A sureth version of the east-syriac dialogue poem of mary and the gardener

In the present paper, a Sureth version is published of the dialogue poem of Mary and the Gardener. As a first attempt to reconstruct the history of this text, the poetic version in the vernacular is compared with five manuscript witnesses of the Classical Syriac original. The poem is presented as part of an intertextual web of Classical Syriac hymns for Easter and Pentecost that are preserved in late liturgical collections and appear to be narrative and rhetorical expansions of John 20:11-17. Formal and thematic parallels to the poem are then found in the broader framework of Christian and Jewish hymnography written in varieties of Late Aramaic.