"Let books be your dining table, / And you shall be full of delights. / Let them be your
mattress,/
And you shall sleep restful nights" (St. Ephraim the Syrian).


Thursday, May 3, 2018

Robert Murray's Eternally Memorable Syriac Scholarship

John Flannery of Heythrop College in the University of London e-mailed me to let me know of Robert Murray's death. A brief obituary from the Society of Jesus in the United Kingdom is here.

He was one of those pioneering and incredibly talented Jesuit scholars who did so much work to advance our understanding of the Christian East. He was an early pioneer especially of the revival of studies into Syriac Christianity, which now has a number of prominent young scholars, some of the noted and interviewed on here over the years.

Perhaps his best known book, which I have long had on my shelves, is Symbols of Church and Kingdom: A Study in Early Syriac Tradition. 

An earlier work, published in 1992 and reprinted more recently by the invaluable Gorgias Press, has language that all those of us involved with the World Council of Churches in the 1990s will immediately recognize:  The Cosmic Covenant: Biblical Themes of Justice, Peace, and the Integrity of Creation. 

His funeral Mass was to have been today in the Jesuit church in Farm Street in London (which I have fond memories of visiting very briefly in 1997). Eternal memory!

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