Position:
Associate Professor of Aramaic and Syriac; Fellow of Wolfson College
Faculty / College Address:
Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies / Wolfson College
Email:
david.taylor@ames.ox.ac.uk
Research Interests:
- Syriac literature, history, theology
- Syriac and Aramaic biblical versions and exegesis
- Middle Aramaic texts (Palmyrene, Nabataean, Hatran)
- Bilingualism and language contact in Late Antique Near East
Current Projects:
- Editio princeps of the Syriac Psalm commentary of Daniel of Salah (542 CE)
- New editions of Old Syriac Gospel palimpsests
- Synopsis of the Syriac Gospels
- Edition of the Psalm titles in the West Syrian tradition
- Annotated translation of the History of Karka d-Bet Slokh
- New edition and translation (with Alison Salvesen) of Jacob of Edessa's Hexaemeron
Courses Taught:
- Introductory, intermediate, and advanced Syriac language and texts
- Early Syriac Christianity
- Targumic and other Jewish Aramaic texts
- Old Aramaic, Imperial Aramaic, and Biblical Aramaic texts
Recent Publications:
- ‘Two Syriac Disputations against the Jews attributed to Ephrem and John Chrysostom: Rediscovered sources of Dionysius bar Ṣalibi’s Treatise against the Jews’, in Bert Jacobs, Bert, Teule, Herman, & Verheyden, Joseph, (eds), Dionysius bar Ṣalībī: Guardian of the Syriac Orthodox Tradition (Texts and Studies in Eastern Christianity 37. Leiden: Brill, 2025).
- ‘Eschatological Rivers of Fire and Purgatorial Purification in Sixth-Century Syriac Texts’, in Løvlund Toft, Lasse, Sommer Bostrup, Mattias, & Falkenberg, René, (eds), On the Matter: Studies on Manichaeism and Church History presented to Nils Arne Pedersen at Sixty-Five (Corpus Fontium Manichaeorum. Analecta Manichaica IV. Turnhout: Brepols, 2024), 323-356.
- ‘Seeing Slaves in Syriac Sources’, in Berti, Vittorio, and Debié, Muriel, (eds.), Le droit en monde syriaque (Études syriaques 18; Paris: Paul Geuthner, 2023), 291-389.
- ‘The Syriac version of Strategios’ History of the Persian conquest of Jerusalem’, in Phil Booth & Mary Whitby (eds), Mélanges James Howard-Johnston (Travaux & mémoires 26; Paris: Association des Amis du Centre d’Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance, 2022), 445–466.
- ‘The authorship of the apocalypse of the Testament of Our Lord reconsidered’, in S. Brelaud, J. Daccache, et al. (eds), Le calame et le ciseau: colophons syriaques offerts à Françoise Briquel Chatonnet (Cahiers d’études syriaques 8; Paris: Geuthner, 2021), 421-440.
- ‘ “Inclination” (yaṣrā) in the Syriac tradition’, in Aitken, J., Patmore, H.M., & Rosen-Zvi, I., (eds), The Evil Inclination in Early Judaism and Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 262-279.
- ‘New Developments in the Textual Study of the Old Syriac Gospels’, in Houghton, H.A.G., & Montoro, Peter, (eds), At One Remove: The Text of the New Testament in Early Translations and Quotations: Papers from the Eleventh Birmingham Colloquium on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament (Texts and Studies III.24; Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2020), 1-42.
Further Info:
