Why we need to learn Late Antique Eastern Syriac

I've been putting off since maybe I was a teenager a serious attempt to read some kind of Aramaic. I've stymied myself several ways: didn't learn any Semitics in high school, went down a blind alley in Hebrew in my early college years (plus - needed Latin, elsewhere). Although I did pick up some Modern Standard Arabic alongside Qâric and Classical; plus, lately, Safaitic.

My problem was that I didn't have a focus. I don't care enough about the Book of Daniel, which (like Jeremiah) is better in Greek anyway. Ditto Aramaic Levi or the rest of Qumran (like Tobit). Um. Ezra-Nehemiah/2 Esdras? Looking abroad Aramaic is not a classical tongue (yet).

Another issue here is that whenever something gets published in Aramaic it tends to get published, concurrently, in Latin or French or English - or, failing all that, in early mediaeval Arabic translation. All these can be cross-translated in Google so, if it gets into one such language, it gets into all the others. Why learn what everyone else has learnt. I felt more immediate need to get Arabic over to the Western languages.

One exception has been nagging at me, over the past year. John bar Penkaye's Main Points - which some of us oldsters remember as "The Foreword" (LOL): resh mille. As of 2010 Steven Ring listed the MSS. From AD 1875, a Syriac Nestorian resurgence resulted in several mediaeval MSS getting recopied. Of their Bar Penkaye work, Alphonse Mingana's famous 1928 Sources Syriaques amounts to one (partial) example. In a now-disfavoured font. Hey, at least that got to a printing-press and (at last) onto the Internet.

Since 2010 Mingana's French version of chapter 15 can be read in English; but, if you desire a better text, Sebastian Brock beat us to it doi 10.1163/9789004307742_028 - not that this really matters, since this translation from French certainly used Brock. Brock also got us the end of chapter 14. Since then a few other chapters have been relayed to us, especially if Mingana did not publish these, just because there's been more interest in reception-history of earlier Syriac lore.

It turns out rather a lot of Syriac has not been published or - if "published", as in Mingana's case - the publications were done in bad scripts from not-enough MSS all without a proper apparatus. Last year I got wind of a whole library of Syriana encapsulated in the Siʿrt Chronicle.

I also am a Catholic now. I hold that we in the West need a spokesman for the Nestorians.

Looking to Bar Penkaye in particular, I find that his generation had Stuff To Say about Ephesus and Chalcedon. That's the dark-age, not just because Siʿrt skipped it; more because there wasn't much even preserved. Except Bar Sahdé, the Martyride. Maybe.

The only person whom syri.ac has listed for the Resh Melle is Yulia Furman, who has been doing other work since after Memras #1 and #9. She may have lost interest. Mar-Emmanuel promised, but so far has dangled excerpts only (pdf). Until some-one else translate those pages we want, I'll have to do it. UPDATE 2/1/2022: Memra XIV.