ABSTRACT
Rhetoric and philosophy were the two subjects in the late antique Greek scholarly curriculum likely to have influenced the work of Syriac writers on controversial matters. No Syriac manual of rhetoric is known before the treatise of Antony of Tagrit (ninth century), but familiarity with classical rhetoric, especially epideictic, has been proposed in the case of several Syriac texts of various dates. Aristotelian logic was undoubtedly studied in Syriac and was occasionally employed in Christological controversy and subsequently in Christian-Muslim disputation, even though the prime motive for the study of logic was not confessional argumentation, but its role as the foundation of the whole Aristotelian philosophy. Syriac literature, however, has preserved the most philosophically erudite writing on Christology from late antiquity in works of John Philoponus. Brief extracts in a catena manuscript from his work Against Aristotle on the eternity of the world and his Hexaemeron commentary indicate that they too were probably known among Syriac Aristotelians, and by the time of the seventh century scholars of Qenneshre had led them to reject the divinity and eternity of the heavens and adopt a more critical stance towards Aristotelian natural philosophy than towards Aristotelian logic.
