If nobody minds, I'm filling up this evening with footnotes to this project. Here, we'll talk about John bar Penkaye's sources.
First up: he used the Syriac language. This is a variant he shared with Sabrisho' the master of his abbey up in northern Mesopotamia. I don't know how it was spoken in his days, since I don't think we have a seventh-century AD copy, but we have plenty of copies from the 1800s and early 1900s, among which Alphonse Mingana's handcopied (but published!) partial edition should count. And of course it's in the eastern script.
As for what taught me this script and this language, I have to say, W.M. Thackston's Introduction to Syriac worked wonders. Had some slight problems with the vocabulary. For that, I went with the Vocabulaire usuel. This was, admittedly, for the Western dialect on the one side and French on the other. We just needs convert û to "ou" and the occasional "a" to "o"; usually we'll get it.
John's main literary source was - drumroll please - the Bible. Elsewhere Yulia Furman's two 2014 essays, in Syrians and the Others, directed me to the Peshitta. For the New Testament, that's Dukhrana. Old Testament was a little trickier to find; in fact - as of 1922 - there was no critical text. That means I'd have to pay a lot of money and/or find an excellent library. Then I figured - do I really want a critical text? - or do I want some vulgata / textus-receptus likely to be used in northern Mesopotamia from the end of the seventh century AD until Bar Penkaye quit getting copied longhand. For that, the Mosul edition comes recommended. Someone doing philology on the Biblical text itself can go spend the money and/or do that job, that is, the job which isn't mine. I figured that where I was translating from Mosul, I'd quote George Lamsa for the English.
Another source for this side of John's text would be the creeds. I struggled with the text here until I dug up online quotes from Syriac translations of Nestorius' livre d'Heraclide de Damas. French again! - although, thanks to Roger Pearse over at Tertullian.org, this is available to everyone in English as well. Also invaluable - although taken with some natric-chloride - was Sebastian Brock's 1985 translation of several creeds in "Christology of the Church of the East", which I found excerpted (Google Books) in Doctrinal Diversity (Garland, 1999), including much technical Syriac jargon. Kyana, qnoma, dilayat, sebyana and lots of words ending -uta. UPDATE 1/30: The warning comes from Stephen Gero, “The See of Peter in Babylon: Western Influences on the Ecclesiology of Early Persian Christianity”. On the other hand: Babay, Liber de Unione: mšihā d-aitūhi trēn kyanē ū-trēn qnomē b-had parsōpā d-barutā as an antiChalcedonian mantra (pdf). And here's Lulyane.
The "something by Jubal" parallels a comment by the "Cave of Treasures". Jubal, as descendate of Cain, is considered part of the corrupted generation prior to the Flood. Jubal's compositions were anti-Psalms, if you like. ON FURTHER RESEARCH 1/22: Furman offers Bar Penkaye's sources for 2/9ths of the first 9/15ths of the book: Jubal appears at the end of the first. Furman doesn't cite "the Cave" in there - which, we must remember, was a Miaphysite text. However, I cannot rule out East Syrian use of Miaphysite lore perhaps laundered through some homily or other. Bar Penkaye himself insinuates Theodore of Mopsuestia, who did indeed write a commentary.
What I do not find in this (admittedly brief) extract is reference to ... any Syriac historiography after, if I can trust Mingana's sidebars, emperors Jovian and Theodosius I. Who were Roman. So where's Acacius? Where's Aba? AD 424-484 might have been a dark-age but the two centuries afterward were not. That might be due to the focus on the crimes of the Ephesians and the failures of Chalcedon, as our man saw them. This is a personal disappointment, I must say.
Finally, there's the personal touch, by our fine historian. Nah, I'm being sarcastic: John bar Penkaye was a bigot who never bothered even to learn Greek, and it likely would have killed him to learn Coptic or (ugh) Armenian. In this he contrasts poorly not just with the later Zuqnîn chronicler but also with the contemporary Pseudo Methodius of Sinjar, who made an especial point not to alienate other Christians.
John, further, was a blowhard. This actually helps when translating him because he's got a number of verbal mannerisms that he's going to repeat in what few chapters have been translated already. If nothing else his rants flag where we're safe in skipping over some text. Mingana himself couldn't stomach this bore so skipped everything up to chapter 14.
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