Antonio Maria Ceriani

Who was Antonio Maria Ceriani?

Antonio Maria Ceriani was an Italian prelate, Syriacist, and scholar.

Ceriani was born at Uboldo, in Lombardy. He was ordained a priest for his home diocese of Milan in 1852 and the same year was appointed keeper of the catalogue of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana at Milan. From 1857 he was one of the Doctors of the Ambrosiana of which in January 1870 he became Prefect, a post he kept until his death. Among his additional charges, from 1855 he was professor of oriental languages in the diocesan Major Seminary and from 1872 professor of paleography. From the 1880s he was in scholarly contact with the English medical doctor turned liturgical scholar, John Wickham Legg.

Ceriani discovered the pseudepigraphal apocrypha entitled the Assumption of Moses —a Jewish work that survived in one poorly preserved sixth-century Latin palimpsest in the Ambrosian Library. He published the work in 1861. The edition presented by The Online Critical Pseudepigrapha is "identical to Ceriani's excellent transcription of the manuscript.". He also discovered and published in 1866 another apocryphal text, the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch.