The Harmonious Texture of John Bar Zoʿbi: First Steps Towards a Critical Edition / Preliminary Observations, Syriac Text, and Russian Translation of the First Six Chapters

This article offers the first publication in a series accompanying the dissertation research of Alexander V. Tamrazov (PhD candidate at the Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences) entitled “The Harmonious Texture of John Bar Zoʿbi in the Context of East Syriac Letters of the Late Abbasid Period”. The series is devoted to a hitherto unpublished fundamental East Syriac dogmatic-polemical compendium in verse, whose full title is The Harmonious Texture—on the Orthodox Faith Professed by the Catholic Church, Confirmed by Examples from the Holy Scriptures. The article presents the first results of codicological research, a translation of the compendium’s synoptic table of contents, as well as the Syriac text and Russian translation of the first six chapters of the treatise. New autobiographical data from chapters II–III are supplemented by a number of verses from the final chapter LXX, on the basis of which important clarifications are made concerning the life circumstances of John Bar Zoʿbi who turns out to have come from a Syro-Jacobite milieu and converted to the Church of the East at a mature age.

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