George Kiraz

George Kiraz was born in Bethlehem to a Syriac Orthodox merchants family. He learned Syriac at the St. Mary’s Church in Bethlehem and St. Mark’s Monastery in Jerusalem. In 1983 he emigrated with his family to the United States. He obtained a master’s degree in Syriac Studies from the University of Oxford under Dr. Sebastian Brock and a doctorate in Computational Linguistics from the University of Cambridge. He came back to the US in 1996 where he worked as a research scientist at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies. He founded in 1992 Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute (formerly The Syriac Computing Institute). In 2001 he founded Gorgias Press, an academic publisher of books and journals covering a range of religious and language studies that include Syriac language, Eastern Christianity, Ancient Near East, Arabic and Islam, Early Christianity, Judaism, and more. He is the author of many works on Syriac studies including a six-volume Concordance to the Syriac New Testament (1993), a four-volume Comparative Edition of the Syriac Gospels (1996), etc.