Church of the East and the Jacobite church: the Pearl of Abdisho bar Brikha, his catalogue of Syriac writers, and two works of Dionysius bar Salibi, on Revelation and against the Melchites. The third part holds the Arabic Christian writers: Hunayn ibn Ishaq, Yahya ibn Adi, Abdallah and Abu al-Khayr ibn al-Tayyib and Abu al-Majdalus, on faith, reason and the Gospels. The last part holds two Greek dialogues with Islam, one by the emperor Manuel II and one by Gerasimos.
The introductions, the descriptions of the parts and the headings were prepared for SermonIndex with the help of artificial intelligence. The texts themselves are the translations, and were not rewritten.
Translations and texts
The English is that of older translators, nearly all of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and is printed as the website prints it. Most of these texts were read by machine from scanned books and have not been proofread against the printed pages, so a misreading may remain. Footnotes, and words in Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic and Latin, are left out of this book, as are the translators’ long introductions; the reader who wants them should go to the printed edition.
Dates and authorship
The Arabic writers are of the ninth century and after, and several of their works survive in English only in recent translations, which are printed here without the Arabic text that stood beside them. The works run in time from about the year 840 to 1425. Some are replies to Muslim questions and others are not written against Islam at all, and the reader will see the difference.