Gorgias Press
Founded in 2001 Gorgias Press is an independent academic publisher of books and journals related to history, languages, and religious studies, with specific areas of expertise in the Ancient Near East, Arabic and Islamic Studies, Archaeology, Biblical Studies, Classics, Early Christianity, Jewish Studies, Linguistics, and Syriac.
Gorgias [GOR-gee-us] Press was originally created by George and Christine Kiraz as a specialty press that could keep up with their research interests. With a background in computational linguistics, George Kiraz envisioned combining cutting-edge technology with humanities research. The new company would be completely online, with no physical storefront, and it would use automation and digital printing technology rather than traditional print runs. With these tools, the press could afford to publish rare and understudied topics that were previously considered unprofitable, and Gorgias soon became known for its pioneering work in language and linguistics, religion, and especially Syriac and Eastern Christianity.
Gorgias’ philosophy of “Publishing for the Sake of Knowledge” rather than profit, attracted a number of new authors, and the press’ areas of interest rapidly began to expand. Today, Gorgias Press publishes 50-60 new titles a year, including monographs, edited volumes, translations, and more, and Gorgias books can be found in academic collections all over the world.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 188
ISBN: 9781463245702
Pub Date: 05 Jul 2023
Series: Pro Oriente Studies in the Syriac Tradition
Description:
Identity has become a central theme in a globalised world, both in politics and in the humanities, and the Syrian churches cannot escape it either. Christianity also exists as an identity that can in some ways compete with or even contradict theological understandings as a witness. But how should religious leaders deal with the fact that their churches are as much faith communities as identity markers?
This volume does not offer the all-encompassing answer to this central question, but it provides keys for reflection and discussion beyond the circle of clergy and theologians, showing why the Syriac tradition matters for global Christianity.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 504
ISBN: 9781463241971
Pub Date: 30 Jun 2023
Description:
An English translation of a Latin work on the Syriac grammatical tradition ('Historia artis grammaticae apud Syros') by the 19th-century German theologian and linguist, Adalbert Merx.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 289
ISBN: 9781463240776
Pub Date: 30 Jun 2023
Description:
The important text of Kitāb al-sawād al-a‘ẓam by al-Ḥakīm Muḥammad b. Ismā‘īl al-Samarqandī (d. 342/953) is an early Ḥanafī creed from Transoxania that found consensus among Ḥanafī scholars within the region, and was translated into Persian sometime between 366/976 and 387/997.
Al-Samarqandī attained fame not only as a scholar of religious sciences and law, but, moreover, as an ascetic and a sage (ḥakīm), in the sense of possessing a 'divine blessing' for calling to the way of God, knowledge of inner rightfulness, and wisdom about high spiritual truths (ḥikma). This volume offers an annotated critical edition and a detailed study of this important text.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 280
ISBN: 9781463242718
Pub Date: 30 Jun 2023
Format: Hardback
Pages: 310
ISBN: 9781463245528
Pub Date: 30 Jun 2023
Description:
This work argues that there are traces of Sufism to be found in British Romanticism. Most scholars of Romanticism have overlooked the impact of Sufism on Romanticism in favour of Christian and neo-Platonic Mysticism, but this work fills in this gap by showing the magnitude of the influence of Sufism on the Romantics without negating the influence of other -isms. What elements of Sufism attracted the attention of the Romantics?
And why were the Romantics attracted more to Sufism and Sufi poets than to Christian Mysticism and Mystic poets?
Format: Hardback
Pages: 294
ISBN: 9781463243678
Pub Date: 15 May 2023
Series: Texts and Studies
Description:
Fragmentary material comprises a significant part of the manuscript tradition of the New Testament. Whether it be tattered papyrus documents, the abbreviated citation of biblical texts in early Christian writings, or the scattering of once-whole manuscripts, the story of the New Testament is a gathering of fragments—in all their forms—in the hopes that “nothing may be lost.” This volume is a result of the Twelfth Birmingham Colloquium on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament, wherein presenters were invited to approach the theme of “fragments” from any philological or philosophical framework.
Chapters discuss the possible forgery of a biblical papyrus, the dismemberment of a sixteenth-century lectionary manuscript, and the Arabic text of Romans preserved in a fragmentary bilingual codex. Elsewhere, software tools are employed to re-assess the readings of manuscripts digitised in decades past and to re-evaluate the stemma of a family of manuscripts. Further contributions consider the fragments of the biblical text contained in patristic commentaries and Byzantine catenae. The wide-ranging scope of the research contained in this volume reflects the need to examine these pieces of the past so that the shape of research in the present accurately illustrates the tapestry that is the history of the New Testament texts.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 403
ISBN: 9781463244934
Pub Date: 15 May 2023
Description:
The essays collected in Watering the Garden are intended to honor Deirdre Dempsey, a distinguished biblical educator, translator, and scholar. The contributions to this Festschrift mirror Dempsey’s own scholarly interests, including biblical studies, with particular attention to the Old Testament and intertestamental literature, the theology of visual arts, the history of spiritual traditions, and modern theology. The content of the Festschrift closely follows Dempsey's own spiritual and scholarly journey and reflects the breadth and scope of her influence on the academy.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 132
ISBN: 9781463245504
Pub Date: 15 Mar 2023
Series: Journal of Language Relationship
Description:
The Journal of Language Relationship is an international periodical publication devoted to the issues of comparative linguistics and the history of the human language. The Journal contains articles written in English and Russian, as well as scientific reviews, discussions and reports from international linguistic conferences and seminars.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 615
ISBN: 9781463243845
Pub Date: 16 Feb 2023
Description:
The Qāḍī Abū Bakr Ibn al-ʿArabī was an Ašʿarite theologian, a Maliki jurist and an Andalusian traditionalist of the fifth-sixth / eleventh-twelfth century. His influence in the Muslim West is undeniable: he is one of the most important figures in the history of ašʿarism in al-Andalus, and introduced kalām books that quickly became references of local teaching, such as the Iršād of al-Ǧuwaynī. He also introduced treatises of uṣūl al-fiqh such as the Mustaṣfā and the Manḫūl of al-Ġazālī.
Ibn al-ʿArabī is also the most famous disciple of the latter and one of the first to have transmitted his thought to Andalusian scholars, then to the rest of the Muslim West. Through a critical, introduced, translated and commented edition of his sum of legal theory entitled Nukat al-Maḥṣūl fī ʿilm uṣūl, this present work shows how the legal thought of the Qāḍī is articulated between language and theology.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 227
ISBN: 9781463244897
Pub Date: 14 Feb 2023
Series: Gorgias Handbooks
Description:
Thirty short reading selections from the Book of Entertaining Stories of Gregory Bar ʿEbrāyā, with an analysis of the grammar and vocabulary of the texts.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 197
ISBN: 9781463244736
Pub Date: 14 Feb 2023
Description:
The study of sectarianism in Islam and the study of Muslim-Christian relations are both sub-specialities attracting growing numbers of scholars in Islamic studies. Rarely, though, are these two fields put into direct conversation with each other. In this work, Steven Gertz brings the two together to ask how the Sunni-Shi'a divide in Islam impacts Muslim relationships with Christians.
Do tensions within Islam do more to help Muslim relationships with Christians, or harm them? Gertz goes about answering this through a historical study of the Fatimid caliphate in Palestine and Egypt during the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries. He specifically works to understand how Fatimid religious principles (ascertained through the study of law) and politics (ascertained through the study of history) impacted Christians in light of Fatimid-Abbasid rivalry. In the process of doing so, he makes a valuable contribution to the study of Islamic religious identity formation as it concerns sectarianism within Islam and inter-religious relations with non-Muslims.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 358
ISBN: 9781463244248
Pub Date: 31 Dec 2022
Series: Perspectives on Hebrew Scriptures and its Contexts
Description:
Does Job convincingly argue against a fixed system of just retribution by proclaiming the prosperity of the wicked—an assertion that distinctly runs contrary to traditional biblical and ancient Near Eastern wisdom? This study addresses this question, giving careful consideration to the rhetoric, imagery, and literary devices used to treat the issue of the fate of the wicked in Job’s first two rounds of dialogue, where the topic is predominantly disputed. The analysis will glean from related biblical and non-biblical texts in order to expose how Job deals with this fascinating subject and reveal the grandeur of the composition.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 326
ISBN: 9781463244569
Pub Date: 31 Dec 2022
Description:
In this engaging book of commentary on the Talmud, the author upends the long-held theory of the immutability of halakhah, Jewish law. In her detailed analysis of over 80 short halakhic anecdotes in the Babylonian Talmud, the author shows that the Talmud itself promotes halakhic change. She leads the reader through one sugya (discussion unit) after another, accumulating evidence for her rather radical thesis.
Along the way, she teases out details of what life was like 1500 years ago for women in their relationships with men and for students in their relationships with mentors. An eye-opening read by one of today’s leading Talmud scholars.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 319
ISBN: 9781463244620
Pub Date: 20 Dec 2022
Description:
Theology is the discipline that mainly explores what it means to know God. This book therefore explores the topic Knowing God, from an interdisciplinary theological perspective, against the backdrop of celebrating 500 years of Reformation which was celebrated in 2017. Approaching the issue from the perspectives of their respective theological disciplines, scholars ask what it means to know God, how people of faith have sought to know God in the past, and indeed whether, or to what extent, such knowledge is even possible.
The project team approached scholars from different disciplines in theology, affiliated with the Evangelische Theologische Faculteit, Leuven in Belgium, to reflect on the topic. This provided the faculty with the opportunity for fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration and reflection as we attempted to look at the same topic from the vantage point of our own subject and expertise. Although we all come from the same institution, and are bounded by our common motto Fides Quaerens Intellectum, we have allowed ourselves to roam freely within the flats of the castle of theological inquiry and have enjoyed meeting each other in the courtyard and beautiful gardens on the occasion of our interdisciplinary seminars each year. The authors do not promise to provide in this book a coherently designed interdisciplinary approach. The authors promise to show you the beauty of each of our disciplinary rooms within the castle. The authors also show you their own dialogicality, and even paradox, but also their own dialogical harmony. This book will be of utmost value to anyone seeking to explore the question of ‘Knowing God’, or even the ‘Knowability of God’, from the perspective of all the main classical subdisciplines in theology (e.g. Old and New Testament Studies; Church History; Systematic Theology; Practical Theology and Missiology).
Format: Hardback
Pages: 425
ISBN: 9781463244095
Pub Date: 15 Dec 2022
Description:
The Life of Theodotus of Amida is that rare thing: a securely dated eye-witness account of life under Arab Muslim rule in the first century of Islam, and one of the few extant texts from seventh-century North Mesopotamia. It is imbued with local color and contemporary detail, revealing an intimate knowlredge of the terrain, its inhabitants and officialdom, as well as the precariousness of the lives of those living in the borderlands between the Byzantine and Islamic empires.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 422
ISBN: 9781463206499
Pub Date: 30 Nov 2022
Description:
The book analyses all extant works by Ibn Jarir al-Tabari (d. 224/839–310/923), referring to their individual methodologies; their legacy as al- madhhab al-jariri; and their scholarly and socio- political context. Through the study of al- Tabari’s works, the book addresses research debates over dating the legal and scholarly institutions and their disciplines; authorship and transmission of scholarly writings; political theory and administration; and ‘origins’ of the Qur’an and Islam.
Al-Tabari defined the Qur’an in linguistic and legal terms. The linguistic terms refer to rhetoric and semiotics, and the legal to theories of social contract, ‘natural law’, and rule of law. Both sets of terms go into al-Tabari’s theory of prophecy and administration, including of ‘minorities’. By engaging current debates about the usefulness or not of the medieval Muslim scholars in research on the Qur’an and early Islam, this book argues that the – 2 – 20:59 contribution of each medieval scholar be assessed on an individual basis. Al-Tabari’s philosophical, ethical, historical, linguistic, and legal education produced analysis of the Qur’an and ‘origins’ of Islam that stands up to some fronts in contemporary research. The book thus adds to research on al-Tabari; early Islamic disciplines and institutions; and the Qur’an and early Islam.
