The present volume, soon after its publication a classic title in the field, covers the history of the Church born in apostolic times east of the Roman Empire. Almost unknown in Western Christianity, the Syro-Eastern Church has survived the two millennia of Christianity to the present day, with Saints Ephrem the Syrian and Isaac the Syrian among its few representatives known outside its borders.

Raymond le Coz’s book traces the meandering theological, monastic, liturgical, didactic and cultural history of the Christians of the former Persian Empire, which successively came under Arab, Mongol and Ottoman rule. Neither the influence of syriac christianity on arab culture nor the role of christians in the formation of the arab intellectual elite and scientific literature, which, through latin translations in the Middle Ages, was to have a significant influence on European culture, theology and science, are overlooked.

The presentation of the current ecclesiastical situation of the Syrian Christians happily completes this history, allowing the romanian reader to form a general and richly detailed picture of an apostolic Christian universe, keeper and confessor of the teaching of the early Church.