Students of the Bible in 4th and 5th Century Syria: Seats of Learning, Sidelights and Syriacisms by theologist and professor emeritus Henning Lehmann (
Danish Wikipedia) is his scholarly academic religious history work on Exactly What It Says In The Title, free courtesy of Aarhus University Press in Denmark.
Apparently they've been running a bilingual monthly free ebook programme for the past few years which no one who knew about it ever bothered to mention on MR, sigh. Anyway, this seems to have been their English-language May selection, so enjoy it while it lasts.
Currently free, probably just for the rest of the day until midnight Danish time (approx 3 PM Pacific) directly @
the Aarhus University's website (DRM-free PDF available worldwide).
Description (frankendescription cobbled together from both the freebie announcement page and the regular catalogue page, since academic stuff is the sort of thing you want more info for, and the full blurb makes it look even niftier)
After the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451 the churches using the Syriac language came to represent the unorthodox. Before this epoch-making Council 150 years had past in which the church language in Syria had been primarily Greek, but at the same time the diversity of languages, cultures and theologies had been huge - sometimes creating tension, especially when biblical texts were to be translated or interpreted. This early period and the many different sources to the understanding of it (in Greek, Syriac, Latin and Armenian) have been the subject of a great part of Henning Lehmann's research, and this volume presents 15 of his articles from the period 1969-2008.
A number of prolific writers were active in the Syrian Church of the 4th and 5th centuries. However, in some cases these writers are only accessible by virtue of sidelights thrown e.g. from Armenian and Latin translations (as is the case with Eusebius of Emesa); or, their works may be hidden under false attributions in Greek manuscripts (as, e.g. in Pseudo-Chrysostomica - in fact belonging to Severian of Gabala); or, their relationship to the Syriac language and culture may be misrepresented in modern research (as for Theodoret of Cyrrhus).
Since the 1960s Henning Lehmann's research has concentrated on disclosing secrets and answering puzzling questions in such contexts, in particular concerning Eusebius, Severian and Theodoret, calling for sound scholarship in identifying syriacisms and school traditions.
The 15 chapters of this book, originally published over the years 1969-2005 in various conference reports, periodicals, Festschriften etc., and in various languages, can be studied here as a coherent collection - all in English.