The Third Lung: New Trajectories in Syriac Studies: In Honour of Sebastian P. Brock [33, 1 ed.] 9004537880, 9789004537880

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33

Eastern Christian Studies

THE THIRD LUNG: NEW TRAJECTORIES IN SYRIAC STUDIES In Honor of Sebastian P. Brock

Edited by Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony, Miriam L. Hjälm and Robert A. Kitchen

The Third Lung: New Trajectories in Syriac Studies

Eastern Christian Studies Editors-in-Chief Joseph Verheyden (KU Leuven) Alfons Brüning (Radboud University, Nijmegen) Associate Editors Petre Maican (Radboud University, Nijmegen) Philip Forness (KU Leuven) Assistant Editor Peter Judge (Winthrop-College, Rockwill, US)

Volume 33

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ecs

The Third Lung: New Trajectories in Syriac Studies In Honor of Sebastian P. Brock Edited by

Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony Miriam L. Hjälm Robert A. Kitchen

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Brock, Sebastian P., honouree. | Bitton-Ashkelony, Brouria, editor. | Hjälm, Miriam L., editor. | Kitchen, Robert A., editor. Title: The third lung: new trajectories in Syriac studies : in honor of Sebastian P. Brock / edited by Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony, Miriam L. Hjälm, Robert A. Kitchen. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2023. | Series: Eastern Christian studies, 1783-7154 ; vol. 33 | Includes index. | Summary: “No one mentions Syriac, - a dialect of the Aramaic language Jesus spoke -, without referring to Sebastian P. Brock, the Oxford scholar and teacher who has written and taught about everything Syriac, even reorienting the field as The Third Lung of early Christianity (along with Greek and Latin). In 2018, Syriac scholars world-wide gathered in Sigtuna, Sweden, to celebrate with Sebastian his accomplishments and share new directions. Through essays showing what Syriac studies have attained, where they are going, as well as some arenas and connections previously not imagined, flavors of the fruits of laboring in the field are offered. Contributors to this volume are: Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Shraga Bick, Briouria Bitton-Ashkelony, Alberto Camplani, Thomas A. Carlson, Jeff W. Childers, Muriel Debié, Terry Falla, George A. Kiraz, Sergey Minov, Craig E. Morrison, István Perczel, Anton Pritula, Ilaria Ramelli, Christine Shepardson, Stephen J. Shoemaker, Herman G.B. Teule, Kathleen E. McVey”-- Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2023013810 (print) | LCCN 2023013811 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004537880 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004537897 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Christian literature, Syriac. | Syriac philology. | Aramaic philology. | Syriac literature. Classification: LCC PJ5402 .A57 2023 (print) | LCC PJ5402 (ebook) | DDC 492/.3--dc23/eng/20230506 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023013810 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023013811 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1783-7154 isbn 978-90-04-53788-0 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-53789-7 (e-book) Copyright 2023 by Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony, Miriam L. Hjälm, and Robert A. Kitchen. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau, V&R unipress and Wageningen Academic. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Contributors ix Introduction: The Third Lung 1 Robert A. Kitchen

Part 1 Going Where We Should Have Gone Ephrem and the Mariological Motif of Conceptio per Aurem 9 Kathleen E. McVey Seeking the Women of Ancient Syriac Christianity: Strategies of Method and Remembrance 41 Susan Ashbrook Harvey Teach Your Children Well: Martyrs, Monks, and Mothers in Severus of Antioch 67 Christine Shepardson The Ladder of Prayer, the Ship of Stirrings, and the Exodus from Egypt 86 Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony Stuck between Voice and Silence: Ephrem and the Rabbis on Prayer 110 Shraga Bick

Part 2 Digging Deeper The Church’s “Third Lung”: Ancient Voices from the Syriac Orient That Speak to Today’s Western Society 135 Craig E. Morrison

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Peshitta Parables as Oral Performance 154 Terry C. Falla Severus of Antioch on Ancient Church Customs: The Significance of Cyprian’s Letters as Quoted by Severus and Oriental Canonical Collections 173 Alberto Camplani Theodicy in the Letter of Mara Bar Serapion: Connections with Philosophical (Stoic) Accounts of Divine Retribution 193 Ilaria L.E. Ramelli A Monk and a Fish by the River of Babylon: An Unpublished Edifying Tale 223 Sergey Minov Notes on Syriac Learning in South India in the Middle Ages and Early Modernity 235 István Perczel with a contribution by Radu Mustață

Part 3 Going Where We Have Not Been Bringing the Syriac Climacus to the Twenty-First Century 267 Jeff W. Childers Towards a Syriac Semantic Web from the Perspective of 2020 279 George A. Kiraz Dialogue Elements in Late Syriac Poetry: The Ways of Transformation 311 Anton Pritula Syriac Apocalypticism and the Rise of Islam 325 Stephen J. Shoemaker Christianity in Iraq and the Issue of Chaldean Identity 339 Herman G.B. Teule

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Who Says? A Social History of Syriac Use in the Medieval Islamic Period 348 Thomas A. Carlson Sergius Baḥīrā and a Syriac “Story of Muḥammad” 363 Muriel Debié Index of Places 407 Index of Authors and Texts  409 Index of Bible Passages 412 General Index  415

Contributors Susan Ashbrook Harvey Brown University Shraga Bick The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Alberto Camplani Sapienza University of Rome Thomas A. Carlson Oklahoma State University Jeff W. Childers Graduate School of Theology, Abilene Christian University Muriel Debié Institut universitaire de France-EPHE, PSL Terry C. Falla Pilgrim Theological College, University of Divinity George A. Kiraz Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute, Piscataway, New Jersey Robert A. Kitchen Regina, Saskatchewan Kathleen E. McVey Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton Sergey Minov HSE University, Moscow

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Craig E. Morrison Pontifical Biblical Institute, Rome Radu Mustață Central European University, Vienna István Perczel Central European University, Vienna Anton Pritula The State Hermitage Museum, Oriental Studies Department, St. Petersburg Ilaria L.E. Ramelli Durham University; Stanford; Sacred Heart, Cambridge Christine Shepardson University of Tennessee Stephen J. Shoemaker University of Oregon Herman G.B. Teule Radboud University of Nijmegen; Catholic University of Louvain

Introduction: The Third Lung Robert A. Kitchen The separation between the Roman Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox Church officially signaled in 1054 began to be repaired in 1964 when Pope Pius VI and the Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I mutually dropped anathemas and re-established communion between the two churches. Pope John Paul II would urge in several meetings with the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of the need for Christianity “to breathe fully with both lungs, Latin and Greek, of the ancient Christian Church.” The Pope would include this directive as well in his 1995 Papal Encyclical “Ut Unum Sint/That All May Be One.”1 Acknowledging each other’s historical contributions led inexorably to an ecumenical appreciation. They were only two-thirds correct. Responding to the Pope’s metaphor, Sebastian Brock suggested that while the human body did not have three lungs, the Christian Church has. The third lung is Syriac Christianity.2 By the early twenty-first century scholars of early and late antique Christianity have gradually come to realize that Syriac Christianity was just as significant in the development and spread of the faith as its Greek and Latin colleagues. Its literature is as voluminous as its literary cousins, but somehow along the way students and scholars seemingly forgot that the Syriac world had existed right next door. As a consequence, a large percentage of Syriac manuscripts and literature remains unread and untranslated, a delight now for Syriac scholars. The perception of historians does change. In 1970, the standard introductory textbooks surveying the history of Christianity rarely looked beyond Constantinople, Alexandria and Cappadocia. The watershed of a new perspective can be located in the publication of Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years,3 which shifted the focus of early Christendom definitely eastward. Given the nature and influence of multi-media in this age, however, it was MacCulloch’s abridged presentation of his chronicle in six 60-minute episodes on BBC-TV, “A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years,” 1 https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc _25051995_ut-unum-sint.pdf, §54, p. 26. 2 S.P. Brock “The Syriac Orient: A Third ‘Lung’ for the Church?,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 71, no. 1 (2005): 5–20. 3 Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (New York: Viking Penguin, 2010). Especially, chapters 5–7, 177–254.

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that emphasised this paradigm shift most forcefully.4 The initial hour, “The First Christianity,” began in Jerusalem at the Syrian Orthodox and Ethiopian Orthodox Churches, and then went to China to catch glimpses of remnants of the expansion of Christianity in that country in the first millennium by so-called Nestorian Christians, now the Assyrian Church of the East. MacCulloch concluded with a visit to the Syrian Orthodox Monastery of Maʿaret Saydnaya, north of Damascus, Syria, to discuss with one of the monks the distinctiveness of Syriac worship. This was where MacCulloch thought we should begin to understand the character of early Christianity. Attention to and study of Syriac Christianity has moved from the margins, indeed, from off most maps to the center which geographically and historically it occupied in the first millennium of Christianity. In the small town of Sigtuna, Sweden, historically the first settlement in Sweden just before 1000 CE, participants in a conference honouring Sebastian P. Brock’s legacy while anticipating and imagining the future of Syriac studies already knew and assented to MacCulloch’s assessment. The impetus of this colloquium, organized by Sankt Ignatios Foundation and generously co-sponsored by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (F17–1314:1), was to award Sebastian Brock with the Order of Sankt Ignatios for his outstanding contribution to the field as well as to explore where Syriac studies need to explore further.5 And appropriately, the over sixty-five papers presented told us where Syriac studies is heading, where it had been, what it had been overlooking and ignoring, and what we had not investigated enough. Not surprisingly, very little of the road looming ahead had not been trod in some fashion previously by Sebastian Brock, and most speakers alluded to their indebtedness to him for showing them which road to take. Legacy is not something from the past that is no longer living or vital, but accompanies and empowers us on the journey. Trajectory is a more fitting term to describe the dynamic character of Syriac scholarship in the past half-century. Trajectory indicates a certain direction and pattern, but not a final result or conclusion. The same applies to the rest of Christianity – we are always somewhere on the curve, creating and being driven to the next level. The studies included in this volume explore three current trajectories in Syriac studies. One is in areas and realms which have been overlooked, ignored, or simply never came to mind: “Going Where We Should Have Gone.” The second, “Digging Deeper,” revisits Syriac history and literature previously investigated equipped with new methods, perspectives and questions. 4 Original airdate on BBC Channel 4, 5 November 2009. 5 We are also grateful to Hugh Doyle for helping us with the English editing.

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The results are intriguing, some are startling, and in each instance a more expansive narrative of an older story is told. The third, “Going Where We Have Not Been,” tracks the future trajectory, depicting new methodologies, as well as generating new discoveries and increased benefits out of earlier scholarship. The opening lecture of the conference by kathleen e. mcvey, “Ephrem and the Mariological Motif of Conceptio per Aurem,” takes us indeed where we should have gone before. McVey demonstrates the stunning and subtle virtuosity of Ephrem, primarily in two madrashe: the first one aligning Eve and Mary typologically, and the second interpreting the Samaritan Woman at the Well (John 4). McVey follows Ephrem’s exploration of human physical perception of the Gospel through touch, smell, sight, silence and hearing. Both madrashe evoke the “conception by ear” of the Gospel and its proclamation. susan ashbrook harvey, “Seeking the Women of Ancient Syriac Christianity,” ventures on a tour, not of specific women portrayed in Syriac texts, but of how women in general are depicted, and still participate in the Syriac pilgrimage towards perfection. Despite infamous diatribes against women, the majority are positive exemplars of the virtuous Christian life. The first of two diverse studies of Severus of Antioch, the champion of Miaphysitism, is presented by christine shepardson. “Teach Your Children Well: Martyrs, Monks, and Mothers in Severus of Antioch” traces how Severus transformed the traditional rhetoric of martyrdom of violent persecution and death to daily living and the development of an ascetical regimen. Shepardson examines a number of Severus’ sermons in the midst of the antiChalcedonian controversy, pointing to his clear emphasis upon women, especially mothers, who encourage their children to live ascetical, martyrial lives, rather than direct them to worldly success and wealth. Escorting us through the lineage and character of East Syriac prayer, brouria bitton-ashkelony, “The Ladder of Prayer,” centers on Joseph Ḥazzaya, who in turn synthesized the approaches of Evagrius Ponticus and John the Solitary of Apamea. Bitton-Ashkelony elucidates the monk’s complex progression towards the ultimate stage of a languageless prayer of pure light, in which he takes on the characteristics of God who is formless and imageless. More Ephrem, as shraga bick, “Stuck Between Voice and Silence: Ephrem and the Rabbis on Prayer,” begins from Ephrem’s employment in his madrashe of the paradoxical balance between “word and silence.” Bick examines closely the rabbinic background and possible source of silent, unspoken prayer, especially Hannah’s voiceless prayer in 1 Samuel 1.

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The second trajectory, “Digging Deeper,” emphasises the critical necessity for the future of Syriac studies to revisit classic literature and historical aspects and see from different perspectives what was not apparent before. craig e. morrison, “The Church’s ‘Third Lung’: Ancient Voices,” goes back to the fourteenth Demonstration of Aphrahat to examine in greater detail how the Persian Sage confronts the inner corruption and conflict of the church. Morrison points to the humility of Aphrahat who does not exempt himself from his challenges of the clergy regarding hypocrisy and duplicity as he unravels Biblical portrayals of human arrogance, pride and corruption in order to reprove the clergy. The Syriac Peshiṭta has always been at the centre of Syriac scholarship, and there is no lack of work yet to be done. In his chapter “Peshitta Parables as Oral Performance,” terry falla addresses a principal genre in the New Testament, the parables of Jesus, as evidence and examples of their oral performance which underly their composition. Utilizing the parables of the Rich Man and Lazarus and the Good Samaritan, Falla constructs a methodology to discern intentional expression of artistic-poetic elements in these pericopes, rather than only seeing a coincidental and random occurrence of poetic features. alberto camplani, “Severus of Antioch on Ancient Church Customs,” unravels a complex web of Oriental texts regarding the rebaptism of heretics from the perspective of Severus of Antioch in the early sixth century. The journey begins with a fifth-century Geʿez translation of canonical materials that includes Cyprian of Carthage’s Canon 70 in which historical context allows a conciliatory approach. In the fallout from Chalcedon Severus insists upon a compassionate and accepting attitude towards those on the other side. Going back to the very beginning of Syriac literature, the Letter of Mar Bar Serapion (ca. 70 CE), ilaria ramelli, “Theodicy in the Letter of Mara Bar Serapion,” gives a detailed commentary on the Stoicizing philosophy of Serapion, who also gives one of the first witnesses to Jesus by a non-Christian source. Hagiography has always been a favourite endeavour of Syriac literature, foremost in the various vitae and lives of the saints. sergey minov identifies “spiritually beneficial tales” which were written from early periods, but have not received the same kind of attention until recently. Minov presents the Syriac text and English translation of a unique British Library manuscript of an edifying tale of “A Monk and a Fish by the River of Babylon,” and illumines the motifs and humour of the anonymous author, who plays on the story of Jonah. A major and unique segment of Syriac Christianity has been its presence and culture in south India, Kerala, in particular, since the first century according to tradition and historically from the evidence of early fourth-century activity. In fact, Indian Syriac Christians comprise the majority of Syriac Christians in the world today and their presence has been significant in ecumenical and

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academic arenas. Yet again, they are virtually off the map of most investigations of Syriac Christianity, and their indigenous literature is left unread. istván perczel has devoted considerable research recovering these neglected manuscripts, and along with radu mustață, in their chapter “Notes on Syriac Learning in South India in the Middle Ages and Early Modernity,” describes the recent discovery of an eighteenth-century manuscript of considerable intellectual depth for its own sake, but through it reveals the evolution and theological subtleties of the Indian Syriac Church which deserve critical attention. “Going Where We Have Not Been” is not an imagined trajectory of where one might go, but one upon which many scholars have already begun to walk and ride, often employing different vehicles. Beginning with the Syriac translation of John Climacus’ Ascent of the Divine Ladder, jeff w. childers in his chapter “Bringing the Syriac Climacus to the Twenty-First Century” does not focus on the content of the spiritual treatise, but shifts into the detailed description of a new institute which digitizes and records variants from a large number of manuscripts of the Syriac Climacus, involving a diverse international consortium of graduate students and senior scholars. This project represents a paradigm shift for a scholarly research project, moving from the solitary scholar to group collaboration, especially for large scale studies which individuals could not undertake or complete. The history of how the present and future came into being is depicted most clearly through the computerisation and digitisation of Syriac studies. george a. kiraz in his chapter “Towards a Syriac Semantic Web from the Perspective of 2020” relates his story of traveling to Oxford on a personal interlude and discovering through his relationship with Sebastian Brock that this was the “kairos” – the right time – for the employment of computers in studying Near Eastern scripts and languages. Brock was not just an innocent bystander, but an engaged participant, even though he had never used a computer. A detailed history of computers in service of Syriac receives an entertaining and comprehensible narrative for non-computer folk and nerds alike. Kiraz surveys the history, yet also prescribes some necessary futures. Syriac dialogue poetry is rooted in very ancient forms, and has been studied as a genre, in particular by Sebastian Brock. anton pritula, “Dialogue Elements in Late Syriac Poetry,” introduces a later development of the soghyatha/onyatha poems, principally by Khamis bar Qardahe and Bar Ebroyo in the thirteenth/fourteenth centuries, during the Syriac Renaissance movement, influenced by Arabic, Persian and Islamic poetic styles. This is a field rarely examined which is in need of translations and editions, for which Pritula calls. The study of apocalypticism has increased concerning different historical periods. A critical period was the rise of Islam in the Near East, and two

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studies here explore the phenomenon of Syriac apocalypticism from different vantage points. Taking note of an early article by Sebastian Brock regarding the contemporary references to the rise of Islam in Syriac literature, stephen j. shoemaker, “Syriac Apocalypticism and the Rise of Islam,” reviews the apocalyptic movement of the sixth/seventh centuries in Jewish, Christian, Sasanian and then Islamic writings, centering on the Syriac Legend of Alexander. The Syriac literature was not an anomaly, but an active participant in a larger inter-religion conversation and urgent interpretation. Syriac Christianity is quite alive in the Near East. herman g.b. teule, “Christianity in Iraq and the Issue of Chaldean Identity,” reports on the contemporary situation of Syriac Christianity in Iraq, where the Chaldean Catholic Church is at the centre of a vigorous debate concerning Syriac and Christian identity. The Chaldean Church is behind the movement to establish a new geographical province in Iraq for Christians, which has not yet reached resolution or common agreement. Challenging a common assumption among historians and linguists that following the Islamic movement of the seventh century, Arabic became the universal language of its domains, thomas a. carlson, “Social History of Syriac Use in the Medieval Islamic Period,” shows that this was not always true, especially regarding Syriac usage. He points to geographical and sometimes banal factors at play that enabled some non-Arabic languages to continue and even revive and flourish. The well-known tale of the monk Sergius Baḥira found in the Charfet/ Rahmani collection, a polemical Syriac sīrā about Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, is re-examined by muriel debié, “Sergius Baḥīrā and a Syriac Story ‘of Muhammad.’” Debié surveys six short Syriac texts, three of which have not been previously treated, regarding the life of Muhammad and the origins of the Qurʾān. These latter texts appear to be West Syrian, while the previously known were East Syrian. The study demonstrates the complexity of an early tradition shared in part by Islam, and East and West Syriac Christianity, although Debié sees the East Syriac hand being dominant. These diverse studies are stages on one trajectory curve or the other, neither conclusive nor complete in everything that may be said or written. Sebastian Brock is still writing – some things new, sometimes amending previous articles, even correcting them, and often continuing to fill out a trajectory begun years earlier. He continues to find something more and new to report. Our time together in Sigtuna renewed us, realizing that the Third Lung of Syriac Christianity can never be expressed in one breath.

Part 1 Going Where We Should Have Gone

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Ephrem and the Mariological Motif of Conceptio per Aurem Kathleen E. McVey As George Kiraz said in the title of his splendid festschrift for Sebastian, he is the Malphono w-Rabo d-Malphone. This is true, first, in a quasi-literal sense: He is a teacher of teachers. Sebastian, has taught many of the active Syriac scholars throughout the world – formally or, as in my case, informally – by reading, writing, advising, and encouraging us in our effort to understand the cultures that have grown around the Syriac language in many places and times.1 Also in the larger sense, he is the greatest of Syriac teachers not only for his vast learning, for his prolific writing, and for his insights across a dizzying array of sources. Sebastian is also, as we all know, the most kind and generous, delightful person with whom to spend time. What better reason is there to apply oneself to Syriac studies? Thank you, Sebastian, for being you! Now let us turn to an earlier master of Syriac literature, a great malphono of the fourth century, Ephrem, one of many Syriac figures illuminated by Sebastian Brock’s studies. Here, I propose to explore a theme within Ephrem’s Mariology: conceptio per aurem – the idea that, at the moment of the Annunciation, Mary miraculously conceived the infant Jesus in her womb. The notion represents, in concrete form, the early Christian belief in Mary’s virginal conception. As such, it invites representation in the visual arts.2 It is no surprise that Ephrem, with his frequent use of visual imagery and his concern to defend and celebrate Mary’s virginity, would find this motif attractive. His corpus includes only a few instances, but these significantly influenced later Syriac Mariology. This 1 G.A. Kiraz, ed., Malphono w-Rabo d-Malphone: Studies in Honor of Sebastian P. Brock (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2008). 2 For a brief overview of conceptio per aurem in western Christian art, see D.R. Cartlidge, “‘How Can This Be?’ Picturing the word made flesh,” Bible Review 18, no. 6 (2002): BAR BAS library online https://members.bib-arch.org/print/119695. Accessed 5 April 2018. G.A. Anderson adduces a rich visual repertoire for the theme in eastern Christian art in The Genesis of Perfection: Adam and Eve in Jewish and Christian Imagination (Louisville: Westminster, 2001) esp. 75–98. The earliest is at Bagawat. On Mary’s portrayal there, see K. Urbaniak-Walczak, Die “Conceptio per aurem”: Untersuchungen zum Marienbild in Ägypten unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Malereien in El-Bagawat (Altenberge: Oros Verlag, 1992), esp. 8–14, 50–53, 179–191; M. Zibawi, Bagawat: Peintures Paléochrétiennes d’Égypte (Paris: Picard, 2005), 124–127; G. Cipriano, El-Bagawat: Un cimitero paleocristiano nell’alto Egitto, Prefazione di F. Bisconti, Ricerche di archeologia e antichità cristiane 3 (Todi: Tau, 2008), 221–236.

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is so much the case that in his pioneering study of Syriac Mariology, Robert Murray asserted that, in the context of the Annunciation and in conjunction with a “Second Eve” tradition, “The reference to ears is a peculiarity of Syriac tradition.”3 It is, indeed, a major theme of Syriac Mariology,4 but it is now clear that this motif is not unique to Syriac tradition. Nor is Ephrem the first to elaborate on it. Hilda Graef identified Greek and Latin antecedents to Ephrem on this motif. Nicholas Constas has added considerably to the study of later elaborations of the theme, especially in the works of Proclus and his school.5 Since Ephrem remains one of the earliest to employ the motif, and since his exploitation of the notion is complex and imaginative, his use of conceptio per aurem merits further study. Here I will consider two of the hymns in which he used this motif.

Ephrem’s Use of “Conception by Ear”

The notion of conceptio per aurem occurs several times in the extant corpus of Ephrem’s hymns: twice in the Hymns on the Church – specifically, in Eccl 35.18 3 R. Murray, “Mary, the Second Eve in the Early Syriac Fathers,” Eastern Churches Review 3 (1971): 372–384 (374). 4 For the theme in Ephrem, see E. Beck, “Die Mariologie der echten Schriften Ephräms,” Oriens Christianus 40 (1956): 22–39, esp. 33–34 (on Eccl 35.17 and 49.7–8), 38–39 (on Virg 23.4–5); the latter is “nur bildhaft zu verstehenden Empfängnis durch das Ohr” (34), but comparison of the Samaritan with Mary is “eine überraschende Parallele,” (38). Murray, “Mary, the Second Eve,” 374–375, adds to the discussion Comm. Diat. 1.26, as well as examples from the Syriac Acts of John. S.P. Brock, The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem (rev. ed.; Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1992), 32–33, points out another instance of the motif in Ephrem in Virg 6.9, includes a translation of Eccl 49.7, and notes the parallel notion in Hamlet. See also Urbaniak-Walczak, Conceptio, 91–95. For an example in a later, anonymous work, falsely attributed to Ephrem, see S.P. Brock, Bride of Light: Hymns on Mary from the Syriac Churches (Kottayam: St. Ephrem Ecumenical Research Institute, 1994) 5–6, 14–16, 140–146, esp. 145. 5 Hilda Graef had already drawn attention to the theme in a Latin contemporary of Ephrem’s, Zeno, Bishop of Verona 363–372; in Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion, vol. 1: From the Beginnings to the Eve of the Reformation (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963), 56–57. Citing both Murray and Graef, Nicholas Constas refuted the claim of Syriac uniqueness, adding several more Latin examples; in Proclus of Constantinople and the Cult of the Virgin in Late Antiquity: Homilies 1–5, Texts and Translations (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 274, n4. Further, he traced the motif and the literary and theological nuances of its development in Greek Christian literature, especially in Proclus of Constantinople and his disciples; see especially chapter 5, “‘The Ear of the Virginal Body’: The Poetics of Sound in the School of Proclus,” 273–313, his argument summarized in 274–275. He briefly considers Ephrem and other Syriac and Greek antecedents of Proclus, 282–303 passim.

Ephrem and the Mariological Motif

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and 49.7–86 – twice in the Hymns on Virginity – in Virg 6.9 and 23.57 – and it is implied once in the Nativity Hymns – in Nat 21.15–16.8 Another example from Ephrem or a member of his school is in the Commentary on the Diatessaron 20.32.9 Although several scholars have cited these verses in the context of studies of Mariology, a thorough study of Ephrem’s use of the concept has not yet appeared. The first step for this study should be to look at each instance in the context of the complete hymn in which it occurs; that is Eccl 35 and 49, Virg 6 and 23, and Nat 21. Similar content, common metrical patterns and melodies suggest expanding that examination to at least one more hymn that precedes or follows in the manuscript collection, that is, Eccl 35–37, Eccl 49–50, Virg 4–7, and Virg 22–23. This larger study is not feasible here. 6 Syriac text, E. Beck, ed. Des Heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen de Ecclesia, CSCO 198, Scr. Syri. 84 (Louvain: Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, 1960), 89, 126, hereinafter Beck, Eccl. Translations: German: Beck, CSCO 199, Scr. Syri. 85 (Louvain: Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, 1960), 86, 122; French: D. Cerbelaud, Le Combat Chrétien: Hymnes de Ecclesia, Spiritualité Orientale 83 (Bégrolle en Mauges: Abbaye de Bellefontaine, 2004), 159, 212, hereinafter Cerbelaud, Eccl. 7 Syriac text: E. Beck, ed. Des Heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen de Virginitate, CSCO 223, Scr. Syri. 94 (Louvain: Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, 1962), 23, 82, hereinafter Virg. Translations: German: Beck, CSCO 224, Scr. Syri. 95 (Louvain: Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, 1962), 23, 74; trans., Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns, Introduction, translation, and notes by K.E. McVey, Preface by J. Meyendorff, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist, 1989), 290, 362; French: Éphrem le Syrien, Le Christ en ses symboles: Hymnes De Virginitate. Introduction, traduction du texte syriaque, notes et index par D. Cerbelaud, Spiritualité Orientale 86 (Bégrolles en Mauges: Abbaye de Bellefontaine, 2006), 51–52, 125–126, hereinafter Cerbelaud, Virg. 8 Syriac text: E. Beck, ed., Des Heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen de Nativitate, CSCO 186, Scr. Syri. 82 (Louvain: Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, 1959), 107–108, hereinafter Nat. Translations: German: Beck, CSCO 187, Syr. 83 (Louvain: Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, 1962), 97; trans., McVey, Hymns, 176–177; French: Éphrem de Nisibe, Hymnes sur la Nativité, Introduction par F. Graffin, S.J., Traduction et notes par F. Cassingena-Trévedy, Sources chrétiennes 459 (Paris: Cerf, 2001), 250–251. 9 Cited by Murray, Second Eve, 374. The passage is extant only in the Armenian. See L. Leloir, Saint Éphrem Commentaire de l’Évangile Concordant Version Arménienne, CSCO 137 (Louvain: Durbecq, 1953), 305; Latin translation, CSCO 138 (Louvain: Durbecq, 1954), 218. French: L. Leloir, Ephrem de Nisibe. Commentaire de l’Évangile concordant ou Diatessaron …, Sources chrétiennes 121 (Paris: Cerf, 1966), 366–367. English: C. McCarthy, Saint Ephrem’s Commentary on Tatian’s Diatessaron: An English Translation of Chester Beatty Syriac MS 709 with Introduction and Notes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993; reprint with corrigenda, 2000), 311. German: C. Lange, Ephraem der Syrer. Kommentar zum Diatessaron, Fontes Christiani 54.1–2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 374. On the authenticity of the Syriac text, see C. Lange, “A View on the Integrity of the Syriac Commentary on the Diatessaron,” Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 56:1–4 (2004): 129–144. On the complex problem of authorship, Lange has argued persuasively that the commentary is a composite work of which only some parts – discernible only with difficulty and, finally, with uncertainty – may be derived from notes originating from Ephrem himself. Lange, Kommentar, 81–118. On the relation of Syriac to the Armenian, see Lange, Kommentar, 56–80.

12

McVey

Instead, we will begin with a study of two examples of conceptio per aurem – one from the collection On the Church and the other from the collection On Virginity  – each presented in the context of the complete hymn in which it occurs: Hymn 35 on the Church and Hymn 23 on Virginity. Both are rich in rhetorical display and in theological and exegetical range, but their broader themes differ significantly. In the first Ephrem unfolds an Eve/Mary typology and a sophisticated understanding of sense perception within a broad soteriological framework. In the second, he develops rhetorical and generative metaphors with respect to Mary and to the Samaritan woman of John 4, and he combines them with an embrace of women in an apostolic role. In each of these hymns, the notion of conception by ear is central and well integrated with the flow of ideas.

Conceptio per aurem in Ephrem’s Thirty-Fifth Hymn on the Church

Hymn 35 on the Church is challenging to the interpreter. Ephrem seems to jump unpredictably from one subject to another without clearly connecting his thoughts.10 By engaging the hymn through Ephrem’s general understanding of sense perception, its fundamental structure emerges. Comparison of Eve and Mary leads Ephrem to assert the value of subtle intelligence. The listener must then apply subtle intelligence to several verses about the role of the human hand in human achievement. As is true for all the organs of sense, the power underlying this most materially rooted of them is the transcendent faculty, the mind. Both Eve and Mary received information through hearing and seeing. Eve’s foolish reception and response led to human ruin, but Mary’s intelligent reception led directly to the incarnation. Its result is the redemption of the human sensorium – begun at the annunciation and to be completed in Paradise.11 10

In a brief introduction to Eccl 35–37, Cerbelaud sketches their principal themes, but he does not attempt to follow Ephrem’s sequence of thought at 35.7: “comme à son habitude, le fleuve éphrémien décrit quelques méandres: on retiendra notamment l’insolite digression en forme d’« hymne aux mains humaines » et à leur « compagnon », où l’on doit sans doute reconnaître l’esprit … ou l’Esprit (XXXV, 7–15) !” Cerbelaud, Eccl, 156. Beck lists some basic themes without attempting to connect them, CSCO 199, 84. 11 Though her principal focus is on the sense of smell, S.A. Harvey, lays out the Patristic schema of redemption for all the senses, and emphasizes Ephrem’s role in the evolution of that understanding, Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination, The Transformation of the Classical Heritage 42 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), esp. 60–65, 132–134, 235–239. For Ephrem’s understanding of

Ephrem and the Mariological Motif

13

The hymn consists of twenty-three strophes – each with three lines of five plus five syllables. The first and last strophes serve as introduction and summation. The main body of the hymn consists of four sets of five strophes (2–6, 7–11, 12–16, 19–23), interrupted by a penultimate pair (17–18). The first strophe presents Mary and Eve as two naïve young girls who brought about stunningly different conditions for humankind. The first group (2–6) compares and contrasts simplicity and cleverness – first, with respect to Mary and Eve, then more generally. The need for balance between the two provides for an otherwise sudden transition to the subject of the hands as agents of civilization and culture (7–11). The next section (12–16) describes a “companion” to the hands – one who is both immersed in them and beyond them (12–13). Despite the presence of this transcendent faculty, the eyes and ears are unable to perceive ineffable truths (14–16). The next two strophes bring back Eve and Mary and their disparate capacities to grasp the truth as presented to them (17–18). The confounding of the senses in the face of spiritual choices is resolved by the conceptio per aurem, a sudden, dramatic assertion of the fact of incarnation. At the moment of the annunciation the ultimate divine condescension to human bodies and to human sense perception begins. Perhaps, we are meant, at this point to appreciate Ephrem’s choice to sing his “Ode to the human hand” rather than to another sense such as sight or hearing.12 The sense of touch may be the least susceptible to spiritualizing or intellectualizing and, thus, the most pertinent to an uncompromising claim to the reality of the incarnation.13 Finally (19–23), traditional theological themes emerge as a response to the challenge posed by Death and Satan: what is the point of this? For their destruction of life and hope, they are themselves annihilated, and joy and hope reign in heaven and on earth. The final strophe revisits human sense perception, portraying the salvation as a gradual saturation of the world (including human beings) with the Divine presence (though without Harvey’s specific emphasis on sense perception), see, for example, B. Daelemans, “Dieu Sauve En Se Montrant: La révélation rédemptrice dans la troisième Hymne Sur La Nativité de St. Éphrem,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 77 (2011): 351–398; B. Daelemans, “Le Caché Nous Relève En Se Révélant: La révélation rédemptrice dans les Hymnes Sur La Nativité de St. Éphrem,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 78 (2012): 29–80; also K.E. McVey, “Ephrem the Syrian” in The Early Christian World, ed. Ph.F. Esler (2nd ed.: London: Routledge, 2017), 1145–1168; earlier version in the original edition, Routledge, 2000, 1228–1250. 12 Modifying, a bit, Cerbelaud’s apt phrase “hymne aux mains humaines” (Cerbelaud, Eccl, 156). On Ephrem’s interest in all the senses, see U. Possekel, Evidence of Greek Philosophical Concepts in the Writings of Ephrem the Syrian, CSCO 580, Subsidia 102 (Louvain: Peeters, 1999), 186–229, and Harvey, Scenting Salvation, 260. 13 On the ranking of the senses, see, for example, Harvey, Scenting Salvation, 100–105.

14

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joy of the senses at this victory and anticipating their greater satisfaction still to come. Eccl 35.1–6: Mary and Eve, Simplicity and Cleverness In the thirty-fifth Hymn on the Church, as well as in the two succeeding hymns, Ephrem shows a consistent interest in the Eve-Mary typology. Hymn 35 begins with six verses exploring that typology in relation to the delicate balance between simplicity and cleverness – which Eve got wrong, leading to death for humankind, while Mary got it right, leading to the restoration of life: 35.1 Two naïfs,14  two simple (girls),15 Mary and Eve  placed in comparison – One the cause of our death,  the other of our life. 35.2 Eve: her cleverness16  withdrew [from] her simplicity.17 She became indiscreet.18  Mary: by her discernment,19 made her cleverness  the salt of her simplicity. Not content with simply asserting a need for balance between cleverness and simplicity, Ephrem has added a metaphor of taste – with salt representing the discernment that enabled Mary to achieve the necessary balance. Next (in 35.4–7), keeping the sense of taste in mind (with references to taste, bitterness, and seasoning), he introduces further polarities. As a synonym to simplicity, he adds naïveté,20 and to cleverness, he adds guile. 35.3 Neither does a word of naïveté21  have taste without cleverness.  Nor does a word of deceit have trust  without simplicity. 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

̈ .‫ܒܖܝܪܬܐ‬ ̈ ‫ܛܬܐ‬ ܳ ܽ ‫ܦܫܝ‬ ‫ܝܡܘ ܳܬ ̇ܗ‬ ‫ܥܪ‬ ܻ ܽ ‫ܦܫܝ‬ ܺ ‫ܛܘܬ ̇ܗ‬ ܽ ‫ܕܠܳܐ‬ ‫ܒܘ ܳܝܢ‬ ‫ܒܦܘܪܫܢܐ‬

More precisely, he retrieves the root [‫ ]ܒܪܪ‬of naïveté [‫ ]ܒܪܝܪܘܬܐ‬from the hymn’s ̈ first line, where the adjective is used nominally [‫ ;]ܒܖ ܺܝܪܬܐ‬see Virg 35.1 above and R. Payne Smith, et al., eds. Thesaurus Syriacus, 2 vols, and a supplement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879–1901), esp. 621.

21 ‫ܒܪܝܪܘܬܐ‬

Ephrem and the Mariological Motif

15

35.4 Love is akin  to all naïveté. Sin is neighbor  to all guile.22 But one is able by the other  to be adorned, my brothers! Without abandoning metaphors of tasting, to the opposition of life to death, he adds another layer – love vs. sin and deceit vs. trust – one of each pair clearly good, the other clearly bad. Using the language of kinship, however, he softens the moral polarities by moving from deceit vs. trust to guile vs. naïveté: 35.5 Naïveté tempers  the bitterness of guile. Cleverness seasons  the word of simplicity. Cleverness is naïve;  simplicity is clever. Finally, he returns to his metaphorical recipe for the proper mixture of cleverness and simplicity. Within a few lines, the opposing term for love is no longer sin, but lack of taste. 35.6 For when they are not combined,  they are repugnant – each on its own. The one is without taste,  the other without love. But when they are mixed as one,  together they become great. The cumulative effect of these stanzas (1–6) is to develop the complexity of Mary’s character. While the moral difference (love vs. sin) and the theological consequence of their decisions (life vs. death) are clear, Eve and Mary share similar character traits: simplicity and naïveté as well as cleverness. When seasoned with the salt of discernment, Mary’s cleverness, while removed from the bitterness of guile, has a provocative tang. Eccl 35.7–11: The Symbolic Significance of the Human Hand In the next section of the hymn (7–11), Ephrem develops a new metaphor: the human hands as the symbol of human achievement and, ultimately, of the mind. He begins with the polarities already established, cleverness and simplicity. Metaphorically, naïveté and guile (or cleverness and simplicity) resemble two hands, which have strength only when working together. Ephrem quickly moves to various forms of reciprocity and collaboration better represented by the hands and fingers. When they work together, the hands are able to subdue 22 ‫ܨܢܝܥܘܬܐ‬

16

McVey

the sea and the dry land by smelting and forging brass and iron and by hewing mountains and filling in valleys. All these technological achievements are the work of human hands. 35.7 They resemble, allegorically,23  the two hands since, when they are far  from one another, they are weak. But when they work together,  they can dominate the world. 35.8 For they subdue the sea,  and they subdue the dry land. Brass they have melted and poured.  Iron they have softened and forged. Valleys they have filled and raised up.  Mountains they have hewn and brought low. Likewise, the “daughters” of the two hands, their fingers, despite apparent weakness, have, in fact, remarkable accomplishments. 35.9 Two mothers who possess  daughters – ten fingers! With these weak (daughters)  they subdue formidable things. Though their power is weak,  their accomplishment is splendid. The extraordinary abilities of the hands with their fingers seem, at first, to be their capacity for adornment with jewelry, but Ephrem quickly introduces an allegorical sort of embellishment comparable to the feats already attributed to the hands. The more exalted ornamentation of the fingers is evident when they assist in intellectual pursuits: when drawing, painting or forming images, or when writing books, or facilitating numerical calculation. 35.10 They are small but great  when gems24 are multiplied, crude but beautiful  when they paint images,25 silent but articulate  when they write books.26

̈ 23 ‫ܒܦܠܐܬܐ‬ ̈ 24 ‫ ܨܒܬܐ‬He used the idea of adornments allegorically above in 35.4.3, using the same root, ‫ܨܒܬ‬. In this instance, the meaning of gems in finger rings makes sense (J. Payne Smith [Mrs. Margoliouth], ed., A Compendious Syriac Dictionary: Founded upon the Thesaurus Syriacus of R. Payne Smith, D.D. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903], 473a), but the broader meaning of adornment should be kept in mind. ̈ ‫ܟܕ ̇ܨ‬ ̈ ‫ܝܖܢ‬ 25 ‫ܨܠܡܐ‬ ̈ ̈ 26 ‫ܟܕ ܟܬܒܢ ܣܦܖܐ‬

Ephrem and the Mariological Motif

17

35.11 (They are) naked but clad  in the numbers of calculations,27 empty cupped palms28  whose fullness alone becomes, by calculation,   the world and its numbers.29 In the final lines of this strophe, Ephrem adds to his praise for the arithmetical skills made easier by the fingers, the notion that the cupped hands, with only their naked fingers, represent “the world and its numbers.” This understanding – namely that the fingers with the cupped palms have cosmic symbolism – is supported by ideas found in one of Ephrem’s prose compositions, his Treatise against Bardaisan’s Domnus. There, he addressed the subject of incorporeals.30 Among them, he counted Number [‫]ܡܢܝܢܐ‬, along with ̈ Space ]‫[ܐܬܪܐ‬, Time [‫]ܙܒܢܐ‬, and four other notions [‫]ܣܘܟܠܐ‬.31 Among the incorporeals, Time and Number seem to have a structural role, since he asserts that, “with respect to Time and Number and with respect to everything which is incorporeal … its branches divide there, for these are the roots from which all the branches shoot forth.”32 Thus, here in this hymn (Eccl 35), he asserts, ̈

̈ ‫ܫܠܝܚܢ‬. Both Beck and Cerbelaud suggest, plausibly, that ̈ 27 ‫ ܠܒܝܫܢ ܕܚܘܫܒܢܐ‬ ‫ܘܡܢܝܢܐ‬ counting on the fingers is key to understanding this passage. Each adds further ideas about this difficult passage; Beck, CSCO 199, 53, n4, and 85, and Cerbelaud, Eccl, 102–103 and 58, n1. ̈ ̈ 28 ‫ܣܦܝܩܬܐ‬ ‫ܚܘܦܢܐ‬ ̈ 29 ‫̇ܗܘܐ ܒܚܘܫܒܢܐ ܥܠܡܐ ܘܡܢܝܢܘܗܝ‬ 30 C.W. Mitchell, ed. and trans., S. Ephraim’s Prose Refutations of Mani, Marcion, and Bardaisan, 2 vols. (Oxford: Williams and Norgate, 1912; repr. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2008) = PrRef. For The Treatise [‫ ]ܡܐܡܪܐ‬against Bardaisan’s Domnus, PrRef 2, 1–49. On the incorporeals, see PrRef 2, 6–29; further, Possekel, Evidence, esp. 155–185, see also 127–154. 31 Mitchell chose two different words in English to render ‫ܣܘܟܠܐ‬. Although Mitchell did not explain the distinction he saw, it appears to me that where Ephrem uses it in the sense of an incorporeal entity, or an idea understood as an incorporeal reality, he uses “notion”; as in the present example, PrRef 2, 22.31, and in 29.10–30.14. In the context of Ephrem’s discussion of sense perception, however, Mitchell translates the word as “meaning”; as in PrRef 2, 27.17–29.2, with PrRef 2, 29.10 marking a transition between the two senses of the word. On this I have followed Mitchell’s choices. On the other hand, in Mitchell’s Syriac text ‫ ܣܘܟܠܐ‬sometimes appears without seyame where the context demands the plural and his translation renders it in the plural. In those cases, and in others where Mitchell shows a lacuna in the text but has clearly read a letter or two to fill the lacuna, if I quote from the Syriac text, I have altered it to match the Syriac presumed to underlie Mitchell’s translation. For Time and Number among the seven incorporeals, see esp. PrRef 2, 18.43–19.10, 22.23–26.41, and for discussion of the full roster of seven, see Possekel, Evidence, esp. 169–181, 184–185. Certainty about the identification of the last four is not necessary for present purposes. 32 ‫ܥܠ ܙܒܢܐ ܘܡܢܝܢܐ … ܘܥܠ ܟܠ ܡܕܡ ܕܕܠܐ ܓܫܘܡ ܗܘ … ܐܬܦܪܣܐ ܣܘܟܝܗܝ‬ ̈ .‫ ܥܩܪܐ ܐܢܘܢ ܓܝܪ ܗܠܝܢ ܕܡܢܗܘܢ ܡܣܪܥܦܢ ܟܘܠ ܣܘܟܝܢ‬.‫ ܬܡܢ‬PrRef 2, 18.46–19.10. Mitchell’s English translation, PrRef 2, viii.

18

McVey

in effect, that since the fingers are useful for counting, they enable humans to think about numbers. Since Number is one of two entities from which all the incorporeals branch out, the fingers enable humans to begin to comprehend incorporeal notions. Figuratively stated, then, empty human hands may embrace the entire world – by leading humans to contemplate incorporeal realities.

Eccl 35.12–16: The Hands and the Mind – Both Kinsman and Stranger to the Senses In the next section, Ephrem introduces another level of metaphor: the hands33 – thanks to their ability to enhance the higher human capacities – are like their friend, companion, or kinsman, who is also a stranger or foreigner. From within these dichotomies a mysterious figure emerges. 35.12 A single kinsman they have,   a companion and one from the same stock, a friend and relative  whose origin is difficult to understand, a foreigner, and yet,   one entirely immersed in them.

Although Ephrem does not name this figure here, similar descriptions elsewhere in his corpus suggest that “he” is the human mind or capacity for transcendence.34 In his refutation of Manichaean views, for example, he describes mind (‫ )ܪܥܝܢܐ‬as transcendent and not limited to a place, yet, paradoxically, fully present in the human body. Contrasting the great light of a bonfire in the desert with the “excellent mind” (‫ )ܪܥܝܢܐ ܡܝܬܪܐ‬of a “little human” (‫ܒܪ‬ ‫ )ܐܢܫܐ ܙܥܘܪܐ‬he argues: every Light that exists … can be confined in an enclosure (‫)ܥܘܒܐ‬. But there is no enclosure to confine the Mind; for it is confined in the body, but greater than it; and in the midst of creation, but much greater than

33

34

In Syriac, hands, fingers, and cupped palms are all grammatically feminine, so any or all of them may be the antecedent to “they” and “their” (both feminine plural) in the following strophes (12–13). So, the mysterious kinsman, stranger or foreigner may be the companion of any or all of them. Both Beck and Cerbelaud reach similar conclusions. Citing the passages discussed here (HdF 57.5.3 and PrRef 1, 116.9–46), Beck suggests, “Der «einzige Verwandte» muss … der menschliche Geist sein.” (Eccl, CSCO 199, 86, n3; and HdF, CSCO 155, 153, n3). He adds synonyms used by Ephrem for the mind as a transcendent human faculty, such as ‫ ܗܘܢܐ‬and ‫ܡܕܥܐ‬. Cerbelaud agrees that the companion of the hands must be “l’esprit” and adds another possibility: “ou l’Esprit” (Cerbelaud, Eccl, 156).

Ephrem and the Mariological Motif

19

it; and in the enclosure of creation, but it has no power against it; for it is without limit because its reach extends even to God who is limitless.35 In the next verses of Eccl 35, Ephrem continues his portrayal of the human mind or the capacity for transcendence, now adding the metaphor of a swooping bird. Soaring like a bird, this ineffable messenger flies without wings, while concealing within himself a mystery entrusted to him. 35.13 He is their messenger,  flying without wings, turning without pinions,  and soaring without feathers.36 He hides in his bosom37  the mystery (‫ )ܪܐܙܐ‬entrusted to him. Again, we can confirm the identification of this winged messenger as the mind by adducing passages where Ephrem explicitly applies the same imagery to the mind and its capacities. In HdF 53.12 he exhorts his listener, “Come and fly to [the Savior’s] side with the feathers of the mind and the wings of thought, and then cleanse and clarify the eyes of your intelligence, and ascend to gaze upon the Son.”38 Contrasting the soul39 with memory in HdF 57.5, he says that, “memory flies to every region, but there is no place where you can say, ‘Look! Here it is!’ Though it is inside the body, creation is smaller than it, for it exists in everything completely.”40 Consideration of the human capacity to count using the fingers led Ephrem in Eccl 35.12–13 to reflect on the relation of the hands to the mind. His next step will be to consider more broadly the relation of the senses to the mind. Similarly, in his Treatise against Bardaisan’s Domnus, Ephrem moves from consideration of incorporeals to a detailed account of the working of sense perception.41 Ordinary bodily perception is dependent on the senses, which he 35 PrRef 1, 116.9–47, esp. 116.32–47; from Book IV of the Discourses to Hypatius; Mitchell’s English translation, PrRef 1, lxxxvii, slightly altered. ̈ ̈ ̇ ̇ ̈ 36 ‫ܕܦܪܚ ܕܠܐ ܓܦܐ ܘܦܢܐ ܕܠܐ ܟܢܦܐ ܘܛܐܣ ܕܠܐ ܐܒܖܐ‬ ̈ 37 ‫ܥܘܒܘܗܝ‬ ̈ ̈ ̈ 38 ‫ܡܢܥ ܦܪܚ ܨܐܕܘܗܝ ܒܐܒܖܐ ܕܪܥܝܢܐ ܘܓܦܐ ܕܡܚܫܒܬܐ ܘܡܟܝܠ ܡܪܘܩ ܫܦܐ ܥܝܢܐ‬ ‫ ܕܬܪܥܝܬܟ ܘܣܩ ܚܘܪ ܒܗ ܒܒܪܐ‬Syriac text: E. Beck, ed. Des Heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen de Fide, CSCO 154, Scr. Syri. 73 (Louvain: Durbecq, 1955), 167, trans. J.T. Wickes, St. Ephrem the Syrian, The Hymns on Faith, Fathers of the Church 130 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2015), 275, slightly modified. 39 ‫ ܢܦܫܐ‬here understood to be bound to the body. ̈ ‫… ܥܘܗܕܢܐ ܦܪܚ ܠܟܠ‬ 40 ‫ܦܢܝܢ ܘܠܐ ܐܝܬ ܠܗ ܐܬܪܐ ܕܬܐܡܪ ܕܗܐ ܗܪܟܐ ܗܘ ܘܟܕ ܗܘ‬ ‫ ܒܓܘ ܦܓܪܐ ܒܪܝܬܐ ܙܥܘܪܐ ܠܗ ܕܟܠܗ ܒܟܘܠ ܐܝܬܘܗܝ‬HdF 57.5.3–6. Beck, CSCO 154, 178, trans. Wickes, 290, slightly modified. 41 PrRef 2, 27.11–49.30. For discussion of his notions about sense perception, see Possekel, Evidence, 186–229.

20

McVey

counts as seven. Sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch are all clearly among them, and each has its proper organs (eyes, ears, tongue, nose, and limbs): sight perceives with the eye, voice with the tongue, smell with the nostrils, taste with the palate, but touch [with all] the body, and these things are “bound” and not separable; but notions not “bound” [to one sense.]42 The bodily organ of sense must communicate with the mind in order to perceive meaning: hear the sound of the tongue, which has in it and within it modulations, which convey a meaning to the hearer when they are varied in the mouth, and these modulations and variations of the voice are called verbs, such as “eat,” “drink,” “rise,” “sit.” Now these are variations of the tongue within the mouth and changes of sound, but the sound, because it exists (?), has been apprehended (lit. overtaken) by the hearing; whereas the meaning of these variations of the tongue and of sound is perceived by the mind.43 In his prose works, especially those addressing Bardaisan’s and Mani’s views, Ephrem laid out his views on the functioning of the senses in ordinary life and their relation to the working of the mind. His opinions are consistent on many points of detail with the ideas of a variety of philosophers and physicians among his contemporaries.44 In Eccl 35.14–18, then, Ephrem assumes that his audience is familiar with his views on ordinary sense perception, as set forth in his prose; they are, perhaps, the common views of an educated audience in his time and place. ̈

42 ‫ܪܓܫ ܚܙܝܐ ܒܥܝܢܐ ܩܠܐ ܒܠܫܢܐ ܡܪܝܚܢܘܬܐ ܒܢܚܝܖܐ ܛܥܡܐ ܒܚܟܐ ܓܫܬܐ ܕܝܢ‬ ̈ … ‫ܗܘ ܠܗ ܦܓܪܐ ܘܐܣܝܪܝܢ ܗܢܘܢ ܗܠܝܢ ܘܠܐ ܡܬܦܣܩܝܢ ܣܘܟܠܐ ܕܝܢ ܠܐ ܐܣܝܪܝܢ‬ PrRef 2, 30. 5–14. In spite of some inconsistency in vocabulary for the organs of sense (for example, nose vs. nostrils, tongue versus palate, limbs versus body), Ephrem’s general apportionment of their tasks is consistent. Further, see Possekel, Evidence, 197–203. The last two senses may be speech and generation; see Possekel, Evidence, 186–192. Certainty about the last two is not necessary for the discussion here. ̇ ̇ 43 .‫ܦܘܡܐ‬ ‫ ܕܟܕ ܡܬܗܦܟܢ ܒܓܘ‬.‫ܢܥܡܬܐ‬ ‫ ܕܐܝܬ ܠܗ ܒܗ ܘܒܓܘܗ‬.‫ܘܫܡܥ ܩܠܗ ܕܠܫܢܐ‬

̈ ‫ܝܗܒܢ ܣܘܟܠܐ ܠܫܡܘܥܐ ܘܗܢܝܢ ܗܠܝܢ ܢܥܡܬܗ‬ ‫ܘܗܦܟܬܗ ܕܩܠܐ ܡܬܩܪܝܢ ܡܠܐ ܠܥܣ‬ ̈ ̈ ‫ܗܦܟܬܗ ܐܢܝܢ ܕܠܫܢܐ ܒܓܘ ܦܘܡܐ ܘܫܘܚܠܦܘܗܝ‬ ‫ܠܡ ܐܫܬܝ ܩܘܡ ܬܒ ܗܢܝܢ ܕܝܢ ܗܠܝܢ‬ ‫ ܗܘ ܕܝܢ ܣܘܟܠܐ ܕܝܠܗܝܢ‬.‫ܕܩܠܐ ܠܗ ܕܝܢ ܠܩܠܐ ܡܛܘܠ ܕܐܝܬܘܗܝ ܐܕܪܟܬܗ ܡܫܡܥܬܐ‬ ̈ ‫ܗܦܟܬܗ ܕܠܫܢܐ ܘܕܩܠܐ ܒܪܥܝܢܐ ܗܘ ܡܬܪܓܫ‬ :‫ ܕܗܠܝܢ‬PrRef 2, 27.12–33, trans. Mitchell,

44

PrRef 2, xii, with minor changes. Further, see PrRef 2, 27.34–29.5, and the discussion in Possekel, Evidence, 181–185. So demonstrated in detail by Possekel, Evidence, 186–229.

Ephrem and the Mariological Motif

21

For Ephrem, however, communicating spiritual meaning and, more importantly, effecting spiritual transformation are not simply matters of transmission of messages through ordinary sense perception. To make this point, he might have chosen to elaborate an idea of spiritual perception through a set of spiritual senses that mirror the physical senses, as, for example, Origen did.45 At times, he seems to allude to this sort of solution.46 Here, however, in the following strophes, he chooses a different path. He repeatedly begins with a statement that seems to imply the usual forms of sense perception, mainly of hearing and seeing. He could easily name the mysterious foreigner – who seems to be, as I have argued here, a metaphor for the mind or for some other transcendent faculty. Yet he does not do so. Instead, he seems intent upon destabilizing the ordinary understanding of perception. Even though the mind’s activity is essential to the perception of meaning of any sort, perception of the “hidden mysteries” is not merely analogous to ordinary perception – not even to ordinary perception of incorporeals. It is sui generis. To make this point, he now startles us with inconsistencies, forcing us to recognize that we are entering a different realm where the usual rules about perception do not apply. Ephrem asserts that the ear is not meant to hear the voice of this mysterious stranger when he speaks the language of silence, a language the ear is unable to comprehend. As the voice is foreign to the eye, so also is silence foreign to the ear, but somehow the mysteries are communicated and understood. 35.14 He murmurs lest his voice  reach the sense of hearing because it is not [for the ear  that he speaks] in his stillness. [To the eye47] alone he reveals  the hidden mysteries.48 45 See M.J. McInroy, “Origen of Alexandria,” in The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity, ed. P.L. Gavriliuk and S. Coakley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 20–35. 46 See the “eyes of intelligence” in HdF 53.18, and the “luminous eye” for which Sebastian P. Brock entitled his insightful book; Brock also notes Ephrem’s use of auditory imagery and allusions to the “luminous heart” and “luminous mouth”; see Brock, Luminous Eye, esp. 67–84. The hymn that provides the touchstone for that “luminous eye” is the thirty-seventh Hymn on the Church, one of three possibly composed together with the hymn under discussion here. ܳ ܰ (f.). 47 A few crucial words in the Syriac text here are illegible. Here Beck suggests ‫ܠܥܝܢܐ‬ If this is correct, the eye must be the spiritual, “luminous eye.” Another possibility – to ܳ ܳ ‫( ܶܪ‬m.) – is metrically and grammatically preferable, and it is consistent with read ‫ܥܝܢܐ‬ Ephrem’s notions of sense perception and epistemology in PrRef 2,10.27–37. Consultation of the sole manuscript (Vat.Sir. 111, 14v. c 2 https://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.sir.111/0036 consulted 4/1/2019), however, shows Beck’s reading is more likely and could be dismissed only on the grounds of a scribal error. 48 Although Beck takes this as the symbol/mystery in the counting fingers, I think it is better to allow a fuller range of meanings here.

22

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35.15 The ear is not [accustomed to]49  his language [For it] is barbarian  to his language of stillness. Only one shares his mother tongue50 – [the silence that is akin] to him. In another context, in order to prove that it is the mind, rather than any of the senses, that perceives meaning, Ephrem offers similar examples. If the speakers “are Persians, the mind fails to perceive the meaning of the words, though the ear did not fail to perceive the sound.”51 Further, he argues, that it may seem as if one organ of sense perception does the work of another. “[W]hen by a gesture someone conveys a meaning, in this case hearing misses [the meaning], and you hear with [the eye].”52 Or, again: even an unlearned eye sees a book because it is really a thing seen. But these senses … do not perceive … the meaning (of the book) because that meaning is not seen by the eye, nor tasted by the mouth, nor smelt, nor handled. But that meaning which is heard by the ear in the sound can attach itself (lit. can come) to a gesture, and the ear does not hear it in the gesture, but the eye [sees] that whereby really the meaning was spoken.53 These are subtle arguments about special cases in the everyday operation of the senses that demonstrate the essential role of the mind in producing meaning from what the senses detect. When there is no sound for the ear to hear, the eye, by seeing a gesture, conveys to the mind the meaning that, ordinarily, hearing would convey. In another context, Ephrem portrays the senses as assisting one another – the mouth filling in for the inexperienced eye by tasting the fruit

49 ‫ ܡܦܣܐ‬feminine passive participle Afel ‫ܦܝܣ‬ – an uncertain reading per Beck. 50 Or “speaks the same language, understands his language” – literally, only one is son of his language bar leshno. ̈ ‫ܘܐܢ ܦܪܣܝܐ ܗܘ ܐܢܘܢ ܒܛܠ ܠܗ ܪܥܝܢܐ ܡܢ ܕܠܡܪܓܫܘ ܒܣܘܟܠܐ‬ 51 ‫ܕܡܠܐ ܟܕ ܐܕܢܐ‬ ‫ ܠܐ ܒܛܠܬ ܡܢ ܫܡܥܐ ܕܩܠܐ‬PrRef 2, 27.47–28.5, trans., Mitchell, PrRef 2, xii. For the probable source of this example, see Possekel, Evidence, 183. ̇ ‫ܘܗܐ ܐܦ ܒܪܡܙܐ‬ 52 ‫ܝܗܒ ܐܢܫ ܣܘܟܠܐ ܘܐܦܝܫܬ ܠܗ ܗܪܟܐ ܡܫܡܥܬܐ ܘܫܡܥܬ ܒ‍[ ] ܐ‬ PrRef 2, 28.10–14; trans., Mitchell, PrRef 2, xii, slightly modified. 53 ‫ ܠܐ ܕܝܢ ܡܪܓܫܝܢ‬.‫ܘܐܦ ܥܝܢܐ ܗܕܝܘܛܬܐ ܚܙܝܐ ܣܦܪܐ ܡܛܠ ܕܚܙܝܬܐ ܗܝ ܕܠܩܘܫܬܝܢ‬

‫ ܠܐ ܡܬܚܙܐ ܒܥܝܢܐ ܘܠܐ ܡܬܛܥܡ‬.‫ ܒܣܘܟܠܐ ܡܛܠ ܕܗܘ ܣܘܟܠܐ‬. . ‫ ܗܠܝܢ ܪܓܫܐ‬. . ‫ܒܦܘܡܐ ܘܠܐ ܡܬܪܝܚ ܘܠܐ ܡܬܓܫܫ ܗܘ ܕܝܢ ܗܘ ܣܘܟܠܐ ܕܡܫܬܡܥ ܠܐܕܢܐ‬ ‫ܒܓܘ ܩܠܐ ܡܨܐ ܐܬܐ ܠܪܡܙܐ ܘܠܘ ܐܕܢܐ ܫܡܥܐ ܠܗ ܒܪܡܙܐ ܐܠܐ ܥܝܢܐ ܠܗ‬ ‫ [ ]ܬܐ ܗܘ ܕܠܩܘܫܬܝܢ ܒܗ ܡܬܡܠܠ ܗܘܐ ܣܘܟܠܐ‬PrRef 2, 28.22–43; trans., Mitchell,

PrRef 2, xiii.

Ephrem and the Mariological Motif

23

that looks good but is bitter, or the heart testing the words that may beguile the inexperienced ear.54 In Eccl 35, however, Ephrem introduces notions of mystery and silence – and meanings that neither are the senses able to perceive, nor is the mind able to comprehend. Rather than invoking concepts of a spiritual ear that hears the mysteries and a spiritual eye that sees them, he confounds his audience by mixing the senses: the eye may hear the silent voice that the ear is unable to hear. 35.16 Just as the voice  is foreign to the pupils of the eye,55 so also the ear is foreign  to the silence of everything. [Her vision]56 hears.  [Her regret]57 listens.58

Eccl 35.17–18: Eve and Mary – the Confounding of Sight and Hearing Resolved Ephrem continues to confound the senses as he reintroduces Eve and Mary after their absence for fourteen strophes. In four of those intervening verses he considered naiveté and cleverness, and in ten he pondered sense perception and the mind, focusing especially on the hands. His return to the foremothers of sin and redemption should not be seen as Ephrem’s recovery from an absentminded flight of fancy.59 There is strategic intent in this long interlude. Namely, to situate these two prototypical figures in a drama of sin and redemption focused on the senses and sense perception. In the normal process of seeing corporeal things, the object of sight is portrayed in the mind: 54 PrRef 2, 144–145. This discussion comes from another refutation of Bardaisan’s views. ܳ ܳ ܳ 55 ‫ܠܒ ̈ܒܬܐ‬ Here Ephrem distinguishes the pupils, which see in a usual sense, from the eye ‫ܥܝܢܐ‬, perhaps with its spiritual capacity. ̇ 56 ‫ܚܙܝܗ‬ is Beck’s reading at this lacuna. ̇ ̇ 57 Here Beck proposes to read ‫ܘܥܘܒܗ‬ . To me it looks more like ‫ܬܘܬܗ‬  – which I have translated here. Possibly it anticipates the strophe immediately following, concerning Eve, but the feminine pronominal suffixes may refer to the ear or the eye as well as to Eve or Mary. Beck’s reading and proposed translation, the “womb obeys” – anticipating Mary’s womb in 35.18 – does not, I think, make sense in this strophe; see Beck, CSCO 199, 86, n9; cf. Vat. Sir. 111, 14v. c 13: https://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.sir.111/0036 consulted 4/1/2019. ̈ 58 ‫ܠܒܒܬܐ‬ ‫ܐܝܟ ܡܐ ܕܢܘܟܪܝ ܓܝܪ  ܩܠܐ‬

‫ܢܘܟܪܝ ܠܐܕܢܐ ܬܘܒ  ܫܬܩܐ ܕܟܠܡܕܡ‬ ̇ ‫ܕܗܝ‬ ̇ ̇ [ Beck, CSCO 198, 89. Vat. Sir. 111, 14v. c 9–14 ̇ ]‫ܘܥܘܒܗ‬ ̇ ]‫ܚܙܝܗ‬ ‫ܨܐܬ‬ [ ‫ܕܗܝ ܫܡܥ‬

https://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.sir.111/0036 consulted 4/1/2019. 59 Cf. Cerbelaud, 156: “comme à son habitude, le fleuve éphrémien décrit quelques meandres : on retiendra notamment l’insolite digression en forme d’hymne aux mains humaines et à leur « compagnon », où l’on doit reconnaître l’esprit”.

24

McVey

Concerning … a horse or an eagle or one of the bodies and substances, when [someone] begins to paint them … [lacuna] at the beginning when you watch, you know by yourself whether he wishes to paint a horse or a lion. And before the painter will paint on the tablet, the likeness of the horse is painted in his mind.60 Similarly, verbal description may create a picture in the mind of the reader or listener, as Ephrem implies when, after rehearsing details about Balaam’s ass, the serpent, and Judas, gleaned from Scripture, and commenting on their significance, he remarks that “these and similar things and all I had read portrayed the Garden of Life in my mind.”61 Eve’s case, however, is different. She sees one thing, but another is portrayed in her mind. She has been deceived and will regret it. 35.17 With the one, Eve  saw the beauty of the tree. But the advice of the deceiver  was painted in her imagination, and regret was  the result of the deed.62 The “one” with which Eve saw, is apparently, the eye [‫]ܥܝܢܐ‬, but the choice not to name it here calls attention to Ephrem’s destabilizing the competences of the senses. Instead of portraying what she had seen, Eve’s mind portrayed the deceitful advice that she had heard. This is not as in the case where the eye understands the meaning of a gesture since the ear cannot hear it. Eve saw the beauty of a visible, corporeal thing – the tree – but the deceitful advice that she had heard supplanted the image of the tree in her mind. The inversion of sense perception that takes place in Mary’s case is a complex mirror image of Eve’s. ̈

̈

60 ‫ܥܠ … ܐܘ ܣܘܣܝܐ ܐܘ ܢܫܪܐ ܐܘ ܚܕ ܡܢ ܓܘܫܡܝܢ ܘܩܢܘܡܝܢ ܡܐ ܕܫܪܝ ܐ[ܢܫ] ܕܢܨܘܪ‬ ‫ ܕܐܢ ܣܘܣܝܐ ܐܘ ܐܪܝܐ ܨܒܐ‬.‫ܐܢܘܢ ܒ‍[ ] ܡ‍[ ] ܒܫܘܪܝܐ ܡܐ ܕܚܙܝܬ ܝܕܥܬ ܠܟ‬

‫ܠܡܨܪ ܘܡܢ ܩܕܡ ܕܢܨܘܪ ܨܝܪܐ ܥܠ ܕܦܐ ܐܬܬܨܝܪܬ ܠܗ ܕܡܘܬܗ ܕܣܘܣܝܐ ܒܪܥܝܢܗ‬

PrRef 2, 19.21–37, trans., Possekel, Evidence, 167 with changes for consistency in the translation of ‫ ܨܘܪ‬and its derivatives in the present article. See also PrRef 2, 21.1–12.

̇ ‫ܨܪܗ ܒܓܘ ܡܕܥܝ‬ ̇ ̈ ‫ܠܗܝ ܓܢܬܐ‬ 61 ‫ܕܚܝܐ‬ ‫ܗܠܝܢ ܘܕܐܝܟ ܗܠܝܢ ܥܡ ܟܠܗܝܢ ܕܩܪܝܬ‬ Parad. 15.17.1–2. Syriac text: E. Beck, Des Heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen de Paradiso und Contra Julianum, CSCO 174, Scr. Syri. 78 (Louvain: Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, 1957), 65. 62 ‫ܒܚܕܐ ܚܙܬ ܚܘܐ  ܫܘܦܪܗ ܕܐܝܠܢܐ‬

̇ ‫ܒܬܪܥܝܬܗ  ܡܠܟܐ ܕܢܟܘܠܐ‬ ‫ܘܐܬܨܝܪ‬ ‫ ܘܗܘܬ ܬܘܬ ܢܦܫܐ  ܚܪܬܗ ܕܣܘܥܪܢܐ‬Beck, 198, 89. See J. Payne Smith, ed., A Compendious Syriac Dictionary, 609a for ‫ ܬܘܬ ܢܦܫܐ‬f. compunction, regret, remorse; cf. R. Payne Smith 4398, s.v. ‫ܬܘ ܴܬܐ‬ ܴ .

Ephrem and the Mariological Motif

25

35.18 With her ear Mary saw63  the Hidden One who came in a voice. Conceived in her womb  was the Power who came in a body. Death and Satan asked  what was the value of this?64 With her eye Eve saw the tree’s beauty, but with her ear Mary saw one who cannot be seen. The voice alludes to Gabriel’s words, but also hints at the Word who was conceived. Whereas the advice of the serpent mysteriously and disastrously appears in Eve’s imagination where the tree ought to be, “the Power”65 mysteriously and fortuitously appears in bodily form in Mary’s womb. As the Hidden One came in a voice implausibly seen by Mary’s ear, the Son of God came in a body, just as implausibly conceived in her womb. Here, at last, is the conceptio per aurem at the culmination of so many strophes describing and then subverting normal sense perception. We may well ask, along with Death and Satan, what is the point of all this? Ephrem entertained sophisticated notions of a world made up of corporeal and incorporeal beings, and he had worked out complex ideas of the relationship between the human senses and the mind. In the verses of this hymn leading up to the conceptio, Ephrem first compared Eve and Mary with respect to simplicity and cleverness, ending with a metaphor playing on the sense of taste.66 Then he turned to the hands and their role in enabling human culture. The underlying concern with sense perception, with a prolonged focus on the tactile, leads to the confounding of the senses in the experiences of Eve and Mary. Particularly in response to the virginal conception  – situated at the culmination of this confounding of the senses – Death and Satan demand an explanation. Eccl 35.19–22: The Joy of Incarnation and Redemption The final five strophes of the hymn provide that explanation. In a rhetorical echo and theological expansion of Luke 2.13–14, the angels respond with an announcement that the one conceived brings life, goodness, joy, and hope. 63 64



Ephrem mixes the faculties of hearing and seeing. While Beck (Mit dem Ohr gewahrte Maria) and Cerbelaud (Par l’oreille Maria a capté) resolve that tension in their translations, I have chosen to preserve it here.

̇ ‫ܒܐܕܢܗ ܚܙܬ ܡܪܝܡ  ܠܟܣܝܐ ܕܐܬܐ ܒܩܠܐ‬ ̇ ‫ܐܬܒܛܢ ܒܓܘ ܥܘܒܗ  ܚܝܠܐ ܕܐܬܐ ܠܦܓܪܐ‬ ‫ܡܘܬܐ ܘܣܛܢܐ  ܫܐܠܘ ܕܡܐ ܛܒܗ‬

Beck, CSCO 198, 89; translating the final phrase as Cerbelaud, Eccl, 159, “quelle était sa valeur” rather than Beck, CSCO 199, 86, “wer er sei” – though either is possible. 65 Syriac ‫ ܚܝܠܐ‬is an unusual designation for the Son/Logos. 66 That is, that simplicity must be seasoned with cleverness to avoid being insipid (Eccl 35.5–6).

26

McVey

35.19 Standing there, the Watchers heard  and shouted out for joy about him:   “He is the killer of death.  He is the destroyer of evil.   He is the joy of those on high  and the hope of those below.”67 Death and Satan seek in vain to flee. 35.20 Death and Satan  looked at one another and trembled.   They took counsel,  “Where shall we flee and hide?”   To the desert the Evil One fled.  Into the depth Death descended.68 35.21 But to the dwellings where they had fled from him  he entered.   To the desert he went out to conquer  the Evil one in his land.   Into the depth he descended to conquer  Death in his den.69 The utter defeat of the forces of hopelessness restores hope on earth and joy on high. 35.22 Since the two eradicators of human hope  were annihilated,   hope increased on earth  and joy on high   when the Watchers brought good tidings  to those below.70 Eccl 35.23: Joy for Our Senses Begun but Not Yet Complete In the final strophe, Ephrem returns to the subject of the senses and, simultaneously, brings the hymn home to us, his listeners. Longing for more after the joy at the announcement of the incarnation, our senses are eager to have it all, but the poet encourages us to moderate this desire for fulfillment. ̈ ‫ܝܒܒܘ‬ ̣ ̇ ‫ܟܕ ܩܝܡܝܢ ܫܡܥܘ  ܠܥܝܖܐ ܕܥܠܘܗܝ‬ ‫ܒܝܫܐ‬ ‫ܕܗܢܘ ܡܡܝܬ ܡܘܬܐ  ܘܗܢܘ ܡܣ‬ ̣ ‫ܝܦ‬ ̈ ̣ ‫ ܚܕܘܬܐ ܗܘ‬Beck, CSCO 198, 89–90. ̈ ‫ܕܬܚܬܝܐ‬ ‫ܕܥܠܝܐ  ܘܣܒܪܐ ܗܘ‬ 68 ‫ܡܘܬܐ ܘܣܛܢܐ ̣ܚܪܘ ܚܕ ܒܚܕ ܘܪܥܠܘ‬ ̇ ‫ܘܢܬܛܫܘܢ‬ ‫ܫܩܠܘ ܕܐܝܟܐ  ܢܥܪܩܘܢ‬ ̣ ‫ܡ ̣ܠܟܐ‬ ‫ܒܝܫܐ ܠܥܘܡܩܐ ܢܚܬ ܡܘܬܐ‬ ̣̈ ‫ ܠܚܘܪܒܐ ܥܪܩ‬Beck, CSCO 198, 90. 69 ‫ܐܙܠ ܠܕܝܖܝܗܘܢ‬ ‫ ܗܘ‬ ̣ ̣ ‫ܘܕܥܪܩܘ ܠܗܘܢ ܡܢܗ‬ ‫ ܠܒܝܫܐ ܒܓܘ ܕܒܪܗ‬ ‫ܢܦܩ ܘܙܟܝܗܝ‬ ̣ ̣ ‫ܠܚܘܪܒܐ‬ ‫ ܠܥܘܡܩܐ ܢܚܬ ܘܙܟܝܗܝ  ܠܡܘܬܐ ܒܓܘ ܢܩܥܗ‬Beck, CSCO 198, 90. ̈ ‫ܘܕܒܛܠܘ‬ 70 ‫ܬܖܝܢ ܕܦܣܩܘ  ܣܒܪܐ ܕܐܢܫܘܬܐ‬ ̣ ‫ܣܒܪܐ ܣܓܝ ܒܐܪܥܐ  ܘܐܦ ܚܕܘܬܐ ܒܪܘܡܐ‬ ̈ ̇ ‫ܐܝܟ ܡܐ ܕܢܚܬܘ‬ ̈ ‫ ܥܝܖܐ‬ ‫ܠܬܚܬܝܐ‬ ‫ܣܒܪܘ‬ Beck, CSCO 198, 90. The linguistic link in Syriac between hope [‫ ]ܣܒܪܐ‬and the angels’ ̇ ] is not easily conveyed in English. bringing good tidings [‫ܣܒܪܘ‬ 67

27

Ephrem and the Mariological Motif

35.23 Since we were filled with joy   (our) senses eagerly desired,   They panted after the surplus,  the rest of the overabundance.   Let us hold back our hunger  to enjoy it another day.71 For Ephrem the transformation of the human sensorium began with Mary’s conception and pregnancy.72 It continues through participation in sacramental life.73 Its fullness will come for the resurrected in Paradise.74 In this hymn Ephrem explores the need for and the plausibility of this transformation by considering the sensory experience of Eve and Mary. Mary’s conception by ear is the hymn’s turning point from deliberations on human capacities, their strengths, and their limits, to celebration of salvation for humans, as bodily, sensate beings.

Mary and the Samaritan Woman – conceptio per aurem in the Context of Ephrem’s Twenty-Third Hymn on Virginity

The second example of conceptio per aurem under consideration here occurs in the twenty-third hymn in the collection entitled On Virginity, the second of two consecutive compositions focused on the woman of Samaria who encountered Jesus at the well of Jacob. In a few verses (Virg 23.4–7), Ephrem links Mary’s virginal conception and her giving birth to the listening and speaking of this bold woman, whom he views as virtually an apostle. That is, instead of using the idea of conceptio per aurem to compare Mary with Eve, Ephrem compares her with the Samaritan woman, whose prophetic and kerygmatic speech is thereby given prominence. He anchors the association between Mary and the Samaritan woman in three inter-related rhetorical and theological sequences: 1) insemination, conception, and giving birth; 2) sowing, fruition, and reaping; and 3) hearing, conception, and speech. In short, this is a metaphorical meditation on the conceptio per aurem. As in the previous example (Eccl 35), the verses directly concerned with the conceptio grow organically from the images portrayed and the arguments pursued throughout the two hymns (Virg 22 and 23). 71



Beck, CSCO 198, 90. 72 See Nat 28.7. 73 See, for example, Virg 37.2. 74 See, for example, Parad. 8.7.

‫ܘܕܐܬܡܠܝܢ ܚܕܘܐ  [ܣܘܚܘ] ܠܗܘܢ ̈ܖܓܫܝܢ‬ ̣ ̈ ̈ [ ‫ܬܘܬܖܐ‬ ‫ܝܐܒܝ] ܠܣܓܝܐܐ  ܫܪܟܢ‬ ‫ܢܛܪ ܠܟܦܢܘܬܢ  ܕܢܒܣܡ ܐܚܪܝܢ [ܝ]ܘܡܐ‬

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Virg 22: Jesus, His Living Water, and the Samaritan Woman In the twenty-second hymn Ephrem provides a vivid poetic paraphrase of the Johannine dialogue.75 While retelling the story, he adds other dimensions, often developing themes integral to John’s gospel, but fine-tuning them to match his aims in these compositions. For example, the themes of living water and of hidden truth revealed, prominent both in Johannine literature as a whole and in the pericope of the meeting of Jesus with the Samaritan woman, run through these two hymns. Ephrem links them with metaphors of farming and reproduction, on the one hand, and with gradual and personalized revelation, on the other hand, to bring out particular qualities he sees in the Samaritan woman. Virg 22 begins with a strophe that proposes an interpretation for the Johannine pericope as well as for this hymn and the following one. Our Lord labored and He went like a farmer to water the seed that Moses sowed. Directly to the well He went to give hidden and living water for the sake of the revelation. Blessed is Moses, who, with the book he wrote, sowed the symbols, still young, of the Messiah; by [Christ’s] watering were the seeds of the house of Moses perfected, and they were reaped by His disciples.76 Thus the agricultural motif is introduced immediately. Moses has sown the seeds, the symbols or mysteries of the messiah; Jesus waters and perfects them; his disciples reap them. At the same time, Ephrem declares that Jesus’ intention from the start is to reveal himself, to provide living water to the woman. As he recapitulates the Johannine dialogue between Jesus and the woman, the Syrian poet pursues two concerns that go beyond the gospel account. He 75 Virg 22. 2–8, 22.12–13, and 22.21; cf. John 4.1–42. 76



‫ܘܐܙܠ ܐܝܟ ܐܟܪܐ‬ ̣ ‫ܥܡܠ‬ ̣ ‫ܡܪܢ‬ ‫ܕܢܫܩܐ ܙܪܥܐ ܕܙܪܥ ܡܘܫܐ‬ ‫ܢܦܩ ܘܝܗܒ ܫܩܝܐ‬ ̣ ‫ܠܒܐܪܐ ܬܪܨ‬ ‫ܟܣܝܐ ܘܚܝܐ ܒܥܠܬ ܓܠܝܐ‬ ‫ܛܘܒ ܠܡܘܫܐ ܕܒܣܦܪܗ ܟܬܒ ܙܪܥ‬ ‫̈ܖܐܙܘܗܝ ܕܡܫܝܚܐ ܟܕ ܛܠܝܢ‬ ‫ܒܫܩܝܗ ܐܬܓܡܪܘ ̈ܙܖܥܐ ܕܒܝܬ ܡܘܫܐ‬ ̈ ‫ܒܬܠܡܝܕܘܗܝ‬ ‫ܘܐܬܚܨܕܘ‬

Virg 22.1; Beck CSCO 223, 74; McVey, Hymns, 355, slightly changed. For further discussion, see K. McVey, “Saint Ephrem’s Portrayal of the Samaritan Woman at the Well,” Syriac Orthodox Patriarchal Journal 57 (2019): 1–23.

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insists that, contrary to the views of some, the woman is a reputable person.77 Secondly, she is a prototype of the believer gradually brought by Jesus to deeper understanding of his identity. As she tests Jesus by her questions,78 he leads her to recognize him as a thirsty man, then as a prophet, then as Messiah. In the final strophe of this hymn, Ephrem summarizes this progression: Because she in her desire said, “The Messiah will come,” He revealed to her with love, “I am He.” That He was a prophet she believed already; soon after, that He was the Messiah. O Wise One, Who appeared as a thirsty man, [and] soon was called a prophet, [and next] she understood He is Messiah.79 Finally, he declares that she is “a type of our humanity that he leads step by step.”80 Virg 23.1–3: The Samaritan Woman: Mediator of Blessings Having affirmed that the woman understood that Jesus is the messiah, Ephrem proceeds in the twenty-third Virginity Hymn to affirm her as an apostle to her city, Shechem. He begins by pronouncing her blessed for mediating to her 77

78

79



Thirteen strophes engage the problem of the woman’s many husbands, Virg 22.9–11 and 22.14–20. Most of these may be later additions, some, perhaps, by the hymnodist’s disciples eager to confirm the master’s unusual argument. For comparison of Ephrem’s treatment of this and other themes with Heracleon and Origen, see McVey, “Saint Ephrem’s Portrayal of the Samaritan Woman,” 14–15, 19–21, 23. In the course of the exchange, going beyond what is explicit in the gospel passage, but following undertones of betrothal recognized by scholars today [e.g., M. Martin, “Betrothal Journey Narratives,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 70 (2008): 505–523], Ephrem asserts that, “the Living One espoused her.” Virg 22.12.8.

̇ ‫ܒܪܚܡܬܗ‬ ̇ ‫ܕܐܬܐ ܡܫܝܚܐ ܒܚܘܒܐ ܓܠܐ‬ ̇ ‫ܠܗ ܕܐܢܐ ܐܢܐ ܠܡ‬ ‫ܕܐܡܪܬ‬ ‫ܢܒܝܐ ܗܘ ܐܫܪܬ ܕܐܝܬܘܗܝ ܠܘܩܕܡ ܒܬܪ ܩܠܝܠ ܐܦ ܕܡܫܝܚܐ ܗܘ‬ ‫ܐܘ ܚܟܝܡܐ ܕܐܝܟ ܨܗܝܐ ܐܬܚܙܝ ܒܬܪ ܩܠܝܠ ܢܒܝܐ ܗܘ ܐܬܩܪܝ‬ ‫ܡܫܝܚܐ ܗܘ ܣܝܟܬ‬

Virg 22.21.1–7a. Beck, CSCO 223, 80–81, trans. McVey, Hymns, 360. Ephrem’s assertion that she understood Jesus to be messiah is not fully supported by the gospel text. On this issue, see McVey, “Saint Ephrem’s Portrayal of the Samaritan Woman.” ̈ ̇ 80 ‫ܕܪܒܝܗ ܒܟܠ ܡܘܫܚܢ‬ ‫ܛܘܦܣܐ ܕܐܢܫܘܬܢ‬. Virg 22.21.7b–8. Beck, CSCO 223, 81, trans. McVey, Hymns, 360, mirroring Beck’s “Ein Beispiel dafür, wie er uns Menschen Stufe für Stufe erzog.” Or, “a type of our humanity that he leads in all our ages [or conditions or circumstances].” Cerbelaud, Virg, 124, renders it, “figure de notre humanité, dont tu augmentes sans cesse les capacités.”

30

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townspeople her newfound understanding of Jesus as Messiah.81 Specifically, she is praised “for not suppressing [her] judgment about what [she] discovered.”82 Just as Jesus “the glorious Treasury” shared himself out of love, her love motivated her “to share [her] treasure with [her] city.”83 Echoing the final verse of the previous hymn, Ephrem affirms that each recipient of divine blessings receives them at the appropriate level – a notion for which he has already identified the Samaritan woman as a prototype. The glorious fount of Him who was sitting at the well as Giver of drink to all, flows to each according to His will: Different springs according to those who drink. From the well a single undifferentiated drink came up each time for those who drank. The Living Fount lets distinct blessings flow to distinct people.84

81 Virg 23.1 and 23.2. Although he does not specifically address these verses on the Samaritan woman, Andrew Hayes has shown that Ephrem often uses “the macarism formula to punctuate or underline a mediation motif in his thought and imagery.” Specifically, Ephrem uses the formula “Blessed are you … ‫ ”ܛܘܒܝܟܝ‬to demonstrate “the way in which creatures, drawn close by divine initiative into a suspended or liminal state between the paradox of God’s nearness and otherness, then serve to mediate, as examples or types, the divine blessing to other creatures.” A. Hayes, “Macarisms and their Mediating Function in the Madrāšê of Ephrem the Syrian,” NAPS Conference Paper (May 26, 2016) https://www.academia.edu/28342770/Macarisms_and _their_Mediating_Function_in_the_Madrashe_of_Ephrem_the_Syrian. Accessed 1 April 2019, p. 1. Hayes’s insight fits well with Ephrem’s portrayal of the Samaritan woman and her significance here as a mediator of divine insight and blessing. The formula appears with remarkable frequency in these two hymns. Addressed to the woman: Virg 22.2.1, 22.3.1, 22.3.5, 22.4.1, 22.5.1, 22.5.5, Virg 23.1.1, 23.2.1, 23.4.7, 23.8.1; to Shechem: 23.10.1, 23.10.1. 82 ‫ ܕܠܐ ܟܡܬ ܗܘܬ ܼܗܝ ܟܐܢܘܬܟܝ ܥܠ ܡܐ ܕܐܫܟܚܬܝ‬Virg 23.1–2. Beck, CSCO 223, 81, trans. McVey, Hymns, 361. 83 ‫ܓܙܐ ܡܫܒܚܐ … ܢܫܘܬܦܝܘܗܝ ܠܟܪܟܟܝ ܒܣܝܡܬܟܝ‬ Virg 23.1 and 23.2, esp. 23.1.1 … 6. Beck, CSCO 223, 81, trans. McVey, Hymns, 361. ̇ ̇ ‫ܡܥܝܢܗ ܫܒܝܚܬܐ‬ 84 ‫ܕܗܘ ܕܝܬܒ ܗܘܐ ܠܥܠ ܡܢ ܒܐܪܐ ܐܝܟ ܡܫܩܐ ܟܠ‬



̈ ‫ܢܒܥܐ‬ ̈ ‫ܠܟܠ ܐܢܫ ܡܪܕܝܐ ܐܝܟ ܨܒܝܢܗ‬ ‫ܦܖܝܫܐ ܠܦܘܬ ̈ܫܬܝܐ‬ ̈ ‫ܡܢ ܒܐܪܐ ܚܕ ܫܩܝܐ ܕܠܐ ܦܪܝܫ ̇ܣܠܩ ܗܘܐ ܠܫܬܝܐ ܒܟܠ ܙܒܢ‬ ̈ ‫ܛܘܒܐ ܕܦܘܪܫܢܐ ܡܪܕܝܐ‬ ̈ ‫ܡܥܝܢܐ ܚܝܬܐ‬ ‫ܠܦܖܘܫܐ‬

Virg 23.3, Beck, CSCO 223, 82, trans. McVey, Hymns, 362. Further on the Samaritan woman and this notion of spiritual progress, see K.E. McVey, “St. Ephrem’s Understanding of Spiritual Progress: Some Points of Comparison with Origen of Alexandria,” The Harp 1 (1987–1988): 117–128.

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31

Thus, Ephrem portrays the Samaritan woman as a mediator in two senses. First, she receives from Jesus the knowledge that he is the messiah, and she will pass this message on to her townspeople. Second, as a prototype of blessings given at differentiated spiritual levels, she mediates this concept to others who hear her story in the gospel or, perhaps, in Ephrem’s hymns. Virg 23.4–5: The Samaritan Woman, Mary, and conceptio per aurem With these notions of the woman’s role as a mediator in place, the scene is set for the verses on conception by ear, in which Ephrem compares and contrasts the Samaritan woman with Mary (Virg 23.4–5). In the elaboration of this motif now he constructs a complex correlation among three ways of bringing forth something new: 1) procreation: conception and birth, 2) agriculture: sowing, growth, and harvest, 3) speech: conceiving a thought and uttering it. Each of these metaphors implies a process of renewal which underlies both John’s gospel and Ephrem’s poetry. The physical conception and birth of Jesus leads to spiritual rebirth in those who encounter him. After harvest, seeds are gathered to be sown again. The spoken word enters the ears of others to begin again the process of conception of ideas and the potential for newly uttered speech. While he playfully explores these metaphors, Ephrem alludes to major Johannine themes such as rebirth, light from darkness, and hidden truth revealed. O, to you, woman in whom I see a great wonder as in Mary! For she from within her womb, as an infant, in Bethlehem gave birth to His body. But you, from your mouth you manifested Him as an adult in Shechem, the town of His fathers’ household. Blessed are you, woman, who gave birth by your mouth to Light for those in darkness.85 Ephrem balances similarities with difference through parallelism and chiasm throughout these verses.86 Both Mary and the Samaritan woman give birth in

̇ ‫ܐܘ ܠܟܝ ܐܢܬܬܐ ܕܬܗܪܐ ܪܒܐ‬ ‫ ܚܙܐ ܐ̱ ܢܐ ܒܟܝ ܐܝܟ ܕܒܡܪܝܡ‬ ̇ ‫ܟܪܣܗ  ܒܓܘ ܒܝܬ ܠܚܡ ܦܓܪܗ ܝܠܕܬܗ‬ ‫̇ܗܝ ܓܝܪ ܕܟܕ ܙܥܘܪ ܡܢ ܓܘ‬ ‫ܐܢܬܝ ܕܝܢ ܡܢ ܦܘܡܟܝ ܐܕܢܚܬܝܘܗܝ  ܟܕ ܓܡܝܪ ܒܓܘ ܫܟܝܡ ܩܪܝܬܐ ܕܒܝܬ ܐܒܘܗܝ‬ ̈ ‫ܛܘܒܝܟܝ ܐܢܬܬܐ ܕܐܘܠܕܬܝ ܡܢ ܦܘܡܟܝ  ܢܘܗܪܐ‬ ‫ܠܚܫܘܟܐ‬

85

Virg 23.4, Beck, CSCO 223, 82, trans. McVey, Hymns, 362, revised. 86 Indicated here visually by four different colored fonts.

32

McVey

a wonderful way.87 Mary births the infant Jesus from her womb in Bethlehem. The Samaritan births (or midwifes or manifests) the adult Jesus, the Light, from her mouth for the unenlightened in Shechem, a town of the descendants of Jacob. Infancy and adulthood, Bethlehem and Shechem, physical birth and speech are points of contrast. Here Ephrem applies Mary’s birth giving – literally attested by Matthew and Luke – to the Samaritan woman. The passage in John 4 does not mention the metaphor of birth giving. Yet rebirth is a major theme of John’s gospel, and it is central to the encounter with Nicodemus in the preceding chapter of the gospel.88 Thus, Ephrem’s introduction of the metaphor here fits well with Johannine thought. The next verse shifts the image from birth giving to conception, and it adds new dimensions, mixing metaphors freely. Conceiving in bodily form is set over against conceiving a thought. Agricultural metaphors re-emerge to jostle with notions of hearing and speech: watering and planting land are set over against “drinking in” a teaching by the ear and “planting” it by speech in the ears of others: Mary, the thirsty land in Nazareth, c onceived our Lord by her hearing. You, too, O woman thirsting for water, conceived the Son by your hearing. Blessed are your ears that drank the Source who gave drink to the world. Mary planted Him in the manger, but you [planted him] in the ears of His hearers.89 Both Mary and the Samaritan thirst, conceive, and plant. Ephrem here presumes the birth-giving phase (between conception and planting) without expressly mentioning it. The pattern of hearing and response is present both in Luke 1.26–56 with respect to Mary and Gabriel and in John 4.4–42 with respect 87 88

89



Even here, Ephrem adds a nuance – using the P’al for Mary but Aphel for the Samaritan – the latter embracing midwifery along with giving birth among its meanings. Many see John 3 and John 4 as one of several pairings central to the composition of the gospel. See, for example, C. Bennema, Encountering Jesus: Character Studies in the Gospel of John (Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2014), chapter 11 “The Samaritan Woman: An Unexpected Bride,” 161–174; and see 147–160 on her counterpart, Nicodemus. This interpretation, then, affirms Ephrem’s insight.

̇ ‫ܡܪܝܡ ܒܢܨܪܬ ܐܪܥܐ ܨܗܝܬܐ  ܠܡܪܢ ܒܛܢܬ ܡܢ‬ ‫ܡܫܡܥܬܗ‬ ‫ܐܦ ܐܢܬܝ ܐܢܬܬܐ ܨܗܝܬ ܡܝܐ  ܒܛܢܬܝܘܗܝ ܠܒܪܐ ܡܢ ܡܫܡܥܬܟܝ‬ ̈ ‫ܛܘܒ‬ ̇ ‫ܠܐܕܢܝܟܝ ܕܐܫܬܝܝܗܝ ܠܡܒܘܥܐ‬ ‫ ܗܘ ܕܐܫܩܝ ܠܥܠܡܐ‬ ̈ ̈ ‫ܡܪܝܡ ܒܐܘܪܝܐ ܙܪܥܬܗ ܗܘܬ  ܐܢܬܝ ܕܝܢ ܒܐܕܢܐ ܕܫܡܘܥܘܗܝ‬

Virg 23.5, Beck, CSCO 223, 82, trans. McVey, Hymns, 362.

Ephrem and the Mariological Motif

33

to the Samaritan woman and Jesus. In a sense, Mary’s role here is more literal in that it corresponds to her portrayal in the New Testament. That is, she conceived Jesus (brought him forth), and placed him in a manger. On the other hand, the Samaritan woman’s conception, her drinking, and her planting are all conceptual. Yet in her case, the ear functions literally – she hears, conceives (a notion of) the Son, and transfers that notion by speaking to others. Apart from her actual birth giving, Mary’s image and actions are metaphorical and initially somewhat perplexing: she is the “thirsty land in Nazareth”;90 she “conceived our Lord by her hearing”;91 she “planted” Jesus in the manger. This time Ephrem has applied to Mary the metaphors of living water, thirst and drinking, prominent in John 4. He also invokes the agricultural metaphor, drawn from the end of the Johannine pericope ( John 4.31–38), at the beginning and the end of these hymns about the Samaritan woman and Shechem.92 Ultimately (in Virg. 23.10), he will relate the themes of planting and harvesting to the living bread – another Johannine theme. In this verse, then, inverting the approach of the previous verse, Ephrem has applied to Mary metaphors more obviously related to the Samaritan woman in her Johannine context. Through this complex poetic comparison of Mary and the Samaritan woman, Ephrem begins a process of reaching outside the gospel passage for comparisons that augment the role of this unnamed woman to affirm her as a major figure in the drama of salvation. In the following verses he confirms the importance of her speech by claiming for her the titles of prophet and apostle. Then, introducing Eve as another counterpart to her, he broadens the chronological scope in which she plays a part. Finally, by introducing ecclesiological and sacramental images, he brings her significance into the church of his time. Virg 23.6–7: The Samaritan Woman: Prophet and Apostle The following verses leave Mary behind, focusing on the Samaritan woman, her “word,” her “voice,” and her “prophecy” and what her speech revealed to Jesus about her. This emphasis on hearing and speech is now echoed with visual metaphors.93 The woman’s word becomes a mirror by which Jesus is able to look into the hidden depths of her heart. There Jesus sees the messianic expectation that she had voiced. Ephrem introduces themes familiar to his audience:

90 Beck, who translates “die dürstende Flur,” aptly, refers this phrase to Nat. 8.8, where Mary is “the virgin cluster of a thirsty vine” ‫ ܣܓܘܠܐ ܒܬܘܠܐ ܕܣܬܐ ܨܗܝܬܐ‬and Nat. 11.4 where she (or her virginal womb) is the “thirsty earth.” ‫ܐܪܥܐ ܨܗܝܬܐ‬. 91 The word connotes both the sense of hearing or obedience. Both fit Mary’s response in Luke 1.38. 92 Virg 22.1 and 23.10–11. 93 In the passage below images of hearing are in red font, those of sight are in green font.

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McVey

the dichotomy of hidden and revealed,94 and the mirror, a device he frequently uses to show the transition to “knowledge, insight into otherwise hidden and invisible things.”95 In this case, it is Jesus to whom the hidden meaning of her word is revealed. Your word, O woman, became a mirror i n which He might see your hidden heart. “The Messiah,” you had said, “will come, and when He comes, He will give us everything.” Behold the Messiah Whom you expected, chaste woman! With your voice … … your prophecy was fulfilled.96 The larger dichotomy of hidden things now revealed, fits well with the Johannine context. Again, however, Ephrem pushes beyond the gospel passage to amplify the woman’s insight and importance. According to the gospel, the woman calls Jesus a prophet, and after he tells her that he is the Messiah, she suggests to her townspeople that he might be the messiah. Ephrem treats her statement as itself a prophecy. In the following verse he goes on to compare her not only with the apostles but also with Jesus himself. Before Jesus permitted his apostles to proclaim him to pagans and Samaritans, Ephrem notes, she proclaimed the news to her town. Agricultural images of the life cycle of sowing, fruition, reaping, storing, and sowing again, jostle with imagery of life-giving voices of apostolic preaching, bringing life from death by voicing the truth. Finally, in the last line of the strophe he sets the woman’s return to her town in parallel with Jesus’ life-giving entry into Sheol.97

94

See Brock, Luminous Eye, 27–29; K. den Biesen, Simple and Bold: Ephrem’s Art of Symbolic Thought, Gorgias Dissertations 26, Early Christian Studies 6 (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006), 187–200. 95 E. Beck, “Das Bild vom Spiegel bei Ephraem,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 19 (1953): 1–24 (5). ̇ 96 ‫ܒܓܘܗ ܠܒܟܝ ܟܣܝܐ‬ ‫ܡܠܬܟܝ ܐܢ̱ܬܬܐ ̱ܗܘܬ ܡܚܙܝܬܐ  ܕܢܚܙܐ‬

‫ܡܫܝܚܐ ܐܡܪܬܝ ̱ܗܘܬܝ ܕܗܐ ܠܡ ܐܬܐ  ܘܡܐ ܠܡ ܕܐܬܐ ܟܠ ܢܬܠ ܠܢ‬ … ‫ܗܐ ܡܫܚܐ ܕܠܗ ܣܟܝܬܝ ܢܟܦܬܐ  ܥܡ ܩܠܟܝ‬ ‫…    ܫܠܡܬ ܢܒܝܘܬܟܝ‬ Virg 23.6, Beck, CSCO 223, 82–83, trans., McVey, Hymns, 362–363. 97 In the following passage words of proclamation are in red font, agricultural cycle in purple, death and life in green.

Ephrem and the Mariological Motif

35

Your voice, O woman, brought forth98 by proclamation even before the apostles. The apostles were forbidden to proclaim Him among Gentiles and Samaritans. Blessed is your mouth that he opened and his truth that the Granary of life took and gave to you to sow. Into a city that was dead like Sheol you entered and revived your native land.99 Virg 23.8–9: Eve the Vine of Death The following stanzas continue to bring the woman into the larger framework of salvation history. Two fragmentary stanzas mention Eve and Adam. Eve, is added to a web of birth (now with the opposing forces of desire, pain, and death),100 and agriculture (sprouting, fruition, plucking, and eating),101 that Ephrem had woven with the Samaritan woman and Mary as subjects. Eve had become a vine of death; the sprouts from her brought forth pains. With desire she plucked the fruit that also was first ripe …102 Another hymn in this collection, Virg 17, provides a more coherent version of the association of Shechem with the fallen creation and its redemption in the church of the gentiles – ideas only vaguely linked here, probably due to the fragmentary state of the text. Addressing the town of Shechem in Virg 17, Ephrem asserts that it is a type of the creation “full of corpses” because of Eve and the serpent.103 At the same time, Shechem is both the “origin and

98 99

Although the Syriac‫ ܒܟܪ‬can mean simply to be first, it often pertains to the first bloom or first fruits of plants or the firstborn of infants; R. Payne Smith 525; also J. Payne Smith, 45.

̈ ‫ܠܫܠܝܚܐ ܒܟܪܘܙܘܬܐ‬ ‫ܩܠܟܝ ܐܢ̱ܬܬܐ ̇ܒܟܪ ̇ܩܕܡ  ܐܦ‬ ̈ ̈ ‫ܫܡܖܝܐ‬ ‫ܫܠܝܚܐ ܟܠܝܢ ܗܘܘ ܠܡܟܪܙܘܬܗ  ܒܝܢܬ ̈ܚܢܦܐ ܘܒܝܬ‬ ̈ ‫ܝܗܒ ܠܟܝ ܕܬܙܪܥܝܢ‬ ܼ ‫ܛܘܒ ܠܦܘܡܟܝ ܕܦܬܚܗ ܗܘܐ ܘܫܪܪܗ  ܐܘܨܪ ܚܝܐ ܫܩܠ‬ ‫ܒܟܪܟܐ ܕܡܝܬ ܗܘܐ ܐܝܟ ܠܫܝܘܠ   ܥܠܬܝ ܗܘܝܬܝ ܘܐܚܝܬܝ ܡܐܬܟܝ‬

Virg 23.7, Beck, CSCO 223, 83, trans. McVey, Hymns, 363, modified. 100 Indicated in the passage below by green font. 101 Indicated in the passage below by red font. ̈ ‫ܕܡܢܗ ̇ܒܟܪܘ‬ ̇ 102 ‫ܟܐܒܐ‬ ‫ܚܘܐ ܗܘܬ ܗܘܬ ܓܦܬܐ ܕܡܘܬܐ ̈ܣܬܐ‬ … ‫ܩܛܦܬ ܒܪܓܬܐ ܦܐܪܐ ܕܐܦ ܗܘ ܫܪܘܝܐ ܗܘܐ‬. Virg 23.9.1–4, Beck, CSCO 223, 83, trans. McVey, Hymns, 363, modified. ̈ Virg 17.2, esp. 17.2.4. Beck, CSCO 223, 58, trans. McVey, Hymns, 334. 103 ‫ܫܠܕܐ ܡܠܝܐ‬

36

McVey

the allegory of the church of the gentiles.”104 Key to these associations are the bones of Joshua, Joseph, and Eleazar buried at Shechem or in its environs. The bones of these “just men who portrayed the Son”105 “found rest” in the very place Jesus would seek rest at the well.106 Virg 23.10–11: Shechem, Recipient of the Living Bread The final stanzas of Virg 23 address the town of Shechem and return to the woman of Samaria. Again, Ephrem highlights her apostolic role, and he appears to view Shechem as symbolic of the church of the gentiles. In the first verse of Virg. 22, alluding to John 4.31–38, he portrayed Christ as a farmer, watering the seeds sown by Moses with living water. Now he returns to the same gospel pericope to emphasize the harvest by the disciples. Ephrem, perhaps hinting at the Eucharist, goes beyond the fruit of that harvest, the grain that produces bread, to the living bread of John 6.22–71. Again, he magnifies the role of the woman, who “entered [Shechem] and gave the Living Bread, the Truth who freely disclosed Himself.” Blessed are you, O Shechem, where the hungry107 entered to buy bread for the Sustainer of all. But you entered108 and gave Living Bread, the Truth who freely disclosed Himself. Blessed are your fields that in the parable became white and attained the blessed harvest.109 Ears of grain have not ripened, but souls have been perfected, have become zealous, whitened, and like you.110

̈ ‫ܘܦܠܐܬܗ ܕܥܕܬܐ ܕܡܢ‬ ̇ 104 ‫ܥܡܡܐ‬ ‫ ܪܝܫܝܬܐ‬Virg 17.2.7–8. Beck, CSCO 223, 58, trans. McVey, Hymns, 334 modified. ̈ Virg 17.6.2. Beck, CSCO 223, 59, trans. McVey, Hymns, 335. 105 ‫ܟܐܢܐ ܕܨܪܘܗܝ ܠܒܪܐ‬ 106 ‫ ܐܬܢܝܚܘ‬Virg 17.7, esp. 17.7.1. Beck, CSCO 223, 60, trans. McVey, Hymns, 336. 107 The disciples, John 4.8. 108 The feminine verb form allows only the woman (not Jesus) to be the subject; nor can it be Shechem since “she” enters the city. 109 John 4.35–36. ̇ ‫ܠܗܘ‬ ̇ ‫ܛܘܒܝܟܝ ܐܘ ܫܟܝܡ ܕܠܟܝ ܥܠܘ ̈ܟܦܢܐ  ܠܡܙܒܢ ܠܚܡܐ‬ 110 ‫ܙܐܢ ܟܠ‬

‫ܝܗܒܬܝ ܠܚܡܐ ܚܝܐ  ܫܪܪܐ ܕܡܓܢ ܦܪܣܝ ܢܦܫܗ‬ ܼ ‫ܐܢܬܝ ܕܝܢ ܥ ܼܠܬܝ‬ ̈ ̈ ‫ ܘܡܛܝ ܗܘܝ ܠܚܨܕܐ ܕܒܘܪܟܬܐ‬ ‫ܠܚܩܠܬܟܝ ܕܚܘܪ ̈ܗܘܝ ܒܦܠܐܬܐ‬ ‫ܛܘܒ‬ ̈ ̈ ̈ ‫ܠܘ‬     ‫ܫܒܠܐ ܫܡܢ ܢܦܫܬܐ ܗܘ ܐܬܓܡܪ   ܛܢ ܚܘܪ ܘܕܡܝ ܒܟܝ‬

Virg 23.10. Beck, CSCO 223, 84, trans. McVey, Hymns, 363–364 modified. The final pronoun is feminine, making its antecedent the woman (or Shechem, as symbol of the Gentile church).

Ephrem and the Mariological Motif

37

In the final verse Ephrem affirms the significance of Shechem and the figures who, in their persons and in their deeds, constituted types to be fulfilled by Jesus. Blessed are you, O Shechem, beloved of righteous men. Treasure … and treasury of symbols … [Joshua]111 made laws and judgments in Shechem. In you Jesus is also named. This … the wood of our Savior. How many blessings and symbols you recall! Praiseworthy is He who magnified you, our native land!112 Conclusion: Conceptio per aurem in Virg 23 In the compact and artful verses that stand at the center of Virg. 23, Ephrem links two women, Mary and the Samaritan woman, to three generative cycles: procreation, farming, and speech. The notion of conception by ear is an underlying premise for this complex metaphorical structure. Taken as a compositional unit, Virg 22 and 23 provide a coherent exegetical and theological setting for the conceptio motif. The Samaritan woman as she appears in John’s gospel is affirmed, and her role is amplified. For Ephrem she is a prophet, an apostle, and a figure comparable to Mary and even to Jesus. Her acceptance and promulgation of the gospel to her townspeople is symbolic of the emergence of the church. Through her speech she sows the seed of the gentile church. Again, the conceptio motif plays a central role in the meaning conveyed by these hymns.

111 I suggest that Ephrem refers here to Joshua for two reasons: 1) the statement that “in you Jesus is named” and 2) “Joshua made a covenant with the people that day, and made statutes and ordinances for them at Shechem.” Josh. 24.24 RSV cf. P Josh. 24.25 ‫ܘܐܩܝܡ ܝܫܘܥ‬ ̈ ‫ ܘܐܠܦ ܐܢܘܢ‬.‫ ܒܗ ܒܝܘܡܐ ̇ܗܘ‬.‫ܕܝܪܝܟܝ ܠܥܡܐ‬ ̈ ‫ܦܘܩܕܢܐ‬ .‫ܘܕܝܢܐ ܒܫܟܝܡ‬ ̈ ‫ܟܐܢܐ  ܣܝܡܬ … ܘܓܙܐ‬ ̈ ‫ܛܘܒܝܟܝ ܐܘ ܫܟܝܡ ܪܚܡܬ‬ 112 ‫ܕܖܐܙܐ‬ ̈ ‫…  ܣܡ‬ ̈ ‫ܢܡܘܣܐ‬ ‫ܘܕܝܢܐ ܒܫܟܝܡ‬ ̇ ̇ ‫ܒܟܝ ܗܘ ܐܦ ܝܫܘܥ ܐܫܬܡܗ  ܠܗܝ … ܩܝܣܗ ܕܦܪܩܢ‬



̈ ‫ܛܘܒܝܢ‬ ̈ ‫ܟܡܐ ܟܝ‬ ‫ܘܖܐܙܝܢ ܡܥܛܦܬܝ  ܒܪܝܟ ܕܐܘܪܒܟܝ ܡܬܢ‬

Virg 23.11. Beck, CSCO 223, 84, trans. McVey, Hymns, 364, modified, following the argument of Hayes, “Macarisms,” esp. 10–11.

38

McVey

Conclusion

Close examination of Ephrem’s use of conceptio per aurem in two hymns, Eccl 35 and Virg 23, shows a wealth of rhetorical display, and, at the same time, it is well integrated with a multiplicity of theological and exegetical themes. In Eccl 35 Ephrem situates the conceptio motif in a broad soteriological landscape highlighted by Eve/Mary typology and a sophisticated, yet playful, understanding of sense perception. Comparison of the traits of simplicity and cleverness in Eve and Mary leads to an exploration of human capacities and the transcendent faculty that underlies them. All the senses, but especially the eyes and ears, play a role in the drama of salvation – with the sight and hearing of Eve and Mary and the conceptio per aurem falling at the middle of this poetic landscape. The hymn ends with the rejoicing of the human senses at the defeat of death and Satan. In Virg 23 Ephrem positions the conceptio motif within a nuanced exegesis of the fourth chapter of John’s gospel, guided by an understanding of the Samaritan woman as an apostolic figure and a symbol of spiritual progress. In the midst of recapitulating her dialogue with Jesus, Ephrem freely develops his scenario of literal and metaphoric procreation – of babies, of thoughts, and of seeds. He plays freely with these rhetorical and generative metaphors as he compares the woman with the mother of Jesus. His use of the motif in each of these hymns is complex and integral to their broader theological and poetic framework. Bibliography Anderson, G.A. The Genesis of Perfection: Adam and Eve in Jewish and Christian Imagination (Louisville: Westminster, 2001). Beck, E. “Das Bild vom Spiegel bei Ephraem,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 19 (1953): 1–24. Beck, E., ed. Des Heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen de Fide, CSCO 154, Scr. Syri. 73 (Louvain: Durbecq, 1955). Beck, E. “Die Mariologie der echten Schriften Ephräms,” Oriens Christianus 40 (1956): 22–39. Beck, E., ed. Des Heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen de Paradiso und Contra Julianum, CSCO 174, Scr. Syri. 78 (Louvain: Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, 1957). Beck, E., ed. and trans. Des Heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen de Nativitate, CSCO 186–187, Scr. Syri. 82–83 (Louvain: Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, 1959–1962). Beck, E., ed. and trans. Des Heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen de Ecclesia, CSCO 198–199, Scr. Syri. 84–85 (Louvain: Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, 1960).

Ephrem and the Mariological Motif

39

Beck, E., ed. and trans. Des Heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen de Virginitate, CSCO 223–224, Scr. Syri. 94–95 (Louvain: Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, 1962). Bennema, C. Encountering Jesus: Character Studies in the Gospel of John (Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2014). den Biesen, K. Simple and Bold: Ephrem’s Art of Symbolic Thought, Gorgias Dissertations 26, Early Christian Studies 6 (Piscataway: Gorgias, 2006). Brock, S.P. The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem (rev. ed.; Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1992). Brock, S.P. Bride of Light: Hymns on Mary from the Syriac Churches (Kottayam: St. Ephrem Ecumenical Research Institute, 1994). Cartlidge, D.R. “‘How Can This Be?’ Picturing the word made flesh,” Bible Review 18, no. 6 (2002): BAR BAS library online https://members.bib-arch.org/print/119695. Accessed 5 April 2018. Cassingena-Trévedy, F., ed., with an introduction by S.J. Graffin. Éphrem de Nisibe: Hymnes sur la Nativité, Sources chrétiennes 459 (Paris: Cerf, 2001). Cerbelaud, D., trans. Le Combat Chrétien: Hymnes de Ecclesia, Spiritualité Orientale 83 (Bégrolle en Mauges: Abbaye de Bellefontaine, 2004). Cerbelaud, D., ed. Éphrem le Syrien, Le Christ en ses symboles: Hymnes De Virginitate, Spiritualité Orientale 86 (Bégrolles en Mauges: Abbaye de Bellefontaine, 2006). Cipriano, G. El-Bagawat: Un cimitero paleocristiano nell’alto Egitto, Prefazione di F. Bisconti, Ricerche di archeologia e antichità cristiane 3 (Todi: Tau, 2008). Constas, N. Proclus of Constantinople and the Cult of the Virgin in Late Antiquity: Homilies 1–5, Texts and Translations (Leiden: Brill, 2003). Daelemans, B. “Dieu Sauve En Se Montrant: La révélation rédemptrice dans la troisième Hymne Sur La Nativité de St. Éphrem,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 77 (2011): 351–398. Daelemans, B. “Le Caché Nous Relève En Se Révélant: La révélation rédemptrice dans les Hymnes Sur La Nativité de St. Éphrem,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 78 (2012): 29–80. Graef, H. Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion, vol. 1: From the Beginnings to the Eve of the Reformation (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963). Harvey, S.A. Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination, The Transformation of the Classical Heritage 42 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). Hayes, A. “Macarisms and their Mediating Function in the Madrāšê of Ephrem the Syrian,” NAPS Conference Paper (May 26, 2016) https://www.academia.edu/2834 2770/Macarisms_and_their_Mediating_Function_in_the_Madrashe_of_Ephrem _the_Syrian. Accessed 1 April 2019. Kiraz, G.A., ed. Malphono w-Rabo d-Malphone: Studies in Honor of Sebastian P. Brock (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2008).

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Lange, C. “A View on the Integrity of the Syriac Commentary on the Diatessaron,” Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 56:1–4 (2004): 129–144. Lange, C., trans. Ephraem der Syrer. Kommentar zum Diatessaron, Fontes Christiani 54.1–2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008). Leloir, L., ed. and trans. Saint Éphrem Commentaire de l’Évangile Concordant Version Arménienne, CSCO 137–138 (Louvain: Durbecq, 1953–1954). Leloir, L., trans. Ephrem de Nisibe. Commentaire de l’Évangile concordant ou Diatessaron: Commentaire sur l’Évangile concordant ou Diatessaron  …, Sources chrétiennes 121 (Paris: Cerf, 1966). Martin, M. “Betrothal Journey Narratives,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 70 (2008): 505–523. McCarthy, C., trans. Saint Ephrem’s Commentary on Tatian’s Diatessaron: An English Translation of Chester Beatty Syriac MS 709 with Introduction and Notes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993; reprint with corrigenda, 2000). McInroy, M.J. “Origen of Alexandria,” in The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity, ed. P.L. Gavriliuk and S. Coakley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 20–35. McVey, K.E. “St. Ephrem’s Understanding of Spiritual Progress: Some Points of Comparison with Origen of Alexandria,” The Harp 1 (1987–1988): 117–128. McVey, K.E., trans. Preface by J. Meyendorff. Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns, Introduction, translation, and notes, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist, 1989). McVey, K.E. “Ephrem the Syrian,” in The Early Christian World, ed. Ph.F. Esler (2nd ed.; London: Routledge, [2000] 2017), 1145–1168 [1228–1250]. McVey, K. “Saint Ephrem’s Portrayal of the Samaritan Woman at the Well,” Syriac Orthodox Patriarchal Journal 57 (2019): 1–23. Mitchell, C.W., ed. and trans. S. Ephraim’s Prose Refutations of Mani, Marcion, and Bardaisan, 2 vols. (Oxford: Williams and Norgate, 1912; repr. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2008). Murray, R. “Mary, the Second Eve in the Early Syriac Fathers,” Eastern Churches Review 3 (1971): 372–384. Payne Smith, J. (Mrs. Margoliouth), ed. A Compendious Syriac Dictionary: Founded upon the Thesaurus Syriacus of R. Payne Smith, D.D. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903). Payne Smith, R., et al., eds. Thesaurus Syriacus, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879–1901). Possekel, U. Evidence of Greek Philosophical Concepts in the Writings of Ephrem the Syrian, CSCO 580, Subsidia 102 (Louvain: Peeters, 1999), 186–229. Urbaniak-Walczak, K. Die “Conceptio per aurem”: Untersuchungen zum Marienbild in Ägypten unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Malereien in El-Bagawat (Altenberge: Oros Verlag, 1992). Wickes, J.T., trans. St. Ephrem the Syrian, The Hymns on Faith, Fathers of the Church 130 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2015). Zibawi, M. Bagawat: Peintures Paléochrétiennes d’Égypte (Paris: Picard, 2005).

Seeking the Women of Ancient Syriac Christianity: Strategies of Method and Remembrance Susan Ashbrook Harvey

Syriac Women: Questions Still to Ask

Dramatic advances have taken place in Syriac studies over the past fifty years, in no small part due the contributions of Sebastian Brock. While we may well say that there is no area of Syriac studies, in any reach of life, that Dr. Brock’s scholarship has not illumined, it is also the case that his scholarship has changed how we might approach questions of women in ancient Syriac Christianity.1 On the one hand, Sebastian Brock has made available critical editions and translations of a number of important texts about women. He has recovered, edited, and translated numerous hagiographies, martyr accounts, hymns and homilies devoted to particular female saints or biblical women (and each such account makes a difference to our knowledge of women in ancient Syriac Christianity!).2 He has done the same with texts relevant to women’s religious offices – deaconesses and nuns;3 and on feminine imagery for the divine, by his work on the Holy Spirit.4 If there is a single instance of a possible female author, or a single example of a hymn-type devoted to female saints, he will cite it.5 Equally important, however, has been his attention to literary genres, and 1 I believe that the first text I read as a student with Sebastian Brock was the Syriac hagiography of St. Pelagia. It was a life-changing experience from every perspective: the text, the language, and the teacher. This essay is dedicated to my teacher, Sebastian Brock, in deepest gratitude for all of this, and so much more. 2 Many of these will be cited in the course of this essay. 3 E.g., S.P. Brock, “Deaconesses in the Syriac Tradition,” in Woman in Prism and Focus: Her Profile in Major World Religions and in Christian Traditions, ed. P. Vazheeparampil (Rome: Mar Thoma Yogam, 1995), 205–217; S.P. Brock, “Burial service for Nuns,” Moran ʿEthʾo 4 (Kottayam: St. Ephrem Ecumenical Research Institute, 1992). 4 S.P. Brock, “The Holy Spirit as Feminine in Early Syriac Literature,” in After Eve: Women, Theology and the Christian Tradition, ed. J.M. Soskice (London: Marshall Pickering/Collins, 1990), 73–88; S.P. Brock, “‘Come, Compassionate Mother …, Come, Holy Spirit’: A Forgotten Aspect of Early Eastern Christian Imagery,” ARAM 3 (1991 [1993]): 249–257. 5 For the example of ambiguity in the gender of the author see S.P. Brock, “Two Syriac Verse Homilies on the Binding of Isaac,” Le Muséon 99, no. 1–2 (1986): 61–129 (98–99). For the singular example of the East Syriac hymn on women saints, see S.P. Brock, “L’Hagiographie versifiée,” in L’Hagiographie Syriaque, ed. A. Binggeli, Études Syriaque 9 (Paris: Geuthner, 2012), 113–126 (119).

© Susan Ashbrook Harvey, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004537897_004

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particularly to liturgical poetry. These studies have significant implications for how we think about women in the history of Syriac Christianity: how and what we know about them, how they participated in the larger life of their communities (whether civic, domestic, or monastic), how they were represented, and how these different possibilities might connect (or whether they do). In this essay, I will focus on this situation for Syriac Christianity in Late Antiquity, in particular, offering reflections on the kind of evidence we have and how we might use it. My question is this: In a surviving literary corpus that seems to preserve no texts written by women, how can we hear women’s voices? Where, how, and when did their voices sound forth?

Women in the Liturgy: Performance and Participation

Sebastian Brock has set a spotlight on liturgical poetry, both madrashe (in their variegated forms) and memre.6 I propose that this literature, abundant and rich as it is, has much to tell us about women in the ancient Syriac church. It does so in part by its content, which sometimes spoke to women’s lives or sometimes focused on female saints, for example. But also important were its context and performance within liturgical celebration. Here I use the term “liturgy” in its broad sense: the array of services that comprised the collective life of the worshipping community, daily, weekly, on special occasions whether celebratory or crisis-ridden. My stress here is on the public, civic context of such religious occasions. For liturgy in its broadest sense must be recalled as a public event in Late Antiquity. It offers us a social location of serious significance for the times, a civic location where women played substantial roles. The notion that women’s work was somehow restricted to domestic or monastic contexts may have been a socially constructed ideal expressed in some specific literary genres, but it does not match our most abundant evidence.7 Late antique Syriac liturgy, by virtue of the preferences of its poetic forms, offers 6 For a representative (and invaluable) overview, see S.P. Brock, “Poetry and Hymnography (3): Syriac,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, ed. S.A. Harvey and D.G. Hunter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 657–671. 7 S.A. Harvey, “Women and Children in Syriac Christianity: Sounding Voices,” in The Syriac World, ed. D. King (London: Routledge, 2019), 554–566; S.A. Harvey, “Sacred Bonding: Mothers and Daughters in Early Syriac Hagiography,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 4 (1996): 27–56; S.A. Harvey, “Women in Syriac Christian Tradition,” Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 3 (2003): 44–58. For the commonalities with broader late antique Mediterranean culture, see G. Clark, Women in Late Antiquity: Pagan and Christian Lifestyles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

Seeking the Women of Ancient Syriac Christianity

43

witness to women’s roles and functions in the civic community at large: both as noteworthy liturgical participants, and as striking models of faith worthy of emulation of by all Christians. In the first place, late antique Syriac Christianity is known for its use of women’s liturgical choirs, starting in the fourth century (if not earlier).8 This was an era of expansion for Christian liturgical life more broadly. Two features of this expansion matter here: first, the emergence of trained choirs across the Mediterranean at this time,9 and second, the development of new forms of hymnography featuring stanzas for the choirs and responses that enabled the congregation to participate also.10 In Syriac churches, women’s choirs, generally comprised of daughters of the covenant, performed the madrashe that engaged and instructed the congregation on Bible, theology, and the life of the Christian community. Although completely anonymous, these choirs are well attested as an ordinary part of Syriac liturgies.11 Late antique Syriac sources mention these women’s choirs with brief yet vivid descriptors. Jacob of Sarug (d. 521), for example, refers to the women’s choirs as “teachers” (malphanyatha), whose singing declared the “proclamation” (karuzutha/kerygma) in the liturgy.12 He describes them singing “songs of praise,” “with a serene sound.”13 According to Jacob, the “pure” voices of these “pious” women14 sang “instructive melodies”15 with “soft tones” and “wonderful tunes”16 by which heresies were defeated and the truth gloriously performed.17

8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

S.A. Harvey, “Performance as Exegesis: Women’s Liturgical Choirs in Syriac Tradition,” in Inquiries into Eastern Christian Worship: Acts of the Second International Congress of the Society of Oriental Liturgy, ed. B.J. Groen, et al., Eastern Christian Studies 12 (Leuven: Peeters, 2012), 47–64; K. McVey, “Ephrem the Kitharode and Proponent of Women: Jacob of Serug’s Portrait of a Fourth-Century Churchman for the Sixth Century Viewer and Its Significance for the Twenty-First Century Ecumenist,” in Orthodox and Wesleyan Ecclesiology, ed. S.T. Kimbrough (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007), 229–253. On the development of Christian choirs, see above all Ch. Page, The Christian West and its Singers: The First Thousand Years (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). On the changing forms of hymnography, see O. Münz-Manor, “Liturgical Poetry in the Late Antique Near East,” Journal of Ancient Judaism 1, no. 3 (2010): 336–361. Harvey, “Performance as Exegesis”; S.A. Harvey, “Singing Women’s Stories in Syriac Tradition,” Internationale Kirchliche Zeitschrift 100, no. 3 (2010): 171–189. Jacob, Homily on Ephrem, v. 42, in J.P. Amar, “A Metrical Homily on Holy Mar Ephrem by Mar Jacob of Sarug,” Patrologia Orientalis 47, no. 1 (1995), 35. Jacob, Homily on Ephrem, v. 99, 49. Jacob, Homily on Ephrem, v. 101, 49. Jacob, Homily on Ephrem, v. 114, 53. Jacob, Homily on Ephrem, vv. 152, 154, 65. Jacob, Homily on Ephrem, passim.

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Both Ephrem and Jacob urged their congregations to pay close heed to the women’s choirs, which, Jacob admonished, were nothing less than a gift from God for the church’s benefit.18 The more one heard these choirs, Jacob assured his listeners, the more one would become “pure, modest, and full of hope and discernment.”19 In one homily, he extolled the women’s choir in a prayer, “[O Christ], By the sweet voices of the young women who sing Your praise, / You have captured the World.”20 From a variety of Syriac sources, including church canons both East and West, we know that these women’s choirs were assigned to sing the madrashe, which, as the anonymous Life of Ephrem described, contained “words of subtle meaning and spiritual knowledge about the birth and baptism and fasting and the entire economy of Christ: the passion and resurrection and ascension; and about the martyrs and repentance and about the deceased.”21 There are good reasons why Syriac scholars are uncomfortable translating the term “madrasha” as “hymn”; many prefer “teaching song.”22 And in fact, our sources attest an important teaching ministry for these choirs. 18

19 20 21

22

Ephrem, Hymns on Resurrection, 2.6,8, trans. S.P. Brock and G.A. Kiraz, Ephrem the Syrian: Select Poems (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2006), 170–179 (174–175); Jacob of Sarug, On the Partaking, ll. 131–132, in A. Harrak, Jacob of Sarug’s Homily on the Partaking of the Holy Mysteries (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2009), 18. Jacob, On the Partaking, l. 175, Harrak, Jacob of Sarug’s Homily, 22. Jacob of Sarug, On Elisha 4, l. 25, in S.A. Kaufman, Jacob of Sarug’s Homilies on Elisha (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2010), 176. Anonymous, Life of Ephrem 31, ed. J.P. Amar, The Syriac “Vita” Tradition of Ephrem the Syrian, CSCO 630, Scr. Syri. 243 (Leuven: Peeters, 2011), 79–80 (V). Further references that specify women’s choirs singing madrashe include e.g., Ephrem, Hymns on Resurrection, 2.9, in Brock and Kiraz, Ephrem the Syrian, 170–179 (176–177); Rabbula of Edessa, Canons for Priests and Covenanters, 20, in R.R. Phenix, Jr. and C.B. Horn, The Rabbula Corpus: Comprising the Life of Rabbula, His Correspondence, a Homily Delivered in Constantinople, Canons, and Hymns (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2017), 107; Jacob of Sarug, Homily Against the Jews, 7. 538, in M. Albert, Jacques de Saroug: homélies contre les juifs. Édition critique, introduction, traduction et notes, PO 38.1 (1976), 271; Jacob of Sarug, Homily on Ephrem, vv. 96–116, Amar, “A Metrical Homily on Holy Mar Ephrem,” 48–53. East Syriac sources of later date (seventh through ninth centuries) continue to mention the madrashe assigned to the women’s choirs: an anonymous liturgical commentary ascribed to George of Arbela, and Canon 9 of the Synod of Catholicos George I in 676 are both discussed in J. Mateos, Lelya-Sapra: essai d’interprétation des matines chaldéennes (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1959), 408–410. M. Lattke, “Sind Ephraems Madrashe Hymnen?” Oriens Christianus 73 (1989): 38–43; K. McVey, “Were the Earliest Madrase Songs or Recitations?” in After Bardaisan: Studies on Continuity and Change in Syriac Christianity in honor of Professor Han J.W. Drijvers, ed. G.J. Reinink and A.C. Klugkist (Leuven: Peeters, 1999), 185–199; Brock, “Poetry and Hymnography (3): Syriac”; A. Palmer, “A Single Human Being Divided in Himself: Ephraim the Syrian, the Man in the Middle,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 1, no. 2 (1998): 119–163.

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The assignment of the madrashe to the women’s choir included various subgenres of hymns or songs.23 In Late Antiquity, these shared a basic structure: stanzaic verses punctuated by a short refrain. Different performative patterns were possible. Especially in more complicated madrashe (such as Ephrem’s), a chanter might sing the verses and the choir lead the congregation in the refrain; or, the choir the verses and the congregation the refrain. In the case of the dialogue hymns, two choirs might alternate the verses antiphonally with the congregation singing a refrain each time in response. These forms hence bring into view not only the contributions of women’s choirs, but also the active engagement of laity female and male, through their sung responses and refrains. For choirs were not the only source of women’s contributions to liturgical celebration. Women featured prominently among the congregation, another group whose voices were central – indeed, crucial – to late antique liturgy in all its permutations.24 Among the congregation, women were present as widows, consecrated virgins, nuns, ascetic solitaries, and as laity, married and unmarried, old and young. Within this diversity, women were constantly singing throughout the different services: providing the required punctuations of “Lord have mercy,” “amen,” “alleluia”; joining the responses; reciting the creed and the Lord’s Prayer; singing the collective hymns such as the Trisaghion and the Sanctus; voicing their confession, supplications, and acclamations.25 Here, for example, is a verse from an anonymous prayer song for the Nativity – and we have numerous examples of similar verses from other hymns: Today let all creation thunder out in praise, Let each mouth give a shout of “glory,” Let tongues be stirred with a song of praise. Let all the peoples cry out in song. In heaven, praise to the Lord, And on earth, peace to all flesh, 23

The anonymous author of the Life of Ephrem 31, mentions that Ephrem taught the women madrashe, seblatha, ʿonyatha, baʿwatha, qinyatha, and mushhatha. Whether these are simply lexical aesthetic variations on the idea of “song” or “hymn,” or refer to specific hymn types, is unclear. The latter would have been anachronistic for Ephrem’s time. 24 K.J. Torjesen, “Clergy and Laity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, ed. S.A. Harvey and D.G. Hunter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 389–405; also useful is E. Braniste, “The Liturgical Assembly and its Functions in the Apostolic Constitutions,” in Roles in the Liturgical Assembly: The Twenty-third Liturgical Conference, Saint Serge, ed. A.M. Triacca, trans., M.J. O’Connell (New York: Pueblo Publishing, 1981), 73–100. 25 Consider Jacob of Sarug’s descriptions in On the Partaking, passim.

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For a Savior hath shone forth for all the world. Refrain: In both height and depth have You resided, Lord: In the womb of Your Begetter, in hidden fashion, and in Mary’s bosom, made manifest.26 Women’s voices from the choir led the congregation; women’s voices from the congregation responded in turn, sounded from among the assembly. Throughout the liturgy’s progression, women’s voices wove in and out of the sequenced actions, inflecting its sounds, enhancing its harmonies. Of course, not everyone was present for every service. But our sources demonstrate that the full community was generally present for major feasts as well as Sunday Eucharists.27 Hagiographies and chronicles also mention that liturgies served in monasteries, at shrines, and at stylite columns often included a mixed congregation of clergy, monastics and laity; certainly, important funerals always did.28 Again, I speak of liturgy as a whole. Individual, domestic, or single-gendered monastic services were understood to contribute to, and gain their potency by, their relationship to the larger collective practice.29 Multiple voices, from their varied social locations and designated roles, were each necessary to liturgy’s proper exercise and function as an expression of the full community’s worship. Hence, each voice carried a degree of authority, just as each carried significance within the larger constitution of the church body. A mosaic of voices, just as a variety of ritual roles, was at work.30 26 Anonymous, Prayer Song 20 (Hymns on Mary 15), v. 4, in S.P. Brock, Bride of Light: Hymns on Mary from the Syriac Churches (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2010), 70 (adapted). 27 See, for example, Ephrem, Hymns on Resurrection 2, eds. Brock and Kiraz, Ephrem the Syrian, 170–179; Jacob of Sarug, On Nativity 3, ll. 342–371, Th. Kollamparampil, Jacob of Sarug’s Homilies on the Nativity (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2010), 224–227; Jacob of Sarug, On Palm Sunday, ll. 275–304, in Th. Kollamparampil, Jacob of Sarug’s Homily On Palm Sunday (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2008), 32–37. 28 Liturgies and the composition of their congregations are described, for example, in: the Life of Pelagia 16–19, in S.P. Brock and S.A. Harvey, Holy Women of the Syrian Orient, The Transformation of the Classical Heritage 13 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 46–48; The Life of Febronia 35–41, in Brock and Harvey, Holy Women of the Syrian Orient, 172–176; The Syriac Life of Simeon the Stylite 54, 75, 92, in R. Doran, The Lives of Simeon Stylites, Cistercian Series 112 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1992), 135, 155–157, 169; John of Ephesus, Lives of the Eastern Saints, chapter 4 (Abraham and Maro), in E.W. Brooks, ed. John of Ephesus, Lives of the Eastern Saints, Patrologia Orientalis 17 (1923), 76–77. 29 C. Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) is especially helpful, for both the understanding of the ritual body, esp. 94–117; and for the social, political effects of ritual action in the construction and negotiation of power, 169–238. 30 Points stressed with deep discernment by T. Berger in her two books, Gender Differences and the Making of Liturgical History: Lifting a Veil on Liturgy’s Past (Farnham, UK: Ashgate,

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Such consideration de-centers the authority of bishop or clergy; it recontextualizes the patriarchal ecclesiastical structure amidst a broader, more richly textured communal body, in which various “authorities” were recognized, exercised, enabled, and articulated. These were not rival authorities, nor were they interchangeable. Rather, they were complementary, mutually constitutive, and even mutually necessary, existing in relation to one another.31 When Ephrem the Syrian praised the liturgy as a woven crown to which each rank and member contributed, offering the whole in thanksgiving to God, he delineated the place and function for each. In his verse, bishop, presbyters, deacons, chanters, choirs male and female, rulers, and lay people each presented a distinct and differentiated gift, each with a necessary purpose and role for the liturgy’s work.32

Performance and Representation

Such a context was vividly evident in the ways that hymns called attention to their own sung performance. Hymns extolled the voices of their singers, and often also the voices of those biblical figures or saints whom they celebrated. A number of Ephrem’s Nativity hymns, for example, were cast directly, in first person voice, as lullabies that Mary sang to her newborn Son.33 This literary device appears often in anonymous Nativity hymns, as well.34 Sung by women’s choirs, with responses from the congregation female and male, women’s voices evocatively sounded these festive verses. Another anonymous hymn reflected on the resounding voices thus elicited: Blessed are you, Mary … Blessed is your tongue that eagerly sang to [your Son] … While the cherubim with wondrous sound Directed their praise in awe. … Blessed are you, mother, full of grace, 2011), and Women’s Ways of Worship: Gender Analysis and Liturgical History (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999). 31 Torjesen, “Clergy and Laity.” 32 Ephrem, Hymns on Resurrection 2: 8–9, Brock and Kiraz, Ephrem the Syrian, 174–177. 33 Ephrem, Hymns on Nativity 5: 19–24; 6: 1–6; 9: 4–16; 15: 1–10; 16: 1–14; 17: 1–18; 19: 1–19, in K. McVey, Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns (New York: Paulist Press, 1989), 105–170. 34 E.g., Prayer Song 14 (Hymns on Mary 7): 3–7, Prayer Song 21 (Hymns on Mary 16): 6, in Brock, Bride of Light, 49–50, 73.

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All generations call you thrice blessed Crying out with their voices. … The Islands, all nations, and all peoples Call you blessed….35 Or again, from another anonymous hymn: Today heaven and earth and all that is in them Rejoice and exult As they throng together to raise up songs of praise, Shouting out their acclamations.36 Dozens of such verses adorn late antique Syriac hymns. Often, they echo their predecessors from the festal hymns of Ephrem. For example, from Ephrem’s Hymns on Nativity 25: “Blessed are you, O church, …/ blessed are your voices …/ Your mouth is a censer, and your voices like sweet spices/ rise up on your festivals!,” with the congregation’s refrain: “Glory to the One Who sent Him!”37 The citing of Mary’s voice, echoed by the congregation’s refrain, raises further performative issues.38 Late antique Syriac liturgical poetry is intriguing for its consistent representation of biblical, historical, and legendary saints, female as well as male, with extensive, imagined first-person speeches. Performed liturgically, by the voices of a variety of liturgical agents, male and female, these imagined voices keep a constancy of attention on gendered sound.39 Here, I will raise only two sample groups. First, the soghyatha, dialogue hymns, are a body of material Sebastian Brock has repeatedly foregrounded for us.40 As is now well known, the soghitha pre35 36 37 38

Prayer Song 14 (Hymns on Mary 9), vv. 1, 5, 6, in Brock, Bride of Light, 53–54. Prayer Song 18 (Hymns on Mary 13), v. 4, in Brock, Bride of Light, 67. Ephrem, Hymns on Nativity, 25. 2, McVey, Ephrem, 200. A helpful resource is R.D. McCall, Do This: Liturgy as Performance (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). 39 Consider the discussion in S.A. Harvey, “On Mary’s Voice: Gendered Words in Syriac Marian Tradition,” in The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies: Gender, Asceticism, and Historiography, ed. P.C. Miller and D. Martin (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 63–86. 40 Sebastian Brock has been the pioneer on this genre of Syriac literature. See especially his articles: “The Dispute Poem: from Sumer to Syriac,” Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 1 (2001): 3–20, and “Dialogue and other sughyotho,” in Mélanges offerts au Prof. P. Louis Hage, ed. A. Chehwan, Université Saint Esprit de Kaslik, Faculté de Musique Études 9 (Kaslik: Université Saint Esprit, 2008), 363–384. Also fundamental

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sented a dialogue between two characters, with a brief narrative frame at the beginning and a closing doxology at the end. Sung antiphonally by two choirs in alternating verses, it set up a conflict or contest of competing positions. Again, these hymns employed short, repeated refrains between the verses, inviting and allowing the congregation to comment on and bear witness to the imagined dialogue taking place. The Virgin Mary, the Sinful Woman, and Potiphar’s Wife are cases Sebastian Brock has prominently highlighted.41 In each case, the dialogue poems provided generous opportunity for seeing the woman as an active agent in God’s salvific plan.42 Throughout each hymn, fifty-four verses, or forty-five verses, or such – the congregation sang its response. These were conventional, stock refrains, for example: “Praise to You, O Lord,/ whom heaven and earth worship as they rejoice.”43 Yet, they are words that establish shared witness to the momentous events set in motion by the imagined exchange, allowing all ritual participants – everyone present for the service – to linger on each moment of the encounter. Voices performed, bore witness, and participated. Because of their rhetorical form, the dialogue poems set the significance of the female character’s speech in high relief. In each soghitha, an equal number of stanzas must be sung in her voice as in that of her male opponent – stanzas is R. Murray, “Aramaic and Syriac dispute poems and their connections,” in Studia Aramaica, ed. M.J. Geller, et al., Supplement to Journal of Semitic Studies 4 (1995), 157–187; and K. Upson-Saia, “Caught in a Compromising Position: The Biblical Exegesis and Characterization of Biblical Protagonists in the Syriac Dialogue Hymns,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 9, no. 2 (2006): 189–211. 41 For example, S.P. Brock, Mary and Joseph, and Other Dialogue Poems on Mary (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2011); S.P. Brock, “The Sinful Woman and Satan: two Syriac dialogue poems,” Oriens Christianus 72 (1988): 21–62; S.P. Brock, “Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife (Genesis 39): Two Anonymous Dispute Poems,” in Syriac Polemics. Studies in Honour of Gerrit Jan Reinink, ed. W.J. van Bekkum, et al., Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 170 (Leuven: Peeters, 2007), 41–57. For a sense of the contrast to other modes of exegesis employed in late antique homilies, see Severus of Antioch, “Homily 118 (on the Sinful Woman),” in M. Brière, ed. Les Homiliae Cathedrales de Sévère d’Antioche, PO 26, no. 3 (1948), 357–374; and John Chrysostom, “Homilies on Hannah,” in R.Ch. Hill, St. John Chrysostom: Old Testament Homilies, vol. 1, Homilies on Hannah, David, and Saul (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2003), 61–132. 42 For the intersection of dramatic dialogue and liturgy in Greek tradition of the same period, see esp. G.W. Dubrov, “A Dialogue with Death: Ritual Lament and the threnos theotokou of Romanos Melodos,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 35 (1994): 385–405. Also important for the broader traditions of literary and rhetorical disputes, are the essays in Dispute Poems and Dialogues in the Ancient and Medieval Near East: Forms and Types of Literary Debates in Semitic and Related Literature, ed. G.J. Reinink and H.L.J. Vanstiphout, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 42 (Leuven: Peeters, 1991). 43 As in the anonymous dialogue poem, “Mary and the Angel,” in Brock, Mary and Joseph, 10.

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intoned by women’s choirs, in a performative voice that enhanced their sung content. In these hymns, speech is the action that defines these women, and it is extraordinary in its power: it can stem or bring to effect God’s salvific plan. Here, real and imagined women’s voices interlaced in public performance.44 My second example is from the other primary genre of liturgical poetry, the memra, particularly as composed by the great poets Jacob of Sarug and Narsai of Nisibis.45 In this case, the imagined speeches of biblical characters were embedded in dramatic narratives that framed, interpreted and annotated the force of the words voiced. Moreover, in memre the imagined voices of biblical women were sounded forth by the male preacher intoning his carefully metered couplets. Yet here, too, I would argue, the larger frame is that of the liturgical process, in which women’s voices were singing, from choir and congregation, at multiple points. Jacob, for example, tells us in his homily On the Partaking of the Mysteries that the women’s choir sang between the lectionary readings and his homily, and then again following it, leading the congregation in their hymns.46 The liturgical sequence enfolded the imagined, intoned voices amidst a larger ritual dialogue. Quite a number of biblical women are featured in these magnificent memre, from both the Old and New Testaments.47 Sebastian Brock has written on Tamar the daughter-in-law of Judah, the Hemorrhaging Woman, and Jairus’ Daughter, all by Jacob of Sarug; but there are many more, and even Narsai presents a splendid Canaanite Woman.48 These texts presented women’s speech as edifying, bold, wise, and powerfully public in witness to faith. Often their imagined dialogues are presented as taking place in public spaces: the Hemorrhaging Woman, like the Canaanite and the paralytic Woman, undertakes her verbal contest in the civic square, so to speak, confronting Jesus with 44 S.A. Harvey, “Spoken Words, Voiced Silence: Biblical Women in Syriac Tradition,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 9 (2001): 105–131. 45 Brock, “Poetry and Hymnography (3),” 662–664; and see now S.H. Griffith, “The Poetics of Scriptural Reasoning: Syriac Mêmrê at Work,” Studia Patristica 78 (2017): 5–24. 46 Jacob of Sarug, On the Partaking, ll. 129–142, 163–184. 47 S.A. Harvey, Song and Memory: Biblical Women in Syriac Tradition (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2010) for examples. 48 S.P. Brock, “Jacob of Serugh’s Verse Homily on Tamar (Gen. 38),” Le Muséon 115 (2002): 279–315. For Brock’s translations of Jacob’s homilies on the Hemorrhaging Woman (Hom. 170) and Jairus’s Daughter (Hom. 91), see Jacob of Sarug’s Homilies on Women Whom Jesus Met, ed. S.A. Harvey, et al. (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2016), 171–270. For Narsai on the Canaanite Woman contrasted with Jacob, see E.G. Walsh, “Holy Boldness: Narsai and Jacob of Sarug Preaching the Canaanite Woman,” Studia Patristica 78 (2017): 85–98, and E.G. Walsh, “The Canaanite Woman within Late Antique Syriac Poetry,” in Syriac Christian Culture: Beginnings to Renaissance, ed. A.M. Butts and R.D. Young (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2020), 66–82.

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his disciples, in the marketplace, amidst crowds.49 Sometimes, Jacob uses verbs of singing (zmr) interchangeably with other verbs of speech for the women. Thus he presents the Canaanite Woman as one whose “loud voice” shouted, groaned, called out, bellowed her need to Jesus with “boldness,” but also sang and proclaimed (krz), “like a harp.”50 I suggest that such verbal descriptors echoed the singing voices that framed the homilist’s song (and Jacob of Sarug, for one, often describes his own preaching as singing).51 Performed in contexts that included women’s choirs and responding congregational voices female and male, these memre drew attention to, recognized, and gave value to, real women’s voices, and women’s contributions, to the larger social community. Liturgy, as I am stressing, was a public, civic, and shared context for all members of the church, lay, ordained, consecrated, or monastic. In Late Antiquity, portions of the liturgy were often conducted outdoors, where the audience potentially included many beyond the church’s own members. Accounts of public processions in Syriac sources often mention the ritual gathering by rank, gender, and status, and often include mention of the women’s choir, the laywomen, and the women religious who were part of the retinue.52 Such public events both constituted, and reinforced, a notion of community in which the participation of all members was honored. It is such events that the Syriac version of the Life of Saint Eugenia presented as converting the pagan Eugenia to Christianity, when she repeatedly heard the crowds of Christians singing with their bishop in the streets of Alexandria.53

Beyond Liturgy: Literacy and Literary Presence

Did performative elements cross between the liturgical event and other social locations? Not all poetry was composed for liturgical performance, and not 49

All three texts are translated in Harvey, et al., Jacob of Sarug’s Homilies on Women Whom Jesus Met. 50 Jacob of Sarug, On the Canaanite Woman, ll. 36, 47–48, 84, 101–102, 111, 113, 119, 127, 157, 183, 256, 379, 387, in Harvey, et al., Jacob of Sarug’s Homilies on Women Whom Jesus Met, 1–49. 51 S.A. Harvey, “The Poet’s Prayer: Invocational Prayers in the Mêmrê of Jacob of Sarug,” Studia Patristica 78 (2017): 51–60. 52 For example, Pseudo-Joshua the Stylite, Chronicle 36, 43, 100, F.R. Trombley and J.W. Watt, The Chronicle of Pseudo-Joshua the Stylite, Translated Texts for Historians 32 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 35, 45, 117. See also the descriptions of civic mourning, e.g., for Rabbula of Edessa in the Life of Rabbula 55, in Phenix Jr. and Horn, eds., Rabbula Corpus, 81; or for Simeon the Stylite in the Syriac Life of Simeon 125–126, in Doran, Lives of Simeon Stylites, 192–193. 53 Life of Eugenia, in A.S. Lewis, Select Narratives of Holy Women by John the Stylite of BethMari-Qanun, Studia Sinaitica 10 (London: C.J. Clay and Sons, 1900), 4–6.

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all singing was liturgical. Jacob of Sarug famously raged against the songs of the theater, with their seductive melodies that lingered in one’s mind and on one’s lips long after the show had ended.54 In a recent article, Jeffrey Wickes has argued that many of Ephrem’s madrashe were composed for instructional rather than liturgical purposes, used to teach the men and women whom he trained for church service of different kinds.55 Sung poetry, then, was both a method of education, and also, in the form of liturgical hymns, a means to disseminate that education to a larger public in a liturgical context. Similarly, sometime later, music at the School of Nisibis was both a mode of academic study and also a skill to be gained, refined, and mastered for liturgical performance.56 A number of Syriac sources suggest that women’s choirs were also trained in this way.57 From the perspective of women’s singing, this quality of educational purpose inflected other areas of women’s activity. In late antique Syriac Christianity, evidence for female literacy is strongly joined to evidence for women’s liturgical knowledge. Literacy was a basic part of ascetic training in Late Antiquity, including the ability to read scripture, hagiography, ascetic and theological literature, and also the ability to chant psalms and prayers of the daily offices with knowledgeable skill.58 The sound of women’s sung ascetic prayers was often heard in civic communities, as John of Ephesus and others attest.59 54

Jacob of Sarug, On the Spectacles 3, in C. Moss, “Jacob of Serugh’s Homilies on the Spectacles of the Theatre,” Le Muséon 48 (1935): 87–112 (105). 55 J. Wickes, “Between Liturgy and School: Reassessing the Performative Context of Ephrem’s Madrāšê,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 26, no. 1 (2018): 25–51. 56 An aspect stressed by A.H. Becker, Fear of God and the Beginning of Wisdom: The School of Nisibis and the Development of Scholastic Culture in Late Antique Mesopotamia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 87–94. 57 Anonymous, Life of Ephrem 31; Jacob of Sarug, Homily on Ephrem, vv. 98–101, in Amar, 48–49; John of Ephesus, Lives of the Eastern Saints, chapter 16. 58 On women’s literacy in ancient Christianity, see now K. Haines-Eitzen, The Gendered Palimpsest: Women, Writing, and Representation in Early Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); A. Brown, “Psalmody and Socrates: Female Literacy in the Byzantine Empire,” in Questions of Gender in Byzantine Society, ed. B. Neil and L. Garland (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 57–76. Specifically on the literacy and training necessary for Byzantine choir nuns, see L. Garland, “‘Til Death Do Us Part?’: Family Life in Byzantine Monasteries,” in Questions of Gender in Byzantine Society, ed. Neil and Garland, 29–55. 59 For example, John of Ephesus, Lives of the Eastern Saints, chapter 12, on Euphemia and Maria, in Brock and Harvey, Holy Women of the Syrian Orient, 122–133 (126, 128–129); and John of Ephesus, Lives of the Eastern Saints, chapter 31, on Elijah and Theodore, Brooks, PO 18 (1924): 581–583. See also Sahdona’s account of Shirin, in Brock and Harvey, Holy Women of the Syrian Orient, 180; the “Life of Mary of Qidun,” in Brock and Harvey, Holy Women of the Syrian Orient, 27–37 (29, 36). The martyr Anahid sang Psalms in the prison all night, in Brock and Harvey, Holy Women of the Syrian Orient, 82–99 (93–94).

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Hagiography of women saints mentions reading together as a valued practice of women’s monasteries, taking place in the context of sung prayer services as well as at other times of communal gathering.60 I suggest there was a resonance between this kind of singing and that of women’s liturgical choirs. Further, I suggest we should hear these two kinds of singing – that of choirs in the church, and that of female ascetics performing their devotions – as interactive in the quality of authority they conveyed. In other words, the liturgical voices of women – both real and imagined, I would argue – inflected the sound of women’s devotional singing in other contexts. But not only the singing: for literary elements also crossed between liturgical poetry and the literature of other social locations. Two cases come broadly to mind here, that of hagiographical literature of female saints, and that of anonymous dramatic narratives on biblical women. Hagiography produced literarily sophisticated portraits of women saints, and also provided content for the hymns and verses that would be sung for a saint’s feast day.61 Even when the entire hagiography was not – or was no longer – read at the liturgical gathering, yet the verses often carried vivid, lively citations of the saint. And when even such content was no longer part of the liturgical celebration, the names or titles of the saint were yet remembered, as David Taylor has recently reminded us.62 When the proper story had been lost, as for the Daughter of Macnyo, conventional verses could be constructed and a hymnic remembrance could still be offered.63 We have also the enigmatic instance of the anonymous dramatic memre devoted to biblical characters. Here, in portraits of haunting, penetrating power, figures such as Sarah the wife of Abraham (whether in dangerous flight through Egypt, or at the terrifying specter of the Aqedah), or Dinah the sister of Joseph, or the wife of Potiphar, surprisingly reaching redemption from 60

An especially prominent theme in the Life of Febronia, in Brock and Harvey, Holy Women of the Syrian Orient, 150–176. For this aspect of Syriac women’s monasticism, see F. Jullien, “Le monaschisme feminine en milieu Syriaque,” in Le monachisme syriaque, ed. F. Jullien, Études Syriaques 7 (Paris: Guethner, 2010), 65–87; C. Hélou, “La vie monastique féminine dans la tradition syriaque,” in Le monachisme syriaque du VIIe siècle à nos jours, Patrimonie Syriaque Actes du colloque, VI (Antélias, Lebanon: Centre d’Études et de Recherches Orientales, 1999), vol. 1: 85–118. 61 E.g., the case of Mary of Qidun, in Brock and Harvey, Holy Women of the Syrian Orient, 27–39 (vita and hymn); or Marina/Marinus, considered in S.P. Brock, “St. Marina and Satan: A Syriac Dialogue Poem,” Collectanea Christiana Orientalia 5 (2008): 35–57. 62 D.G.K. Taylor, “Hagiographie et Liturgie Syriaque,” in L’Hagiographie Syriaque, ed. A. Binggeli, Études Syriaque 9 (Paris: Geuthner, 2012), 77–112. 63 S.P. Brock, “‘The Daughter of Maʿnyo’: A Holy Woman of Arbela,” Annales du Départment des Lettres Arabes, 6-B (1991–1992 [1996]), 121–128.

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her wretched trial, or the Widow of Sarepta, are set forth in lyrically exquisite metered couplets.64 These seem to have no liturgical connection, as Sebastian Brock has stressed – no homiletic elements or cues, nor are they transmitted in the liturgical manuscripts.65 Yet, as with hagiography, such texts witnessed to an elite literary culture that valued complex and heroic portraits of women (as well as men), and that provided remarkably subtle negotiations of gender, sexuality, and holiness. Such representations should not, I think, be understood in isolation from Syriac liturgical poetry, and the representations of biblical women and female saints found there; nor, I would suggest, should they be severed from the theological resonances of women’s voices performing their commemoration in liturgical context.

Gendered Voices: Liturgical Poetry at Work

Liturgy was a transactional space. What was heard and encountered there was not necessarily what was presented in contexts of learned study. The story of Eve from Genesis 3 provides a poignant case in point.66 Severe castigations of Eve and her model can be found in Syriac scriptural commentaries, and in ascetic and monastic literature, as in those of other languages.67 But that is not the Eve encountered in Syriac liturgy. And the Eve of liturgy was the one most 64 Brock, “Two Syriac Verse Homilies on the Binding of Isaac”; S.P. Brock and S. Hopkins, “A Verse Homily on Abraham and Sarah in Egypt: Syriac Original with Early Arabic Translation,” Le Muséon 105 (1992): 87–146; S.P. Brock, “A Syriac Verse Homily on Elijah and the Widow of Sarepta,” Le Muséon 102 (1989): 93–113; S.P. Brock, “Dinah in a Syriac Poem on Joseph,” in Semitic Studies in Honour of Edward Ullendorff, ed. G. Kahn, Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics 47 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 222–235; K. Heal, “The Syriac History of Joseph,” in Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, ed. R. Bauckham, et al. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans 2013), 1: 85–120. See also S.P. Brock, “Creating Women’s Voices: Sarah and Tamar in Some Syriac Narrative Poems,” in The Exegetical Encounter between Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity, ed. E. Grypeou and H. Spurling (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 125–142. 65 S.P. Brock, “Dramatic Narrative Poems on Biblical Topics in Syriac,” Studia Patristica 45 (2010): 183–196. 66 S.A. Harvey, “Encountering Eve in Syriac Tradition,” in Syriac Encounters: Papers from the Sixth North American Syriac Symposium, ed. M. Doerfler, et al. (Leuven: Peeters Press, 2015), 11–49. 67 E.g., Ephrem, Commentary on Genesis, 2.11–36, in E.G. Mathews, Jr. and J.P. Amar, St. Ephrem the Syrian, Prose Works, Fathers of the Church 91 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1994), 104–123; Aphrahat, Demonstration 6.6, in A. Lehto, The Demonstrations of Aphrahat the Persian Sage (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2010), 181–183; Narsai, Eve’s Daughters, in C. Molenberg. “Narsai’s memra on the reproof of Eve’s daughters and the ‘tricks and devices’ they perform,” Le Muséon 106 (1993): 65–87.

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people, and certainly most women, knew best. Those who knew her story only from attending liturgies rarely if ever heard the lection from Genesis 3 (perhaps only once a year, on Monday of the first week of Lent, amidst other readings).68 Rather, in liturgy Eve was present in hymns and other poetry as a grieving penitent whose burdens were lifted and whose restoration was exclaimed. In the words of one anonymous hymn, at the birth of Christ Eve and Adam “received comfort in their grief.”69 Or, as Jacob of Sarug intoned on the Nativity, “Today the mouth of Eve has been opened so that she can say with an exalted voice and with careful confidence that her fault has been forgiven.”70 In an anonymous soghitha, Mary herself sings out to Eve: Let Eve, our aged mother, now hear and come as I speak. Let her head, once bowed in her naked state in the Garden, be raised up. Let her reveal her face and sing to You [O Lord], for her shamefacedness has passed away in You; Let her hear the message full of peace for her daughter has repaid her debt.71 Even Eve, then, most reviled of women in Christian theological tradition, is invited to join her voice in liturgical song, in the gathered worshipping community. As in the case of Eve, or of the Virgin Mary, in liturgy women’s voices (real and imagined) mediated sacred instruction, offering gendered voices as common voices. Homilists intoned, choirs sang, and congregations responded in the imagined voices of biblical figures and saints both female and male. In song, the believer (of any rank or status) ritually and poetically assumed the persona of a holy woman or man, fashioning a devotional subjectivity with gendered resonance.72 In one anonymous soghitha, for example, Mary the 68 F.C. Burkitt, “The Earliest Syriac Lectionary System,” Proceedings of the British Academy 10 (1923): 301–338. 69 Prayer Song 6.14 (= Anon., Hymns on Mary 1.14), in Brock, Bride of Light, 38. 70 Jacob of Sarug, “On Nativity,” 4. 12, in Th. Kollamparampil, Jacob of Serugh, Select Festal Homilies (Rome: Centre for Indian and Inter-Religious Studies, 1997), 133. 71 Prayer Song 23.19–20 (= Anon., Soghitha 2. 19–20), in Brock, Bride of Light, 77. 72 For this phenomenon in Byzantine hymnography, see D. Krueger, Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual, Biblical Narrative, and the Formation of the Self in Byzantium (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 152–158, 164–196; A. Purpura, “Beyond the Binary: Hymnographic Constructions of Eastern Orthodox Gender Identities,” Journal of Religion 97, no. 4 (2017): 524–546.

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niece of Abraham of Qidun sings a mournful lament for her unwitting seduction into sin. The choir chants in Mary’s voice, singing her anguish and recalling, too, the mercy Christ offered to the Sinful Woman of Luke 7, and to the poor Widow whose mite was all she had to give. To each verse, the congregation responded, “Alas for me, my brothers and sisters, what has happened to me?/ Again, alas for what the Evil One has wrought in me.”73 They sing echoing Mary of Qidun’s words, they sing her words for her, and they sing her words as their own. Gender is a basic part of this voice: Mary’s gender is part of her story and how it is told; it is intrinsic to how she is presented as a figure of sin and of salvation. Men and women, singing her voice, would hear, embody, and engage such gendered representation. Liturgy hence engaged gender in fluid terms, examining it from diverse perspectives, never allowing reductionism of gender and biological sex. In liturgical poetry, biblical women and female saints fought Satan with the might – and with the imagery – of powerful male warriors, as did St. Marina in an anonymous, fierce soghitha with Satan.74 So, too, holy men wept with the grief of the penitent harlot, the mourning mother, the pious widow.75 In sung responses, the congregation moved within such imagined personae, male and female, as they celebrated and recalled the women and men of the sacred past. Gender was no barrier to identification with a character, even when it was used to enhance or evoke particular aspects of sin, compassion, mercy, agency, or boldness of faith. With their long imagined speeches, saints and biblical characters in hymns and homilies exceeded typical gendered social roles. They exemplified virtues and vices applicable to both women and men. Holy figures could be presented not so much as “men” or “women,” but as faithful Christians: available to all. Such gendered imagery penetrated into the representation of the faithful believer as an individual, even as it was sung in the context of collective worship. So, in several hymns on virginity, Ephrem presented the Sinful Woman as the model for how every believer should approach the communion chalice in 73 S.P. Brock, “The Lament of Mary, Niece of Abraham Qidunaya,” Syriac Annals of the Romanian Academy 1 (2020–2021): 9–30. 74 S.P. Brock, “St. Marina and Satan.” St. Marina’s presence especially in Maronite Syriac tradition is profound: see C. Hélou, ed. Sainte Marina: Moniale déguisée en habit de moine dans la tradition moronite, Patrimoine Syriaque 6 (Kaslik, Lebanon: Parole de l’Orient, 2013). 75 Consider the tears of Jephthah, in Jacob of Sarug, “Homily on Jephthah’s Daughter,” ll. 227–244, in S.A. Harvey and O. Münz-Manor, Jacob of Sarug’s Homily on Jephthah’s Daughter (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2010), 34–37. For other examples in Byzantine and Syriac liturgical texts, see S.A. Harvey, “Guiding Grief: Liturgical Poetry and Ritual Lamentation in Early Byzantium,” in Greek Laughter and Tears: Antiquity and After, ed. D. Cairns and M. Alexiou (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2017), 199–216.

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the Eucharistic liturgy: as a sinner, yet unafraid; receiving God’s body into one’s own hands, reverencing it with kisses; offering worship both physical and spiritual, intimate, direct, and whole.76 Or again: Jacob of Sarug in one homily had described the preparations of the Virgin Mary to receive the Holy Spirit at the moment of the immaculate conception of her Son, and he used the imagery of housekeeping to describe her action of preparation.77 Elsewhere, he used that same imagery to instruct his congregation on how to prepare to pray the Lord’s Prayer. Each aspect of body and soul should be cleaned, set right, and adorned, until one rendered the self a fitting place for God to enter: “Let your soul become a place worthy of the king’s encampment./ He will come to dwell.”78 In both these cases, gendered with female imagery, devotional acts of the laity are likened to priesthood, itself usually gendered male for late antique Christians. Other biblical women are presented in Syriac liturgical poetry with differently gendered imagery, as apostles, disciples, and teachers.79 Here, I barely scratch the surface of a rich, profoundly textured exploration of gender, sexuality, and devotional subjectivity in the imagery and stories of the Syriac religious imagination. Liturgical poetry, I am suggesting, provides a substantive and significant means through which historians might consider women, their contributions, and their participation in ancient Syriac Christianity, as well as the complex uses of gender as a tool of devotional reflection. Moreover, and again as Sebastian Brock has often reminded us, such poetry has been a persistent presence in Syriac Christianity, transmitted, preserved, and continuously reworked as it recurs throughout the liturgical books of the Syriac churches. As Heleen Murre-van den Berg has recently emphasized, not only has such poetry continued as a vibrant expression of Syriac Christianity, but women have also continued to find ways to enable and facilitate that process.80 And of course, female voices continue to fill the choirs of Syriac parishes to this day.81 76 Ephrem, Hymns on Virginity, 26.4, 35.5–8, trans. McVey, Ephrem, 378, 417–418, respectively. 77 Jacob of Sarug, On Nativity 1, ll. 387–418, in Kollamparampil, Jacob of Sarug’s Homilies, 54–59. For discussion of this extraordinary passage, see S.A. Harvey, “Interior Decorating: Jacob of Serug on Mary’s Preparation for the Incarnation,” Studia Patristica 41 (2006): 23–28. 78 Jacob of Sarug, On the Lord’s Prayer ll. 391–420, in M. Reed, Jacob of Sarug’s Homily on the Lord’s Prayer (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2016), 54–57. 79 For example, S.A. Harvey, “Bearing Witness: New Testament Women in Early Byzantine Hymnography,” in The New Testament in Byzantium, ed. D. Krueger and R. Nelson (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Publications, 2016), 205–221. 80 H. Murre-van den Berg, Scribes and Scholars: The Church of the East in the Eastern Ottoman Provinces (1500–1850) (Leuven: Peeters, 2015), 127–142, 156–183. 81 S.B. Kellog, “Ritual Sounds, Political Echoes: Vocal Agency and the Sensory Cultures of Secularism in the Dutch Syriac Diaspora,” American Ethnologist 42, no. 3 (2015): 431–445;

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Gender and Genre: Modes of Memory

Some time ago, the Roman historian Suzanne Dixon pointed out that issues of genre and rhetoric are fundamental in the consideration of women in ancient sources.82 For women, these matters determine the type of portrait presented, as well as the type of imagery used to render the representation. What was the genre? Who was the audience? Above all, what were the literary conventions, tropes, and rhetorical habits that attended the example at hand? Two notoriously vitriolic portraits of women famously occur in late antique Syriac literature: Aphrahat’s tirade against the “daughters of Eve” in Demonstration 6, especially at section 6, where he presents the whole of human history as a series of disasters caused by women since the time of Eve;83 and, a century and more later, Narsai’s diatribe on the tricks and devices of the daughters of Eve.84 Certain features characterize both: first, the context of admonition to an ascetic elite to maintain a life of chastity under all circumstances; second, stern reprimand against moral laxity; and third, inclusion of a list of morally reprehensible female exemplars drawn from biblical narratives. Yet ancient rhetoric  – whether in Syriac, Greek, Latin, or otherwise  – showed a strong predilection for moral binaries. Lists of vices implied, and were often paired with, lists of virtues. Literary forms of reprobation had their counterparts in encomiastic literature. We have seen such patterns in the texts I have cited in this essay. But for the moment, consider the cases of Aphrahat and Narsai. In addition to their two extended tirades on the evils of womankind, both found occasion to list other biblical women as exemplars of moral virtue: of righteousness, wisdom, true devotion, strength of character and will.85 In Aphrahat, these alternative lists happen in other Demonstrations (although we should note that in Demonstration 6, he also warns the daughters of the covenant to beware of the seductively evil intentions of their avowed brethren, the sons of

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S.A. Bakker, “Fragments of a Liturgical World: Syriac Christianity and the Dutch Multiculturalism Debates,” PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2013. S. Dixon, Reading Roman Women: Sources, Genres, and Real Life (London: Duckworth, 2001), 16–31. Aphrahat, Demonstration 6.6, 181–183. Narsai, Eve’s Daughters. This point was made some time ago regarding Aphrahat in an important article by R. Murray, “Some Rhetorical Patterns in Early Syriac Literature,” in A Tribute to Arthur Vööbus: Studies in Early Christian Literature and its Environment, Primarily in the Syrian East, ed. R.H. Fischer (Chicago: Lutheran School of Theology, 1977), 109–131.

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the covenant; in this regard, his warnings work both ways even in this text).86 In Narsai’s memra, the reversed pattern appears at the end of the same text: an inversion to correct the wrongdoings of the female villains of the biblical past, offered to women of the present who, he points out, have the choice of whom to imitate. In fact, he states, the highest pattern of moral perfection belongs to women, in the person of the Virgin Mary, perfect counterpart to her foremother Eve: one the source of sin, the other the source of salvation.87 Narratives that display similar patterns of the denouncement of womankind recur occasionally in Syriac ascetic and monastic literature, as we might expect. But we should always ask: who read such texts? In what contexts? How were these texts used? Far more common, far more ordinary, and far more extensive than such denouncements, were the transmission, circulation, dissemination, and encounter with liturgical poetry that characterized Syriac Christianity in Late Antiquity. With that poetry went its richly variegated, overwhelmingly positive and powerful portraits of women, as saints, biblical figures, devotional subjects, and liturgical participants, as discussed here. We cannot, of course, know how such poetry was received by the women and men who heard it: how it concretely shaped and formed subjectivities, or how it had impact on the lives people lived.88 What we do know is that there is a vast body of such material, and it merits our most careful consideration as scholars and historians. Finally, I offer a word about lists. Aphrahat and Narsai, after all, presented lists of biblical women both evil and saintly. Lists of such figures abound in Syriac liturgical texts, in hymns, prayers, supplications, recitations, blessings. These lists are drawn from the Bible (often cited together in liturgical prayers are: Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel; or Tamar, Rahab, Ruth; or the Samaritan Woman, the Canaanite Woman, the Hemorrhaging Woman; or Mary, Martha, Joanna); and from the memory of saints and martyrs, as in the extraordinary East Syriac hymn on female saints;89 or from local, revered tradition, as in the 86

Aphrahat includes Hannah and Esther among those whose prayers were powerful (Demonstration 4.8, and Demonstration 3.7); Rahab and Ruth among Gentiles justified by their faith (Demonstration 16.6); Rahab and Esther among those saved by their charity (Demonstration 14.14), and in the same place (Demonstration 14.14) he lists women who made peace: the Woman of Tekoa (2 Samuel 14), the “wise woman” of 2 Samuel 20, Deborah, Jael, and Rebecca. For the contrast within Demonstration 6, see Demonstration 6.7, 183–184. 87 Narsai, Eve’s Daughters, vv. 213–221, Molenberg, “Narsai’s,” 87. 88 Compare Krueger, Liturgical Subjects. 89 J.M. Fiey, “Une hymne nestorienne sur les saintes femmes,” Analecta Bollandiana 84 (1966): 77–110.

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West Syriac Book of Life.90 These lists are important. They remind us that even when the history, and the names, and the stories, of women (and men) are lost, forgotten, stolen, or destroyed, yet they are remembered. Wherever else their memory may reside, it resides in liturgy. I will end with one such list. Among the Persian Martyr Acts is the account of forty martyrs from the region of Beth Kashkraye, set during the reign of Shapur II and most likely dating from the sixth century.91 Like most martyr accounts, it tells us virtually nothing about these forty martyrs, other than recounting their wretched deaths. Poignantly, even hauntingly, the text begins with a list of their names, given in liturgical order:92 two bishops, ʿAbda and ʿAbdisho, sixteen presbyters, nine deacons, six sons of the covenant, each one by name. Last, but not least, are listed seven daughters of the covenant. By their number and by the liturgical nature of the list (including their rank), I wonder: were they a choir? Here are their names: Maryam, Tetta, Emma, Adrani, Mama, Maryam, and Marrah.93 Behind these names are histories we do not know and stories we have lost. Yet we may still remember them. This, surely, is our job as scholars and historians. In the witness of Syriac liturgical poetry, we have evidence of that history, of those voices, and of the means by which their memory has been honored in the continuing life of their communities. We must do likewise, seeking to honor a history fully inclusive of those whose voices sounded within it – women as well as men. Bibliography Albert, M., ed. Jacques de Saroug: homélies contre les juifs. Édition critique, introduction, traduction et notes, Patrologia Orientalis 38, no. 1 (1976). Amar, J.P., ed. “A Metrical Homily on Holy Mar Ephrem by Mar Jacob of Sarug,” Patrologia Orientalis 47, no. 1 (1995). 90 R.H. Connolly, “The Book of Life,” Journal of Theological Studies 13 (1912): 580–594; A. Palmer, “The Book of Life in the Syriac Liturgy: An Instrument of Social and Spiritual Survival,” The Harp 4 (1991): 161–171. 91 “On the Forty Martyrs,” P. Bedjan, ed. Acta Sanctorum et Martyrum Syriace (Paris: Otto Harrassowitz, 1891; repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1968), 2: 325–347. 92 “On the Forty Martyrs,” 2: 325. 93 Several of these are still used as endearments in modern Aramaic: “Tetta” can be a term for “Grandmother”; “Emma” and “Mama” for “Mother.” I am grateful to His Eminence Mor Polycarpus Aydin for discussion on this point.

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Amar, J.P., ed. The Syriac “Vita” Tradition of Ephrem the Syrian, CSCO 630, Scr. Syri. 243 (Leuven: Peeters, 2011). Bakker, S.A. “Fragments of a Liturgical World: Syriac Christianity and the Dutch Multiculturalism Debates,” PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2013. Becker, A.H. Fear of God and the Beginning of Wisdom: The School of Nisibis and the Development of Scholastic Culture in Late Antique Mesopotamia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Bedjan, P. ed. Acta Sanctorum et Martyrum Syriace, vol. 2 (Paris: Otto Harrassowitz, 1891; repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1968). Bell, C. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Berger, T. Women’s Ways of Worship: Gender Analysis and Liturgical History (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999). Berger, T. Gender Differences and the Making of Liturgical History: Lifting a Veil on Liturgy’s Past (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011). Braniste, E. “The Liturgical Assembly and its Functions in the Apostolic Constitutions,” in Roles in the Liturgical Assembly: The Twenty-third Liturgical Conference, Saint Serge, ed. A.M. Triacca, trans., M.J. O’Connell (New York: Pueblo Publishing, 1981), 73–100. Brière, M., ed. Les Homiliae Cathedrales de Sévère d’Antioche, Patrologia Orientalis 26, no. 3 (1948). Brock, S.P. “Two Syriac Verse Homilies on the Binding of Isaac,” Le Muséon 99, no. 1–2 (1986): 61–129. Brock, S.P. “The Sinful Woman and Satan: two Syriac dialogue poems,” Oriens Christianus 72 (1988): 21–62. Brock, S.P. “A Syriac Verse Homily on Elijah and the Widow of Sarepta,” Le Muséon 102 (1989): 93–113. Brock, S.P. “The Holy Spirit as Feminine in Early Syriac Literature,” in After Eve: Women, Theology and the Christian Tradition, ed. J.M. Soskice (London: Marshall Pickering / Collins, 1990), 73–88. Brock, S.P. “‘The Daughter of Maʿnyo’: A Holy Woman of Arbela,” Annales du Départment des Lettres Arabes, 6-B (1991–1992 [1996]), 121–128. Brock, S.P. “‘Come, Compassionate Mother …, Come, Holy Spirit’: A Forgotten Aspect of Early Eastern Christian Imagery,” ARAM 3 (1991 [1993]): 249–257. Brock, S.P. “Burial service for Nuns,” Moran ʿEthʾo 4 (Kottayam: St. Ephrem Ecumenical Research Institute, 1992). Brock, S.P. “Deaconesses in the Syriac Tradition,” in Woman in Prism and Focus: Her Profile in Major World Religions and in Christian Traditions, ed. P. Vazheeparampil (Rome: Mar Thoma Yogam, 1995), 205–217.

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Brock, S.P. “The Dispute Poem: from Sumer to Syriac,” Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 1 (2001): 3–20. Brock, S.P. “Jacob of Serugh’s Verse Homily on Tamar (Gen. 38),” Le Muséon 115 (2002): 279–315. Brock, S.P. “Dinah in a Syriac Poem on Joseph,” in Semitic Studies in Honour of Edward Ullendorff, ed. G. Kahn, Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics 47 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 222–235. Brock, S.P. “Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife (Genesis 39): Two Anonymous Dispute Poems,” in Syriac Polemics. Studies in Honour of Gerrit Jan Reinink, ed. W.J. van Bekkum, et al., Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 170 (Leuven: Peeters, 2007), 41–57. Brock, S.P. “Dialogue and other sughyotho,” in Mélanges offerts au Prof. P. Louis Hage, ed. A. Chehwan, Université Saint Esprit de Kaslik, Faculté de Musique Études 9 (Kaslik: Université Saint Esprit, 2008), 363–384. Brock, S.P. “St. Marina and Satan: A Syriac Dialogue Poem,” Collectanea Christiana Orientalia 5 (2008): 35–57. Brock, S.P. “Poetry and Hymnography (3): Syriac,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, ed. S.A. Harvey and D.G. Hunter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 657–671. Brock, S.P. “Creating Women’s Voices: Sarah and Tamar in Some Syriac Narrative Poems,” in The Exegetical Encounter between Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity, ed. E. Grypeou and H. Spurling (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 125–142. Brock, S.P. Bride of Light: Hymns on Mary from the Syriac Churches (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2010). Brock, S.P. “Dramatic Narrative Poems on Biblical Topics in Syriac,” Studia Patristica 45 (2010): 183–196. Brock, S.P. Mary and Joseph, and Other Dialogue Poems on Mary (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2011). Brock, S.P. “L’Hagiographie versifiée,” in L’Hagiographie Syriaque, ed. A. Binggeli, Études Syriaque 9 (Paris: Geuthner, 2012), 113–126. Brock, S.P. “The Lament of Mary, Niece of Abraham Qidunaya,” Syriac Annals of the Romanian Academy 1 (2020–2021): 9–30. Brock, S.P. and S.A. Harvey. Holy Women of the Syrian Orient, The Transformation of the Classical Heritage 13 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Brock, S.P. and S. Hopkins. “A Verse Homily on Abraham and Sarah in Egypt: Syriac Original with Early Arabic Translation,” Le Muséon 105 (1992): 87–146. Brock, S.P. and G.A. Kiraz. Ephrem the Syrian: Select Poems (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2006). Brooks, E.W. John of Ephesus, Lives of the Eastern Saints, Patrologia Orientalis 17–19 (1923–1925).

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Brown, A. “Psalmody and Socrates: Female Literacy in the Byzantine Empire,” in Questions of Gender in Byzantine Society, ed. B. Neil and L. Garland (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 57–76. Burkitt, F.C. “The Earliest Syriac Lectionary System,” Proceedings of the British Academy 10 (1923): 301–338. Clark, G. Women in Late Antiquity: Pagan and Christian Lifestyles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Connolly, R.H. “The Book of Life,” Journal of Theological Studies 13 (1912): 580–594. Dixon, S. Reading Roman Women: Sources, Genres, and Real Life (London: Duckworth, 2001). Doran, R. The Lives of Simeon Stylites, Cistercian Series 112 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1992). Dubrov, G.W. “A Dialogue with Death: Ritual Lament and the threnos theotokou of Romanos Melodos,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 35 (1994): 385–405. Fiey, J.M. “Une hymne nestorienne sur les saintes femmes,” Analecta Bollandiana 84 (1966): 77–110. Garland, L. “‘Til Death Do Us Part?’: Family Life in Byzantine Monasteries,” in Questions of Gender in Byzantine Society, ed. B. Neil and L. Garland (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 29–55. Griffith, S.H. “The Poetics of Scriptural Reasoning: Syriac Mêmrê at Work,” Studia Patristica 78 (2017): 5–24. Haines-Eitzen, K. The Gendered Palimpsest: Women, Writing, and Representation in Early Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Harrak, A. Jacob of Sarug’s Homily on the Partaking of the Holy Mysteries (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2009). Harvey, S.A. “Sacred Bonding: Mothers and Daughters in Early Syriac Hagiography,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 4 (1996): 27–56. Harvey, S.A. “Spoken Words, Voiced Silence: Biblical Women in Syriac Tradition,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 9 (2001): 105–131. Harvey, S.A. “Women in Syriac Christian Tradition,” Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 3 (2003): 44–58. Harvey, S.A. “On Mary’s Voice: Gendered Words in Syriac Marian Tradition,” in The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies: Gender, Asceticism, and Historiography, ed. P.C. Miller and D. Martin (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 63–86. Harvey, S.A. “Interior Decorating: Jacob of Serug on Mary’s Preparation for the Incarnation,” Studia Patristica 41 (2006): 23–28. Harvey, S.A. “Singing Women’s Stories in Syriac Tradition,” Internationale Kirchliche Zeitschrift 100, no. 3 (2010): 171–189. Harvey, S.A. Song and Memory: Biblical Women in Syriac Tradition (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2010).

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Harvey, S.A. “Performance as Exegesis: Women’s Liturgical Choirs in Syriac Tradition,” in Inquiries into Eastern Christian Worship: Acts of the Second International Congress of the Society of Oriental Liturgy, ed. B.J. Groen, et al., Eastern Christian Studies 12 (Leuven: Peeters, 2012), 47–64. Harvey, S.A. “Encountering Eve in Syriac Tradition,” in Syriac Encounters: Papers from the Sixth North American Syriac Symposium, ed. M. Doerfler, et al. (Leuven: Peeters Press, 2015), 11–49. Harvey, S.A. “Bearing Witness: New Testament Women in Early Byzantine Hymnography,” in The New Testament in Byzantium, ed. D. Krueger and R. Nelson (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Publications, 2016), 205–221. Harvey, S.A. “Guiding Grief: Liturgical Poetry and Ritual Lamentation in Early Byzantium,” in Greek Laughter and Tears: Antiquity and After, ed. D. Cairns and M. Alexiou (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2017), 199–216. Harvey, S.A. “The Poet’s Prayer: Invocational Prayers in the Mêmrê of Jacob of Sarug,” Studia Patristica 78 (2017): 51–60. Harvey, S.A. “Women and Children in Syriac Christianity: Sounding Voices,” in The Syriac World, ed. D. King (London: Routledge, 2019), 554–566. Harvey, S.A., et al. Jacob of Sarug’s Homilies on Women Whom Jesus Met (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2016). Harvey, S.A. and O. Münz-Manor. Jacob of Sarug’s Homily on Jephthah’s Daughter (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2010). Heal, K. “The Syriac History of Joseph,” in Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, vol. 1, ed. R. Bauckham, et al. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013), 85–120. Hélou, C. “La vie monastique féminine dans la tradition syriaque,” in Le monachisme syriaque du VIIe siècle à nos jours, vol. 1, Patrimonie Syriaque Actes du colloque, VI (Antélias, Lebanon: Centre d’Études et de Recherches Orientales, 1999), 85–118. Hélou, C. ed. Sainte Marina: Moniale déguisée en habit de moine dans la tradition moronite, Patrimoine Syriaque 6 (Kaslik, Lebanon: Parole de l’Orient, 2013). Hill, R.Ch. St. John Chrysostom: Old Testament Homilies, vol. 1, Homilies on Hannah, David, and Saul (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2003). Jullien, F. “Le monaschisme feminine en milieu Syriaque,” in Le monachisme syriaque, ed. F. Jullien, Études Syriaques 7 (Paris: Guethner, 2010), 65–87. Kaufman, S.A. Jacob of Sarug’s Homilies on Elisha (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2010). Kellog, S.B. “Ritual Sounds, Political Echoes: Vocal Agency and the Sensory Cultures of Secularism in the Dutch Syriac Diaspora,” American Ethnologist 42, no. 3 (2015): 431–445. Kollamparampil, Th. Jacob of Serugh, Select Festal Homilies (Rome: Centre for Indian and Inter-Religious Studies, 1997).

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Kollamparampil, Th. Jacob of Sarug’s Homily On Palm Sunday (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2008). Kollamparampil, Th. Jacob of Sarug’s Homilies on the Nativity (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2010). Krueger, D. Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual, Biblical Narrative, and the Formation of the Self in Byzantium (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). Lattke, M. “Sind Ephraems Madrashe Hymnen?,” Oriens Christianus 73 (1989): 38–43. Lehto, A. The Demonstrations of Aphrahat the Persian Sage (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2010). Lewis, A.S. Select Narratives of Holy Women by John the Stylite of Beth-Mari-Qanun, 2 vols., Studia Sinaitica 10 (London: C.J. Clay and Sons, 1900). Mateos, J. Lelya-Sapra: essai d’interprétation des matines chaldéennes (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1959). Mathews, E.G. Jr. and J.P. Amar. St. Ephrem the Syrian, Prose Works, Fathers of the Church 91 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1994). McCall, R.D. Do This: Liturgy as Performance (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). McVey, K. Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns (New York: Paulist Press, 1989). McVey, K. “Were the Earliest Madrase Songs or Recitations?,” in After Bardaisan: Studies on Continuity and Change in Syriac Christianity in honor of Professor Han J.W. Drijvers, ed. G.J. Reinink and A.C. Klugkist (Leuven: Peeters, 1999), 185–199. McVey, K. “Ephrem the Kitharode and Proponent of Women: Jacob of Serug’s Portrait of a Fourth-Century Churchman for the Sixth Century Viewer and Its Significance for the Twenty-First Century Ecumenist,” in Orthodox and Wesleyan Ecclesiology, ed. S.T. Kimbrough (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007), 229–253. Molenberg, C. “Narsai’s memra on the reproof of Eve’s daughters and the ‘tricks and devices’ they perform,” Le Muséon 106 (1993): 65–87. Moss, C. “Jacob of Serugh’s Homilies on the Spectacles of the Theatre,” Le Muséon 48 (1935): 87–112. Murray, R. “Some Rhetorical Patterns in Early Syriac Literature,” in A Tribute to Arthur Vööbus: Studies in Early Christian Literature and its Environment, Primarily in the Syrian East, ed. R.H. Fischer (Chicago: Lutheran School of Theology, 1977), 109–131. Murray, R. “Aramaic and Syriac dispute poems and their connections,” in Studia Aramaica, ed. M.J. Geller, et al., Supplement to Journal of Semitic Studies 4 (1995), 157–187. Murre-van den Berg, H. Scribes and Scholars: The Church of the East in the Eastern Ottoman Provinces (1500–1850) (Leuven: Peeters, 2015). Münz-Manor, O. “Liturgical Poetry in the Late Antique Near East,” Journal of Ancient Judaism 1, no. 3 (2010): 336–361.

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Page, Ch. The Christian West and its Singers: The First Thousand Years (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). Palmer, A. “The Book of Life in the Syriac Liturgy: An Instrument of Social and Spiritual Survival,” The Harp 4 (1991): 161–171. Palmer, A. “A Single Human Being Divided in Himself: Ephraim the Syrian, the Man in the Middle,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 1, no. 2 (1998): 119–163. Phenix Jr., R.R. and C.B. Horn. The Rabbula Corpus: Comprising the Life of Rabbula, His Correspondence, a Homily Delivered in Constantinople, Canons, and Hymns (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2017). Purpura, A. “Beyond the Binary: Hymnographic Constructions of Eastern Orthodox Gender Identities,” Journal of Religion 97, no. 4 (2017): 524–546. Reed, M. Jacob of Sarug’s Homily on the Lord’s Prayer (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2016). Reinink, G.J. and H.L.J. Vanstiphout, ed. Dispute Poems and Dialogues in the Ancient and Medieval Near East: Forms and Types of Literary Debates in Semitic and Related Literature, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 42 (Leuven: Peeters, 1991). Upson-Saia, K. “Caught in a Compromising Position: The Biblical Exegesis and Characterization of Biblical Protagonists in the Syriac Dialogue Hymns,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 9, no. 2 (2006): 189–211. Taylor, D.G.K. “Hagiographie et Liturgie Syriaque,” in L’Hagiographie Syriaque, ed. A. Binggeli, Études Syriaque 9 (Paris: Geuthner, 2012), 77–112. Torjesen, K.J. “Clergy and Laity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, ed. S.A. Harvey and D.G. Hunter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 389–405. Trombley, F.R. and J.W. Watt. The Chronicle of Pseudo-Joshua the Stylite, Translated Texts for Historians 32 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000). Walsh, E.G. “Holy Boldness: Narsai and Jacob of Sarug Preaching the Canaanite Woman,” Studia Patristica 78 (2017): 85–98. Walsh, E.G. “The Canaanite Woman within Late Antique Syriac Poetry,” in Syriac Christian Culture: Beginnings to Renaissance, ed. A.M. Butts and R.D. Young (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2020), 66–82. Wickes, J. “Between Liturgy and School: Reassessing the Performative Context of Ephrem’s Madrāšê,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 26, no. 1 (2018): 25–51.

Teach Your Children Well: Martyrs, Monks, and Mothers in Severus of Antioch Christine Shepardson Many early Christian communities highlighted their unjust persecution and thus their connection with famous early Christian martyrs in periods when they did not hold political power. Those who rejected the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE) in the late fifth and the sixth centuries so frequently found themselves in this position that their self-representation as martyrs persisted even in moments when they received imperial support. Severus of Antioch’s teachings that rejected the imperial Council of Chalcedon were, for example, eventually condemned as heretical by the sixth-century leaders who came to define imperial orthodoxy, but he nevertheless spent six influential years (512–518) as the formidable bishop in residence in the metropolis of Antioch. When he preached to his congregation in these years, Severus continued to rely on the rhetoric of martyrdom that had sustained anti-Chalcedonian Christians through past periods of persecution, and that would do so again through the decades after 518. Facing a larger, less urgently zealous, and more comfortable urban audience in these years, however, Severus reshaped his definition of martyrdom, witnessing, and sacrifice to fit this less persecutorial context, expanding the possibilities of martyrdom in ways that he hoped would redirect his congregants’ daily habits to be more in line with his ascetic and church-focused ideals without actually risking their lives. In this process, Severus attributed an unusually significant role to Christian mothers as teachers and role models, not only in the stories of the martyrs he commemorated, but also in the lessons that he drew from those stories for his early sixth-century audience. This essay will demonstrate that in reconfiguring martyrdom discourse for this period of episcopal power, Severus marshaled the influence of every-day mothers in an effort to teach his congregants to be steadfast in both anti-Chalcedonian orthodoxy and an ascetic avoidance of luxury and civic spectacles.

Martyrdom without Persecution: Witnessing to Christian Orthodoxy

Like his Antiochene predecessor John Chrysostom, Severus notably offered frequent and elaborate praise in celebration of Christianity’s martyrs in

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an effort to asceticize the behavior of Antioch’s theater- and party-going congregants.1 In Homily 11, Severus told his audience, “We celebrate the memory of the martyrs/sāhde of God,”2 and in Homily 75 on a regional hero, “the ܳ holy martyr [‫ ] ܳܣܗܕܐ‬Julian,” Severus said, “it seems to me that nothing is ܶ ̈ ‫ ;] ܳܣ‬or rather, I think that more advantageous than to praise the martyrs [‫ܗܕܐ‬ even remembering the martyrs adds an advantage greater than I can say.”3 For Severus, the local and regional martyrs that he emphasized were models of ideal Christian behavior; that is, they were fully human beings who nevertheless resisted social and political pressures in order to devote themselves completely to God, counting as nothing the material things of this world in favor of adhering to Christian virtues and thus earning spiritual rewards in the afterlife. Severus’ frequent and eloquent praise for the martyrs, however, and his representation of them as role models for his audience obscures the fact that he preached these homilies as the powerful bishop in residence in Antioch 1 I am grateful to Robert Kitchen for his invitation to participate in this conference and publication, and to the Late Antiquity faculty research seminar at the University of Tennessee (Knoxville) for their feedback on an earlier draft of this essay. Like all of my work in the field of Syriac Studies, this project is indebted to the generosity and scholarly excellence of Sebastian Brock whose life’s work has transformed the study of Syriac Christianity. Although Severus’ homilies were quickly translated into the Syriac language, in which they have largely been preserved, he delivered them in Greek. On Severus’ multilingual afterlife, see, for example, L. van Rompay, “Severus, Patriarch of Antioch (512–538), in the Greek, Syriac, and Coptic Traditions,” Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 8 (2008): 3–22. On Severus’ time in Antioch, see also G. Downey, A History of Antioch in Syria from Seleucus to the Arab Conquest (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961), 507–513. On Antioch as particularly devoted to local and regional martyrs, see P. Allen, “Severus of Antioch as a Source for Lay Piety in Late Antiquity,” in Historiam Perscrutari. Miscellanea di studi offerti al prof. Ottorino Pasquato, ed. M. Maritano (Rom: LAS, 2002), 711–721. 2 Severus, Homily 11.10 (PO 38: 374). Except where otherwise noted, all quotations from Severus’ Cathedral Homilies are my translation of the Syriac in the Patrologia Orientalis (PO) series, with assistance from the facing French translations. There is a substantive introduction to these homilies by Maurice Brière in his larger introduction to Severus’ writings and their translation and recensions, see M. Brière, “Les homélies de Sévère d’Antioche: Introduction générale à toutes les homélies,” PO 29, no. 1 (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1960), 50–62. There are more recent introductions in P. Allen and C.T.R. Hayward, Severus of Antioch (London: Routledge, 2004), 3–55; and in Y. Moss, Incorruptible Bodies: Christology, Society, and Authority in Late Antiquity (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016). For other relevant work on Severus and his homilies, see, for example, P. Allen, “Severus of Antioch and the Homily: The End of the Beginning?,” in The Sixth Century – End of Beginning?, ed. P. Allen and E.M. Jeffreys, Byzantina Australiensia 10 (Brisbane: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, 1996), 165–177; P. Allen, “A Bishop’s Spirituality: The Case of Severus of Antioch,” in Prayer and Spirituality in the Early Church, vol. 1, ed. P. Allen, R. Canning, L. Cross, with B.J. Caiger (Brisbane: Centre for Early Christian Studies, 1998), 1: 169–180. 3 Severus, Homily 75 (PO 12: 112).

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with the imperial support of the emperor Anastasius. A closer look at these homilies reveals that unlike his fifth- and sixth-century anti-Chalcedonian colleagues writing from pro-Chalcedonian Palestine or under a less sympathetic emperor’s control, in these years Severus most often mentioned martyrs not primarily as illustrations toward an ideal of dying for God, but toward an ideal of living a life appropriately devoted to God.4 As Michael Gaddis and others have shown, persecution and martyrdom stories are common throughout early Christian history and helped to justify a community’s existence in some cases, and its orthodoxy in others.5 In moments of the community’s earthly power, the theme sometimes remained, but its focus shifted. Diane Fruchtman’s work on “living martyrs” wonderfully demonstrates some of the ways in which martyrial rhetoric was turned by authors like Prudentius (d. 413), Paulinus of Nola (d. 431), and Augustine (d. 430) to encourage certain behaviors among late antique Christians who were very much still alive in the later Latin West, and I have elsewhere built on her work in a study of the Syriac rhetoric of John of Ephesus (d. 588/9), confirming that in Late Antiquity, not all sāhde died from physical violence externally imposed on account of their religious commitments.6 In some of his Antiochene homilies, Severus drew upon a rhetoric of martyrdom to emphasize the multivalence of the word martyr, both as a term that called to mind early Christians who died defending their Christian identity and also more generally as the word for a witness.7 In Homily 14 from February 513, for example, Severus noted martyrs’ bloodshed alongside their 4 Although Severus preached in a wide variety of locations during his time in residence, from a variety of local churches and martyrs’ shrines to other regional churches and monasteries, in this essay I focus generally on what listeners to his homilies would have heard, even though the members of his audience varied. On the diversity of Severus’ preaching locations, see, for example, P. Allen, “Severus of Antioch as a Pastoral Carer,” Studia Patristica 35 (2001): 353–368. 5 M. Gaddis, There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 6 D. Fruchtman, Living Martyrs in Late Antiquity and Beyond: Surviving Martyrdom (London: Routledge, 2023). See also D. Fruchtman, “Modeling a Martyrial Worldview: Prudentius’ Pedagogical Ekphrasis and Christianization,” Journal of Late Antiquity 7 (2014): 130–158. See also, Ch. Shepardson, “Martyrs of Exile: John of Ephesus and Religious Persecution in Late Antiquity,” in Heirs of Roman Persecution: Studies on a Christian and para-Christian Discourse in Late Antiquity, ed. É. Fournier and W. Mayer (New York: Routledge, 2019), 277–295; Ch. Shepardson, “Suffering Saints: Shaping Narratives of Violence after Chalcedon,” in Religious Violence in Antiquity: New Perspectives, ed. J. Dikstra and Ch. Raschle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 345–366. 7 Presumably in Severus’ original Greek, these would have been forms of μαρτυρέω but they are ܳ ܽ ܶ ]. preserved in Syriac as forms of sahed/sāhdutā [‫ ܳܣܗܕܘܬܐ‬/‫ܣܗܕ‬

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role as teachers and witnesses when he said, “it is the custom to call them ‘sāhde,’ those who through their expression give credence to the things that can’t be demonstrated … for the expression of the sāhde of Christ is the pouring out of their blood that followed the first and divine pouring out of blood shed for us by ‘the lamb of God’ … who witnessed [‫ܕܐܣܗܕ‬ ̣ ] to himself before these others.”8 Similarly, in Homily 102, Severus claimed that someone who spoke godly words must have resolve like a sāhdā and be ready to suffer, and that is why Psalms gave the word “sāhedwatā/confessions (martyrdoms)” to godly speech.9 Through this rhetoric, anyone who witnessed to Christian truth, which in Severus’ time happened more often in arguments between Chalcedonian and anti-Chalcedonian Christians than in a Christian’s unjust violent death, became at least martyr-like and often a martyr-witness-sāhdā themselves. Likewise, Severus expanded his use of terms like athlete,10 and ܽ struggle (aguna [‫ܐܓܘܢܐ‬ ]/ἀγων),11 to conflate earlier martyrs’ struggles with those of Christian ascetics and other “witnesses,” including Jesus’ mother as well as Severus himself and his audience.12 For Severus, martyrs were importantly both role models and teachers, whether they lived or died as a result of their witnessing to orthodox Christianity, a practice that he particularly emphasized in the midst of the Christological controversies over the Council of Chalcedon and the vacillating imperial definition of Christian orthodoxy in these decades.13 Severus called upon his audience in Homily 78 on the “holy sāhde Tarachos, Probos, and Andronicos” 8

Severus, Homily 14.1–2 (PO 38: 400). This translation is only lightly revised in consultation of the Syriac in the PO from the translation provided in Allen and Hayward, Severus, 111. 9 Severus, Homily 102 (PO 22: 279–280); Psalm 118.46. 10 For example, Severus, Homily 18 (PO 37: 10); Homily 41 (PO 36: 21); Homily 30 (PO 36: 611); Homily 75 (PO 12: 113, 120); Homily 91 (PO 25: 17, 25–26). 11 See for example, Severus, Homily 78 (PO 20: 278); Homily 91 (PO 25: 17, 25–26); Homily 91 (PO 25: 17); Homily 75 (PO 12: 114). 12 Severus, Homily 14.3 (PO 38.400). 13 On the complexity of defining Christian orthodoxy in this period, see, I. Torrance, Christology After Chalcedon: Severus of Antioch and Sergius the Monophysite (Norwich: The Canterbury Press, 1988), 3–74; W.H.C. Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement. Chapters in the History of the Church in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); V. Menze, Justinian and the Making of the Syrian Orthodox Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); A. Kofsky, “Severus of Antioch and Christological Politics in the Early Sixth Century,” Proche-Orient Chrétien 57 (2007): 43–57; P. Gray, The Defense of Chalcedon in the East (451–553) (Leiden: Brill, 1979); P. Gray, Claiming the Mantle of Cyril: Cyril of Alexandria and the Road to Chalcedon (Leuven: Peeters, 2021). In examining Severus’ method of conceiving of orthodoxy, R. Roux argues he was deeply influenced by his legal training in Beirut: R. Roux, “The Concept of Orthodoxy in the Cathedral Homilies of Severus of Antioch,” Studia Patristica 35 (2001): 488–493.

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to “consider the sāhde and learn from them,” in particular “both to think and to say the same things on the subject of the one and only God” and to hold orthodox teachings consistently without being “tossed” in one doctrinal direction and then another.14 Severus echoed this concern for doctrinal constancy in Homily 100 on the early martyr Drosis, saying, “You [‫ ]ܐܢܬ‬praise, o excellent one, the steadfastness of the sacred struggles [agune] of the young woman of Christ; then be instructed and learn through these things that which you praise, and when the time calls, endure those reproaches for (your) piety [šafirut deḥlta], and profess before people the healthy faith, and do not change with the times.”15 Severus further asked his audience to learn from the story of Tarachos, Probos, and Andronicos to “get on your knees for prayer,” and assured them, “All this was written for our warning, so that we would be zealous for good things.”16 Severus thus used early martyrs’ stories to encourage less than lethal behavior among his congregants, including prayer and zealous devotion, but most pointedly stressing that they should maintain a steadfast commitment to (anti-Chalcedonian) orthodoxy.

Asceticizing Antiochenes: Modeling Ideal Lives

When we examine more closely what sort of martyrial living Severus asked his audience to undertake, we find that his rhetoric often focused on a criticism of congregants’ participation in the spectacles of the theater, horse races, athletic competitions, and other games for which Antioch was so famous. Severus, like John Chrysostom, chastised Antiochenes for their love of spectacles, which he argued compromised their Christian virtue.17 In the case of Homily 26 on Theodore of Antioch, for example, Severus recounted this martyr’s struggles not so much with the expectation that his audience would imitate Theodore in offering their body for brutal and lethal torture, but that the martyr’s example would lead Severus’ more comfortable audience to avoid the spectacles that threatened their spiritual calm and ultimately their eternal salvation.18 14 15 16 17

Severus, Homily 78 (PO 20: 278), from Sept 6, 515 CE. Severus, Homily 100 (PO 22: 245). Severus, Homily 78 (PO 20: 295). Severus, Homily 26 (PO 36: 544–549, 553); Homily 76 (PO 12: 135–141). See also F. Graffin, “La vie à Antioche d’après les homélies de Sévère. Invectives contre les courses de chevaux, le theater et les jeux olympiques,” in Erkenntisse und Meinung, vol. 2, ed. G. Wiessner, Göttinger Orientforschungen, 1. Reihe: Syriaca, Bd. 17 (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1978), 2: 115–130. 18 Severus, Homily 26 (PO 36: 545, 549).

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Severus similarly used the martyr Julian’s story to teach against “those who go to the spectacle of the wild beasts.”19 In general in Severus’ writings, martyrs’ stories instructed the bishop’s audience in the importance of valuing the eternal over the worldly, that is, of rejecting worldly pleasures like theatrical spectacles and wealth, and prioritizing ascetic practice under the care of his anti-Chalcedonian church. In some cases Severus specifically asked the women in his audience to imitate earlier martyrs in their commitment to lifelong virginity, although he often paired perpetual virginity with vows of chastity, making his asceticizing goals accessible to wives and mothers as well as virgins. In Homily 97, Severus called upon his audience to imitate “the powerful martyr [‫ ]ܣܗܕܬܐ‬Thecla,” for example, not in being willing to die a violent death, but in her virginity or at least by living “dignified and chaste lives.”20 Severus also asked his congregants to imitate the martyr Drosis in her devotion more than in her death; as Severus explained, “By her spirit she is joined and engaged with these souls that are contending vigorously and valiantly in a manner similar to her own.”21 Severus asked rhetorical questions of his audience in an effort to foster greater devotion, wondering out loud why “we” don’t desire the advantages of heaven; why “we don’t practice steadfastness or the chaste life.”22 He spoke of his hope that women in particular would imitate Drosis in her virginity or at least in a chaste marriage; “you praise, you say to me, o woman, the virginity of Drosis,” Severus said; “be zealous in that occupation that you praise.”23 Not mentioning any expectation of contemporary women suffering a violent death, Severus rather focused on his audience imitating these early martyrs in prioritizing eternal salvation over material pleasure through an asceticizing Christian life. In addition to living chastely, Severus’ models for living martyrially also detached themselves from material wealth, something that the bishop’s examples suggest was ideally imitated in his own day by donating generously to his church.24 Severus emphasized that the martyr Drosis, for example, gave 19 Severus, Homily 75 (PO 12: 131). 20 Severus, Homily 97 (PO 25: 138). On this homily, see also C. Burrus, “Imagining Thecla: Rhetorical Strategies in Severus of Antioch’s 97th Cathedral Homily,” Studia Patristica 42 (2006): 83–88. 21 Severus, Homily 100 (PO 22: 241). 22 Severus, Homily 100 (PO 22: 242). 23 Severus, Homily 100 (PO 22: 243–244). 24 On the complex role that wealth played in late antique Christianity, see J. Maxwell, Simplicity and Humility in Late Antique Christian Thought: Elites and the Challenges of Apostolic Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); P. Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012).

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up all of her rich worldly goods in favor of spiritual rewards; “she closed her eyes to everything that could be perceived by the senses, and fixed the eyes of her mind on heaven.”25 “For the true commemoration of the martyrs,” Severus insisted to his Antiochene congregants, “is the imitation of their perfection. It’s for this reason also that we have this (commemoration) … in order that by the memory and imitation of their endurance and valor … we will toss far from ourselves the sleep of worldly cares.”26 In other words, Severus hoped to refocus what he represented as a typical concern for worldly cares onto a Christian concern for eternal riches that could be acquired by, among other things, giving earthly wealth to his church. Severus specifically addressed his expectation that his congregation should make greater financial donations to his church. To the men, he said, you [‫ ]ܐܢܬ‬praise the martyr – well, “show the praise in your action; give from your resources to the needy,” or at least “don’t covet the things of others.”27 Severus chastised all his congregants for not giving more of their resources to the church.28 For, he says, “all the men and all the women run frequently to this holy temple [‫]ܗܝܟܠܐ‬. They make their prayers, and offer their requests, and delight in the aid and intercession of the martyr … But no one considers the honorable table of the holy priesthood … no one condescends as a powerful act … to bring the fruit of even one pound of silver.”29 In these ways Severus adjusted the rhetoric of martyrdom to his new imperially supported context, asking his congregants to imitate the martyrs not through sacrificing their lives but by living more ascetically and privileging spiritual over earthly riches. What earthly wealth they have, he suggested, would best be given to God through his church. For Severus, combining the forty days of the Lenten fast with the forty soldier-martyrs of Sebaste (Sivas in Roman Lesser Armenian, now eastern Turkey) was a particularly potent tool for instructing his audience in how they could imitate the martyrs through asceticizing practices in their ongoing daily living.30 In Homily 18 from March 9, 513, Severus told his congregants that the forty days of Lenten fasting should make them remember these forty martyrs, and that remembering the martyrs should make them want to fast and 25 26 27 28 29 30

Severus, Homily 100 (PO 22: 240). Severus, Homily 100 (PO 22: 243). Severus, Homily 100 (PO 22: 244–245). Severus, Homily 100 (PO 22: 246). Severus, Homily 100 (PO 22: 246). On the martyrium outside Antioch’s city walls that was associated with the martyr Barlaam and the forty martyrs of Sebaste, see W. Mayer and P. Allen, The Churches of Syrian Antioch (300–638 CE) (Leuven: Peeters, 2012), 49–51.

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perform other acts of endurance and penitence like the martyrs did.31 Those in his audience who lived such “a good and virtuous life” would, Severus promised, thus be prepared for the resurrection “like the martyrs.”32 These martyrs were models of “longsuffering,” and Severus hoped, “Therefore, we too, having learned the martyrs’ tactics, let us stir ourselves up against debilitating fornication (and), in the face of the passion which turns us savage like wild beasts, let us train ourselves to calmness.”33 Severus valued as “steadfast” those who made a hard choice to live ascetically and avoid the horse races.34 Thus, earlier martyrs (whose deaths and their later narration ironically provided their own commemorative spectacles) should inspire Christians to a life of fasting and emotional calm far from the city’s theater and hippodrome. “For, if we wish it, there is even now,” Severus said from the comfort of his episcopal church, “a time for sāhdutā/witness-martyrdom.”35 Severus thus elided contemporary asceticizing and doctrinal Christian steadfastness with the violent sufferings of early Christian martyrs. The following year on March 8, 514, Severus again used the spectacle of these forty martyrs of Sebaste in Homily 41 to enhance his comparison of martyrdom with his congregants’ Lenten sacrifices.36 Severus preached that the early martyrs who willingly suffered a violent death “persuade the weak to contend together in times that resemble theirs,”37 and he encouraged his congregants to fast as a way to imitate and honor the martyrs, claiming that by abstaining from all passions and mortifying their bodies by fasting during these forty days, they like the early martyrs would also be “decorated by the crowns of sāhdutā/witness-martyrdom.”38 Severus elaborated on this comparison in this homily, expanding what mundane daily actions his congregants could perform and consider themselves to be imitating the holy martyrs: “their steadfastness in the cold, we repay by withering from ascetic practice, and by the drying 31 Severus, Homily 18 (PO 37: 6). All quotations from this homily are from the English in Allen and Hayward, Severus, 118–126, with consultation of the Syriac in the PO. For the dating of this text, see Allen and Hayward, Severus, 108. As Allen has noted, Homily 15 from this same Lenten period of 513 “strongly discouraged” the laity, in her words, “from attending the horse races” and rather encouraged them to imitate the emperor Anastasius “because he does not attend such spectacles, but instead prays for the church, attends vigils, and maintains the ascetic life”: Allen, “Severus of Antioch as a Source for Lay Piety,” 715; see also Severus, Homily 15 (PO 38: 432). 32 Severus, Homily 18 (PO 37: 8). 33 Severus, Homily 18 (PO 37: 12). 34 Severus, Homily 18 (PO 37: 20). 35 Severus, Homily 18 (PO 37: 12). 36 Severus, Homily 41 (PO 36: 14). 37 Severus, Homily 41 (PO 36: 14). 38 Severus, Homily 41 (PO 36: 16).

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up of our desires when we diligently practice chastity instead of fornication; and [we repay] the nakedness of their holy bodies … in giving clothes to those who are in need.”39 Beyond these ascetic practices and acts of charity, Severus added, “Look how the single act of thinking about the actions of the martyrs … leads out of us such rich fonts of profit,” implying that even the thought of their accomplishments already benefitted his congregants.40 Severus ended this homily with a return to this comparison between his congregants and the earlier martyrs, but this time with an eye toward the contemporary doctrinal conflicts: “We pray, we too, that the agune/combats and the athletic records of these sāhde … might be before our eyes during our whole life so that in similar times we won’t abandon the truth,” and that we will be worthy of the kingdom of heaven.41 While it might have surprised some in his audience to consider their relatively comfortable existence in early sixth-century Antioch as “similar” to the context of these earlier Christians’ violent deaths, Severus was clear about what it meant to him to live martyrially in the present circumstances; remembering the earlier martyrs should lead his congregants to avoid excessive passions and the corrupting city spectacles, give material goods to those in need, fast and live chastely, and unwaveringly confess anti-Chalcedonian orthodoxy without “abandoning the truth.” Bishop Severus thus used the martyrs’ stories to encourage his congregants to make their devotion to his church visible in their orthodox beliefs as well as in asceticizing practices.

“Let These Mothers … Who Do Not Love Their Children Listen”: Mothers as Role Models and Teachers

In several of Severus’ sermons, mothers have a special place as role models and teachers, both the mothers in the martyrs’ stories and also contemporary Antiochene mothers whose children Severus hoped to draw further into his church. Antioch’s local history in some ways laid a foundation for these teachings, since the city hosted a memorial to the Maccabean martyrs that was frequented by John Chrysostom’s fourth-century church congregants.42 39 40 41 42

Severus, Homily 41 (PO 36: 24). Severus, Homily 41 (PO 36: 24). Severus, Homily 41 (PO 36: 28). For a cave in Antioch’s suburb of Daphne that may have been associated with the Maccabean martyrs, see John Chrysostom, Adversus Judaeos 1.6 (PG 48: 852); cf., 1.8.1 (PG 48: 855); Homily 3 in Epistolam Ad Titum (PG 62: 675–82). For a church in Antioch related to the Maccabean martyrs, see John Chrysostom, pan. mart. 1 (PG 50.647); Augustine, sermo 300 (PL 38: 1376–80). See also, Ch. Shepardson, Controlling Contested Places: Late Antique Antioch and the Spatial Politics of Religious Controversy (Berkeley: University of

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These Jewish martyrs’ hagiographical story commemorated the heroism of an elderly teacher, seven brothers who were his students, and the boys’ mother who encouraged her sons to suffer torturous deaths before her eyes rather than renounce their commitment to kashrut, allegedly under the Hellenizing efforts of Antiochus IV.43 The story of the forty martyrs of Sebaste mentioned above also included the story of a devoted mother who caused her son to remain steadfast in his commitment to suffer martyrdom, in that case to assure the Christian promise of eternal reward, and Severus also recounted the story of the martyr Julian’s mother who likewise encouraged her son’s violent death for its spiritual benefit. While it is little surprise that this sixth-century ascetic bishop advocated lives of celibacy for his congregants, it is noteworthy that he also spent considerable time articulating significant roles for mothers in his church. For all the men and the women of his congregation, Severus redefined martyrdom in a context of privilege to advocate prioritizing the ascetic practices and doctrinal constancy that would guarantee eternal salvation over the luxuries of the ephemeral material world. In revising the definition of martyrdom during his years in Antioch’s episcopal church, though, he offered mothers a significant role in shaping the future of this church community in the very same ways the earlier martyrs did, that is, through their positions as role models and teachers. Mothers are unusually visible in Severus’ sermons from Antioch. In fact, one of Severus’ epistles to the noblewoman Caesaria similarly reveals that despite his love of asceticism, Severus insisted that this woman should place the needs of her husband, children, and household above even her desire for a life of ascetic withdrawal and abstinence.44 Severus wrote to Caesaria, “You California Press, 2014), 114–115; and Mayer and Allen, Churches, 90–93; cf. 143. Discussions of Antiochenes’ honoring of the Maccabees are complex. Raphaëlle Ziadé has rejected the association of the cave in Daphne with the Maccabees: R. Ziadé, Les martyrs Maccabées: de l’histoire juive au culte chrétien, les homélies de Grégoire de Nazianze et de Jean Chrysostome (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 119–120. See also M. Vinson, “Gregory Nazianzen’s Homily 15 and the Genesis of the Christian Cult of the Maccabean Martyrs,” Byzantion 64 (1994): 166–192; L. Triebel, “Das angebliche Synagoge der makkabäischen Märtyrer in Antiochia am Orontes,” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 9 (2005): 464–495; L.V. Rutgers, “The Importance of Scripture in the Conflict between Jews and Christians: The Example of Antioch,” in The Use of Sacred Books in the Ancient World, ed. L.V. Rutgers, et al. (Leuven: Peeters, 1998), 287–303. 43 4 Macc. 8–18 (cf., 2 Macc. 7). 44 Severus, Epistle 10.7 (Brooks, 450–454; Syriac, 506–511). All translations from this epistle are from the English translation in E.W. Brooks, The Sixth Book of the Select Letters of Severus, Patriarch of Antioch, In the Syriac version of Athanasius of Nisibis, vol. 2, part 2 (London: Williams & Norgate, 1904), with reference to the Syriac text in volume 1, part 2.

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besought me to pray on behalf of your modesty that the Lord would release you from the bonds of this world, and would bring you to the calm haven of penitence, seeing that you are buried as you say in the evils of this world.”45 But rather than encourage this path for her, a path that he otherwise strongly encouraged as an ideal Christian life for men and women, Severus wrote that Caesaria should look not “at her personal chastity only,” but also that of her husband.46 Severus taught Caesaria that rather than adopt a life of asceticism to further only her own eternal reward, she should instead “be one who loves her husband and loves her children and is a good housekeeper, in order that through these things you may at the same time be also one who loves God.”47 In this letter and some of his Antiochene sermons, Severus relied on the social perception that mothers played a particularly influential role in shaping the virtue and Christian commitments of the rest of the members of their family. After addressing his broader audience in his homily on the martyr Drosis, as noted above, Severus specifically addressed wealthy Antiochene women and mothers in the hope they would give some of their family’s material wealth to his church. Severus wrote, “what will I say again concerning all these women who are being brought to the bath with vessels of many pounds of silver”; and if a king’s daughter came to town and got engaged, he argued, each one of these women would give an expensive gift, “but for the martyr who renounced the earthly realm and became the daughter of the King and the heavenly Father, and became the bride of Christ, you [‫ ]ܐܢܬܝ‬are lazy, you are negligent, and you delay to give any of these objects. But extend your hand and give joyously.”48 Severus promised that such financial generosity to his church would not be one-sided, and that the women who gave would also receive. It is in that context that we learn that they are not merely women but more specifically wives and mothers with hopes for the material and worldly success of their family. Severus promised the women, “You will be worthy of rich rewards”; he elaborated by saying that in return for their gifts, their heavenly betrothed “will give your children health, aptitude for studies, and other things over which parents rejoice for their children; he will give your husband, along with good health, also an abundance of honest gains. For your household and your possessions, blessings and grace from on high, and after all these things, after departing here,

45 46 47 48

Severus is not alone in asking a wife to forego asceticism for the sake of her family; see, for example, Augustine’s Letter to Ecdicia. Severus, Epistle 10.7 (Brooks, 450; Syriac, 506). Severus, Epistle 10.7 (Brooks, 452; Syriac, 508). Severus, Epistle 10.7 (Brooks, 454; Syriac, 511). Severus, Homily 100 (PO 22: 247–248).

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the heavenly kingdom.”49 Such assurances reveal that Severus here addressed particularly wives and mothers, hoping to intervene in what he anticipated would be mothers’ concerted efforts to assure certain forms of worldly success for their families. Severus taught all of his congregation to strengthen their devotion to the church, but he hoped to persuade women by claiming that it would not only give them and their family a heavenly reward, but also in the meantime good health and material success for their entire household.50 While Homily 100 presumed mothers’ interest in their children’s worldly success, other homilies asked mothers to imitate the martyr stories by being role models in donating to the church and the needy, and by teaching their children to avoid the theaters and encouraging them in a life in the church. Severus praised the martyr Julian’s mother, for example, because when a pagan judge ordered her to persuade her son to abandon his commitment to Christianity, she said to her son, “save yourself [‫]ܛܪ ܐܢܬ ܠܟ‬,” instructing him in language that sounded to the judge as if it complied with his orders, but that in fact told Julian to stay steadfast in his devotion to the Christian God in order to guarantee eternal salvation through martyrdom.51 Severus implored his sixth-century audience, “Let the mothers remember the strong mother of the martyr, and let them teach their children these things that are beautiful and agreeable to God, lest they [the mothers] consent to their [childrens’] sin.”52 In Homily 41 on Lent and the forty martyrs, Severus addressed mothers in his audience directly, saying, “And you (women), in the same way, prevent your children from walking on the noxious and destructive path of the spectacles – that is, the horse races, the disgraceful songs, and these dancers”; he asked Antiochene mothers to “snatch” their children “from corruption,” as this fortieth martyr’s mother did for her son when she threw his weakened body on the pile of those to be martyred.53 Severus thus taught that different forms of witness were appropriate in different contexts, but that a mother’s influence could be critical in each. In early sixth-century Antioch, sāhdutā did not require mothers to hand their children over to be killed, but rather required them to teach their children to stay on the virtuous path by avoiding the city’s popular spectacles and other habits that Severus considered dangerous to their eternal salvation. 49 Severus, Homily 100 (PO 22: 248). 50 Note that this representation of mothers’ interest contrasts with John Chrysostom’s description of fathers wanting their sons to go into the military while their mothers would have supported a life in the church: see John Chrysostom, Against the Opponents of the Monastic Life 3.12. 51 Severus, Homily 75 (PO 12: 127). 52 Severus, Homily 75 (PO 12: 131). 53 Severus, Homily 41 (PO 36: 26–28).

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In some of these homilies, Severus used martyrs’ stories to intervene in what he presumed would be (and perhaps knew to be) some mothers’ hesitation to encourage their children’s devotion to a life in the church, perhaps because it seemed to be at odds with the very types of material success that he elsewhere represented as normative ideals in the city. Homilies 18 and 41 on Lent and the forty martyrs of Sebaste, for example, narrated some behaviors that he suggested were commonplace that he hoped to change. These martyrs’ stories included an agonizing scene in which the mother of the only man who was still breathing after a bitter night in an icy lake picked up her son and threw him onto the pile of saints’ bodies so that he would die with them as a martyr rather than be left behind alive.54 In Homily 18, Severus turned to the story of this surviving martyr’s mother for the purpose of instructing Christian mothers in early sixth-century Antioch, warning them to privilege eternal over earthly rewards. He used the early martyr’s mother to chastise his congregants: “Let these mothers who love the flesh, but do not love (their) children listen, be instructed, and learn the hope of a mother, a virile hope, and as is proper for Christians, and let them hasten towards the things to come.”55 In his effort to have his congregants privilege the spiritual over the material, Severus here went so far as to claim that mothers who focused on the worldly cares of their children – the very successes that he elsewhere promised them in exchange for their financial donations – in fact did not actually love their children; if they did love them, they would push their children toward devoting their lives more fully to God. In 514 Severus more specifically used this martyr’s mother’s story to teach mothers in his audience how to teach their children properly, in this case with respect to fasting and devotion to the church: “Let the mothers resemble her in this, that they prove themselves no stranger to piety when they see their chilܰ ] loved by God; and if one of you sees dren give themselves to the labor [‫ܥܡ ܴܠܐ‬ her son fasting, again let her increase his cheerfulness by a wise and maternal [‫ ]ܐܡܗܝܬܐ‬exhortation, rather than noting the pallor of his face.”56 In this 54

On the idea of Christian parents being asked to be willing to sacrifice their children to show their devotion to God, and the biblical exempla that were used to encourage them, see also C. Schroeder, “Child Sacrifice in Egyptian Monastic Culture: From Familial Renunciation to Jephthah’s Lost Daughter,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 20, no. 2 (2012): 269–302; C. Schroeder, Children and Family in Late Antique Egyptian Monasticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); and M. Doerfler, Jephthah’s Daughter, Sarah’s Son: The Death of Children in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019). 55 Severus, Homily 18 (PO 37: 20). 56 Severus, Homily 41 (PO 36: 26). For the dating of this text, see Allen and Hayward, Severus, 108.

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passage, Severus presumed that most mothers, upon seeing their child pale from fasting, let alone about to die, would think first of their child’s physical well-being. In an effort to change this response, Severus exhorted Antiochene mothers to focus instead on the benefits of their children’s temporary physical suffering for their eternal spiritual salvation, whether their child suffered in a martyr’s death like in the story or, in the more likely scenario during the bishop’s time in Antioch, in the fasting of ascetic Christian practice. Severus went further in this comparison, saying about a son’s physical suffering and his mother’s response, “in the face of (his) participation in the suffering/Passion [‫] ܰܚ ܳܫܐ‬, it is not proper that she fall…. And if she finds him going to the church, and being steadfast in the service, and in prayer, let her rejoice with him at once because of (his) excellence, and let her immediately increase the riches with him.”57 Here Severus explicitly addressed his concern that early sixth-century mothers would be likely to interfere if their child showed interest in a life in the church. In fact, Severus asked Antiochene mothers not only to allow their children to choose such a life, but to shift from socially normative maternal behavior to the behavior modeled by ideal Christian martyrs’ mothers and to actively encourage their children to take up a life of Christian prayer and asceticism. These intriguing remarks suggest that many Antiochene mothers had ambitions for their children’s worldly success, and would be concerned by seeing their bodies suffering and their time spent devoted to prayer and fasting. On this topic, Severus’ rhetoric foreshadowed the Syriac Life of John of Tella written by John’s disciple Elias in the years soon after John’s and Severus’ deaths in 538. This text echoed Severus’ in presuming that a typical early sixth-century Syrian mother would want her son to succeed by worldly standards, and also in praising an ideal Christian mother who taught her son to avoid civic spectacles and who eventually accepted his ascetic practices on account of their more valuable spiritual rewards. Elias spoke of a mother’s influence when he praised John of Tella’s mother for raising her son “with every care, attention, and diligence with regard to his soul and to his body as well.”58 In particular, 57 Severus, Homily 41 (PO 36: 26). 58 Elias, Life of John of Tella (Ghanem, 49; Brooks, 39). All translations from this text are from the English translation by Ghanem, which is based on the Syriac text edited by Brooks. J.R. Ghanem, “The Biography of John of Tella (d. AD 537) by Elias: Translated from the Syriac with a Historical Introduction and Linguistic Commentaries, PhD Dissertation,” Madison, WI, 1970; E.W. Brooks, Vita Virorum, Apud Monophysitas Celeberrimorum, CSCO 7, Scri. Syr. 7 (Leuven: Peeters, 1960), 29–95. Ghanem includes a lengthy commentary on the text. See also the more recent discussion in N. Andrade, “The Syriac Life of John of Tella and the Frontier Politeia,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 12 (2009): 199–234. For a brief introduction to John of Tella, see also V. Menze and K. Akalin, John of Tella’s Profession of Faith: The Legacy of a Sixth-Century Syrian Orthodox Bishop (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2009), 7–17.

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Elias referenced the role of a mother as a teacher when he wrote that John’s mother “was concerned to educate her son in every good thing and in all honest ways. She would not be for him a cause of scandal in anything, nor would she be found a cause of disgraceful sin, the deed of the devil.”59 Elias observed, however, that typical mothers in his world would be concerned by their son leaving the wealth of the material world in favor of an ascetic life in the church. Elias wrote that when John of Tella withdrew to stay with some ascetics, his mother was very upset and when she learned where he had gone, she “went after him” and “brought him back to her home.”60 As Elias wrote, when John’s mother learned that he wanted to leave the life of marriage and a successful worldly career that she had planned for him in favor of a life of asceticism, “She did what all mothers who are deprived of such excellent children would do: she responded with crying, sadness, and bewailing,” and she tried to dissuade her son from his plan by telling him, “You can please God and still stay in the world.”61 The danger of these maternal responses that Severus and Elias presented as typical was, of course, that they might dissuade young Christians from pursuing a life in the church. Elias’ story of John also echoed Severus’ preaching, however, in offering an ideal maternal role model for his audience that encouraged mothers to support their children in devoting their lives to Christian asceticism. Elias continued the story of John’s life by explaining that after his mother forcibly brought him back from the ascetics’ dwelling to their home, John arranged with his tutor to fast and pray in secret in his mother’s house. Even though John’s tutor dutifully ate the food that was brought for John, however, thereby temporarily obscuring John’s abstinence, John’s mother nevertheless “saw that the color of her son’s face and the brightness of his youth had changed” from the fasting, and expressed her concern,62 just as Severus’ Homily 41 described a mother’s concern over “noting the pallor” of her fasting son’s face.63 While Elias presented this as a typical mother’s response, however, he praised John’s mother for eventually overcoming her initial impulses in order to act as an ideal Christian mother, much in the way that Severus hoped to persuade Antiochene mothers to respond with an encouraging “wise and maternal exhortation.”64 Elias wrote that after John’s mother’s initial efforts to dissuade her son from an ascetic life, she was finally persuaded of its value and “she conformed her will to her son’s will in everything. In mutual agreement they freed all their male and female 59 60 61 62 63 64

Elias, Life of John of Tella (Ghanem, 49; Brooks, 40). Elias, Life of John of Tella (Ghanem, 51; Brooks, 41–42). Elias, Life of John of Tella (Ghanem, 55, 52; Brooks, 45, 42). Elias, Life of John of Tella (Ghanem, 53; Brooks, 43). Severus, Homily 41 (PO 36: 26). Severus, Homily 41 (PO 36: 26).

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slaves and they distributed much of their possessions to the poor, the saints, and the widows.”65 Elias’ Life and Severus’ earlier homilies suggest that winning the hearts and minds of young would-be ascetics or clergy was only half the battle when a well-meaning mother had other plans for their children’s future, and that mothers were influential power brokers in the late antique landscape. In these examples Severus reshaped the definition of martyrdom and ideal motherhood in his imperially supported context, and expected mothers to play a particularly influential role in producing a steadfastly orthodox and asceticizing church community.

Conclusion

Many of Severus’ near contemporaries used martyrs’ stories to encourage perseverance in suffering, some of it due to imperially condoned persecution against those who rejected the Council of Chalcedon. Severus delivered these homilies, however, during his years in residence as Antioch’s bishop under the supportive emperor Anastasius, and as a result, he did not here ask his followers to persevere through violent imperial persecution like the early martyrs did. Instead, Severus turned the rhetoric of martyrdom to address daily living, like avoiding corrupting spectacles, living ascetically, and giving money to his church. Severus assumed that mothers had a particularly influential role in teaching their children the values and commitments that could lead them to choose a life of Christian asceticism, and sometimes in trying to prevent them from leaving a life of worldly promise for a life of renunciation in the church. Thus, despite Severus’ love of asceticism, his priority for a married mother is that she first look after the salvation of her husband and children, and then take an ascetic vow herself only after her family’s eternal future has been secured. In this way, while Severus joined other sixth-century authors in acknowledging that it was normative for mothers to encourage their sons to strive for material and worldly success, he joined other Christian writers in praising mothers who could see beyond these earthly rewards and who valued more highly the spiritual rewards of eternal salvation, achieved through the rejection of worldly pleasures and goods and through the adoption of a life of Christian ascetic renunciation and prayer. While Severus was typical in celebrating martyrs and suffering as integral to Christianity, his homilies about martyrdom from 512–518 were most immediately for the purpose not of 65

Elias, Life of John of Tella (Ghanem, 55; Brooks, 45).

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encouraging those suffering physical torture to persevere, but of encouraging those who were quite comfortable to live more ascetically, to remain steadfast in the anti-Chalcedonian church in these decades of doctrinal turmoil, to prioritize the spiritual over the material world, and so to imitate the martyrs in less immediately fatal ways. An examination of these homilies reveals Severus’ focus on mothers as powerful influences in shaping their children’s futures, futures that he hoped to persuade these mothers would benefit the whole family, both in this world and the next, if they were more closely tied to this controversial bishop and his anti-Chalcedonian church. Bibliography Allen, P. “Severus of Antioch and the Homily: The End of the Beginning?,” in The Sixth Century – End of Beginning?, ed. P. Allen and E.M. Jeffreys, Byzantina Australiensia 10 (Brisbane: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, 1996), 165–177. Allen, P. “A Bishop’s Spirituality: The Case of Severus of Antioch,” in Prayer and Spirituality in the Early Church, vol. 1, ed. P. Allen, R. Canning, L. Cross, with B.J. Caiger (Brisbane: Centre for Early Christian Studies, 1998), 169–180. Allen, P. “Severus of Antioch as a Pastoral Carer,” Studia Patristica 35 (2001): 353–368. Allen, P. “Severus of Antioch as a Source for Lay Piety in Late Antiquity,” in Historiam Perscrutari. Miscellanea di studi offerti al prof. Ottorino Pasquato, ed. M. Maritano (Rom: LAS, 2002), 711–721. Allen, P. and C.T.R. Hayward, Severus of Antioch (London: Routledge, 2004). Andrade, N. “The Syriac Life of John of Tella and the Frontier Politeia,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 12 (2009): 199–234. Brière, M. “Les homélies de Sévère d’Antioche: Introduction générale à toutes les homélies,” Patrologia Orientalis 29, no. 1 (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1960), 50–62. Brière, M., F. Graffin, et al., ed. and trans. Les Homiliae Cathedrales de Sévère d’Antioche, Patrologia Orientalis 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 22, 23, 25, 26, 29, 35, 36, 37, 38 (Paris: Firmin-Didot; Turnhout: Brepols, 1906–1976). Brooks, W.E., trans. The Sixth Book of the Select Letters of Severus, Patriarch of Antioch, In the Syriac version of Athanasius of Nisibis, vol. 2, part 2 (London: Williams & Norgate, 1904). Brooks, E.W., ed. Vita Virorum, Apud Monophysitas Celeberrimorum, CSCO 7, Scri. Syr. 7 (Leuven: Peeters, 1960). Brown, P. Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012). Burrus, C. “Imagining Thecla: Rhetorical Strategies in Severus of Antioch’s 97th Cathedral Homily,” Studia Patristica 42 (2006): 83–88.

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Doerfler, M. Jephthah’s Daughter, Sarah’s Son: The Death of Children in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019). Downey, G. A History of Antioch in Syria from Seleucus to the Arab Conquest (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961). Frend, W.H.C. The Rise of the Monophysite Movement. Chapters in the History of the Church in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). Fruchtman, D. Living Martyrs in Late Antiquity and Beyond: Surviving Martyrdom (London: Routledge, 2023). Fruchtman, D. “Modeling a Martyrial Worldview: Prudentius’ Pedagogical Ekphrasis and Christianization,” Journal of Late Antiquity 7 (2014): 130–158. Gaddis, M. There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Ghanem, J.R., trans. “The Biography of John of Tella (d. A.D. 537) by Elias: Translated from the Syriac with a Historical Introduction and Linguistic Commentaries,” PhD Dissertation, Madison, WI, 1970. Graffin, F. “La vie à Antioche d’après les homélies de Sévère. Invectives contre les courses de chevaux, le theater et les jeux olympiques,” in Erkenntisse und Meinung, vol. 2, ed. G. Wiessner, Göttinger Orientforschungen, 1. Reihe: Syriaca, Bd. 17 (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1978), 115–130. Gray, P. The Defense of Chalcedon in the East (451–553) (Leiden: Brill, 1979). Gray, P. Claiming the Mantle of Cyril: Cyril of Alexandria and the Road to Chalcedon (Leuven: Peeters, 2021). Kofsky, A. “Severus of Antioch and Christological Politics in the Early Sixth Century,” Proche-Orient Chrétien 57 (2007): 43–57. Maxwell, J. Simplicity and Humility in Late Antique Christian Thought: Elites and the Challenges of Apostolic Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). Mayer, W. and P. Allen, The Churches of Syrian Antioch (300–638 CE) (Leuven: Peeters, 2012). Menze, V. Justinian and the Making of the Syrian Orthodox Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Menze, V. and K. Akalin. John of Tella’s Profession of Faith: The Legacy of a Sixth-Century Syrian Orthodox Bishop (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2009). Moss, Y. Incorruptible Bodies: Christology, Society, and Authority in Late Antiquity (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016). van Rompay, L. “Severus, Patriarch of Antioch (512–538), in the Greek, Syriac, and Coptic Traditions,” Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 8 (2008): 3–22. Roux, R. “The Concept of Orthodoxy in the Cathedral Homilies of Severus of Antioch,” Studia Patristica 35 (2001): 488–493.

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Rutgers, L.V. “The Importance of Scripture in the Conflict between Jews and Christians: The Example of Antioch,” in The Use of Sacred Books in the Ancient World, ed. L.V. Rutgers, et al. (Leuven: Peeters, 1998), 287–303. Schroeder, C. “Child Sacrifice in Egyptian Monastic Culture: From Familial Renunciation to Jephthah’s Lost Daughter,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 20, no. 2 (2012): 269–302. Schroeder, C. Children and Family in Late Antique Egyptian Monasticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). Shepardson, Ch. “Martyrs of Exile: John of Ephesus and Religious Persecution in Late Antiquity,” in Heirs of Roman Persecution: Studies on a Christian and para-Christian Discourse in Late Antiquity, ed. É. Fournier and W. Mayer (New York: Routledge, 2019), 277–295. Shepardson, Ch. “Suffering Saints: Shaping Narratives of Violence after Chalcedon,” in Religious Violence in Antiquity: New Perspectives, ed. J. Dikstra and Ch. Raschle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 345–366. Torrance, I. Christology After Chalcedon: Severus of Antioch and Sergius the Monophysite (Norwich: The Canterbury Press, 1988), 3–74. Triebel, L. “Das angebliche Synagoge der makkabäischen Märtyrer in Antiochia am Orontes,” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 9 (2005): 464–495. Vinson, M. “Gregory Nazianzen’s Homily 15 and the Genesis of the Christian Cult of the Maccabean Martyrs,” Byzantion 64 (1994): 166–192. Ziadé, R. Les martyrs Maccabées: de l’histoire juive au culte chrétien, les homélies de Grégoire de Nazianze et de Jean Chrysostome (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

The Ladder of Prayer, the Ship of Stirrings, and the Exodus from Egypt Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony “Without Mushê of Nisibis, Where Would We Be”? Sebastian Brock has asked.1 We might add in the same spirit: without the work of Sebastian Brock on Syriac spirituality, and his discoveries and publications of manuscripts, where would the study of prayer in Syriac Christianity be? Certainly, my study on prayer, The Ladder of Prayer and the Ship of Stirrings, could not have been done.2 His publication of John of Apamea’s manuscript on silent prayer in 1979, a text that in many respects marked a paradigmatic moment in the history of prayer in Late Antiquity, enables us to understand the role of silence in prayer not as unsaying, but as an interplay between voice, silence and word, an experience leading to the transformation of the entire self and reducing it to silence, a notion that proved to have a long life in Syriac spirituality.3 Brock’s major discovery in 1983 of the Second Part of the homilies of Isaac of Nineveh, which contains homilies on prayer and important insights on the reception of Evagrius’ contemplative theory in Syriac Christianity (published in 1995), paved my way to the Ladder of Prayer.4 In his critical edition of the Second Part, Brock scrutinized the peculiar terminology and phraseology of Syriac authors and provided in the footnotes many parallels, which I read not as genealogy of knowledge or as a positivist approach to the sources, but as traces of a late antique Syriac cultural network. In those footnotes, Brock, in fact, reconstructed the libraries or traced the readings and the sources of inspiration of Isaac of Nineveh, and divulged the intertextual nature of his literary lore, thus significantly advancing the deciphering of the inner grammar of East Syrian spirituality.

1 S.P. Brock, “Without Mushê of Nisibis, Where Would We Be? Some Reflections on the Transmission of Syriac Literature,” Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 56 (2004): 15–24. 2 B. Bitton-Ashkelony, The Ladder of Prayer and the Ship of Stirrings: The Praying Self in Late Antique East Syrian Christianity, Late Antique History and Religion 22 (Leuven: Peeters, 2019). 3 S.P. Brock, “John the Solitary, On Prayer,” Journal of Theological Studies 30 (1979): 84–101. See also, P. Bettiolo, ed. and trans., “Sulla Preghiera: Filosseno o Giovanni,” Le Muséon 94 (1981): 75–89. 4 S.P. Brock, Isaac of Nineveh (Isaac the Syrian): ‘The Second Part,’ Chapters IV–XLI, CSCO 554– 555, Scr. Syri 224–225 (Louvain: Peeters, 1995). Hereinafter Part II.

© Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004537897_006

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But even before the publication of these remarkable finds, already his anthology The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life, published in 1987, prompted my curiosity and fascination for the topic of individual prayer in Syriac Christianity.5 In this anthology, which contains translation of prayers from Aphrahat in the mid-fourth century up to the eighth-century John of Dalyatha, Brock drew the contours of the subject of prayer in Syriac Christianity which, since then, none of us has succeeded in broadening. In various articles on prayer in which he elucidated the peculiar terminology of the heart and mind, Brock has released Syriac studies – deliberately or not – from the ancient paradigm of two currents of spirituality that dominated Eastern studies in the first half of the twentieth century, namely, the spirituality of the heart and that of the mind, or if you wish, the one associated with Ps.-Macarius and the other with Evagrius Ponticus.6 By abandoning this dichotomy, he opened the field up to a much more nuanced approach to and sophisticated reading of the sources, stimulated a new understanding of the cultural dynamics and the merging of various spiritual trends, the Evagrian contemplative and imageless prayer theories with prayer of the heart in East Syrian monastic circles, and discerned overlapping terminology and discourses.7 The studies of Sebastian Brock and Sabino Chialà that aim to discern the Evagrian terminology and ideas in Isaac of Nineveh’s writings exemplify this new understanding. I remain in massive debt to Sebastian Brock’s studies on prayer, and this essay is but a minor offering of gratitude.

Greek Asceticism and the East Syriac Mystical Turn

My study, The Ladder of Prayer and the Ship of Stirrings, explores the discourse on contemplative prayer as an aspect of interiority and as a path to the divine in late antique Syrian Christianity.8 It deals with the transposition of Greek 5 S.P. Brock, The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and The Spiritual Life, Cistercian Studies Series 101 (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publication, 1987). 6 See, for example, S.P. Brock, “The Prayer of the Heart in Syriac Tradition,” Sobornost 4 (1982): 131–142; S.P. Brock, “The Spirituality of the Heart in Syrian Tradition,” The Harp 1 (1988): 93–115; S.P. Brock, “Some Prominent Themes in the Writings of the Syriac Mystics of the 7th/8th Century AD (1st/2nd cent. H),” in Gotteserlebnis und Gotteslehre. Christliche und islamische Mystik im Orient, ed. M. Tamcke, Göttinger Orientforschungen, I. Reihe: Syriaca 38 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010), 49–59. 7 S.P. Brock, “Discerning the Evagrian in the Writings of Isaac of Nineveh: A Preliminary Investigation,” Adamantius 15 (2009): 60–72; S. Chialà, “Evagrio il Pontico negli scritti di Isacco di Ninive,” Adamantius 15 (2009): 73–84; Bitton-Ashkelony, The Ladder of Prayer, 79–103. 8 Bitton-Ashkelony, The Ladder of Prayer.

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ascetic literature into East Syrian thought and the assimilation of indigenous features. There is no doubt that the Syriac translations of Evagrius Ponticus’ corpus, which rapidly and radically reshaped local ascetic discourse, represent a cultural watershed in Syriac Christian thought. Scholars have long appreciated Syriac Christianity’s whole-hearted reception of Evagrius, his condemnation at the Council of Constantinople (553) notwithstanding. The pervasive and dynamic impact of the Greek ascetic wisdom of the past on East Syriac thought from the second half of the fifth century on attests that the Syrian authors were far from passive inheritors of Evagrius, Abba Isaiah, Mark the Monk, Pseudo-Dionysius, and prominent late antique hagiographies and monastic compilations. Each of those authors, among them Isaac of Nineveh, Dadishoʿ Qatraya, Shemʿon d-Ṭaybutheh, John of Dalyatha and Joseph Hazzaya, had his own unique voice and drew openly on the Greek ascetic literary lore. Without blurring the particular perspective of each author and the differences between them, we can conclude that all adhered to John of Apamea’s tripartite anthropology, namely, the way of life of body, soul, and spirit, as well as notions of stillness and silence; all showed an openness to the depths of Evagrius’ contemplative theory; and for all of them, the theory of imageless prayer was a pivotal stimulus. The synthesis of these two traditions, which are associated with Evagrius and John of Apamea, became a creative feature of East Syriac spirituality. That said, the process of transmission of the Greek literary heritage was also a process of transformation in East Syrian ascetic culture. This phenomenon of change and continuity within late antique Syriac ascetic culture was marked by what we use to designate as a mystical tendency, that is, a religious theology, anthropology and spirituality that centered on various modes and levels of the encounter with the divine. Thus, in my view, the phenomenon of the East Syrian mystical authors in the fifth-eighth centuries – whether we term it a “school” or a unique period9 – does not indicate an “intellectual invasion” or a religious mutation. Rather, it reflects the engagement of those authors in a deep hermeneutic discourse on Greek ascetic wisdom while merging it with indigenous Syrian spirituality. In his fascinating book Sentiment Religieux en France: L’invasion mystique, Henri Bremond noted that mysticism is the most sublime level attainable by serious people.10 After delving for several years into the ascetic and 9

As Sabino Chialà has framed this question: “Les mystiques Syro-Orientaux: Une École ou une Époque?,” in Les mystiques syriaques, ed. A. Desreumaux, Études syriaques 8 (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 2011), 63–78. 10 H. Bremond, Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France (Paris: Librairie Bloud et Gay, 1930), 227: “Le mysticisme n’est, à le bien prendre, que le plus sublime degré du sérieux.”

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contemplative thought of the most prominent East Syrian authors of the fiftheighth centuries, among them John of Apamea, Isaac of Nineveh, John of Dalyatha and Joseph Hazzaya, through the perspective of inner prayer, I am indeed struck by the sublime level of those ascetic authors and the profundity of their mystical thought. Above all, one is impressed with the intricate intertextual and subtle nature of their spiritual discourse, which features its own grammar and terminology. Indeed, to encapsulate their cultural imagination and creative thought is a formidable task for the historian of religion. In what follows, I wish to highlight only a few of the many peculiar elements in the East Syrian mystical trend. The first observation has to do with the role of the Bible in this milieu. Striking here is the paucity of biblical exegesis in the formation of the mystical discourse from the fifth century on. While I would not go so far as to suggest that the biblical text is marginal in late antique ascetic culture as a whole, in this introvertive discourse of the East Syrian mystical authors, I identify a shift away from biblical exegesis as compared to Greek Christian literature.11 While authors like Origen and Gregory of Nyssa based their mystical theories on biblical interpretations of key texts and narratives such as the Song of Songs, the Exodus from Egypt and the experience of Moses, the East Syrian authors sought, first and foremost, to impart a sense of religious experience and subjectivity, mostly leaving aside the exegetical approach. None of them, for instance, produced a work like Origen’s Commentary on the Song of Songs or Gregory of Nyssa’s the Life of Moses and his Commentary on the Song of Songs. When seeking to trace the trajectories of East Syriac mystical phenomenon, then, we have to take into proper account literary genres and efforts. For instance, we do not encounter efforts to implant Gregory of Nyssa’s mystical ideas and treatises, even though some of his writings were available in Syriac translation in the seventh-eighth centuries.12 Even Evagrius’ Scholia did not enjoy the impact of 11

For a comprehensive overview on the mystical authors in East Syrian Christianity, see Desreumaux, ed., Les mystiques syriaques. 12 For the Syriac translations of Gregory of Nyssa’s Commentary on the Song of Songs, see G. Kessel and K. Pinggéra, A Bibliography of Syriac Ascetic and Mystical Literature (Leuven: Peeters, 2011), 98–99; P. Marion, “Sacred Spices: The Syriac Reception of Gregory of Nyssa’s Homilies on the Song of Songs,” in Caught in Translation: Studies on Versions of Late Antique Christian Literature, ed. M. Toca and D. Batovici, Texts and Studies in Eastern Christianity 17 (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 104–121; M.F.G. Parmentier, “Syriac translations of Gregory of Nyssa,” Orientalia Lovaniensia Periodica 20 (1989): 143–193; D.G.K. Taylor, “Les pères Cappadociens dans la tradition Syriaque,” in Les Pères grecs dans la tradition syriaque, ed. A. Schmidt and D. Gonnet, Études Syriaques 4 (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 2007), 43–61.

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his Kephalaia Gnostica, the Praktikos, Skemmata, or the Antirrhêtikos.13 To the best of my knowledge, the major exegetical work of Evagrius, Scholia on the Psalms – in which he interlaced the discipline of spiritual progress and biblical exegesis – has not been found in Syriac translation.14

Scrutinizing the Self

Although the East Syrian authors were very learned people, well versed in biblical interpretations and appreciative of the exegetical authority of Theodore of Mopsuestia, their discourse drew on and was shaped mainly by exegesis of the ascetic tradition and not on biblical exegesis or scholastic deliberations.15 As the teaching of the seventh-century author Dadishoʿ Qatraya attests, sometimes the East Syrian ascetic discourse was shaped by opposing the scholastic tendencies that were widespread in Syriac Christianity.16 Those authors made a deliberate choice to scrutinize the self rather than the Scriptures.17 They preferred to establish and explain the fundamental sense of living religious experience than to pursue scholastic methods and biblical exegesis. From this perspective, however, the eighth-century mystical author Joseph Hazzaya stands apart.18 In his work Chapters of Knowledge, for example, we 13

There are Syriac fragments of Evagrius Expositio in parabolas et in proverbia, De Seraphim and De Cherubim, J. Muyldermans, ed. and trans., “Sur le Séraphins et sur les Chérubins d’Évagr le Pontique dans les versions Syriaque et Arménienne,” Le Muséon 59 (1946): 367–379; J. Muyldermans, Evagriana syriaca. Textes inédits du British Museum et de la Vaticane, Bibliothèque du Muséon 31 (Leuven: Publications universitaires, 1952), 133–134, 163–164. 14 On the subject of prayer in Evagrius’ Scholia on the Psalms, see L. Dysinger, Psalmody and Prayer in the Writings of Evagrius Ponticus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 62–103; B. Bitton-Ashkelony, “The Poetic Performance of the Praying-Mind: Evagrius Ponticus’ Theory of Prayer and its Legacy in Syriac Christianity,” in Théories et pratiques de la prière à la fin de l’Antiquité, ed. Ph. Hoffmann and A. Timotin, Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études, Sciences religieuses 185 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), 327–344. 15 A.H. Becker, Fear of God and the Beginning of Wisdom: The School of Nisibis and the Development of Scholastic Culture in Late Antique Mesopotamia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 155–203. 16 On Dadishoʿ Qatraya’s views on biblical exegesis and purity of heart, P. Bettiolo, Testimoni dell’eschaton. Monaci siro-orientali un’età di torbidi (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2019), 330–346; P. Bettiolo, “Scuole e ambienti intellettuali nelle chiese di Siria,” in Storia della filosofia nell’ Islam medievale, ed. C. D’Ancona (Turin: Einaudi, 2005), 1: 48–100. 17 See my essay, B. Bitton-Ashkelony, “Monastic Hybridity and Anti-Exegetical Discourse: From Philoxenus of Mabbug to Dadišo Qatraya,” Studia Patristica 91 (2017): 413–433. 18 On Hazzaya’s work, see G. Bunge, Rabban Jausep Hazzaya. Briefe über das geistliche Leben und verwandte Schriften (Trier: Paulinis, 1982); N. Kavvadas, ed. and trans., Joseph Hazzaya: On Providence, Texts and Studies in Eastern Christianity 8 (Leiden: Brill, 2016).

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find biblical metaphors and interpretations. Nonetheless, even he did not go so far. A comparison of Pseudo-Macarius’ remarkable Homily 1, an allegorical interpretation of the vision of the prophet Ezekiel (Ez. 1.4–2), with Hazzaya’s reference to this vision in Chapters, reveals that he remains at the descriptive level of the text.19 But it is mainly in his major work, Letter on the Three Stages of Monastic Life, that he exposes the role of the biblical text in forging his mystical discourse.20 If one compares Origen’s Homily 27 on Numbers 33 and Hazzaya’s Letter on the Three Stages of Monastic Life reveals the differing, the different functions played by biblical exegesis in their respective mystical discourse become clear.21 Whereas Origen provides a detailed biblical exposition in which he interprets the departure of the children of Israel from Egypt and the forty-two stages they passed in the desert until they arrived to the Promised Land (Num. 33.1–49), Hazzaya takes the biblical narrative only as a general outline for his teachings on the three stages of the monastic life, in which he follows John of Apamea’s spiritual scheme. Additionally, Origen engages with the Hebrew language and uses the typonim method, while in Hazzaya’s Letter the biblical text itself gained no attention.

Origen and Joseph Hazzaya on the Ascent from Egypt to the Promised Land

In Homily 27 on Numbers, Origen, along with offering a conjunction of phrases from the New Testament (e.g., Matt. 1.17), develops his claim that the forty-two stages of the journey of the children of Israel (Num. 33.1–2) are analogous to the coming of the Savior into this world, which can be traced through forty-two generations (Homily 27.3).22 He understands this as an ascent through the stages by which Christ descended. This is an ascent from the stage of faith, which corresponds to the Exodus from Egypt, through struggles with temptations – lust, desires of the flesh, avarice, pride, anger – and training the soul in the life of virtues. He elucidates that, from the perspective of the spiritual meaning of the 19 M.G. Kalinin and A.M. Preobrazhensky, eds. and trans., “The Gnostic Chapters of Joseph Hazzaya: New Manuscript Evidence and Previously Unidentified Chapters,” Bogoslovksie trudy 47–48 (2018), 258–289 [in Russian]. I wish to thank Sergey Minov for translating this passage. 20 P. Harb, F. Graffin with the collaboration of M. Albert, eds. and trans., Joseph Hazzaya: Lettre sur les trois étapes de la vie monastique, Patrologia Orientalis 45/2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1992). 21 Origen, Homily 27 on Numbers, ed. and trans. L. Doutreleau, Origène, Homélies sur les Nombres III, Sources chrétiennes 461 (Paris: Cerf, 2001), 266–347. Henceforth SC 461. 22 SC 461, 282–285.

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biblical text, the Exodus from Egypt can occur in a double sense: either when we leave our life as Gentiles and come to the knowledge of the divine Law or when the soul leaves its dwelling place in the body (Homily 27.2; 27.9).23 Hence, the ascent from Egypt to the Promised Land (adscensio de Aegypto ad Terram repromissionis) is something by which, according to Origen, “we are taught in mysterious descriptions the ascent of the soul (adscensum animae) to heaven and the mystery of the resurrection from the dead” (Homily 27.4).24 As the stages are repeated twice, there are two journeys of the soul, each of which has its own meaning. One is the training of the soul in virtues when it is placed in flesh, through the Law; the other is the one by which the soul gradually ascends to the heavens after the resurrection (Homily 27.6).25 The guide, he explains, was not Moses – for he himself did not know where to go – but the pillar of fire and cloud, that is, the Son of God and the Holy Spirit (Homily 27.5). Origen emphasises that this is not a process of continuous progress: it has failures and setbacks, as well as new beginnings. Yet Origen imagines this process as an increasing progress of enlightenment, until the soul “arrives at the Father of lights Himself” (Homily 27.6; cf. Jas. 1.17).26 The place of departure in the itinerary of the soul is Rameses (Num. 33.5), a name which, according to its etymology, signifies agitation and perturbation, and it arrives to Succoth, the tents (tabernacula). Thus, the soul perceives itself as a traveller whose progress starts by the removal of earthly agitation, toward virtuous life, which is achieved through the performance of exercises and labor (Homily 27.9).27 Such progress toward virtuous life contains stages of diverse and frequent temptations, until arriving to Tabatha, namely, “the goods” (bona), continuing the transition to a better stage.28 The progress, Origen expounds, consists in coming to great things from small ones; it is a journey from small locations and villages toward the crossing of the Red Sea (Homily 27.9, 3–10.1); from conversion and moderate abstinence, until the soul overcomes temptations and is made spiritual, and begins to have the discernment of heavenly visions and contemplation of amazement (contemplatio stuporis);29 that is, a time when the mind is struck with amazement by the knowledge of great and marvelous things (Homily 27.11–12).30 The typonim interpretation of the Exodus from 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

SC 461, 280–281, 308–309. SC 461, 290. SC 461, 294–295. SC 461, 296. SC 461, 308–311. Homily 27.12, 9 (SC 461, 332–335). Homily 27.12.7 (SC 461, 330). It is interesting that the Latin translator (Rufinus) added that the equivalent term in Greek is ἔκστασιν. 30 SC 461, 316–321.

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Egypt and the travel through the forty-two stations allowed Origen to frame a theological and ethical discourse leading to the contemplative experience of the soul; as he said, the traveller (viator) is engaged in a heavenly itinerary (itineris caelestis) approaching perfection.31 Faithful to the Epistle to the Hebrews 8.5, Origen perceived the earthly things, such as the tabernacle, as umbram et exemplar of the celestial realities. Hence, the earthly geography and itinerary are the shadow and the image of the heavenly geography.32 Origen never developed the second line of interpretation regarding the state of the soul in the resurrection, which, according to Lorenzo Perrone, leaves the impression that what we have here is a draft of Origen’s work.33 But even neglecting the second line of interpretation, and leaving it aside, it hard not to notice that in this “draft,” Origen was delineating his major spiritual and mystical theory. As he elucidated, “there are three general disciplines by which one attains knowledge of the universe,” as the Greeks call them ethics, physics, and enoptics; and Origen refers to them as moral, natural, and contemplative.34 In comparison, and rather distant from the biblical text, Joseph Hazzaya takes the biblical narrative of the Exodus from Egypt and the entrance to the Promised Land as a metaphor for the three spiritual and transitory stages of the monastic life: the transition from the somatic stage (pagrānūtā) of the passions to that of the soul (nafshānūtā) in which prayer of the mind takes place, and to the third stage, that of the spirit (ruḥānūtā) and the vision of the mind.35 He traces the discipline for a monk who withdraws from the world, that is, the Exodus from Egypt; the work of the children of Israel in the desert is a metaphor for the somatic stage with which the monk struggles during his first year in the monastery; the crossing of the Jordan River symbolized the move from the coenobitic life to the life of solitude; and the seven peoples that the children of Israel had to fight are the seven passions, logismoi, which the monk has to fight in his life of solitude in his cell. In the second stage the soul consists of the mental virtues that the monk exercises in the sphere of limpidity; and above it is Sion, the stage of the spirit, and the feast of consecration of his cell, that is, the entrance to the Promised Land (LThS 65–69). Unlike Origen, Hazzaya confined his use of the biblical narrative to the illustrative and schematic level of the framework of his 31 Homily 27.12.12 (SC 461, 338–339). 32 Homily 28.2 (SC 461, 356–357). 33 L. Perrone, “In cammino con la parola: Esodo d’Israele e progresso dell’anima secondo Origene. Note di lettura su Hom. in Num. 27,” in Acri Sanctorum Investigatori. Miscellanea di studi in memoria di Gennaro Luongo, ed. L. Arcari (Roma: Bretschneider, 2019), 227–245. 34 Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs, trans. R.A. Greer, Origen (Paulist Press: Mahwah, 1979), 231. 35 For example, Letter on the Three Stages 15 and 18–19, PO 45/2, 46–47, 48–49.

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exposition. Thus, instead of explaining the meaning of every name-stage in the desert or assigning to them any theological significance in his introvertive scenario, Hazzaya merges Evagrius’ ascetic theories from the Praktikos, the Antirrhêtikos and the contemplative hierarchy of the Kephalaia Gnostica with John of Apamea’s threefold division of the spiritual life36 – that is, the somatic stage; the stage of the soul, and the stage of the spirit. These three poles are interwoven throughout the Letter on the Three Stages, which he interlaces with theological arguments about the image and likeness of God.37 Hazzaya deals at length with the somatic stage (pagrānūtā), a topic that constitutes the main part of his Letter. His instructions touch upon the classic ascetic exercises, emphasizing daily prayers, reciting psalms at night while genuflecting, as well as reading Scriptures and meditations, with each activity assigned a specific hour (LThS 85). He expounds the second stage in which the monk tastes “with the palate of his mind” (‫)ܒܚܟܐ ܕܡܕܥܗ‬, even slightly, the flavor of the resurrection’s glory (LThS 138); then he elaborates on the third stage, in which the vision of the mind is mingled with the vision of the light of the Trinity (LThS 142). In fact, like Origen, Hazzaya too discerned a double exodus, from the body and from the soul, yet he makes only tangential use of the biblical narrative – in the first part of his letter and then again when summarizing the subject on the last page – merely as an outline for his ascetic and mystical teachings, without seeking a deep spiritual meaning in the text or engaging any exegesis method. Nevertheless, as I mentioned above, Hazzaya was a minor exception in using the biblical narratives in this mystical east Syrian milieu, yet he too, offered only a biblical silhouette which he imbued with the teachings of Evagrius, Isaac of Nineveh and John of Apamea. This is a silhouette that recalls the restrained lines of Matisse’s painting in the chapel of Vence, more than the teeming works of Chagall.

Inner and Imageless Prayer and the Harmony of the Self

I turn now to my second general observation concerning East Syrian mystical discourse, which, to a large extent, focuses on the subject of inner prayer and more precisely on pure/imageless prayer (both terms are correct), as defined 36

It is difficult to establish that Hazzaya read John of Apamea, but he was familiar with his central ideas through the writings of Isaac on Nineveh, as noted by the editors of the Letter on the Three Stages, 26. 37 A. Guillaumont, “Sources de la doctrine de Joseph Hazzâyâ,” L’Orient Syrien 3 (1958): 5–25.

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by Evagrius. “Prayer is a conversation of the mind with God.”38 In East Syrian teachings on prayer, imageless prayer moves from being an activity solely of the mind (nous), the entity that prays in Evagrius’ system, to prayer of the whole self.39 This follows the perception of the ascetic self as an integrated, as opposed to fragmented, self of body, soul and mind. John of Apamea’s dominant anthropological model of three stages served as a framework for this development. The harmony of the ascetic self means that the entire self, and not only the mind, the heart or the soul, is involved and evolved in prayer. Isaac of Nineveh, for example, urged his addressee in one case to reconcile himself in the harmony of the triad which is within him: body, soul and spirit, “rather than to appease those who are angry at your teachings.”40 Likewise, Shemʿon d-Ṭaybutheh elucidated that in prayer, if the body (‫ )ܦܓܪܐ‬does not toil by means of the heart (‫)ܠܒܐ‬, and the heart by means of the mind (‫)ܡܕܥܐ‬, together with the intellect (‫ )ܗܘܢܐ‬and the intelligence (‫)ܪܥܝܢܐ‬, all gathered together in deep-felt groaning, “in such a case you have not yet managed to pray in a unified manner” (‫)ܠܐ ܥܕܟܝܠ ܨܠܝܬ ܡܚܝܕܐܝܬ‬.41 Hence, it is not surprising that the East Syrian discourse on contemplative prayer does not undermine the body and the corporeal sensation.42 Moreover, the East Syrian mystical authors were fully aware, as Isaac of Nineveh wrote, that many people despise outward postures and suppose that “prayer of the heart suffices by itself for God.” He, by contrast, underscored the performative role of the body in the entire spiritual path: “You should realize, my brethren, that in all our service God very much wants outward posture, specific kinds of honour, and visible forms of prayer – not for His own sake, but for our benefit”43 Thus, while developing an intense contemplative discourse and stressing the 38

Evagrius, Chapters on Prayer 3, ed. and trans., P. Géhin, Évagre le Pontique: Chapitres sur la prière, SC 589 (Paris: Cerf, 2017), 220–221. For the Syriac text of chapters 1–32, see I. Hausherr, “Le De oratione d’Évagre le Pontique en Syriaque et en Arabe,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 5 (1939): 11–16. On Evagrius’ theory, see C. Stewart, “Imageless Prayer and the Theological Vision of Evagrius Ponticus,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 9 (2001): 173–204. 39 I dealt with this major change in my book, The Ladder of Prayer. 40 Isaac of Nineveh, Part I, Mar Isaacus Ninivita. De perfectione religiosa, ed. P. Bedjan (Leipzig: Harrassowitz, 1909; repr. 2007), 45 [Syr.], 32 [trans.]. 41 Woodbrooke Studies: Christian Documents in Syriac, Arabic, and Garshuni, Edited and Translated with a Critical Apparatus, A. Mingana, vol. 7, Early Christian Mystics (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1934), 313 [Syr.], translation by Brock, “Prayer of the Heart,” 133. 42 S. Chialà, “Prayer and the Body According to Isaac of Nineveh,” in Prayer and Worship in Eastern Christianities, ed. B. Bitton-Ashkelony and D. Krueger (London: Routledge, 2017), 34–43. 43 Isaac of Nineveh, Part II 14:13, Brock, Isaac of Nineveh, 59 [Syr.], 69 [trans.].

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elevated experience of the mind and the soul, the outside world with the body as an actor and its corporeal sensations were not left behind in the East Syriac Church. It was regarding the nature of the Evagrian nous-mind that a significant change took place in East Syrian mystical discourse. As Andrew Louth has pointed out in another context, the Evagrian nous does not experience ecstasy.44 I would add that, in Evagrius’ contemplative theory, the nous does not aim for union with the divine. But, in the development in the East Syriac mystical trend, we witness the extension of the religious experience of the mind to include wonder, stupor – and in John of Dalyatha’s theory – union with the divine.45 This is a move from Evagrius’ theoretical and systematic approach to ascetic and contemplative life to a discourse that stresses experience and subjectivity. While the suspension of faculties is rather rare in this discourse, the texts generally refer to the sensation of the divine, and not in allegorical terms or as metaphors. Indeed, narratives of mystical ecstatic moments are rather marginal in the writings of East Syrian authors. They tended toward reticence about personal experience, which they continued to describe, in accordance with Paul’s paradigm, in the third person (2 Cor. 12.2–4). Thus, first-person accounts of mystical experiences are not so common.46 The contemplative enterprise in the East Syrian tradition was intensively geared toward providing signs, explanations and metaphors, in order to render the topic more comprehensible to a monastic audience. This tendency included the discourse on the praying mind that clearly went beyond the theoretical and theological aspects of Evagrius. Rather, it entailed an effort to clarify the theory and elucidate its performative aspect. Its central concern was how to recognize and to feel the experience of inner prayer and to sense self-transformation, occurrences about which the ascetic has no doubt. In the same vein, John of Apamea asserted: “For as there are many transformations in the growth of the body, so there are many transformations in the

44 A. Louth, The Origins of Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 113. 45 On Dalyatha’s mystical theory, see R. Beulay, L’enseignement spirituel de Jean de Dalyatha, mystique syro-oriental du VIIIe siècle, Théologie historique 83 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1990); R. Beulay, “Les dimensions philosophiques de l’expérience spirituelle de Jean de Dalyatha,” Parole de l’Orient 33 (2008): 201–207. 46 On this aspect of religious experience, see my essay, “Personal Religion and Self-exposure: From Pseudo-Macarius to Symeon the New Theologian,” in Between Personal and Institutional Religion: Self, Doctrine and Practice in Late Antique Eastern Christianity, ed. B. BittonAshkelony and L. Perrone (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 99–128.

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mind’s growth.”47 Hence, the recurring questions: What, precisely, takes place in the mind during prayer? What is the nature of the operation of the stirrings which arise in the mind during prayer?

Stirrings of the Mind and Spiritual Swimming

Joseph Hazzaya tries to answer these subtle questions with regard to prayer in the mind (‫ )ܨܠܘܬܐ ܒܗܘܢܐ‬in his letter On the Stirrings of the Mind during Prayer.48 First, he sets out his fundamental distinction: during prayer, three kinds of impulses arise in the mind – the first of these is material (literally “composite”), the second is immaterial (literally “simple”), and the third is uncircumscribed and formless. This distinction parallels Evagrius’ contemplative hierarchy and his threefold schema of spiritual progress, an idea that Hazzaya beautifully illuminated through poetic skill and nautical imagery: At the time of prayer, he explains, the soul resembles a ship positioned in the middle of the sea, and the mind is like the helmsman in charge of a boat: The impulses [stirrings] convey the boat like the winds. Just as it is the case that not all the winds that blow are suitable for the course of the ship, similarly, with the impulses that are aroused in the soul during the time of prayer … rather, some of them are suitable, while others are not. The latter imprint in the soul some material form, and this hinders the course of the boat of the mind, the steersman preventing it reaching the harbor he is aiming for. The former impulses stirred up in the soul during prayer are immaterial; these are the gentle breezes which convey the ship of the soul over the waves to a harbor that is totally restful.49

47 Dialogues on the Soul 2, 22, ed. S. Dedering, Johannes von Lykopolis. Ein Dialog über die Seele und die Affekte des Menschen, Arbeten utgivna med understöd av Vilhelm Ekmans Universitetsfond, Uppsala 43 (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells, 1936). French translation by I. Hausherr (based on Dedering’s edition), Jean le Solitaire (Pseudo-Jean de Lycopolis). Dialogue sur l’âme et les passions des hommes, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 120 (Rome: Pont. Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1939); English translation and Syriac text based on Dedering’s edition by M.T. Hansbury, John the Solitary on the Soul, Texts from Christian Late Antiquity 32 (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2013), 50–51. 48 On the Stirrings of the Mind during Prayer, ed. Mingana, 272–274 [Syr.], trans. Brock, Syriac Fathers, 319–323. I follow Brock who translates here ‫ ܗܘܢܐ‬mind, and not intellect, Syriac Fathers, 319. 49 On the Stirrings of the Mind during Prayer, ed. Mingana, 272 [Syr.], trans. Brock, Syriac Fathers, 319.

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Similar poetics and maritime metaphors were used by previous Syrian writers, among them, Isaac of Nineveh. He wrote about the “spiritual swimming” that takes place in the mind of those who dive into “the sea of stillness” (‫ܒܝܡܐ‬ ‫)ܕܫܠܝܐ‬, “[descending to] the heart of the earth … and find oysters consisting of just ordinary flesh; only once in a while will there be a pearl in it,” that is, prayer. Similarly, he explains, this corresponds to the ability of the mind, which swims about in such places during the time of prayer – places where it is not easy for everyone to swim.50 Like Isaac of Nineveh, Hazzaya considered the ̈ stirrings (‫( )ܙܘܥܐ‬or impulses, movements) of the mind as a key component in the introvertive performance of prayer: I do not mean the prayer which emanates from distracted thoughts, but the one which emanates from the exertion of the body and from the pure thoughts of the soul. When the impulses of prayer are stirred in your mind, examine the nature of the workings which act in your heart  … Indeed, the false images of the enemy are numerous in the time of prayer, but if the mind is endowed in the time of prayer with the understanding that springs from knowledge, all these false images will stand below the sphere [the place] of prayer, since the holy power which moves prayer will not allow the mind to look at them.51 In this passage, Hazzaya explicitly tackled the main obstacle for the praying mind, namely, the presence of various representations and demons, “the false images of the enemy,” an Evagrian notion that is endlessly discussed in this sort of literature. Hazzaya, however, made an intensive effort to explain the obscure conception of imageless prayer and, in fact, extended the abstract Evagrian theory of pure prayer, identifying three methods, apart from the bodily one, in which prayer can be prayed: the first method, or manner, is through the natural stirrings, the second is through the proximity of the guardian angel, and the third is through the good will which desires virtues: The first movement of prayer is accompanied by love and by a heat of the thoughts which burns in the heart like fire; the second by the working of insights together with tears of joy; and the third by the love of bodily exertions, together with tears which slightly move the thoughts. Beyond [outside] these three movements that I have described, there is no other 50 Part II 34.5–7, 12, 137–138 [Syr.], 148–150 [trans.]. See also, Part I 66, 467 [Syr.], 313 [trans.]; hidden prayer (‫)ܨܠܘܬܐ ܟܣܝܬܐ‬, 469 [Syr.], 317 [trans]. 51 On the Stirrings of the Mind during Prayer, ed. Mingana, 259 [Syr.], 182 [trans.].

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movement which is called prayer, because above them there is no prayer, but wonder (temha), which is not called by the wise [man] the sphere [place] of prayer, but light without image. Apart from [outside] these three stirrings, any stirring that moves destroys pure prayer.52 These are the steps of the ladder through which the mind ascends to the height of heaven and enters into the true city, which consists of the vision of the Savior.53 Notably, this passage echoes his close reading of Isaac of Nineveh on the characteristics of pure prayer, the stirrings of the mind during prayer and the non-prayer sphere, which had become dominant subjects in the East Syrian mystical tradition. He, in fact, summarizes distinctive strands and challenging topics in East Syrian thought about pure prayer, including the concept of light without image, which invariably surfaced, apparently never finding a satisfactory explanation.54 However, Hazzaya deviates slightly from Evagrius in this passage: he refers to the vision of the Savior and not, as Evagrius does, to the vision of the Holy Trinity. The notion of the vision of the Savior probably sparked the debate on the experience of introvertive prayer that can be gleaned from a letter known under the title: On the Prayer which Comes to the Mind in the Sphere of Limpidity, in which Hazzaya articulates his teaching in a polemical tone.55 Hazzaya rejected the views of those who assert that there is a material image and likeness to the vision of the mind which has reached the sphere that is above the sphere of limpidity – although he did not disclose the names of those who made such a claim.56 In his Chapters of Knowledge, he censures those who do not know that the Lord has no image when He is contemplated in the hearts of saints during prayer. They create, he claims, a phantasy and contemplate

52

This is one of the rare instances in which Hazzaya uses the term “pure prayer” (‫ܨܠܘܬܐ‬

‫)ܕܟܝܬܐ‬.

53 On the Stirrings of the Mind during Prayer, ed. Mingana, 259 [Syr.]. I did not always follow Mingana’s translation of this passage (p. 183), who used “emotions” for stirrings, and “extasy” for temha. Italics are mine. 54 V. Berti provides an insightful analysis of this issue, see Berti, “L̰ e débat sur la vision de Dieu et la condamnation des mystiques par Timothée I: La perspective du patriarche,” in Les mystiques syriaques, ed. A. Desreumaux (Paris: Geuthner, 2011), 151–176. See also R. Beulay, La lumière sans forme: Introduction à l’étude de la mystique chrétienne syro-orientale (Chevetogne: Édition de Chevetogne, 1987). 55 Ed. Mingana, 264–272 [Syr. 145v–154r], 151–162 [trans.]. 56 On limpidity (shafyūtā) as a distinctive aspect of the vocabulary of Syriac spirituality, see Brock, Syriac Fathers, xxviii–xxx.

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it (‫)ܡܪܟܒܝܢ ܦܐܢܛܐܣܝܐܐ ܘܚܝܪܝܢ ܒܗ‬.57 He clearly discerns two kinds of visions: the composite that derives from demons, and the simple one, which has no image and composite nature and comes from grace; thus when one sees the Lord within his mind in the moment of prayer, he sees “two rays of light in one.”58 It becomes clear that his theological statement here is highly related to his goal of dissociating the elevated stage of prayer from any material concept or corporality and to his argument that it is possible to attain the deepest and most abstract mental experience. He based his view on the assumption that “in the sphere [or place] of limpidity” (‫)ܒܐܬܪܐ ܕܫܦܝܘܬܐ‬, the mind prays unceasingly.

The Stage of the Soul: Locus of Limpidity

In order to understand Hazzaya’s conception of the praying mind, we must grasp that the locus of limpidity is in the stage of the soul (nafshānūtā), that is, the second stage. In this context, he linked the prayer of the mind to the precise contemplative schema of Evagrius, explaining that “there is one single rank of the prayer of the mind,” consisting of visions and contemplation of spiritual knowledge.59 This prayer is based on a combination of the emotion of joy with a contemplation of corporeal bodies (corresponding to Evagrius’ contemplation of creation) and of the mysteries and revelations that are found in such contemplation, and insights from Holy Scriptures. Hazzaya validated this contemplative stage in which prayer of the mind takes place and illustrated its imageless nature by referring to the biblical example of Moses; just as Moses remained in the cloud for six days without having “visible prayer” or “revealed prayer” (‫ )ܨܠܘܬܐ ܓܠܝܬܐ‬but only visions and spiritual sights with converse, so also is it the case with the mind.60 Hazzaya remarked that he underlined this stance because there are many who contend that in the sphere of limpidity there are prayers, sacrifices, sighs and supplications for former sins: “I wish to show clearly how and in what order prayers, entreaties and supplications for former transgressions are recited, and what place the remembrance 57 Gnostic Chapters 4, 271 [Syr.]. 58 Gnostic Chapters 5–6, 271 [Syr.], ‫ܬ̈ܪܝܢ ̈ܙܠܝܩܐ ܕܢܘܗܪܐ ܒܚܕ ܚܙܐ‬. 59 On the prayer which comes to the mind in the sphere of limpidity, ed. Mingana, 265 [Syr.], 60

‫ܚܕ ܗܘ ܛܟܣܐ ܕܨܠܘܬܐ ܕܡܕܥܐ‬

Ed. Mingana, 265 [Syr.], 152 [trans.]. My translation here differs from Mingana who translates ‫ ܨܠܘܬܐ ܓܠܝܬܐ‬as “definite prayer.” I prefer “visible prayer” or “revealed prayer,” which stands in contrast to the conception of “hidden prayer” that is widely used in Syriac mystical literature.

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of these transgressions is stirred in the soul”61 This gradual inner development carried with it a shift in the introvertive experience. From this point on, he clarified, there is no prayer: “In the sphere of limpidity all the stirrings of prayer are idle.”62 Hazzaya’s schema draws on Isaac of Nineveh’s criterion of the stirrings for discerning the experience of the praying mind and makes two further assumptions.63 The first of these – which is in perfect agreement with the phenomenology of prayer – implies a clear distinction between petitionary prayer and contemplative prayer of the mind that does not include any request, but only an experience and praise of the divine, while the second concerns the role of memory in the sphere of limpidity. Hazzaya holds that, at this point, the memory totally vanishes; thus, the soul has no remembrance of previous transgressions – there is only peace that is above all understanding, and tranquility dwells in all the stirrings of the soul and the intellect: “There is no remembrance of anything but wonder in the divine wisdom,” a state in which, he repeated, all the stirrings of prayer are idle.64 The mind that reaches the “complete limpidity” acquires a new experience in the heavenly realm in which there is a contemplation of the image of the “crystal light,”65 and the spiritual beings spiritually sanctify the hidden and the unknown Being.66 He conceptualized this non-stirrings stage in terms of the Seraphim’s liturgy, in which they cried out one unto another: “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of Hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory” (Is. 6.1–3). “From this sphere of limpidity the intellect rises to the sphere of spirituality” (‫ܠܐܬܪܐ‬ ‫)ܕܪܘܚܢܘܬܐ‬.67 After making this explicit distinction between the sphere of limpidity and the sphere of spirituality, Hazzaya presented his chief conclusion: the intellect’s vision in the sphere of spirituality has no image (‫ )ܕܡܘܬܐ‬or likeness (‫ )ܐܣܟܝܡܐ‬but rather is invested with a single vision of a light, to which nothing can be likened.68 In this context, he repeated that there are many people “without knowledge,” who claim that above the sphere of limpidity the vision of the intellect has an image and likeness.69 This is, in fact, the heart of 61 Mingana, 265 [Syr.], 153 [trans.]. 62 Mingana, 265 [Syr.], 153 [trans.]. 63 For Isaac of Nineveh’s notion of stirrings during prayer, see for example, Isaac of Nineveh, Discourse 22, Part I, 163–175 [Syr.], trans., Brock, Syriac Fathers, 252–263. 64 Mingana, 266–267 [Syr.], 154–155 [trans.]. 65 Hazzaya frequently uses this phraseology for denoting the Evagrian notion of “light of sapphire.” 66 Mingana, 267 [Syr. 149a], 156 [trans.]. 67 Mingana, 267 [Syr. 149a], 156 [trans.]. 68 Ed. Mingana, 267 [Syr.], 156 [trans.]. 69 Ed. Mingana, 267–268 [Syr.], 156 [trans.]

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the debate: the nature and qualities of the mind/intellect and whether it has self-consciousness or self-knowledge in the third sphere of spirituality.70 Just as God has no image and the nature of His Essence is higher than all likenesses or representations of the creation, thus the mind that has reached the sphere of perfection and the highest stage of spirituality will be the image of God, and accordingly, retains an imageless quality. Hazzaya holds: All prayer bears in itself the image of its prototype, and as God has no prototype, He has neither image nor likeness. In this same way is also the mind, His image, when it has reached the sphere of perfection. It will have there no image and likeness, nor of its vision.71 Indeed, at this stage – “when its spirituality is swallowed up in the hidden glory of the contemplation of the Holy Trinity” – no one is able to distinguish his or her own self from the glory of that light which has no image. This is the crux of the theological problem that the very experience of the light during pure prayer could evoke; if the distinction between the self and the experience of the light existed, then, naturally it would entail perceiving the image of God. Thus, the annihilation of the self is a condition for experiencing the divine, a condition that Isaac of Nineveh would not easily accept.72 However, this is a key characteristic of Hazzaya’s theory: the obliteration of the distinctions between the mind and the holy light, which is, plausibly, a new level of consciousness of which Hazzaya needs to convince his readers. He deliberately does not engage in his mystical theology any scholastic knowledge or philosophical argument. No one acquires this teaching from “books and from hearing,” he stressed, but knows it only from self-experience (‫ܒܠܥܕ ܡܢ ܢܣܝܢܐ‬ ‫)ܕܒܟܢܘܡܗ‬.73 This far-reaching and bold claim likely prompted the Church’s hostile response to Hazzaya, who might have appeared to have been subverting written Church tradition. Generally speaking, this sort of contemplative discourse was easily distorted by the Church authorities, as we can glean from the condemnation of John of Apamea, John of Dalyatha and Joseph Hazzaya by the Catholicos Timothy 1st at the synod of 786/87.74 The failure of such 70 71 72 73 74

Hazzaya is not always consistent in his use of mind and intellect. I follow his terminology. Ed. Mingana, 268 [Syr.], 157 [trans.]. On the experience of the mind during pure prayer according to Isaac’s theory of prayer, see my essay, “The Limit of the Mind (Nous): Pure Prayer according to Evagrius Ponticus and Isaac of Nineveh,” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 15, no. 2 (2011): 291–321. Ed. Mingana, 268 [Syr.], 157 [trans.]. The Syriac document relating to the three authors’ condemnation by the Synod of 786/87 is not extant. An Arabic summary of the condemnation is preserved in an eleventhcentury source, see W. Hoenerbach and O. Spies, Ibn al-Tayyib. Fiqh an-Nasrânîya, “Das

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condemnations, however, continues to raise questions about the power of the ecclesiastical authorities and how the historian ought to assess such intellectual and cultural censures.

Visible and Invisible Worship

It is worth mentioning that Hazzaya and other Syrian mystical authors did not belong to esoteric circles. Therefore, we should balance our perspective on that period, on their theories and society. It is remarkable, for example, that this recourse to transcendent piety developed in a society and an epoch which saw a flourishing of the cult of icons and the crucifix, as Sebastian Brock demonstrated in a paper on Iconoclasm that he delivered in 1975.75 Those East Syrian authors who accentuated the mystical elements in their ascetic discourse did not appear to feel a conflict with this cult. For example, in his treatise On Stillness, Dadishoʿ Qatraya provided detailed teachings on the veneration of the crucifix during vigils in the monks’ cells, as well as the practice of inner prayer.76 Isaac of Nineveh, however, did distinguish between the performance of prostration on the face before the cross and inner worship: “These acts of worship are quite separate from those which took place in the heart,” he said. But he also sees an interlacing of the two: Nevertheless, each time they stood up, they performed many acts of worship … kissing the Cross five or maybe ten times … During such acts all of sudden someone might sometimes discover a pearl which in a single prayer would encompass the number of all the others. Sometimes a person would be standing on his feet, or kneeling, his mind seized by the wonder of prayer – a state not under the control of the will of flesh and blood and the soul impulses.77 Recht der Christenheit,” 4 vols. CSCO 161–162, 167–168, Arab. 16–19 (Leuven: L. Durbecq, 1956–57), vol. 2, 185–187 [Arab.], 187–188 [trans.]. Cf. French translation by Beulay, La lumière sans forme, 229–231 (republished in Beulay, L’enseignement spirituel, 423–424). 75 S.P. Brock, “Iconoclasm and the Monophysites,” in Iconoclasm: Papers Given at the Ninth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, March 1975, ed. A. Bryer and J. Herrin (Birmingham: Centre for Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, 1977), 53–57. See also, C. Chaillot, “Some Comments on the Prayer of Consecration of Icons in the Syriac Tradition,” The Harp 8–9 (1995–1996): 67–85. 76 On Stillness 5.10–11, ed. F. del Río Sánchez, Los cinco tratados sobre la quietud (šelyā) de Dāḏišōʿ Qaṭrāyā, Aula Orientalis Supplementa 18 (Barcelona: Editorial AUSA, 2001), 112. 77 Isaac of Nineveh, Part II 14.24, 63 [Syr.], 74 [trans.].

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The authors discussed in the Ladder of Prayer, then, adhered to classic Syriac Christian views, which advocated both visible and invisible worship. Already by the end of the fourth century or the beginning of the fifth, the author of the Book of Steps had developed a clear theory on this aspect of interplay in the religious life: “Since we know that the body becomes a hidden temple and the heart a hidden altar for spiritual worship, let us be diligent in this public altar and before this public [lit. visible] temple.”78 The hidden does not undermine the visible; rather, the author concludes: “There is a hidden prayer of the heart for that one who is bound up in our Lord and meditates on him ceaselessly. Let us pray with our body as well as with our heart, just as Jesus blessed and prayed physically and spiritually.”79 The author of the Book of Steps stressed not only the three dimensions of Christian worship, that is, the earthly “visible” ministry (‫)ܬܫܡܫܬܐ‬, the heavenly and the worship in the heart – but he warns the reader not to despise the “visible church,” that is, the altar, baptism, and priesthood. “It is through theses visible things, however, that we shall be in these heavenly things, which are invisible to eyes of flesh, our bodies becoming temples and our hearts altars” (Heb. 11.3).80 Everything in this church, he explained, is established in imitation of that hidden church. The mystical trend in the seventh-eighth centuries held strongly to this conviction. In other words, this poetic discourse on the inner experience of prayer was also a very tense discourse. The tension is not only the one frequently found in mystical discourse between the saying and the unsaying, the knowing and unknowing. Rather, the tension concerns the limits of hidden worship and the importance of the performance of visible worship.

Concluding Remarks: Whither Inner Prayer?

What, then, is inner prayer in this tradition? Drawing on John of Apamea’s three stages of the ascetic life, and using Pseudo-Dionysius’ three stages by John of Dalyatha, that is, purification, illumination and union with the divine, as well as Shemʿon d-Ṭaybutheh’s use of Galen’s medical theories about the harmony of body and soul, those authors extended the contours of the 78

Book of Steps, Memra 12, ed. M. Kmosko, Liber Graduum, Patrologia Syriaca 3 (Paris: FirminDidot, 1926), 287, trans., R.A. Kitchen and M.F.G. Parmentier, The Book of Steps: The Syriac Liber Graduum, Cistercian Series 196 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2004), 120. 79 Liber Graduum, 288 [Syr.], 119 [trans.]. 80 Liber Graduum, 288 [Syr.], 119 [trans.].

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conception of pure/imageless prayer and implanted it into a broad religious system, which encompassed the elevated stages of the spiritual existence. Pure prayer, together with prayer of the heart and unceasing prayer, grew into a major performative and contemplative introvertive notion, namely, a hidden worship. This was the result of a long process of interpretation, selection and assimilation of the Greek ascetic legacy, during which the stimulus of imageless prayer gained a much broader sense than it had at the end of the fourth century in the Egyptian desert. It became a less defined and spiritually diffused conception that did more than embody the most elevated moment in orienting the self toward God. Pure prayer began to designate a broad spiritual landscape and became an ontology of the spiritual, a realm that touches upon the entire ascetic life and aims for profound interaction with God. The centrality of inner prayer and its broad spiritual meaning in this tradition might explain the remarkable, and in a sense enigmatic, statement of the seventh-century East Syrian bishop and monastic author, Sahdonā (Martyrius): “Prayer is a god ̈ amongst human beings” (‫)ܨܠܘܬܐ ܐܠܗܐ ܗܝ ܒܝܬ ܒܢܝ ܢܫܐ‬.81 The theories of the East Syrian authors on the introvertive ascetic life can be confusing to the modern reader precisely because it is not always clear how to conceptualize their literary heritage. This is not a mere apology for a bit of obscurity in my paper. Instead, as I come to the end of my journey with these texts, I am beginning to grasp the complexity of the thought of those authors and how much is left to be clarified. As Ps. Macarius wrote at the end of the fourth century: “These are not mere and empty words, but we are dealing with a work that truly goes on in the soul.”82 The conceptions cultivated in East Syriac spirituality resonated in the Syriac monastic world for generations and can be easily traced. A glance, for example, at the Life of Ỵawsep Busnaya (d. 979), a monk and spiritual teacher in northern Iraq, written by his disciple Yohannan bar Kaldun, demonstrates the perfect assimilation of the teachings of Isaac of Nineveh and John of Apamea, alongside the enduring stimulation of Evagrius’ theories; the writings of the polymath Barhebraeus (d. 1286) offer a further obvious example. I do hope that future Syriac studies on this topic will inquire into the echo, interaction, or even possible influence of this mystical trend and discourse on early Islam, particularly Sufism from the ninth century on in Baghdad. The Ladder of Prayer engages the linguistic turn that governed East Syriac 81 The Book of Perfection, chapter VIII. 40, ed. and trans. A. de Halleux, Oeuvres spirituelles. III: Livre de la perfection, CSCO 252/3, Syr. 110 (Louvain: Peeters, 1965), 13 [Syr.], trans. Brock, Syriac Fathers, 219. 82 Ps.-Macarius, Homily 1.10.

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Christianity, that is, the impact of the Greek translation into Syriac of major ascetic writings. The next stage may profitably follow a further linguistic turn, namely, the translations into Arabic of Syriac mystical lore and the transposition of Syriac Christianity into the Islamic world. Scholarly efforts have already been made in this direction, and I believe that there is much left to accomplish. Fine young Syriacists and excellent Arabists are poised to do just that. Bibliography Becker, A.H. Fear of God and the Beginning of Wisdom: The School of Nisibis and the Development of Scholastic Culture in Late Antique Mesopotamia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Bedjan, P., ed. Mar Isaacus Ninivita. De perfectione religiosa (Leipzig: Harrassowitz, 1909; repr. 2007). Berti, V. “Le débat sur la vision de Dieu et la condamnation des mystiques par Timothée I: La perspective du patriarche,” in Les mystiques syriaques, ed. A. Desreumaux (Paris: Geuthner, 2011), 151–176. Bettiolo, P., ed. and trans. “Sulla Preghiera: Filosseno o Giovanni,” Le Muséon 94 (1981): 75–89. Bettiolo, P. “Scuole e ambienti intellettuali nelle chiese di Siria,” in Storia della filosofia nell’ Islam medievale, ed. C. D’Ancona, vol. 1 (Turin: Einaudi, 2005), 48–100. Bettiolo, P. Testimoni dell’eschaton. Monaci siro-orientali un’età di torbidi (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2019). Beulay, R. La lumière sans forme: Introduction à l’étude de la mystique chrétienne syroorientale (Chevetogne: Édition de Chevetogne, 1987). Beulay, R. L’enseignement spirituel de Jean de Dalyatha, mystique syro-oriental du VIIIe siècle, Théologie historique 83 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1990). Beulay, R. “Les dimensions philosophiques de l’expérience spirituelle de Jean de Dalyatha,” Parole de l’Orient 33 (2008): 201–207. Bitton-Ashkelony, B. “The Limit of the Mind (Nous): Pure Prayer according to Evagrius Ponticus and Isaac of Nineveh,” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 15, no. 2 (2011): 291–321. Bitton-Ashkelony, B. “Personal Religion and Self-exposure: From Pseudo-Macarius to Symeon the New Theologian,” in Between Personal and Institutional Religion: Self, Doctrine and Practice in Late Antique Eastern Christianity, ed. B. Bitton-Ashkelony and L. Perrone (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 99–128. Bitton-Ashkelony, B. “Monastic Hybridity and Anti-Exegetical Discourse: From Philoxenus of Mabbug to Dadišo Qatraya,” Studia Patristica 91 (2017): 413–433.

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Bitton-Ashkelony, B. The Ladder of Prayer and the Ship of Stirrings: The Praying Self in Late Antique East Syrian Christianity, Late Antique History and Religion 22 (Leuven: Peeters, 2019). Bitton-Ashkelony, B. “The Poetic Performance of the Praying-Mind: Evagrius Ponticus’ Theory of Prayer and its Legacy in Syriac Christianity,” in Théories et pratiques de la prière à la fin de l’Antiquité, ed. Ph. Hoffmann and A. Timotin, Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études, Sciences religieuses 185 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), 327–344. Bremond, H. Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France (Paris: Librairie Bloud et Gay, 1930). Brock, S.P. “Iconoclasm and the Monophysites,” in Iconoclasm: Papers Given at the Ninth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, March 1975, ed. A. Bryer and J. Herrin (Birmingham: Centre for Byzantine Studies, University of Birmingham, 1977), 53–57. Brock, S.P. “John the Solitary, On Prayer,” Journal of Theological Studies 30 (1979): 84–101. Brock, S.P. “The Prayer of the Heart in Syriac Tradition,” Sobornost 4 (1982): 131–142. Brock, S.P., trans. The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and The Spiritual Life, Cistercian Studies Series 101 (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publication, 1987). Brock, S.P. “The Spirituality of the Heart in Syrian Tradition,” The Harp 1 (1988): 93–115. Brock, S.P., ed. and trans. Isaac of Nineveh (Isaac the Syrian): ‘The Second Part,’ Chapters IV–XLI, CSCO 554–555, Scr. Syri 224–225 (Louvain: Peeters, 1995). Brock, S.P. “Without Mushê of Nisibis, Where Would We Be? Some Reflections on the Transmission of Syriac Literature,” Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 56 (2004): 15–24. Brock, S.P. “Discerning the Evagrian in the Writings of Isaac of Nineveh: A Preliminary Investigation,” Adamantius 15 (2009): 60–72. Brock, S.P. “Some Prominent Themes in the Writings of the Syriac Mystics of the 7th/8th Century AD (1st/2nd cent. H),” in Gotteserlebnis und Gotteslehre. Christliche und islamische Mystik im Orient, ed. M. Tamcke, Göttinger Orientforschungen, I. Reihe: Syriaca 38 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010), 49–59. Bunge, G. Rabban Jausep Hazzaya. Briefe über das geistliche Leben und verwandte Schriften (Trier: Paulinis, 1982). Chaillot, C. “Some Comments on the Prayer of Consecration of Icons in the Syriac Tradition,” The Harp 8–9 (1995–1996): 67–85. Chialà, S. “Evagrio il Pontico negli scritti di Isacco di Ninive,” Adamantius 15 (2009): 73–84. Chialà, S. “Les mystiques Syro-Orientaux: Une École ou une Époque?,” in Les mystiques syriaques, ed. A. Desreumaux, Études syriaques 8 (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 2011), 63–78. Chialà, S. “Prayer and the Body According to Isaac of Nineveh,” in Prayer and Worship in Eastern Christianities, ed. B. Bitton-Ashkelony and D. Krueger (London: Routledge, 2017), 34–43.

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Dedering, S., ed. Johannes von Lykopolis. Ein Dialog über die Seele und die Affekte des Menschen, Arbeten utgivna med understöd av Vilhelm Ekmans Universitetsfond, Uppsala 43 (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells, 1936). Desreumaux, A., ed. Les mystiques syriaques, Études syriaques 8 (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 2011). Doutreleau, L., ed. and trans. Origène, Homélies sur les Nombres III, Sources chrétiennes 461 (Paris: Cerf, 2001). Dysinger, L. Psalmody and Prayer in the Writings of Evagrius Ponticus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Géhin, P., ed. and trans. Évagre le Pontique: Chapitres sur la prière, Sources chrétiennes 589 (Paris: Cerf, 2017). Guillaumont, A. “Sources de la doctrine de Joseph Hazzâyâ,” L’Orient Syrien 3 (1958): 5–25. de Halleux, A., ed. and trans. Oeuvres spirituelles. III: Livre de la perfection, CSCO 252–3, Scr. Syri. 110 (Louvain: Peeters, 1965). Hansbury, M.T., ed. and trans. John the Solitary on the Soul, Texts from Christian Late Antiquity 32 (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2013). Harb, P. and F. Graffin with the collaboration of M. Albert, ed. and trans. Joseph Hazzaya: Lettre sur les trois étapes de la vie monastique, Patrologia Orientalis 45/2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1992). Hausherr, I., trans. Jean le Solitaire (Pseudo-Jean de Lycopolis). Dialogue sur l’âme et les passions des hommes, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 120 (Rome: Pont. Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1939). Hausherr, I. ed., “Le De oratione d’Évagre le Pontique en Syriaque et en Arabe,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 5 (1939): 11–16. Hoenerbach, W. and O. Spies, ed. Ibn al-Tayyib. Fiqh an-Nasrânîya, “Das Recht der Christenheit,” 4 vols. CSCO 161–162, 167–168, Arab. 16–19 (Leuven: L. Durbecq, 1956–57). Kalinin, M.G. and A.M. Preobrazhensky, eds. and trans. “The Gnostic Chapters of Joseph Hazzaya: New Manuscript Evidence and Previously Unidentified Chapters,” Bogoslovksie trudy 47–48 (2018), 258–289 [in Russian]. Kavvadas, N., ed. and trans. Joseph Hazzaya: On Providence, Texts and Studies in Eastern Christianity 8 (Leiden: Brill, 2016). Kessel, G. and K. Pinggéra. A Bibliography of Syriac Ascetic and Mystical Literature (Leuven: Peeters, 2011). Kitchen, R.A. and M.F.G. Parmentier, ed. and trans. Book of Steps: The Syriac Liber Graduum, Cistercian Series 196 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2004). Kmosko, M., ed. Book of Steps [Liber Graduum], Patrologia Syriaca 3 (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1926). Louth, A. The Origins of Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).

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Marion, P. “Sacred Spices: The Syriac Reception of Gregory of Nyssa’s Homilies on the Song of Songs,” in Caught in Translation: Studies on Versions of Late Antique Christian Literature, ed. M. Toca and D. Batovici, Texts and Studies in Eastern Christianity 17 (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 104–121. Mingana, A., ed. Woodbrooke Studies: Christian Documents in Syriac, Arabic, and Garshuni, vol. 7, Early Christian Mystics (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1934). Muyldermans, J., ed. and trans. “Sur le Séraphins et sur les Chérubins d’Évagr le Pontique dans les versions Syriaque et Arménienne,” Le Muséon 59 (1946): 367–379. Muyldermans, J., ed. Evagriana syriaca. Textes inédits du British Museum et de la Vaticane, Bibliothèque du Muséon 31 (Leuven: Publications universitaires, 1952). Parmentier, M.F.G. “Syriac translations of Gregory of Nyssa,” Orientalia Lovaniensia Periodica 20 (1989): 143–193. Perrone, L. “In cammino con la parola: Esodo d’Israele e progresso dell’anima secondo Origene. Note di lettura su Hom. in Num. 27,” in Acri Sanctorum Investigatori. Miscellanea di studi in memoria di Gennaro Luongo, ed. L. Arcari (Roma: Bretschneider, 2019), 227–245. del Río Sánchez, F., ed. Los cinco tratados sobre la quietud (šelyā) de Dāḏišōʿ Qaṭrāyā, Aula Orientalis Supplementa 18 (Barcelona: Editorial AUSA, 2001). Stewart, C. “Imageless Prayer and the Theological Vision of Evagrius Ponticus,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 9 (2001): 173–204. Taylor, D.G.K. “Les pères Cappadociens dans la tradition Syriaque,” in Les Pères grecs dans la tradition syriaque, ed. A. Schmidt and D. Gonnet, Études Syriaques 4 (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 2007), 43–61.

Stuck between Voice and Silence: Ephrem and the Rabbis on Prayer Shraga Bick Many studies have been devoted to the search for possible connections between Syriac Christianity and Rabbinic literature. Already in 1979, Sebastian Brock offered a preliminary general survey of possible Jewish traditions within Syriac literature.1 Subsequently, numerous attempts were made by various researchers to fill in this gap, demonstrating mutual influences, interactions and polemics between Syriac and rabbinic literature in Late Antiquity. In the case of Ephrem the Syrian in particular, several scholars have pointed to the close resemblance that appears at times between his writings and rabbinic Midrashim, either halakhic or aggadic.2 However, beyond similarities in specific interpretations or shared traditions, both literatures seem to share a much broader hermeneutical culture.3 Thus, for example, Susan Ashbrook Harvey discussed the positive attitude towards the body in Syriac literature – similar to that in rabbinic literature – as opposed to the Greek-philosophical tradition.4 Another expression of this cultural connection can be found in the 1 S.P. Brock, “Jewish Traditions in Syriac Sources,” Journal of Jewish Studies 30 (1979): 212–231. 2 For example, E. Narinskaya, Ephrem, a ‘Jewish’ Sage: A Comparison of the Exegetical Writings of St. Ephrem the Syrian and Jewish Traditions (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010); S.D. Benin, “Commandments, Covenants and the Jews in Aphrahat, Ephrem and Jacob of Sarug,” in Approaches to Judaism in Medieval Times, ed. D.R. Blumenthal (California: Scholars Press, 1985), 135–156; Y. Monnickendam, “Halakhic Issues in the Writings of the Syriac Church Fathers Ephrem and Aphrahat,” PhD Dissertation, Bar-Ilan University, 2011. These studies add to others who treat the concept of anti-Judaism and the symbolic Jew in Ephrem’s writing. For this see, among others, Ch. Shepardson, Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem’s Hymns in Fourth-century Syria (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2008). 3 Brock, in different places, classifies this assumed shared culture as Semitic. Although I believe that there are some unique characteristics to Rabbinic Judaism and Syriac Christianity that set them apart from the Greek philosophical world of thought, I wish to avoid ascribing such an essentialized category. 4 S.A. Harvey, “Embodiment in Time and Eternity: A Syriac Perspective,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 43, no. 2 (1999): 105–130. For rabbinic literature, see especially D. Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); R. Kimelman, “The Rabbinic Theology of the Physical: Blessings, Body and Soul, Resurrection, Covenant and Election,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 4, The Late Roman-Rabbinic Period, ed. S.T. Katz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 946–976.

© Shraga Bick, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004537897_007

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understanding of religious language in general or in what Sebastian Brock described as God’s incarnation into human language.5 As Menachem Kister recently observed, in Hymns on Faith 31, one of Ephrem’s fullest description of his idea regarding God’s “clothing in names,” Ephrem cites almost verbatim a well attested rabbinic Midrash,6 which addresses the divergence in God’s appearances in specific situations.7 However, this specific shared textual tradition is only one example of a deep and fundamental similarity between Syriac and Rabbinic attitudes towards body and language.8 The question of the role of body and language in religious life becomes even more crucial when one comes to speak about prayer. Most of the descriptions of prayer in the Bible include the use of language and voice, while Hannah’s prayer (1 Sam. 1. 10–13), discussed below, serves as an exception. However, from the second century onwards, the idea of a voiceless mode of prayer appears in various Christian sources. Underlying this speechless prayer, which takes on different forms in various authors, is the assumption that human words cannot serve as an adequate tool in order to address God with prayer. In this article I will examine Ephrem and the Rabbis’ approach to prayer, seeing prayer as the attempt of the human body to approach the Divine through language. In the first part, I will point to a concrete textual similarity between Ephrem and the Rabbis, in order to provide another example of the close textual (or more probably oral) traditions they share, in this case concerning the efficacy of prayer. Then I will proceed to suggest a broader structural similarity in their perceptions of the very act of prayer, expressed in the inherent tension that exists in prayer, which wanders between voice and silence, interior and exterior, visible and hidden.

5 S.P. Brock, Saint Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1990), 45. 6 Pesikta Rabati, parasha 21 (Ish-Shalom edition, 100a–102a). For the different complicated Midrashic traditions, see M. Kister, “The Manifestations of God in the Midrashic Literature in Light of Christian Texts,” Tarbiz 81 (2013): 103–142 [Heb.]. 7 Kister, “The Manifestations of God,” 121–124. 8 Indeed, Ephrem’s as well as the rabbis’ non-philosophical Midrashic style, which was mistreated and criticized in the past, seen as a rather flawed philosophical discourse, is now valued for all its poetic and theological uniqueness. For Ephrem, specifically in the context of speech and silence, see P.S. Russell, “Ephraem the Syrian on the Utility of Language and the Place of Silence,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 8, no. 1 (2000): 21–37; A. Palmer, “Words, Silences, and the Silent: Word Acrostics and Empty Columns in Saint Ephraem’s Hymns on Faith,” Parole de l’Orient 20 (1995): 129–200; K. den Biesen, Simple and Bold: Ephrem’s Art of Symbolic Thought (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006), 14–18.

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The Efficiency of Prayer

In a hymn preserved in Armenian, and attributed to Ephrem, the author cites a long list of successful biblical prayers in order to demonstrate the power of prayer.9 The hymn appears to reflect several Jewish elements. First, all the prayers listed are taken from the Old Testament, and the hymn lacks almost any Christian phraseology. Second, the list of prayers is almost identical to parallel lists found in rabbinic literature, starting from Mishna Taʿanit and later Midrashim, which, like Ephrem, join together the prayers of Moses, Joshua, Elijah, Daniel and others. It is important to note that regarding some of these figures there is no explicit reference in the Bible that they had actually prayed. Moreover, in two passages, Ephrem digresses from his general discussion of the list of biblical prayers to talk about two more general issues. In the first passage he writes: Prayer that rises up in someone’s heart serves to open up for us the door of heaven […] in this way too, tears that well up in the eyes can open the door of compassion.10 Furthermore, in Hymns on Nativity (1. 96), Ephrem again links prayer to the opening of the gates of heaven, using a clear liturgical formulation: “On this day when the gate of heaven is opened for our prayers, let us also open the gates to the seekers who have sinned and asked [forgiveness].”11 Similarly, in 9 10

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The hymn is translated by S.P. Brock, The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1987), 36–38. Ephrem, Hymns Preserved in Armenian 1.3 (trans., Brock, 36). Ephrem uses the metaphor of heavenly gates in several other places. In Hymns on Faith 11.12–13, he once more links that motive to prayer: “To the one who goes carrying an offering of prayer/ The [road itself] is shown to him and he follows it/ And that gate, when it sees him/ Opens itself before his offering/ But whoever goes toward Greatness discussing/ The roads are concealed, the gates are closed” (Ephrem, The Hymns on Faith 16.13, translated by J.T. Wickes, The Fathers of the Church 130 [Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2015], 128). This liturgical formula is close to what appears in the Jewish piyyut Avinu Malkeinu: “Our Father our King, open the gates of heaven to our prayer.” Some of the sentences contained in that Piyyut were recited already in the Tannaitic period (b. Taʿanit 25b). Joseph Heinemann claimed for an early dating of the whole piyyut, J. Heinemann, Prayer in the Talmud: Forms and Patterns (Berlin-New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1977), 150–154. However, this sentence does not appear in Seder R. Amram Gaon, nor in Mahzor Vitry. It is also interesting to note how Ephrem moves from the metaphorical or unliteral “gates of heaven” to the more literal gates of the Church, perhaps even the gates of the physical church. In Y. Berachot 4:1, 7b both opinions regarding the time of the Neʿilah [‫ ]נעילה‬Prayer at the

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the Babylonian Talmud, the ability of prayers and tears to open the gates of heaven is raised and questioned, in light of the destruction of the Temple:12 R. Eleazar also said: From the day on which the Temple was destroyed the gates of prayer have been closed, for it is written, “and when I cry and plead, He shuts out my prayer” (Lam. 3.8). But though the gates of prayer are closed, the gates of weeping are not closed.13 R. Elazar (third century) claims that since the Temple’s destruction the gates of prayer are closed, yet tears still have the power to break through. The destruction, for R. Elazar, symbolizes a dramatic turning point in prayer’s efficacy and in the relations between God and man.14 However, his claim did not remain uncontested: R. Hinene bar Pappa asked R. Samuel bar Nahman, saying to him, what is the meaning of the phrase “far off seas” (Ps. 65.6)? He said to him: Repentance is compared to a sea – just as a sea is eternally open, so the gates of repentance are eternally open.15 And prayer is to be compared to Day of Atonement relate it to the time when the gates are being closed, either the gates of the Temple or the gates of heaven. Furthermore, in the Book of Steps (Liber Graduum) there is what seems as a liturgical formula concerning the gates of repentance: “Blessed is the Good who opens the gate to all who repent” (Liber Graduum 15.1 c. 337). 12 The notion of “gates of heaven” appears already in Hebrew Bible (e.g.: Gen. 28.17; Ps. 78.23), in the New Testament (e.g., Matt. 16.18–19), in ancient Mesopotamian literature, as well as in apocryphal literature (e.g.: The Testament of Levi 5:1), particularly in 1 Enoch. However, the term “gates of prayer” is rare. For example, 1 Enoch 9.2. For a different reference to the opening of gates, especially in a liturgical setting, for example, 1QM 18.7: “You have opened for us many times the gates of salvation.” 13 b. Berachot 32b. According to Baruch Bokser, R. Eleazar’s intent is to restrict the negative disposition regarding prayer as expressed in Lam. 3.8. See, B. Bokser, “The Wall Separating God and Israel,” Jewish Quarterly Review 73, no. 4 (1983): 349–374 (356). 14 Heinemann, Prayer in the Talmud, 19–20. Compare with R. Eleazar’s following saying: “From the time the Temple was destroyed an iron wall has cut Israel off [‫ ]נפסקה‬from its Father in heaven.” However, as convincingly demonstrated by Bokser, R. Eleazar’s sayings are part of an organized unit, intended to show the efficacy of prayer. He thus suggests a different understanding (and translation) of R. Eleazar’s saying: “From the time the Temple was destroyed the iron wall that was between Israel and its Father in Heaven has come to an end [‫( ”]נפסקה‬Bokser, “The Wall,” 357–367). 15 In one parallel in Midrash Psalms 4:3 we find instead of “the gates of repentance” “the gates of compassion” (‫)רחמים‬. See also b. Megilah 12b: “for they were all named after him [Mordecai]: ‘son of Jair’: a son who enlightened the eyes Israel with his prayer; ‘the son of Shimei’: a son whom God heard his prayer; ‘son of Kish’: because he knocked on the gates of mercy (‫ )רחמים‬and they were opened to him.” Here again we find the connection between

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a ritual bath. Just as a ritual bath sometimes is open, sometimes locked, so the gates of prayer sometimes are open, sometimes are locked […]. R. Berekhian, R. Helobo in the name of R. Anan16 bar Yose: Even the gates of prayer are always open.17 Later Ephrem digresses from the list in order to educate his listeners that as prayer brought salvation in the past, so it can continue to serve as an effective and trustworthy tool in the present. This Ephrem expresses in language that is closely related to the language of the rabbis: I will show you, my brethren what faith and prayer have effected: the prayer which held back the sun in Gibeon can hold back evil from us: he who held back the moon at the field of Ayyalon, who overthrew the sevenfold walls of Jericho that mighty city, who drove off Amalek along with its king – will drive off and break into pieces the might of Satan.18 The formula “he who did […] – he will answer our […],” is the ancient Jewish formula for prayer in times of afflictions as one can find in the descriptions of special fasting prayers cited already in Mishna Taʿanit,19 and in the Selihot – the prayer (present in the Midrash on the first two names) and the gates of mercy/compassion (‫)רחמים‬. The opening of a gate of mercy is mentioned as well in a prayer alleged to be Jewish in Apostolic Constitutions VII 33.3. See, P.W. van der Horst and J.H. Newman, Early Jewish Prayers in Greek (Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 42–43. Origen’s allegorical discussion of heavenly gates in Cels. VI.36 has a different context. 16 Anan (‫ )ענן‬means cloud. Interestingly, in the Talmud (b. Berachot 32:b) the saying of R. Eleazar is followed by a story that “Raba did not order a fast on a cloudy day because it says, Thou hast covered Thyself with a cloud (Heb.: ‫ )ענן‬so that no prayer can pass through (Lam. 3.44),” and in different places this verse serves as an evidence that at least in certain times the gates of prayer are closed (see, Sifre Numbers 42; Lamentations Rabba 3:15). Thus, bringing the opposing opinion in the name of R. Anan cannot be coincidental. On this phenomenon see Sh. Friedman, “Nomen est Omen – Dicta of Talmudic Sages which Echo the Author’s Name,” in These Are the Names: Studies on Jewish Onomastics, vol. 2, ed. A. Demsky (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1999), 62–67 [Heb.]. 17 Pesikta deRab Kahana 24:2, trans. J. Neusner (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987), 96. See also: Lamentations Rabba 3:15; Deuteronomy Rabba 2:12. The figures mentioned in this Midrash are dated to the third-fourth centuries. 18 Ephrem, Hymns Preserved in Armenian 1.5 (trans., Brock, 37). 19 According to Mishnah Taʿanit (2:4), six additional blessings are to be added to the daily prayer on special fast days. These six blessings (and the blessing of “Ga‌ʾal Israel,” that comes before) all conclude with a similar formula: (1) “He who answered Abraham on the Mount of Moriah […] (2) He Who answered our fathers at the Red Sea […] (3) He Who answered Joshua at Gilgal […] (4) He Who answered Samuel at Mitzpah […] (5) He Who answered Elijah on the mount of Carmel […] (6) He Who answered Jonah from the belly

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Jewish penitential prayers for public fast days, the Day of Atonement and the days leading up to it.20 Menahem Kister has argued that the appearance of this formula in the seventh book of the Apostolic Constitutions (AC VII, 37) relies on Jewish prayers.21 It is true that lists of prayers of Biblical heroes appear in other early Christian sources as well, which do not necessarily reveal any special Jewish liturgical connections or influences.22 Furthermore, as Anton Baumstark notes, the idea that God(s) is “required to perform this or that action by being reminded of the circumstances in which he performed it in on a previous occasion” can be traced “in all religions.”23 However, Kister shows that the similarities between the prayer in the Apostolic Constitutions and the Selihot are not merely in their content (only Old Testament prayers) but in their structure. In a similar manner, Ephrem here lists only Old Testament prayers and heroes, and, most importantly, he uses what seems to resemble the Jewish structure of the Selihot. The Apostolic Constitutions’ incorporation and Christianization of this Jewish liturgical formula might also suggest that in fourth century Syria this formula was already detached from its Jewish liturgical origins and might have passed down to Ephrem without any direct knowledge of the Jewish liturgy. However, seen as a whole, although Ephrem himself might not have been influenced directly by a Jewish source, this hymn seems to reflect Jewish traditions concerning the efficacy of prayer.

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23

of the fish […] (7) He who answered David, and his son Solomon, in Jerusalem […] He shall answer you and listen this day to the sound of your cry […].” Heinemann, Prayer in the Talmud, 150. Heinemann mentions without further discussion that the “style of this prayer is also to be found in ancient Christian liturgies” such as in the Apostolic Constitutions 7.37 (Heinemann, Prayer in the Talmud, 237, n45). M. Kister, “The Prayers of the Seventh Book of the ‘Apostolic Constitutions’ and their Implications for the Formulation of the Synagogue Prayers,” Tarbiz 77, no. 2 (2008): 225–227 [Heb.]. See also A. Baumstark’s discussion in his Comparative Liturgy (London, 1958), 72–73. E.g.: 1 Clement 9–12, ed. M.W. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations (3rd ed.; Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007), 57–61; The Liturgy of James, V, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7, ed. Ph. Schaff (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 1885), 797; Aphrahat, Demonstrations IV (trans. Brock, 5–14). Aphrahat provides a long list of biblical successful prayers. And see also, P. Gavrilyuk, “Melito’s Influence upon the Anaphora of ‘Apostolic Constitutions’ 8.12,” Vigiliae Christianae 59, no. 4 (2005): 368–372. Gavrilyuk aims to prove the Apostolic Constitutions’ dependency on Melito through a statistical examination of the names mentioned by the different sources. Likewise, David Fiensy argues that it is not uncommon for early Christian literature to cite only the Old Testament examples, therefore, this fact alone cannot serve as evidence for a Jewish influence. D.A. Fiensy, Prayers Alleged to be Jewish: An Examination of the Constitutiones Apostolorum (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985), 136. However, Fiensy himself noticed the resemblance to the Jewish Selihot (207, n68). Baumstark, Comparative Liturgy, 73.

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Prayer between Voice and Silence

At the same time, Ephrem and the Rabbis partake in a more general discussion regarding the problematization of prayer that took place in Late Antiquity.24 Several Jewish and Christian solutions were proposed to solve the apparent inability to address God, such as by describing prayer as God’s own self activity through the human agent,25 or as a divine formula that was headed down directly by God himself, at times by putting on a human body in order to teach the proper way of prayer.26 This idea, well attested in commentaries on the Lord’s Prayer,27 is found also in a famous Talmudic saying in the name of R. Yohanan (third century): “And the Lord passed by before him, and proclaimed” (Ex. 34.6). R. Yoḥanan said: Were it not written in the verse, it would be impossible to say this – The verse teaches that the Holy One, Blessed be He, wrapped Himself in a prayer shawl like a prayer leader and showed Moses the order of prayer.28 All these different ideas endeavor to answer one of the most fundamental problems of religious thought in general, but one especially crucial in a period when ancient rituals and institutions are coming to their end, and new religious customs need to be formed and reconstructed.29 Furthermore, the ancient demand to execute an accurate worship intersected with the interiorization processes of ancient rituals in Late Antiquity. One of these new solutions was praying voicelessly. As described by Pieter van der Horst, in Greco-Roman 24

This problematization process is best attested in Paul’s words “for we do not know how to pray as we ought” (Rom. 8.26). For the Greek-philosophical context see, B. BittonAshkelony, “Theories of Prayer in Late Antiquity: Doubts and Practices from Maximus of Tyre to Isaac of Nineveh,” in Prayer and Worship in Eastern Christianities: 5th to 11th Centuries, ed. B. Bitton-Ashkelony and D. Krueger (London: Routledge, 2017), 10–33. 25 In one place Ephrem writes: “Through your love my harp has grown daring: play on it, Lord, as you are used to do” (Church 9.2 [trans., den Biesen, Simple and Bold, 335]); for a Jewish expression of this idea see: Sh. Naeh, “‘Creates the Fruit of Lips’: A Phenomenological Study of Prayer According to Mishnah Berakhot 4:3, 5:5,” Tarbiz 63 (1994): 185–218 [Heb.]. 26 See Ephrem, Hymns on Paradise 31 (trans., Brock, 45–46). The gap between God and men is overcome only through God’s putting-on language and body. 27 See, for example: Tertullian, Oratione 9: “God alone could teach us the manner in which he would have us pray. Therefore, the practice of prayer is laid down by him” (trans. StewartSykes, 49); See also, Cyprian, De Dominica oratione 2; Augustin, Epistle 130. 28 b. Rosh Hashanah 17b. 29 For this broad transformation in Late Antiquity, see: G.G. Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice: Religious Transformations of Late Antiquity (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009).

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literature silent prayer was not a common phenomenon in antiquity, and was often treated negatively and suspiciously, usually due to its connection to various magical tendencies and to evil intentions.30 Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony traced the development of silent prayer within Syriac Christianity, and especially in the writings of John of Apamea (fifth century). However, as opposed to Van der Horst’s claim, Bitton-Ashkelony has argued that the emergence of the idea of silent prayer in Christianity should not be seen as stemming (necessarily) from Neoplatonist influences, especially since the craft of inner prayer in those circles reached its peak only at the fifth century.31 To this we must add the notions of silent prayer in Judaism and in Syriac-Christianity, which both have evolved without close connections to the Neoplatonist world of thought.32 In Hymns on Faith 20, one of his most studied hymns, Ephrem makes a clear distinction between faith, which should be said out loud, and prayer, which must remain silent: “To you lord do I offer up my faith with my voice, for prayer and petition can both be conceived in the mind and brought to birth in silence, without using the voice.”33 Ephrem uses rich language to describe the difference between the two: faith, likened to a fetus in his mother’s womb, must go out in order to live. Prayer, however, is like new born fish, which dive into the depths. Like Aphrahat, Ephrem also understands Jesus’ instruction to enter and close the door of the inner chamber (Matt. 6.6) as referring to the need to close the mouth during prayer.34 However, interestingly, unlike Aphrahat35 as well as Jewish sources to which I shall refer later on, Ephrem does not allude to

30 P.W. van der Horst, “Silent Prayer in Antiquity,” Numen 14, no. 1 (1994): 2–5. 31 B. Bitton-Ashkelony, “‘More Interior Than the Lips and the Tongue’: John of Apamea and Silent Prayer in Late Antiquity,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 20 (2012): 303–331 (308). 32 At least up to the fifth century, especially due to the translation of Evagrius’ writings into Syriac. For this dramatic influence of philosophical-oriented notions of prayer on Syriac Christianity, see Bitton-Ashkelony, “Theories of Prayer,” 22–24; B. Bitton-Ashkelony, The Ladder of Prayer and the Ship of Stirrings: The Praying Self in Late Antique East Syrian Christianity, Late Antique History and Religion 22 (Leuven: Peeters, 2019), 1–51. 33 Hymns on Faith 20.1 (trans. Brock, The Syriac Fathers, 33); see also Hymns on Faith 16.13: “[Faith] is not prayer, which is served by silence. Faith is symbolized in a face uncovered” (Ephrem, The Hymns on Faith 16.13 (trans. Wickes, 144). 34 Aphrahat, Demonstrations 4.10; Ephrem, Hymns on Faith 20.6. 35 Aphrahat, Demonstrations 4.8. Hanna’s prayer was understood as a source for silent prayer by several other patristic authors, for example, Cyprian, De Dominica oratione 5; Jerome, Commentary on Matthew 6.6, trans., Th. P. Scheck, The Fathers of the Church 117 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 86–87. And also, though in a different manner, Cyril of Jerusalem, Procatechesis 14, ed. R.J. Deferrari, and trans. L.P. McCauley and A.A. Stephenson, The Works of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, vol. 1, The Fathers of the Church 61 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1969), 81.

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Hannah’s prayer.36 In this way, Ephrem creates a clear affinity between silence, which is interior and concealed, and speech, signifying that which is exterior and visible. Faith, directed towards people, is the visible, vocal expression of prayer, which is itself directed only toward God. However, there is no contradiction but rather a complementary relationship between the two: In a single body are both prayer and faith to be found, the one hidden, the other revealed; the one for the hidden one, the other to be seen. Hidden prayer is for the hidden ear of God, while faith is for the visible ear of humanity.37 According to Ephrem, this dual structure is necessary due to the division of the human heart: while a man’s feet or eyes operate together and in the same direction, the heart is divided between good and evil, righteousness and injustice. Thus, it is only by the paradoxical union between voice and silence that the divided person can be re-united: “Let prayer wipe clean the murky thoughts, let faith wipe clean the senses outwardly, and let one such man who is divided collect himself and become one before you.”38 This joining together of prayer and faith serves also to shape and strengthen social boundaries, religious identities and doctrines. This is evident in the way Augustine, for example, joins the Creed (faith) and prayer, since, according to him, one cannot hope nor love (that is – pray) without faith.39 Similarly, in Mishnah Berachot, the Rabbis contrast the recitation of the Shema, which can be seen as an expression of a Jewish creed, that is, a liturgical expression of faith, and the act of prayer.40 36 Furthermore, in a different place Ephrem compares Hannah’s prayer for a son to his wish for new words to come forth from his barren mind: “Grant fruitfulness and birth giving to my mind, as you did to Hanna, so that utterance, in the form of a child proceeding from my mouth, may be offered to you” (Hymns on the Church 30.1). A similar idea appears also in Origen (On Prayer 13.3). 37 Ephrem, Hymns on Faith 20.10, trans. Brock. See also, S.P. Brock, The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World View of Saint Ephrem (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1992), 129–130. 38 Ephrem, Hymns on Faith 20.17 (trans. Brock, The Syriac Fathers, 35). 39 Augustine, Enchiridion 2.7. However, as opposed to Ephrem and the Rabbis, as part of Augustine’s distinction between faith and prayer, the role of silence does not come up. Moreover, as his letter to Flora suggests, it seems that Augustine did not encourage silent (or “wordless”) prayer (see Augustin, Epistle 130). 40 See, m. Berachot 2:2. For the reciting of the Shema as a kind of testimony see, for instance, b. Berachot 14b: “Ulla said: Anyone who recites Shema without phylacteries, it is as if he has borne false testimony against himself.” And also, M. Weinfeld, The Decalogue and the Recitation of “Shema”: The Development of the Confessions (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2001), 9 [Heb.]; R. Kimelman, “The Shema and the Amidah: Rabbinic Prayer,”

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While the Shema must be said aloud,41 and can be said in every possible bodily posture,42 prayer is defined as Amidah,43 a word which simply means “standing,” but its actual meaning here is closer to stillness. Moreover, in rabbinical language, “standing” can signify rising up, prayer, and silence. This close connection between standing and silence appears in several rabbinic sayings, such as regarding the prohibition to speak while the Torah-scroll is unrolled: Raba son of R. Huna said: Once the Torah scroll has been opened, it is prohibited to converse, even about matters of halakha [Law]; as it is said: “And when he opened it all the people stood up” (Neh. 8.5) and standing means nothing else than silence, as it is said: “And I wait because they speak not, because they stand still and answer no more” (Job 32.16).44 Although it is clear from the biblical narrative (Neh. 8.5) that after Ezra opened the book all the people stood up (compare to the beginning of that verse: “And Ezra opened the book […] for he was standing above all the people” – which cannot mean silence!) Raba son of R. Huna creatively changes the literal meaning of the word. This example is of special interest not only because of the general affinity between prayer and standing (Amidah) but because Raba’s saying is structured in a very similar way to how in a different place the Talmud interprets biblical standing as referring to prayer. While debating the origins of Jewish prayer it says: “Abraham instituted the morning prayer as it is said: ‘And Abraham rose early in the morning to the place where he had stood before’ (Gen. 19.27), and standing means nothing else than prayer, as it is said: ‘And Pinehas stood up and prayed’ (Ps. 106.30).”45 The close resemblance in these two distinct sayings regarding the meaning of standing might enable us to tie together prayer, standing and silence.

41 42 43 44 45

in Prayer from Alexander to Constantine: A Critical Anthology, ed. M. Kiley (London: Routledge, 1997), 108–114. b. Berachot 15a. m. Berachot 2:4; t. Berachot 2:7. b. Berachot 26b; y. Berachot 4:1, 7a; Genesis Rabba 68; Sifre Deuteronomy 26. b. Sotah 39a. b. Berachot 26b. This close literal connection between standing and silence can be traced in many other Rabbinic sources. For instance, b. Berachot 27b: “Rabban Gamliel was sitting and expounding while R. Yehoshua stood [‫ ]עמד‬on his feet, until all the people murmured and said to Ḥutzpit the turgeman: Stop! [‫עמוד‬ – literally: stand] and he stopped” [‫ועמד‬ – that is: he was quiet]. See also Genesis Rabba (Albek edition) 65:22; Sifre Deuteronomy 306 (Finkelstein edition) Ecclesiastes Rabba (Vilnah) 3:14. For the linguistic background and meaning of the roots ‫ם‬.‫ו‬.‫ ד‬and ‫ם‬.‫מ‬.‫ ד‬see: N. Ilan, “Vayidom Aharon,” Leshonenu 62 (1999): 15–21 [Heb.], with references to earlier studies.

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Indeed, and although Mishna Berachot does not say so explicitly, there are a few hints in early rabbinic literature that prayer, as opposed to the Shema, should be performed in silence. Thus, for example, in Sifre Deuteronomy, prayer is defined as the worship of the heart, although it is important to stress that situating prayer in the heart does not necessarily imply silence.46 More importantly, in Tosefta Berachot it is learned from Hanna’s prayer in her heart (1 Sam. 1. 10–13) that prayer must be performed voicelessly.47 This, in addition to the apparent silence that accompanied the sacrificial service in the Temple.48 Furthermore, in the Talmud, while discussing prayer’s proper measure, we find the following instruction: “What is meant by the verse, ‘For thee silence is praise’ (Ps. 65.2)? The [best] medicine of all is silence. When R. Dimi came, he said: In the West they say: A word is worth a sela [a coin], silence two selas.”49 However, as Ephrem emphasized, the contrast between prayer and faith, voice and silence is not intended to lead to division, but rather to unification, and similarly according to a Talmudic saying one must connect together the recitation of the Shema and prayer: “R. Yohanan said: Who is worthy of the world to come? He who connects redemption50 to prayer.”51 Thus, it seems that both Ephrem and the rabbis create a model of prayer, performed silently and ought to be united with faith, proclaimed out loud. Admittedly however, on other occasions Ephrem presents a more complicated perception of prayer and so Hymns on Faith 20 is rather exceptional. As argued by Kees den Biesen, instead of a sharp division between voice and silence, Ephrem describes an ambivalent and dialectic relationship between the two. For Ephrem, humanity is placed in a paradoxical situation where it must proclaim what it cannot, and in many places, such as in Hymn on the Church 9, rather than seeking to solve this tension Ephrem intensifies it: No one blames babies for clinging to those they are familiar with; their ingenuousness is not blamed by those who understand. Do not blame me for making bold with, for who can fix his gaze on you?52 46 Sifre Deuteronomy 41. 47 T. Berachot 3:6. For the Talmudic interpretation and limitation of this instruction see the discussion below. 48 See I. Knohl, “Between Voice and Silence: The Relationship between Prayer and Temple Cult,” Journal of Biblical Literature 115, no. 1 (1996): 17–30. 49 b. Megilla 18a; y. Berachot 9:1, 12d. 50 I.e., the Shema. “Redemption” is the rabbinic name for the last blessing the closes the Shema liturgical unit. 51 b. Berachot 4b. 52 “Teaching song on the church” 9.1 (trans., den Biesen, Simple and Bold, 335).

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[…] My reason began to address me. Calmly and angrily it spoke […] “It is enough for you, O weakling, to offer praise in silence.” Blessed is he who through insight has made silence greater than the tongue.53 As in many other occasions, Ephrem tries do draw a clear line between appropriate speech and silence, emphasizing that each of them has its value, while adhering to their proper measure and balance.54 However, Ephrem does not try to obscure the distress caused by this fierce struggle: “So here I stand in the middle, unable either to go in or to get out, stuck between fear and love.”55 In Hymns on Church 49 Ephrem describes again in his rich language the paradox that lies within any human appeal to God: (3) If someone keeps silent he is like an ungrateful one; if someone is bold, he is like an audacious one. I want to speak in order to give thanks, and I want to keep silent in order not to be audacious. (4) With what tongue could one tell about the mercy which is too abundant and copious for the mouth?56 Who could speak, who could keep silent? (5) My mind tired itself with both these: I should keep silent and I should speak.57 Thus, more than creating a theory of silent prayer, Ephrem actually lingers on the tension between voice and silence, between the necessity and the inability to address God, and it is precisely out of this tension that prayer is born. As den-Biesen emphasizes, the uniqueness of Ephrem’s theology is precisely the paradox of the contrasting yet complementary relations of silence and speech.58 As for the rabbis, we have only clues to the existence of the idea of silent prayer. However, if one looks at what is sometimes mistakenly called silent prayer in Judaism today, one will notice open and moving lips, sometimes soundlessly, sometimes with a whisper.59 Yet, what is the meaning of a voiceless 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

Church 9.3 (trans., den Biesen, Simple and Bold, 335–336). Russell, “Ephraem the Syrian on the Utility of Language,” 21–37. Church 9.9 (trans., den Biesen, Simple and Bold, 337).

‫ܪܡܢ ܦܘܡܐ ܫܦܝܥܝܢ ܘܤܓܝܐܝܢ‬

Church 49. 4–5 (trans., den Biesen, Simple and Bold, 152). den Biesen, Simple and Bold, 192. Mistakenly, since in Hebrew it is usually referred to as ‫תפילת לחש‬ – prayer of whisper, a problematic title of its own, which does not necessarily mean silence, although this

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open mouth? Especially in light of the many sources that distinguish between inner and outer prayer, with the mouth described as a door, it seems like a contradictory and unreasonable act. The result of opening of the mouth, presumably, should be the coming out of words.60 As noted above, in Tosefta Berachot, it is learned from Hannah that prayer must be performed voicelessly.61 However, in both the Babylonian and Yerushalmi Talmud, to this voiceless and interior prayer of the heart an additional instruction is added, learned as well from Hannah, that involves in some manner the lips as well: R. Hamnuna (third century) said: How many most important laws can be learnt from these verses of Hannah! “Now Hannah, she spoke in her heart”: from this that one who prays must direct his heart. “Only her lips moved”: from this that he who prays must cut [Yahtokh] with his lips. “But her voice could not be heard”: from this, it is forbidden to raise one’s voice in his prayer.62 Surprisingly, in the Talmud Hanna’s prayer becomes the main source for deriving the laws of prayer. This is unique since Hannah’s prayer is described already within the Bible as odd, and especially since all other biblical prayers are conducted by men, and probably aloud.63 However, although constructing Hanna’s prayer as the main Jewish paradigm of prayer, including the mistranslation is rather common. Thus, for instance, although in the original Hebrew version of Joseph Heinemann’s influential book Prayer in the Talmud: Forms and Patterns there is no reference to silent prayer (and only, at times, to ‫)תפילת לחש‬, in the English version (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1977) silent prayer appears several times. Later this mistranslation was picked up by different studies, as reflected in the Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion, which has a whole entry on “Silent Prayer,” relying on Heinemann’s study. In the same manner, also P. van der Horst’s discussion of silent prayer in Judaism, as part of his important survey of that phenomenon in Late Antiquity, suffers from crucial mistranslations as well (such as his discussion of R. Akiva’s private – yet not [!] silent – prayer) (Van der Horst, “Silent Prayer in Antiquity,” 16). However, I do think that there are traces of silent prayer within rabbinic sources. For this see Knohl, “Between Voice and Silence,” 17–30; U. Ehrlich, The Nonverbal Language of Prayer: A New Approach to Jewish Liturgy (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 174–198. 60 See Ps. 51.17: “O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise.” And also b. Berachot 4b. In fact, the movement of the lips up and down (vertically) is supposed to lead to movement from the inside to the outside (horizontally). 61 T. Berachot 3:6. 62 b. Berachot 31a. 63 On the uniqueness of transforming Hannah’s prayer into the paradigmatic way of prayer for both men and women, see L.L. Bronner, “Hannah’s Prayer: Rabbinic Ambivalence,” Shofar 17, no. 2 (1999): 36–48 (37); Ehrlich, The Nonverbal Language of Prayer, 182; Knohl, “Between Voice and Silence,” 27.

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embracement of her voiceless prayer, the Talmud at the same time seeks to limit it. Therefore, alongside the prohibition to raise the voice, there is an obligation to “cut with the lips.” This restriction is even clearer in the Talmud Yerushalmi: “‘Hannah was speaking in her heart’ [1 Sam. 1.13] – can one meditate in his heart? Scripture states, ‘Only her lips moved’ What does that mean? That one should be Merahesh [‫ ]מרחש‬with one’s lips.”64 From the Yerushalmi’s question – “can one meditate in one’s heart” – we might assume that this was indeed a concrete possibility, perhaps even the original understanding of the Tosefta (and of the biblical narrative). Although the problem already exists in the biblical narrative itself, the normative formulations of the Talmud seem ambiguous, making it difficult to understand the precise meaning – and practice – of prayer: How, and where, does prayer occur? Is a speechless prayer that ought to be expressed, in some way, with the lips – silent?65 Some scholars attempted to explain this as a kind of compromise (apparently by understanding “Merahesh” as whispering).66 I would like to suggest that instead of a mere compromise, the Rabbis wittingly shaped prayer as a tense and paradoxical act, due to the innate ambivalence that constitutes the human appeal to God. In order to fully comprehend their intent, it is necessary first to understand the meaning of the word Merahesh (‫)מרחש‬, which cannot be easily translated into English. Dictionaries are not helpful in this case, since they explain its meaning variously as moving, whispering, talking, feeling and also meditating.67 64 y. Berachot 4:1, 7a. 65 This change between the Tosefta and the Talmud is often overlooked, for instance, Knohl, “Between Voice and Silence,” 27–28. Furthermore, although in the Hebrew version Knohl writes about prayer of Lahash (‫לחש‬, literally: whispering), in the English version he refers in all his discussion of rabbinic sources to silent prayer. 66 For the understanding of the Talmudic construction of prayer as a compromise, Knohl, “Between Voice and Silence,” 27–28; Ehrlich, The Nonverbal Language of Prayer, 183, n21; 188–190. 67 E. Ben Yehuda, A Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew (Tel-Aviv: Laʿam, 1948) s.v. ‫ ;רחש‬M. Sokoloff, A Dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic (Ramat-Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2002), 1071. For an explicit contrast between Rahash, which takes place in the heart, and speech performed through the mouth, see Midrash Psalms (Buber), 45:4: “My heart overfloweth [Rahash] with a goodly matter (Ps. 45.2) to teach you that they were unable to confess with their mouths, but since their hearts were overflowing [Rahash] with repentance, the Holy One, blessed be He, receives them […] And why couldn’t they utter a song with their mouths? Because the pit was open beneath them, and a fire burned about them. As Scripture says, And the earth opened up her mouth […]. And the sons of Korah saw the pit open beneath from here, and fire burning from there, and they were unable to confess with their mouths, and so their hearts overflowed [Rahashu] with repentance” (trans. W.G. Braude, vol. I [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959], 451 (with some changes). Like the examples I will bring below, here too the Rahash of the heart is due to the inability to utter the words through the mouth. And here, too, the

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However, we can get a sense of its meaning from other sources in the Talmud where this verb appears. As I wish to demonstrate here, although all these three sources concentrate on completely different topics, they all use the verb “Rahash” (‫ )רחש‬as an expression of a liminal and uncertain state. In b. Chagigah, there is a discussion whether a mute person is obligated to keep the commandment of going up to the Temple. The first assumption is that only one who is able to participate in Torah study (more precisely, to participate in the mitzvah of “Hakhel” – ‫ )הקהל‬is obliged, and thus, a mute person is exempt, since he cannot study the Torah. However, the Talmud has trouble seeing the connection between being mute and studying skills and thus we are told: There were two mute men in the neighborhood of Rabbi [R. Judah HaNasi] […] who, whenever Rebbe entered the College, went in and sat down before him, and nodded their heads and moved [Merahashin – ‫]מרחשין‬ their lips. And Rabbi prayed for them and they were cured, and it was found that they were versed in Halachah, Sifra, Sifre and the whole Talmud.68 The story is brought to show that muteness is not an obstacle for learning Torah, and thus to challenge the exemption of mutes from the commandment, yet for our current purposes it is important to note that while they were surely mute, unable to speak whatsoever, they moved – Meraheshin – their lips. From this we can learn that the movement of the lips is not equivalent to whispering and does not include any sound at all. Yet again – if they could not speak, why do they continue moving their, so it seems, “barren” lips? However, it is exactly this odd liminal situation, with the movement of the mutes’ lips, which stimulates Rabbi’s intervention on their behalf, and brings fourth his prayer. And indeed, instead of a sign of barrenness, the movement of the silent lips is revealed as a symbol of the vast abundance hidden within them. In addition, in b. Sanhedrin 90b, referring to the Mishnah’s statement that “One who says that resurrection of the dead is not from the Torah” has no share in the World to Come (Sanhedrin 10:1), the Talmud struggles to find scriptural proof for the resurrection of the dead. As part of this discussion, the silent movement of the lips appears again: Rahash occurs in a liminal state: between life and death, between the earth and the abyss, and in the face of the dangerous open mouth of the earth, with its threatening tongues of fire. 68 b. Chagigah 3a.

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From the Writings, as it is written, And the roof of thy mouth, like the best wine of my beloved, that goeth down sweetly, causing the lips of those that are asleep to speak (Songs 7.9) [‫]דובב שפתי ישנים‬. But perhaps it means merely that their lips will move [Merahshan – ‫]מרחשן‬, as R. Johanan said: If a halachah is said in any person’s name in this world, his lips speak [‫ ]דובבות‬in the grave, as it is written (Songs 7.9), “causing the lips of those that are asleep to speak”?69 According to the Talmud, reciting a saying of a dead person stimulates the dead’s mouth to move, “Lerahesh” [‫]לרחש‬. The verb Lerahesh is here connected to the verb Dovev [‫]דובב‬, another verb that is related both to movement and speech, and at times to the attempt to stimulate speech, yet like the verb Rahash [‫]רחש‬, remains unclear.70 However, from the context it is obvious that the dead themselves do not fully speak; they do not utter a single sound nor voice, and they are not alive. Though their lips are preforming the act of speech, actual words and especially sound issue only from the mouth of the living. However, mentioning their sayings acts upon them, and in some sense, they come to life. Indeed, it is not the resurrection of the dead, and yet it is tightly related to awakening, talking, and bringing redemption.71 From this source we may conclude that to Lerahesh [‫ ]לרחש‬does not mean to speak, yet it is also not silence – rather it is a liminal act, a miraculous hint, or the beginning of a great unaccomplished yet expected potential, that is, the full resurrection of the dead. These two sources attest that the verb Lerahesh functions as an expression of a liminal act between speech and silence, interior and exterior, containing a great tension that is waiting, but not yet able, to burst out. Furthermore, in another place the Rabbis themselves were uncertain about 69 b. Sanhedrin 90b, and also b. Yevamot 97a and b. Bechorot 31b where the following image is added: “like a pile [komer – ‫ ]כומר‬of grapes, Just as a pile of grapes, when a person touches it, immediately it moves [Dovev – ‫]דובב‬, so too with Torah scholars: When a teaching is said in their name their lips mouth [Dovevot] in the grave.” And see also y. Berachot 2:1 4b. In these sources the movement is described as something that happens “on its own,” without involvement or even awareness of the dead person. In a sense, it remains a movement of a corpse, while the lips are “pulled by strings” drawn from the living. 70 Dictionaries attempt to define the meaning of Dovev by referring to the verb Rahash, which as I mentioned before is not very helpful. For Dovev see: Ben Yehuda, A Complete Dictionary, s.v. ‫[ דבב‬Heb.]; M. Zevi Kaddari, A Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2006) s.v. ‫[ דבב‬Heb.]. 71 m. Avot 6:6: “One who says something in the name of the one who said it brings redemption to the world.” And also y. Berachot 2:1 4b where it is connected to a wish to “live forever.”

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the meaning of this verb [Rahash – ‫]רחש‬. In the course of their discussion, the close connection between this verb and the tension between lips and heart, interior and exterior, is once again revealed: Mishnah: One who says: It is incumbent upon me [to bring a meal offering prepared] in a Mahavat [‫]מחבת‬, may not bring in a Marheshet [‫;]מרחשת‬ in a Marheshet [‫]מרחשת‬, he may not bring in a Mahavat [‫]מחבת‬. What is the difference between a Mahavat [‫ ]מחבת‬and a Marheshet [‫?]מרחשת‬ A Marheshet [‫ ]מרחשת‬has a cover, whereas a Mahavat [‫ ]מחבת‬does not have a cover; this is the statement of R. Yossi HaGelili. R. Hanina ben Gamliel says: A Marheshet [‫ ]מרחשת‬is deep and its products [‫]מעשיה‬ Rohashin [‫]רוחשין‬.72 A Mahavat [‫ ]מחבת‬is flat, and its products are hard. Gemara: what is the reason of R. Yossi HaGelili? If we say that Marheshet [‫ ]מרחשת‬is brought for the musings [Rahashei – ‫ ]רחשי‬of the heart, as it is written: “My heart muses [Rahash – ‫ ]רחש‬on a goodly matter” (Ps. 45.2), and Mahavat [‫ ]מחבת‬is brought for the concealments [‫ ]אמחבואי‬of the mouth, as people say: He is barking [‫]מנבח נבוחי‬,73 you may say the opposite: Mahavat [‫ ]מחבת‬comes for the concealments of the heart, as it is written: “Why did you flee secretly [‫( ”]נחבאת‬Gen. 31.27). [and] Marheshet [‫ ]מרחשת‬comes for rehushi [‫ ]רחושי‬as people say: His lips were merahashan [‫]מרחשן‬. Rather, his interpretation is learned as a tradition.74 The Talmud, following the Mishnah, struggles to understand the difference between two types of meal offerings (see: Lev. 2.5–7) – Minhat Mahvat and Minhat Marheshet. According to R. Yossi, the difference lies in the fact that Marheshet [‫ ]מרחשת‬has a cover. At first, in order to explain his opinion, the Talmud links between the semantic similarity of Marheshet and the word Rahash [‫]רחש‬, and from this resemblance it tries to conclude that, as the Rahash of the heart, so is the Minhat Marheshet covered and concealed. From here it seems that according to the Talmud, Rahash refers to something hidden and internal, which is identified with the heart. In contrast to the hidden Marheshet, the Mahvat [‫ ]מחבת‬is visible, and more importantly, it is noisy – like 72

That is the version in manuscript Parma and manuscript Kaufmann. However, in all the manuscripts of the Bavli instead of Rohashin the version is Rakin (soft), contrary to the Mahvat whose product is hard. 73 This is the version in the Vilna addition. In each of the manuscripts appears a different and rather difficult version. 74 b. Menahot 63a.

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the barking of dogs.75 However, the Talmud immediately offers an alternative and opposite interpretation: the Mahvat is hidden, whereas the Marheshet is open and revealed just like the mouth. In fact, the entire discussion revolves around the axis between the covered heart and the revealed “barking” mouth, while in between is the intermediate possibility of the moving (Rehushi – ‫ )רחושי‬lips. In this way, the question that hovers around the Talmudic discussion revolves around the question of the closed and concealed as opposed to the revealed and open, while Marheshet is associated with all possibilities. In light of these sources, I argue that shifting the focus from Hannah’s quiet prayer – which takes place secretly, in the depths of the heart, to the movements of the open-closed mouth – should be understood as a dramatic move designed to “pin” prayer on the border between interior and exterior and between voice and silence. The mouth, in this sense, functions as a gateway between the interior and exterior, between the visible and the hidden, between speech and meditation (hirhur – ‫)הרהור‬.

Conclusion

Alongside specific connections, I have tried to point to some deep structural similarities between Ephrem and the Rabbis in their conception of prayer. The first similarity was expressed in the dual structure of prayer, which is constituted from the union between voice and silence, faith and prayer. The second stemmed from the assertion that there is an inherent tension in the impossible yet unavoidable appeal to God. These paradoxical relations are intended to create a kind of dissociation, not in order to establish distance and alienation but rather to allow access and approachability.76 Thus, the body functions as a “theological performance,” in which its paradoxical approach toward the divinity embodies and fulfills the theological ideal and the deepest content of Prayer. Similar to Ephrem who is stuck between speech and silence, the pinning of prayer in rabbinic literature to the mute-moving lips is part of a 75

76

The barking metaphor for describing noisy sounds appears elsewhere in the Babylonian Talmud. See Rosh Hashanah 28b; Baitzah 14a; Berachot 57a. Interestingly, one of the signs mentioned in the Talmud to identify a mad dog is that “its barks and its voice is not heard” (b. Yomah 83b [y. Yomah 8:5 42b]). The Talmudic formulation is very close to the description of Hannah’s prayer (1 Sam. 1.13: “only her lips moved, but her voice was not heard”), and like Eli’s condemnation of her, also in the Talmud “barking voicelessly” seems odd and unnatural. For the metaphor of “mute dogs,” Is. 56.10; Aphrahat, Demonstrations 7.21, 14.37. den Biesen, Simple and Bold, 145.

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deliberate attempt to shape prayer as a paradoxical, dissociative and liminal event, and yet as a positive facilitator of the very act of prayer itself. Although this requires a separate and profound study of its own, it is illuminating to see how this liminality corresponds to a broader understanding of the mouth as a “scandalous organ,” incorporating within itself the physical and the spiritual, as can be seen, for instance, in the words of R. Shimon b. Yohai: R. Simeon b. Yohai said: If I had been at Mount Sinai at the time the Torah was given to Israel, I would have asked God to give man two mouths, one to talk of the Torah and one to use for all his other needs.77 The mouth, therefore, functions as a “double-agent” of exteriority and interiority, and as a gate between the spiritual and the physical. It is precisely the insistence on the open-closed mouth that makes Ephrem and the Rabbis approach to prayer so unique. Bibliography Baumstark, A. Comparative Liturgy (London, 1958). Benin, S.D. “Commandments, Covenants and the Jews in Aphrahat, Ephrem and Jacob of Sarug,” in Approaches to Judaism in Medieval Times, ed. D.R. Blumenthal (California: Scholars Press, 1985), 135–156. Ben Yehuda, E. A Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew (Tel-Aviv: Laʿam, 1948). den Biesen, K. Simple and Bold: Ephrem’s Art of Symbolic Thought (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006). Bitton-Ashkelony, B. “‘More Interior Than the Lips and the Tongue’: John of Apamea and Silent Prayer in Late Antiquity,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 20 (2012): 303–331. Bitton-Ashkelony, B. “Theories of Prayer in Late Antiquity: Doubts and Practices from Maximus of Tyre to Isaac of Nineveh,” in Prayer and Worship in Eastern Christianities: 5th to 11th Centuries, ed. B. Bitton-Ashkelony and D. Krueger (London: Routledge, 2017), 10–33. Bitton-Ashkelony, B. The Ladder of Prayer and the Ship of Stirrings: The Praying Self in Late Antique East Syrian Christianity, Late Antique History and Religion 22 (Leuven: Peeters, 2019). 77 y. Berachot 1:2, 3b.

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Bokser, B. “The Wall Separating God and Israel,” Jewish Quarterly Review 73, no. 4 (1983): 349–374. Boyarin, D. Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Braude, W.G., trans. The Midrash on Psalms, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959). Brock, S.P. “Jewish Traditions in Syriac Sources,” Journal of Jewish Studies 30 (1979): 212–231. Brock, S.P., trans. The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1987). Brock, S.P., trans. Saint Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1990). Brock, S.P. The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World View of Saint Ephrem (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1992). Bronner, L.L. “Hannah’s Prayer: Rabbinic Ambivalence,” Shofar 17, no. 2 (1999): 36–48. Deferrari, R.J., ed. and L.P. McCauley and A.A. Stephenson, trans. The Works of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, vol. 1, The Fathers of the Church 61 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1969). Ehrlich, U. The Nonverbal Language of Prayer: A New Approach to Jewish Liturgy (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004). Fiensy, D.A. Prayers Alleged to be Jewish: An Examination of the Constitutiones Apostolorum (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985). Friedman, Sh. “Nomen est Omen – Dicta of Talmudic Sages which Echo the Author’s Name,” in These Are the Names: Studies on Jewish Onomastics, vol. 2, ed. A. Demsky (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1999), 62–67 [Heb.]. Gavrilyuk, P. “Melito’s Influence upon the Anaphora of ‘Apostolic Constitutions’ 8.12,” Vigiliae Christianae 59, no. 4 (2005): 368–372. Harvey, S.A. “Embodiment in Time and Eternity: A Syriac Perspective,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 43, no. 2 (1999): 105–130. Heinemann, J. Prayer in the Talmud: Forms and Patterns (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1977). Holmes, M.W., ed. and trans. The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations (3rd ed.; Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007). van der Horst, P.W. “Silent Prayer in Antiquity,” Numen 14, no. 1 (1994): 2–5. van der Horst, P.W. and J.H. Newman, Early Jewish Prayers in Greek (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008). Ilan, N. “Vayidom Aharon,” Leshonenu 62 (1999): 15–21 [Heb.]. Kimelman, R. “The Shema and the Amidah: Rabbinic Prayer,” in Prayer from Alexander to Constantine: A Critical Anthology, ed. M. Kiley (London: Routledge, 1997), 108–114.

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Kimelman, R. “The Rabbinic Theology of the Physical: Blessings, Body and Soul, Resurrection, Covenant and Election,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 4, The Late Roman-Rabbinic Period, ed. S.T. Katz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 946–976. Kister, M. “The Prayers of the Seventh Book of the ‘Apostolic Constitutions’ and their Implications for the Formulation of the Synagogue Prayers,” Tarbiz 77, no. 2 (2008): 225–227 [Heb.]. Kister, M. “The Manifestations of God in the Midrashic Literature in Light of Christian Texts,” Tarbiz 81 (2013): 103–142 [Heb.]. Kmosko, M., ed. Book of Steps [Liber Graduum], Patrologia Syriaca 3 (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1926). Knohl, I. “Between Voice and Silence: The Relationship between Prayer and Temple Cult,” Journal of Biblical Literature 115, no. 1 (1996): 17–30. Monnickendam, Y. “Halakhic Issues in the Writings of the Syriac Church Fathers Ephrem and Aphrahat,” PhD Dissertation, Bar-Ilan University, 2011. Naeh, Sh. “‘Creates the Fruit of Lips’: A Phenomenological Study of Prayer According to Mishnah Berakhot 4:3, 5:5,” Tarbiz 63 (1994): 185–218 [Heb.]. Narinskaya, E. Ephrem, a ‘Jewish’ Sage: A Comparison of the Exegetical Writings of St. Ephrem the Syrian and Jewish Traditions (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010). Neusner, J., trans. Pesikta deRab Kahana: An Analytical Translation (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987). Palmer, A. “Words, Silences, and the Silent: Word Acrostics and Empty Columns in Saint Ephraem’s Hymns on Faith,” Parole de l’Orient 20 (1995): 129–200. Paolucci, H., ed. The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Love (Washington, D.C.: Gateway, 1961). Russell, P.S. “Ephraem the Syrian on the Utility of Language and the Place of Silence,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 8, no. 1 (2000): 21–37. Schaff, Ph., ed. The Liturgy of James, V, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7 (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 1885). Scheck, Th.P., trans. Jerome. Commentary on Matthew, The Fathers of the Church 117 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2008). Shepardson, Ch. Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem’s Hymns in Fourthcentury Syria (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2008). Sokoloff, M. A Dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic (Ramat-Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2002). Stewart-Sykes, A., trans. Tertullian, Cyprian, And Origen On The Lord’s Prayer (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004). Stroumsa, G.G. The End of Sacrifice: Religious Transformations of Late Antiquity (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009).

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Teske, R.J., trans. Letter 130, in St. Augustine, Letters 100–155 (New York: New City Press, 2003). Weinfeld, M. The Decalogue and the Recitation of “Shema”: The Development of the Confessions (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2001), 9 [Heb.]. Wickes, J.T., trans. The Hymns on Faith, The Fathers of the Church 130 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2015). Zevi Kaddari, M. A Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2006).

Part 2 Digging Deeper

∵

The Church’s “Third Lung”: Ancient Voices from the Syriac Orient That Speak to Today’s Western Society Craig E. Morrison It is now nearly 20 years since Sebastian Brock’s lecture, “The Syriac Orient: A Third ‘Lung’ for the Church?” at the Pontifical Oriental Institute (March 25th, 2004). In his now famous address, he spoke of three religious communities, the Latin West, the Greek East and the Syriac Orient, that share the common core of Christian doctrine, while each tradition preserves its unique features. He identified six unique aspects of Syriac theology that should be better appreciated in the West, what he named the Church’s “third lung”: 1. The Semitic roots of the Oriental Churches 2. Poetry as a vehicle for theology 3. Distinctive monastic traditions in the Syriac Orient 4. A therapeutic not juridical approach to penance 5. A variety of Christological traditions 6. A distinctive non-Western or non-European form of Christianity To these six aspects I would like to add a seventh: the understanding of, or the approach to, the person in the Syriac Orient. I have recently considered Narsai’s view of the person in his memre1 and in this paper I would like to consider Aphrahat’s view of the person in as much as it can be deciphered in the 14th Demonstration, Exhortatoria. This exhortation is not explicitly theological or Christological. It focuses on a concrete reality of daily life, zeroing in on human corruption in the political, social and religious spheres. While the 14th Demonstration is not a treatise on the nature of the person, it is possible to extract from Aphrahat’s challenging accusations some aspects of how he understands the person, especially how the person is drawn toward the vices that lead to corruption and the oppression of others. His voice from antiquity resonates with millions of people throughout the centuries and around the world who have been and still are victims of corruption and have no voice against their oppressors. Aphrahat is not the first theologian to address the topic of human corruption, especially corruption in a religious sphere. This question first emerges in the prophetic literature of ancient Israel and then comes into the New 1 C.E. Morrison, “The Faculty of Discernment in Narsai,” in Narsai: Rethinking his Work and his World, ed. A.M. Butts, K.S. Heal, and R.A. Kitchen (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020), 161–173.

© Craig E. Morrison, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004537897_008

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Testament, dramatically depicted in Acts 5.1–11 when the corrupt Ananias and Sapphira die at Peter’s feet. Aphrahat, a master of the biblical text, found his prophetic voice as he observed the corruption of his own time and, like the Old Testament prophets, he addressed it directly into the ears of his perhaps unwilling listeners. This paper wants to continue Sebastian Brock’s mission by breathing more air into the Church’s “third lung,” the Syriac Orient, for today’s western societies by retrieving the insights of these writers for our own time. Aphrahat’s insights into the person in the 14th Demonstration participate in the universal quest for self-understanding.

The 14th Demonstration

The 14th Demonstration has not attracted a great deal of interest. It is long and it does not focus on theological questions. Excellent studies of Aphrahat’s anthropology look primarily at his theological anthropology. Stephanie K. Skoyles Jarkins considered the image of the “temple” within Aphrahat’s theological anthropology.2 Marie-Joseph Pierre’s study of Aphrahat’s anthropology describes in detail his faith and creed. Aphrahat’s anthropology is “une anthropologie dynamique” and she notes that his understanding of the person is complex: “Nous sommes en présence d’une approche descriptive de l’être, à partir de différents points de vue qui permettent decerner son espace.”3 Her focus is on the human soul, spirit, body, flesh, heart, and she studies Aphrahat’s image of the soul that is asleep, a leitmotif in the 14th Demonstration. The nature of the person is also understood in relation to Adam and Christ: the person moves toward the image of Christ as Winfrid Cramer notes: “Zudem wird der Mensch nach dem Verständnis Aphrahats in seinem Urstand nach dem Bild Christi, des ersten Adam, geschaffen.”4 This theological anthropology is not explicitly available in Aphrahat’s confrontation with the problems in his Christian community in the 14th Demonstration. William. F. Macomber has argued that the historical setting of the 14th Demonstration is a protest “not against a usurpation of power by the bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, but against the tyrannical manner in which 2 S.K.S. Jarkins, Aphrahat the Persian Sage and the Temple of God: A Study of Early Syriac Theological Anthropology, Gorgias Studies in Early Christianity and Patristics 36 (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2008). 3 M.-J. Pierre, Aphraate le Sage Persan. Les Exposés, Sources chrétiennes 349 (Paris: Cerf, 1988), 181. 4 W. Cramer, Der Geist Gottes und des Menschen in frühsyrischer Theologie, Münsterische Beiträge zur Theologie 46 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1979), 75.

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he exercised it.”5 Chaumont is not so certain that such a historical setting is clear given “le langage symbolique”6 that Aphrahat employs. Particular historical events may have provoked the exhortation, but Aphrahat has broaden the question to include all kinds of abuse of power. Marie-Joseph Pierre, argues that the 14th Demonstration was written in a period of crisis in the Church of Seleucia-Ctesiphon in 344 whose unnamed leader was greedy, arrogant and violent.7 Alberto Camplani, in his recent consideration of the historical background of this Demonstration,8 focuses on Aphrahat’s rhetorical argument that critiques the role of the bishop and aims at describing an ideal Church leader. While not disagreeing with scholars who attempt to locate the 14th Demonstration in a particular historical moment, he understands Aphrahat’s argument as a broader critique of the clergy of his time: “critico nei confronti della gerarchia clericale persiana nel suo complesso, la cui severità e incoerenza nell’uso del potere di legare e sciogliere viene vista sotto il segno dell’arroganza.”9 The strident nature of this exhortation led Fiey to question if the 14th Demonstration belongs in its present position even if it comes from Aphrahat’s hand, as Parisot believed.10 More recently Timothy D. Barnes11 and Robert J. Owens,12

5

W.F. Macomber, “The Authority of the Catholicos Patriarch of Seleucia-Ctesiphon,” Orientalia Christiana Analecta (1968): 179–200 (180, n6). 6 M. Chaumont, La christianisation de l’empire iranien des origines aux grandes persécutions du IVe siècle, CSCO 499, Subs. 80 (Louvain: Peeters, 1988), 144–145, n42. 7 Pierre, Aphraate le Sage Persan. Les Exposés, 49. 8 A. Camplani, “L’Esposizione XIV di Afraate: una retorica antiautoritaria nel contesto dell’evoluzione istituzionale della Chiesa siriaca,” in Storia e pensiero religioso nel Vicino Oriente. L’età bagratide – Maimonide – Afraate, ed. C. Baffioni, R.B. Finazzi, A.P. Dell’Acqua, and E. Vergani, Orientalia Ambrosiana 3 (Milano: Bulzoni, 2014), 191–235. 9 Camplani, “L’Esposizione XIV di Afraate,” 234. 10 J.M. Fiey, “Notule de littérature syriaque. La Démonstration XIV d’Aphraate,” Le Muséon 81 (1968): 449–454. 11 T.D. Barnes, “Constantine and the Christians of Persia,” Journal of Roman Studies 75 (1985): 126–136 (127). 12 R.J. Owens, The Genesis and Exodus Citations of Aphrahat the Persian Sage, Monographs of the Peshitta Institute Leiden 3 (Leiden: Brill, 1983). Robert Owens acknowledges that the 14th Demonstration “fits uneasily into the series of shorter treatises on Judaism” (6). However, he argues that the acrostic pattern of the Demonstrations ensures their order. He rejects Fiey’s argument and follows Gwynn, who notes that though the themes in the 14th Demonstration depart from the topic of Judaism, “the alphabetic sequence … is essential” (J. Gwynn, “Selections Translated into English from the Hymns and Homilies of Ephraim the Syrian, and from the Demonstrations of Aphrahat the Persian Sage,” in A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church: Second Series, vol. 13, Part 2: Gregory the Great, Ephraim Syrus, Aphrahat, ed. Ph. Schaff and H. Wace [New York: Christian Literature Company, 1898], 158).

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while noting the unique aspects of the 14th Demonstration, consider it to be from the same hand as the other Demonstrations.

Aphrahat’s Self-Critique

Persons who act corruptly, Aphrahat teaches, “justify themselves. They are wise to evil but they lack understanding”:13

̈ ̈ ‫ܚܟܝܡܝ ܠܒܝܫܬܐ ܕܠܝܬ ܒܗܘܢ ܣܘܟܠܐ‬ ‫ܡܙܕܩܝ ܢܦܫܗܘܢ‬ ‫ܗܠܝܢ ܐܢܘܢ‬ [676.9–11]

The lack of self-knowledge is essential to Aphrahat’s analysis of the roots of corruption. Corrupt persons are drawn to duplicitous living.

̈ ‫ܡܠܘܗܝ‬ ‫ܐܟܠܝܢ ܒܫܡ ܡܪܢ ܡܬܝܩܪܝܢ ܒܫܡܗ ܘܩܪܝܢ ܒܫܡܗ ܘܡܢ‬ ‫ܣܪܝܩܝܢ‬ They eat in the name of our Lord. They are honoured in his name. They call upon his name. But concerning his words, they are empty. [673.20–22] At several points in the Exhortatoria, Aphrahat presents himself as an example, alluding to his own self-knowledge as a key avenue for combating duplicity in the human heart and the corruption that ensues. This becomes a refrain within his accusatory discourse. He mentions it for the first time at the beginning of his exhortation (§2):

̈ ̈ ‫ܚܒܝܒܝܢ ܘܟܕ ܠܟܘܢ ܡܘܕܥܝܢܢ ܘܐܦ ܠܢܦܫܢ‬ ‫ܐܚܝܢ‬ ‫ܡܘܕܥܝܢܢ ܠܟܘܢ‬ ‫ܡܥܗܕܝܢܢ‬ We inform you, brothers and friends, and while we are informing you we are also reminding ourselves. [573.15–17] This refrain reappears at the midpoint of the exhortation (§21):

13

References to the Demonstrations follow the paragraph and/or column and line number from J. Parisot, ed., Aphraatis Demonstrationes, Patrologia Syriaca, Pars prima, 1–2 (Paris: Firmin Didot et Socii, 1894–1907).

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̈ ‫ܚܒܝܒܝܢ ܕܐܠܨܬ ܠܢ ܠܡܟܬܒ ܕܢܥܗܕ ܢܦܫܢ ܐܦ ܠܟܘܢ‬ ‫ܗܠܝܢ‬ These things, friends, we are constrained to write so that we might remind ourselves as much as you. [625.9–11] Aphrahat feels constrained to write this reprimand. He cannot remain silent before such corruption, a theme to which he will return. Still, he notes that his counsel is as much for himself as it is for his listeners. He models the self-awareness that he wants from his audience. Again in §36 he joins himself to his audience in his exhortation:

̈ ‫ܫܡܥܘ ܕܝܢ‬ ‫ܚܒܝܒܝܢ ܕܡܥܗܕܝܢ ܚܢܢ ܢܦܫܢ ܘܐܦ ܠܟܘܢ‬ Listen my friends that we remind ourselves and also you … [665.10–11] Finally, near the end of his exhortation and after a long list of specific examples of corruption, he expands on the meaning of this refrain (§42):

̈ ‫ܚܒܝܒܝܢ ܘܐܦ ܠܢܦܫܢ ܡܥܗܕܝܢܢ ܒܗܝܢ ܘܠܐ‬ ‫ܗܠܝܢ ܕܟܬܒܝܢ ܚܢܢ ܠܟܘܢ‬ ‫ܗܘܐ ܕܤܢܝܩܝܢ ܐܢܬܘܢ ܕܡܢܢ‬ ̈ ‫ܡܠܘܟܐ ܘܡܥܕ̈ܪܢܐ ܐܝܟ ܕܟܬܝܒ ܕܐܚܐ‬ ‫ܬܐܠܦܘܢ ܐܠܐ ܐܝܟ‬ ‫ܕܡܬܥܕܪ ܡܢ ܐܚܘܗܝ ܐܝܟ ܡܕܝܢܬܐ ܡܢ‬ ‫ܚܤܢܗ ܘܫܠܝܚܐ ܐܡܪ ܕܡܥܕ̈ܪܢܐ ܚܢܢ ܕܚܕܘܬܟܘܢ ܘܬܘܒ ܐܡܪ‬ ‫ܕܗܢܘܢ‬ ‫ܗܘܘ ܠܢ ܡܥܕ̈ܪܢܐ ܒܡܠܟܘܬܗ ܕܐܠܗܐ‬ These things we are writing to you, friends, and we are reminding ourselves of them. It is not necessary that you learn from us, but rather [we are] like counselors and helpers, just as it is written: “a brother who is helped by his brother is like a city with its fortifications.” The apostle said, “We are helpers for your joy.” Another time he said, “They were our helpers in the kingdom of God.” [693.6–14] Aphrahat is one with his audience in the struggle to combat his own corrupt heart. He does not stand above them with his accusations, but he challenges them as a brother and co-worker in the kingdom of God. Having appealed to this refrain three times, at the end of his exhortation, he cites three biblical texts that further illustrate the reciprocity in the battle against corruption: we were your helpers – they were our helpers. He cites Prov. 18.19 as it appears in the Peshitta. The second quotation is from 2 Cor. 1.24.

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‫ܠܐ ܗܘܐ ܡܛܠ ܕܡ̈ܪܝ ܗܝܡܢܘܬܟܘܢ ܚܢܢ ܐܠܐ ܡܥܕ̈ܪܢܐ ܚܢܢ ܕܚܕܘܬܟܘܢ‬ It is not because we are lords of your faith, rather we are helpers of your joy. Aphrahat takes just a few words from the verse (‫)ܡܥܕ̈ܪܢܐ ܚܢܢ ܕܚܕܘܬܟܘܢ‬, but the complete text of 2 Cor. 1.24 draws out the contrast between “lords” and “helpers” or co-workers. Paul is not lording his faith over the Corinthians, rather he sees himself as a helper in their new found joy. This is precisely how Aphrahat understands himself in relation to his audience after what has been an excoriating exhortation. He does not want to dominate his audience; he wants to be a helpful co-worker, a fellow Christian, like Paul, in the struggle against corruption. Aphrahat adjusts the third citation to suit his argument. Col. 4.11 reads:

‫ܗܠܝܢ ܕܐܝܬܝܗܘܢ ܡܢ ܓܙܘܪܬܐ ܘܗܢܘܢ ܒܠܚܘܕ ܥܕܪܘܢܝ ܒܡܠܟܘܬܗ‬ ‫ܕܐܠܗܐ‬ These who are from the circumcised and they alone have helped me in the kingdom of God. Aphrahat reads ‫ ܡܥܕ̈ܪܢܐ‬for ‫ ܥܕܪܘܢܝ‬so that the Colossians text coordinates with how he views himself – as a ‫ܡܥܕܪܢܐ‬.14 Aphrahat, the preacher, challenges his audience but does not lord himself over them. He is a helper and a fellow pilgrim on the journey. The expression, “we are reminding ourselves and you also” appears only one other time in the entire Demonstrations. Near the conclusion of the 6th Demonstration (§19) it appears just after an ultimatum to put on the image of the heavenly Adam or return to Sheol.

‫ܗܦܟܝܢ ܠܗܘܢ ܠܫܝܘܠ ܘܬܡܢ ܗܘܐ ܒܟܝܐ ܘܚܘܪܩ ̈ܫܢܐ ܗܠܝܢ ܟܬܒܬ‬ ‫ܥܗܕܬ ܠܢܦܫܝ ܘܐܦ ܠܟ ܚܒܝܒܝ‬ They will return to Sheol where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. I have written these things, reminding myself and you too, my friend. [309.18–22]

14 C.E. Morrison, “The Bible in the Hands of Aphrahat the Persian Sage,” in Syriac and Antiochian Exegesis and Biblical Theology for the 3rd Millennium, ed. R.D. Miller, Gorgias Eastern Christian Studies 6 (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2008), 1–25.

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The phrase in the 6th Demonstration, as in the 14th Demonstration, appears just after a strong exhortation and by it Aphrahat again signals that his challenge is as much for him as it is for them. The four appearances of this refrain in the 14th Demonstration function as a rhetorical device by which the sage seeks to convince his audience of the seriousness of his charges by not separating himself from his own compelling exhortation. One of Aphrahat’s central accusations is that church leaders have done just that, they have set themselves above their people (§26):

‫ܐܢ ܕܝܢ ܡܬܬܪܝܡ ܐܢܬ ܒܪܥܝܢܟ ܥܠܝ ܘܐܡܪ ܐܢܬ ܕܡܠܦܢܐ ܘܡܠܟܐ‬ ‫ܗܘܐ ܐܢܐ ܥܠܝܟ‬ ‫ܘܠܐ ܩܒܠܬܟ ܐܤܪ ܐܢܬ ܠܝ ܐܝܟܢܐ ܓܝܪ ܬܠܦܢܝ ܡܟܝܟܘܬܐ ܟܕ‬ ‫ܐܢܬ ܪܡ ܘܓܐܐ ܘܡܬܚܬܪ‬ If you are exalting yourself over me in your mind and you say, “I have been a teacher and king over you,” I do not accept that you bind me. How can you teach me humility when you are high and mighty and puffed up with pride? [637.3–8] Aphrahat’s insistence that his accusations are as much for him as for his audience also combats hypocrisy, the root of corruption that he confronts. Pastors teach what they themselves do not practice and Aphrahat points out their hypocrisy to them (§26):

‫ܐܝܟܢܐ ܬܠܦܢܝ ܕܫܒܘܩ ܥܠܡܐ ܗܢܐ ܟܕ ܐܢܬ ܢܦܝܠ ܒܓܘܗ ܘܚܢܝܩ‬ How can you teach me, “Abandon this world,” when you have fallen into it and are choked?15 [637.15–16] According to Aphrahat, the person is drawn toward hypocrisy for two reasons. The first is a desire for titles:

̈ ‫ܐܚܝܢ‬ ̈ ‫ܫܡܗܐ‬ ̈ ‫ܠܚܝܐ ܠܐ ܡܥܠܝܢ ܘܠܐ ܡܢ ܡܘܬܐ ܡܦܨܝܢ‬ Brothers, titles will not bring us into eternal life and they will not save us from death. [633.23–24] 15

The allusion is to the parable of the sower and the seed (Matt. 13.7 and Mark 4.7). Thorns choke (‫ )ܚܢܩܘܗܝ‬the good seed, which Jesus later explains in Matt 13.22 (“the error of ̇ ‫ )ܛܘܥܝܝ ܕܥܘܬܪܐ ܚܢܩܝܢ‬or in Mark 4.19 “other wealth chokes the word” ‫ܠܗ ܠܡܠܬܐ‬ ̈ ‫ܥܐܠܢ‬ ̈ ‫)̈ܪܓܝܓܬܐ ܐܚ̈ܪܢܝܬܐ‬. ̇ ‫ܚܢܩܢ‬ desires enter and choke the word” (‫ܠܗ ܠܡܠܬܐ‬

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The love for titles creates false teachers (§26). The second aspect of hypocrisy is the desire for power over others. Here Aphrahat penetrates into the corrupt psyche to describe its reasoning (§27):

‫ܐܡܪ ܐܢܬ ܠܝ ܕܐܢܐ ܝܐܐ ܐܢܐ ܘܫܦܝܪ ܘܓܒܢܝ ܐܠܗܐ ܘܠܝ ܡܫܚ‬ ̈ ‫ܕܐܡܠܟ ܥܠ‬ ‫ܒܢܝ ܥܡܝ‬ ‫ܐܬܬܛܦܝܤ ܐܘܢ ܒܪܢܫܐ ܕܝܡܐ ܐܠܗܐ ܘܡܠܟ ܠܦܝܢܚܣ ܒܪ‬ ‫ܐܠܝܥܙܪ ܕܢܗܘܐ ܠܗ‬ ̈ ‫ܩܝܡܐ ܕܟܗܢܘܬܐ ܠܗ ܘܠܒܢܘܗܝ ܠܥܠܡ‬ You say to me, “I am virtuous and lovely. God has chosen me and has anointed me to rule over my people.” Be instructed, O person, that God swore and promised to Phineas son of Eleazar that there would be a covenant of priesthood for him and his sons forever. [641.14–19] Aphrahat addresses leaders who would justify themselves by the divine appointment that they presume to have received from God. But Aphrahat will have none of it. He reminds them of Phineas, who assumed that his priestly descendants would rule forever. But when Eli and his sons acted corruptly, that divine promise was annulled (1 Sam. 2.30). Later, he recalls King Saul who was divinely appointed and then divinely rejected.

Aphrahat’s Counsel

How can a person escape self-duplicity and the corruption that follows? At the climax of his exhortation, Aphrahat suggests a way. He begins by praising the wonders of creation and encouraging his listeners to do the same. Creation ̈ ‫ܘܠܐ‬ ̈ itself is without knowledge: the clouds know nothing (‫ܡܬܝܕܥܢ‬ ‫ܥܢܢܐ‬ [660.16]) and ferocious animals are without speech (‫[ ܬܡܝܗܝܢ‬660.17]). All creation obeys the divine law, with the exception of the person who resists the divine will:

̈ ‫ܚܒܝܒܝܢ ܕܡܥܗܕܝܢ ܚܢܢ ܢܦܫܢ ܘܐܦ ܠܟܘܢ ܐܝܟܢܐ ܟܠ‬ ‫ܫܡܥܘ ܕܝܢ‬ ̈ ‫ܒ̈ܪܝܬܗ ܕܐܠܗܐ ܥܒܕܢ ܨܒܝܢܗ‬ ̈ ‫ܘܠܐ‬ ‫ܡܥܨܝܢ ܦܘܩܕܢܗ ܚܕܐ ܚܕܐ ܡܢܗܝܢ ܐܝܟ ܡܐ ܕܦܩܝܕ ܠܗ‬ ̈ ‫ܘܒܢܝ‬ ‫ܩܠܝܠܐܝܬ ܨܒܝܢܗ ܤܥܪܐ‬ ‫ܐܢܫܐ ܒܙܒܢ ܙܒܢ ܡܥܨܝܢ ܘܠܐ ܥܒܕܝܢ ܨܒܝܢܗ‬ Listen, friends, that we are reminding ourselves as much as you, how all of God’s creatures are doing his will. They do not resist his commandment.

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Each one of them, just as it is commanded him, swiftly accomplishes his will. But people occasionally resist and do not do his will. [665.10–17] Fish, savage beasts, a worm, and even water obey God. Aphrahat’s audience should observe creation and imitate its obedience. The human mind must stretch out into a meditation on creation:

̈ ‫ܦܫܝܛܢ‬ ̈ ‫ܟܢܫܝ ܬܪܥܝܬܐ ܘܦܪܝܣܝܢ ̈ܓܦܝ ܡܚܫܟܬܐ ܡܝܫܝܢ ̈ܪܓܫܝ ܪܥܝܢܐ‬ ̈ ‫ܘܡܨܕܝܢ‬ ‫ܥܝܢܝ ܬܐܪܬܐ‬ But the wings of the mind stretch out; the wings of thought are spread wide. The senses of the mind explore; the eyes of the conscience gaze intently. [660.18–20] The meditation on creation leads the person to deeper knowledge of the world that obeys God. According to Aphrahat, such reflection breaks through the hypocrisy and duplicity that is at the root of corruption. Who is able to acquire ̈ this knowledge? The treasury of knowledge is open to those who ask [‫ܫܐܘܠܐ‬ 661.2], he writes. When the wise person allows his mind to live in the great temple [‫ ܗܝܟܠܐ ܗܘ ܪܒܐ‬661.17] of the Creator, vices are overcome:

̈ ̈ ‫ܣܓܝܐܢ ܗܝܕܝܢ‬ ‫ܕܣܝܡܬܗ‬ ‫ܡܐ ܕܚܙܐ ܚܟܝܡܐ ܒܪܥܝܢܗ ܐܬܪܐ‬ ‫ܡܬܥܠܝܐ ܡܚܫܟܬܗ‬ ̈ ‫ܘܒܛܢ ܘܡܘܠܕ ܠܒܗ ܟܠ‬ ‫ܛܒܢ ܪܢܐ ܒܟܠ ܐܠܝܢ ܕܐܬܦܩܕ‬ When the wise person sees in his mind the place of his [God’s] many treasures, then his thought is elevated and his heart conceives and gives birth to all good things. He meditates on all those things that have been commanded. [664.10–15] When humans resist such meditation on creation, the vices that Aphrahat names (672.26–673.2) enter their hearts. In the background of his argument is the contrast between “meditating on the world” (‫ )ܪܢܝܐ ܕܥܠܡܐ‬in Matt. 13.22 and Mark 4.19 and meditating on creation that is under God’s command. The Nature of Corruption Because observing the obedience of all creatures is critical for the person to grasp the divine will, blindness is a major impediment to that understanding. Various forms of the root ‫ܥܘܪ‬, “to blind,” appear 14 times in the Demonstrations. Nine of them appear in the 14th Demonstration. Apart from the

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14th Demonstration, the notion of blindness has a physical meaning in Aphrahat’s writing.16 But in the 14th Demonstration, blindness (‫ )ܥܘܝܪܘܬܐ‬is a metaphor for lack of understanding and self-knowledge. The root ‫ ܥܘܪ‬appears for the first time in the 14th Demonstration as Aphrahat exhorts corrupt leaders (§3), who pervert justice (‫)ܥܩܡܘ ܕܝܢܐ‬. As he is wont, Aphrahat outlines a series of contrasts in the lives of these corrupt leaders: they declare the guilty to be innocent but the innocent they condemn; they love riches and hate the poor. This alternating series is interrupted at one point with the side comment, “the world has blinded them” (‫ܥܠܡܐ ܥܘܪ ܐܢܘܢ‬ [577.16]). The image of blindness expresses their lack of self-knowledge that lies at the root of their corrupt actions, and by confronting them, Aphrahat wants to bring them to a deeper self-understanding. In §18 Aphrahat reviews the story of Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu, who offered alien fire and were consumed by it (Lev. 10.1–2), and the deaths of Hophni and Phinehas the corrupt priests at Shiloh (1 Sam. 2.12–17). This happened, Aphrahat writes, because a bit of blindness came upon them (‫ܘܟܕ ܩܠܝܠ ܥܘܝܪܘܬܐ ܥܠܬ ܥܠܝܗܘܢ‬ [616.11–12]). The theme is developed in §26 where he describes the pastors as the eye of the body.

‫ܥܝܢܗ ܐܢܬ ܕܦܓܪܐ ܗܘܝܬ ܠܟ ܣܡܝܐ ܘܦܓܪ ܚܫܟ ܠܗ ܡܢ ܒܠܝ‬ ‫ܥܝܢܐ ܐܢܬ ܗܘܝܬ ܠܟ ܣܡܝܐ‬ ‫ܦܓܪܐ ܥܘܝܪܐ ܗܘܐ ܠܗ ܨܒܘܬܐ ܕܣܡܝܐ ܕܠܣܡܝܐ ܡܕܒܪ‬ You are the eye of the body. You have become blind and the body has become dark without an eye. You have become blind and the body has become blind. Now it is the case that the blind leads the blind. [640.4–8] He continues:

‫ܘܪܥܝܐ ܒܘܪܐ ܥܝܢܗ ܡܬܥܘܪܐ ܘܕܪܥܗ ܝܒܫ‬ The foolish shepherd’s eye is blind, his arm is withered. [640.12–13] The allusion here is to Mark 3.1, the story of the man with the withered hand who is healed. Perhaps Aphrahat wants to remind his audience that healing 16

In the 10th Demonstration §3 (452.9), the 20th Demonstration §15 (917.7) and the 23rd Demonstration §65 (141.24) it refers to physical blindness. It has a moral sense in the 7th Demonstration §26 (357.14). The root ‫ ܣܡܐ‬also has a moral sense in the 10th Demonstration (452.12).

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can come to them just as it came to the man with the withered hand. This leitmotif appears for the last time in §44:

‫ܐܘ ܥܘܝܪܘܬܐ ܡܚܫܟܬ ܪܥܝܢܐ‬ O blindness that darkens the mind. [704.26–27] Blindness darkens the mind and impedes the person’s observation that all creation, with the exception of the human person, obeys God’s commands. The “darkened mind” (‫[ ܐܬܚܫܟܘ ܡܕܥܝܢ‬573.19]) that is not awake (‫ܠܐ ܡܥܝܪܝܢܢ‬ ‫[ ܢܦܫܢ‬576.1]) leads to corruption.17 Such a person is conquered by greed (‫ܘܙܟܬ‬ ‫[ ܐܢܘܢ ܝܥܢܘܬܐ‬577.3]):

‫ܫܠܝܛܐ ܫܐܠ ܕܗܒ ܘܕܝܢܐ ܐܡܪ ܫܚܘܕ‬ A ruler asks for gold, the judge says, “Bring a gift.” [580.3–4] Pride also clouds human wisdom (§22):

̈ ̈ ‫ܡܟܘܥܝ‬ ‫ܡܕܥܝܢ ܒܪܡܘܬܐ ܘܙܟܬܢ ܝܥܢܘܬܐ ܘܛܡܡܬ‬ ‫ܚܫܟܘ ܓܝܪ‬ ‫ܚܟܡܬܐ‬ Our minds have become dark with pride. Greed has conquered us. It has stopped up the springs of wisdom. [625.17–19] The metaphor “the springs of wisdom” is taken from Prov. 18.4:

̈ ̈ ‫ܥܡܝܩܐ ̈ܡܠܝ ܦܘܡܗ ܕܓܒܪܐ ܘܢܚܠܐ ܕܢܒܥ ܡܒܘܥܐ ܕܚܟܡܬܐ‬ ‫ܡܝܐ‬ The words of a person’s mouth are the waters of the deep, a stream that flows, a spring of wisdom. In Ephrem’s Hymns on Paradise, the beings in Paradise meditate on the fullness ̈ ̈ ] in their mouths surge of God’s gift and “springs of wisdom [‫ܢܒܥܐ ܚܟܡܬܐ‬ 17 This image of the “sleeping soul” has been studied by F. Gavin, “The Sleep of the Soul in the Early Syriac Church,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 40 (1920): 103–120; R. Terzoli, “Âme et esprit chez Aphraate,” Parole de l’Orient 3 (1972): 105–118; M.-J. Pierre, “L’âme ensommeillée et les avatars du corps selon le Sage Persan: Essai sur l’anthropologie d’Aphraate Part 1,” Proche-Orient Chrétien 32 (1982): 233–262; and Part 2, Proche-Orient Chrétien 33 (1983): 104–142.

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forth.”18 Then, as expected, Aphrahat runs through biblical examples of greed, beginning with Adam, then onto Esau, the sons of Aaron, Achan, the sons of Eli, Saul, Ahab, Gehazi, Judas Iscariot, and Ananias. He enters briefly into the psychology of the greedy person:

̈ ‫ܠܫܢܝܢ ܕܠܐ ܚܝ‬ ‫ܠܡܤܟܢܐ ܤܦܩ ܠܗ ܠܚܡ ܝܘܡܐ ܘܪܢܐ ܥܬܝܪܐ‬ For the poor person, daily bread suffices. The rich person meditates on the years that he will not be alive. [632.12–13]

‫ܡܬܚܫܒ ܡܤܟܢܐ ܕܢܩܨܐ ܡܢ ܠܚܡܗ ܠܤܢܝܩܐ ܘܪܢܐ ܥܬܝܪܐ ܕܢܒܠܥ‬ ‫ܠܕܒܨܝܪ ܡܢܗ‬ The poor person figures how to break his bread with the needy. The rich person meditates on how to swallow up whoever is weaker than him. [632.25–27] Instead of meditating on the grandeur of God’s creation, on how all creatures obey the divine will and on how to participate in that obedience, the rich person thinks about the number of years he will live and about the time when he will no longer be. Aphrahat visualizes the poor person sharing his bread, borrowing the verb ‫ ܩܨܐ‬from the New Testament: ‫ܢܤܒ ܝܫܘܥ ܠܚܡܐ ܘܒܪܟ ܘܩܨܐ‬ “Jesus took bread, blessed it and broke it” (Mark 14.22). He insists that meditation on creation provides the knowledge that breaks through corruption:

‫ܛܘܒܘܗܝ ܠܒܪܢܫܐ ܕܢܪܢܐ ܒܝܕܥܬܐ ܕܒܗ ܡܬܦܤܩܝܢ ܫ̈ܪܫܝ ܝܥܢܘܬܐ‬ Blessed is the one who meditates on knowledge which cuts off the roots of greed. [633.2–4] The way out of these vices is through an honest interior reflection that comes by stretching out the mind into creation to observe how all creatures observe the divine law. When that is lacking, vices flourish. 18 E. Beck, Des heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen de Paradiso und contra Julianum, CSCO 174–175, Scr. Syri. 78–79 (Louvain: Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, 1957), 9.28. The phrase “springs of wisdom” in 1 Enoch refers to a spring of righteousness in heaven (1 Enoch 48.1a): “And in that place I saw the fountain of righteousness which was inexhaustible: And around it were many fountains of wisdom” (M. Black, The Book of Enoch or 1 Enoch: A New English Edition [Leiden: Brill, 1985], 49).

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Like blindness, “desire” also perverts self-knowledge. Satan’s key task is to create desires in God’s creatures:

̈ ̈ ‫ܡܛܠ ܕܩܛܝܢܐܝܬ ܥܐܠ ܥܠ‬ ‫ܠܚܝܝܗܘܢ‬ ‫ܒܢܝ ܐܢܫܐ ܘܥܒܕ ܠܗܘܢ ܝܬܝ̈ܪܐ‬ ‫ܘܡܚܬܚܬ ܠܗܘܢ ܒ̈ܪܓܝܓܬܗ‬ ̈ ̈ ‫ܕܣܓܝܐܢ ܒܪܓܬ ܡܕܡ ܡܕܡ ܥܐܠ ܥܠ ܒܢܝ ܐܕܡ ܘܡܤܪܩ ܠܗܘܢ‬ ̈ ̈ ‫ܣܦܝܩܐ ܐܝܟ ܡܐ‬ ‫ܡܐܢܐ‬ ‫ܐܝܟ‬ ‫ܕܫܪܝ ܒܐܒܘܗܘܢ ܩܕܡܝܐ ܟܕ ܠܐ ܗܘܐ ܚܕܐ ܗܝ ܪܓܬܗ ܕܢܕܥܝܗ‬ ̈ ‫ܕܤܓܝܐܢ ܐܢܝܢ‬ ‫ܘܢܥܪܘܩ ܡܢܗ ܡܛܠ‬ ̈ ‫ܐܘܡܢܘܬܗ ܕܢܟܝܠܐ‬ Because stealthily he [Satan] enters people. He makes them [consider] more things for their lives and entices them with many desires. With the desire for this and that he comes to the children of Adam and he empties them like an empty vessel, just as he began with their primordial father, when there was not one of his desires that he could know and from which he could flee, for many are the tricks of the deceiver. [685.8–17] Satan “empties” God’s creatures and then fills them with wicked desires. In Aphrahat’s imagination, in paradise there was no “desire” (‫)ܪܓܬܐ‬. Satan had to empty the person of God’s creation and then fill them with worldly desires. Biblical history, Aphrahat teaches, is filled with persons engaged in misguided desires. Adam desired food, Cain desired murder, Potiphar’s wife desired Joseph, Samson desired Deliliah, Amnon desired Tamar, and Adonijah desired power. Aphrahat lists over 35 biblical examples of desire (a long list even for Aphrahat). Near the end of his exhortation, Aphrahat returns to this leitmotif of “emptying” [‫]ܣܪܩ‬. We must reverse Satan’s attempts to empty us out and fill us with his desires by emptying out Satan and filling the world with peace.

‫ܘܡܐ ܕܐܬܐ ܫܠܡܐ ܡܥܒܪ ܚܪܝܢܐ ܒܛܠܐ ܫܓܝܫܘܬܐ ܘܡܤܬܪܩ‬ ‫ܒܝܫܐ ܡܢ ܓܙܗ‬ When peace comes, it removes quarrelling, strife ceases, and the evil one is emptied of his treasure [721.11–13] Aphrahat writes that “pride and ostentation have overthrown many” (‫ܪܡܘܬܐ‬ ̈ ‫ܠܣܓܝܐܐ ܤܚܦܬ‬ ‫[ ܓܝܪ ܘܫܘܒܗܪܐ‬592.15–16]). He does not penetrate into

the psyche of the self-congratulating person, he just gives a long list of biblical characters whose downfall was pride: Adam, Cain, Ham, Esau, Pharaoh, the sons of Eli, Goliath, Abimelech, Absalom, Adonijah, Ahithophel, Rehoboam, Ahab,

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Haman, the Babylonians, and Judas. In the entirety of the Demonstrations, the term “jealousy” (‫ )ܛܢܢܐ‬appears twenty-nine times and over one-third of these instances (eleven times) appear in the 14th Demonstration. The term strife, ‫ܚܪܝܢܐ‬, appears forty-four times in the entire Demonstrations and over half of them (twenty-four times) appear in the 14th Demonstration. Aphrahat directly addresses the problems of strife and jealousy (§13):

̈ ‫ܠܥܒܘܕܘܗܝ‬ ‫ܡܢܐܓܝܪ ܐܗܢܝ ܚܪܝܢܐ ܘܡܢܐ ܐܘܬܪ ܛܢܢܐ‬ What does strife accomplish, what profit does jealousy gain for its creators? [600.23–24] The Human Tendency to Cover Up Sin and Transgression Aphrahat knows that in the human heart there is the tendency to cover up sins. Secrecy is at the root of corruption and Aphrahat forcefully addresses this perversion. He presents Eli, the father of Hophni and Phinehas (priests of Shiloh), who rebuked his corrupt sons. Eli’s reprimand in the biblical text is not good enough for Aphrahat so he extends the biblical text with a penetrating insight into the human heart.

‫ܥܠܝ ܐܒܘܗܘܢ ܠܐ ܟܐܐ ܒܗܘܢ ܙܥܝܦܐܝܬ ܘܚܠܝܨܐܝܬ‬ ‫ܐܠܐ ܪܦܝܐܝܬ ܘܢܫܝܫܐܝܬ ܪܫܐ ܐܢܘܢ ܟܕ ܫܡܥ ܡܢ ܟܠܗ ܥܡܐ‬ Eli their father did not rebuke them angrily or strenuously, but weakly and feebly he accused them when he heard from all the people. [616.22–24] Aphrahat quotes the biblical text (1 Sam. 2. 23–25a) in which Eli chastises his sons after which he comments:

̈ ‫ܒܒܢܘܗܝ ܘܫܬܩ ܠܗ ܘܒܟܐܬܗ‬ ‫ܗܕܐ ܗܝ ܟܐܬܐ ܢܫܝܫܬܐ ܕܟܐܐ ܥܠܝ‬ ‫ܡܪܕܘܬܐ ܠܐ ܩܒܠܘ‬ ̈ ‫ܒܢܝܟ ܓܒ̈ܪܐ‬ ‫ܐܘܢ ܥܠܝ ܟܗܢܐ ܪܫܐ ܕܥܡܐ ܟܕ ܠܐ ܫܡܥܘܟ‬ ‫̈ܪܫܝܥܐ ܠܐ ܘܠܐ ܗܘܐ‬ ̈ ̈ ‫ܠܟܗܢܘܬܐ ܕܡܕܒܪ ܗܘܝܬ ܕܬܫܬܘܬܦ‬ ‫ܠܚܛܗܐ‬ ‫ܕܒܢܝܟ ܣܥܪܝܢ ܗܘܘ‬ This is the feeble reprimand with which Eli reprimanded his sons. He stayed silent and they did not listen to his disciplining reprimand. O Eli, chief priest of the people, when your sons did not listen to you, wicked men, was it necessary for the priesthood that you lead, that you should participate in the sins that your sons were committing. [617.7–13]

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While the biblical text does not comment on the quality of Eli’s rebuke, Aphrahat extends the biblical text, calling Eli a “chief priest,” a title not in the Bible, and summarizes the biblical rebuke with a very blunt, “you participate in the sins of your sons.” Aphrahat knows that it is not only corruption that is a problem, but those leaders who protect those who act corruptly. To put a stop to this he holds up the biblical text as a mirror to expose their actions. Eli rebuked his sons, but the reprimand was insufficient for Aphrahat. He shifts to direct address and imagines that he is speaking directly to Eli, accusing him of being as guilty as his corrupt sons. It is a clever device designed to accuse the leadership of his own time. Aphrahat utterly rejects the silence of observers that accompanies corruption. Though the biblical Eli was not silent, Aphrahat still accuses him of silence and complicity for his failure to be sufficiently vocal about his sons’ corruption. For this reason, Aphrahat explains in §21 that he feels “constrained” (‫ )ܐܠܨܬ‬to write about the corruption in his own community. He does not want to imitate Eli’s feeble response to his sons’ wicked behavior.

The Struggle to Live Christian Lives

A key aspect of Aphrahat’s understanding of human sin is that one does not conquer all the vices that he identifies in one’s lifetime. But the person can advance in the struggle (§16). Aphrahat borrows the metaphor from the Pauline corpus (Phil. 1.30; Eph. 6.12; Col. 1.29; 1 Tim. 4.10) to encourage his audience to strive against their own vices:

‫ܘܐܬܠܝܛܐ ܟܫܝܪܐ ܢܬܢܨܚ ܒܐܝܓܘܢܐ ܘܠܐ ܢܗܘܐ ܫܦܠܐ ܒܐܝܓܘܢܐ‬ The vigorous athlete is victorious in the struggle; he will not be weak in the struggle. [609.19–21] Then Aphrahat, as expected, roots his notion in the Bible. Those who build a tower should consider the expenses,19 an allusion to Luke 14.28. This phrase parallels his next line, “Successful shepherds should inspect their flocks.”20 Keeping silent like Eli is rejected. He suggests specific actions in the struggle against the vices (§17): ̈ ‫( ܘܕܒܢܝܢ ܡܓܕܠܐ ܢܚܫܒܘܢ‬613.7). 19 ‫ܢܦܩܬܗ‬ 20 ‫( ̈ܪܥܘܬܐ ܢܨܝܚܐ ܢܣܥܪܘܢ ܓܙ̈ܪܝܗܘܢ‬613.8–9).

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̈ ‫ܚܒܝܒܝܢ ܒܥܡܠܐ ܘܒܠܐܘܬܐ ܘܒܫܗܪܐ ܘܒܒܥܘܬܐ‬ ‫ܢܕܪܟ ܢܦܫܢ‬ ‫ܘܒܨܘܡܐ ܘܒܨܠܘܬܐ ܘܒܬܟܫܦܬܐ‬ ‫ܚܢܝܓܬܐ‬ My friends, let us subdue ourselves through toil, struggle, vigil, supplication, fasting, prayer, and doleful petition. [613.20–22] With this advice he anticipates the ascetic counsels of later Greek and Syriac authors. To express the ongoing, daily battle against corruption Aphrahat borrows the metaphor of the “athlete” from many spiritual writers beginning in 1 Cor. 9.25. The vigorous athlete may be victorious in the struggle despite a plethora of sins (§38), but Aphrahat acknowledges the struggle that is part of their lives:

‫ܒܗܠܝܢ ܦܐ̈ܪܐ ܢܥܡܠ ܕܡܪܕܝܢ ܠܚܝܐ ܕܠܥܠܡ‬ for these fruits let us strive because they lead to eternal life [685.1–2] As he closes his discourse (§49), he consoles his audience with the fact that perfection is not of this world. In the background of his discourse is the parable of the weeds and the wheat (Matt. 13.24–30).

̈ ̈ ̈ ‫ܓܢܣܢܝܢ‬ ̈ ̈ ‫ܘܡܣܟܢܐ‬ ‫ܘܚܠܝܐ ܘܡܪܝ̈ܪܐ‬ ‫ܘܒܝܫܐ ܘܥܬܝ̈ܪܐ‬ ‫ܛܒܐ‬ ‫ܘܡܠܐ ܟܠ‬ ̈ ̈ ̈ ‫ܘܢܗܝ̈ܪܐ‬ ̈ ̈ ‫ܘܙܕܝܩܐ‬ ‫ܘܥܘܠܐ ܘܟܠ ܡܕܡ ܚܕܐ‬ ‫ܘܟܐܢܐ‬ ‫ܘܚܛܝܐ‬ ‫ܘܚܫܘܟܐ‬ ̈ ‫ܠܘܩܒܠ ܚܕܐ‬ ‫ܩܝܡܢ ܘܠܝܬ ܒܥܠܡܐ ܗܢܐ ܓܡܝܪܘܬܐ‬ The world is full of all sorts: good and wicked, rich and poor, sweet and bitter, illuminated and dark, righteous and sinners, just and unjust, all sorts, each one standing against the other. There is no perfection in this world. [721.15–20] The allusion to the parable in Matthew’s Gospel consoles his audience. As a final word of encouragement, he urges his audience forward in the struggle:

̈ ‫ܐܚܝܢ ܕܪܗܛܝܢ ܐܢܬܘܢ ܒܬܪ ܫܠܡܐ‬ ‫ܒܪܡ ܕܝܢ ܥܠܝܟܘܢ ܬܟܝܠܝܢܢ‬ ‫ܘܡܥܒܪܝܢ ܐܢܬܘܢ‬ ‫ܫܓܝܫܘܬ ܘܚܪܝܢܐ ܘܚܣܡܐ ܘܛܢܢܐ ܘܦܠܓܘܬܐ‬ However, we trust, brothers, that you are pursuing peace and removing strife, quarrelling, grudges, jealousy and division. [724.8–12]

The Church ’ s “ Third Lung ”



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Summary

The “Third Lung” of the Church – the Syriac Orient – participates in the quest to understand the person, our nature, our desires, and our attraction to corruption. Aphrahat’s 14th Demonstration teaches that: – Self-understanding breaks through hypocrisy and the resulting corruption. Aphrahat presents himself as an example of that self-understanding by not distancing himself from his audience or lording himself over them. – Those who are drawn to corruption are without knowledge. Knowledge breaks through corruption. – A biblically based view of the political, social and religious corruption. Aphrahat helped his audience perceive the corruption in their own times as an extension of the corruption that both the Old Testament prophets and Jesus confronted. – It is necessary to give voice to the victims of corruption while unmasking the reasoning of their oppressors. – God has rejected human corruption from the dawn of creation. Thus, even though victims endure corruption, it is not part of the divine plan for creation. – Aphrahat was well aware of the corruption in his own world and was quite prepared to confront it and to describe it in detail. He models the selfreflection that he calls forth from his audience. – To escape from corrupt desires comes by observing how all creation obeys the divine command. Meditating on creation invites people to imitate its obedience to the divine will and thus frees persons from their corrupt desires. – Life is an ongoing struggle against the vices that lead to corruption.

Conclusion

In the 14th Demonstration, Aphrahat used the Bible as a catechetical tool for teaching his audience. But to overcome vices, it is not enough to read the scriptures, the person must also act.

̈ ̈ ‫ܟܬܒܘܗܝ ܕܐܠܗܐ ܠܐ ܗܘܐ ܡܣܬ ܕܢܐܠܦ ܕܢܩܪܐ ܐܢܘܢ‬ ‫ܚܒܝܒܝܢ‬ ‫ܐܠܐ ܐܦ ܕܢܥܒܕ‬ My friends, as for the divine scriptures, it is not sufficient that we learn to read them. We must act on them. [653.14–16]

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The 14th Demonstration is an unsettling reflection on Christian life in the early fourth century. Aphrahat challenges himself and his audience to an honest appraisal of their Christian culture as he takes his place among Old Testament prophets. He reads the biblical text into the reality of his own day in a most concrete way. Unlike all other creatures, humans can resist the divine will and so live without self-understanding and even worse, in self-denial, like Eli the priest, and so participate in worldly corruption while issuing unconvincing objections to it. Aphrahat places himself among his audience, castigating himself along with them and thus modeling what he seeks from them. His words address a reality that millions of people around the world contend with each day: corruption, abuse of power, and hypocrisy in both religious and secular spheres. Since blindness is one of the roots of corruption, then, as Sebastian Brock has taught us, we must recover Ephrem’s luminous eye to see through that corruption to a more just world, a world envisioned in Aphrahat’s 14th Demonstration. Bibliography Barnes, T.D. “Constantine and the Christians of Persia,” Journal of Roman Studies 75 (1985): 126–136. Beck, E., ed. and trans. Des heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen de Paradiso und contra Julianum, CSCO 174–175, Scr. Syri. 78–79 (Louvain: Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, 1957). Black, M. trans. The Book of Enoch or 1 Enoch: A New English Edition (Leiden: Brill, 1985). Camplani, A. “L’Esposizione XIV di Afraate: una retorica antiautoritaria nel contesto dell’evoluzione istituzionale della Chiesa siriaca,” in Storia e pensiero religioso nel Vicino Oriente. L’età bagratide – Maimonide – Afraate, ed. C. Baffioni, R.B. Finazzi, A.P. Dell’Acqua, and E. Vergani, Orientalia Ambrosiana 3 (Milano: Bulzoni, 2014), 191–235. Chaumont, M. La christianisation de l’empire iranien des origines aux grandes persécutions du IVe siècle, CSCO 499, Subs. 80 (Louvain: Peeters, 1988). Cramer, W. Der Geist Gottes und des Menschen in frühsyrischer Theologie, Münsterische Beiträge zur Theologie 46 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1979). Fiey, J.M. “Notule de littérature syriaque. La Démonstration XIV d’Aphraate,” Le Muséon 81 (1968): 449–454. Gavin, F. “The Sleep of the Soul in the Early Syriac Church,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 40 (1920): 103–120. Gwynn, J. “Selections Translated into English from the Hymns and Homilies of Ephraim the Syrian, and from the Demonstrations of Aphrahat the Persian Sage,” in A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church: Second

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Series, vol. 13, Part 2: Gregory the Great, Ephraim Syrus, Aphrahat, ed. Ph. Schaff and H. Wace (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1898). Jarkins, S.K.S. Aphrahat the Persian Sage and the Temple of God: A Study of Early Syriac Theological Anthropology, Gorgias Studies in Early Christianity and Patristics 36 (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2008). Macomber, W.F. “The Authority of the Catholicos Patriarch of Seleucia-Ctesiphon,” Orientalia Christiana Analecta (1968): 179–200. Morrison, C.E. “The Bible in the Hands of Aphrahat the Persian Sage,” in Syriac and Antiochian Exegesis and Biblical Theology for the 3rd Millennium, ed. R.D. Miller, Gorgias Eastern Christian Studies 6 (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2008), 1–25. Morrison, C.E. “The Faculty of Discernment in Narsai,” in Narsai: Rethinking his Work and his World, ed. A.M. Butts, K. Heal, and B. Kitchen (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020), 161–173. Owens, R.J. The Genesis and Exodus Citations of Aphrahat the Persian Sage, Monographs of the Peshitta Institute Leiden 3 (Leiden: Brill, 1983). Parisot, J., ed. Aphraatis Demonstrationes, Patrologia Syriaca, Pars prima, 1–2 (Paris: Firmin Didot et Socii, 1894–1907). Pierre, M.-J. “L’âme ensommeillée et les avatars du corps selon le Sage Persan: Essai sur l’anthropologie d’Aphraate Part 1,” Proche-Orient Chrétien 32 (1982): 233–262; and Part 2, Proche-Orient Chrétien 33 (1983): 104–142. Pierre, M.-J., ed. Aphraate le Sage Persan. Les Exposés, Sources chrétiennes 349 (Paris: Cerf, 1988). Terzoli, R. “Âme et esprit chez Aphraate,” Parole de l’Orient 3 (1972): 105–118.

Peshitta Parables as Oral Performance Terry C. Falla This paper contends that we have not taken the artistic-poetic dimension of the Peshitta Syriac New Testament with sufficient critical seriousness and that its significance calls for a place in the future of Syriac studies. But what is the nature and extent of the Peshitta’s poetics? What is its source and its purpose? What does it tell us about its translators, their theology, their spirituality, their exegesis, and the historical, cultural and socio-literary forces that were at work in producing it? To pursue these questions it is necessary to ask and answer a prior question: how can we evaluate it? A few decades ago, Sebastian Brock in one of his beautifully hand-written letters asked me a question that changed forever the course of my study of Peshitta poetics. How can we discern, he asked, whether a translator intentionally created a perceived piece of artistic prose or wordplay? His question led to my devising a methodology that allows the researcher to distinguish between what might be a coincidental collocation of sounds and poetics intentionally created in the process of translation. Following a brief account of this methodology, which requires an exhaustive examination of the translator’s lexical and syntactic choices and a study of syntax, word order, and elements of discourse analysis issues that sets terms in the totality of their narrative setting, this essay applies it to two illustrative examples of the Peshitta’s rendering of the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus in Luke 16.19–31 and to the Parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10.25–37. I argue that the poetics of the Peshitta is more than a collective plenitude of individual phenomena such as parallelism, paronomasia, double entendre, inclusio, alliteration, assonance, and even snippets of pure poetry. Rather, as the Parable of the Good Samaritan illustrates, the artistry of the Peshitta translation helps to make it an enduring oral performance of words in which poetics, spirituality, theology, exegesis, pedagogy and liturgy merge and are one.

The Parable of the Good Samaritan

In the Greek New Testament, the Parable of the Good Samaritan is a superb oral performance of words that reaches the heart and touches the soul of

© Terry C. Falla, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004537897_009

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generation after generation.1 It is for the ear not just the eye, an audience not just an individual. In this essay, I wish to show that the Peshitta translator of the final form of this parable was aware of its rhetorical power and sought to equal it. The result is artistic prose, or “poetics,” defined by some linguists such as Roman Jakobson as “the aesthetic or creative linguistic use of the spoken or written medium.”2 Within the parable, and throughout the Peshitta New Testament, poetics is employed to enhance oral performance. As with all literature, the most effective way to become aware of the parable’s orality is to read it, hear it – aloud – over and over again, and then, for good measure, imagine for a magical moment that it is not a translation of a Greek text, nor a revision of an Old Syriac text type, but a somatic performance in which every syllable contributes to its poignancy, inspiration, and universal appeal. It is the best place to start.3 But, of course, it is a translation and it is a revision: a revision made to adhere more closely to a Greek text. To our good fortune, we have two extant versions of that Old Syriac text type: the Sinaitic and the Curetonian.4 For the Greek we have critical editions.5 Thus, in addition to listening to this Peshitta parable, we can compare it, critically with the Greek underlying it and with what we know of the Old Syriac. To do so confirms its indebtedness to its Old Syriac text-type. Sentence after sentence is the same as the Sinaitic and/or Curetonian, or redolent with one of 1 See P. Achtemeier, “Omne Verbum Sonat: The New Testament and the Oral Environment of Late Western Antiquity,” Journal of Biblical Literture 109 (1990): 3–27 (25). See also T.C. Falla, A Key to the Peshitta Gospels, vol. 2, Hē–Yōdh (Leiden: Brill, 2000), XV. 2 D. Crystal, Dictionary of Linguistics & Phonetics (5th ed.; Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 358. 3 The editions used for the Peshitta New Testament are: Ph.E. Pusey and G.H. Gwilliam, Tetraeuangelium Sanctum juxta simplicem Syrorum versionem ad fidem codicum, Massorae, editionum denuo recognitum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901; repr. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias press, 2003), and The New Testament in Syriac (London, British and Foreign Bible Society, 1905–1920; repr. 1950). Pusey and Gwilliam’s Tetraeuangelium Sanctum does not cite in its critical apparatus any variant readings for the passages examined in this study that need to be taken into account. 4 The texts employed for the Old Syriac are: A.S. Lewis, The Old Syriac Gospels, or Evangelion da-Mepharreshê; being the text of the Sinai or Syro-Antiochian Palimpsest, including the latest additions and emendations, with the variants of the Curetonian text … (London: Williams & Norgate: 1910); and F.C. Burkitt, Evangelion da-Mepharreshe; the Curetonian Version of the Four Gospels, with the Readings of the Sinai Palimpsest …, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904); G.A. Kiraz, Comparative Edition of the Syriac Gospels Aligning the Sinaiticus, Curetonianus, Peshîttâ & Harklean Versions, 4 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1996). 5 For an account of all the major critical editions of the Greek New Testament employed for this essay, from Tischendorf’s 8th ed. to the 28th ed. of Nestle-Aland’s Novum Testamentum, and the criteria for the evaluation of variant Greek readings corresponding to Syriac New Testament readings, see Falla, A Key to the Peshitta Gospels, vol. 1: XXIX–XXXIII.

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their poetic renderings. Moreover, in more than one place, the Peshitta parable follows the Old Syriac in an intentional departure from the Greek. This dual comparison also confirms the Peshitta parable’s unique profile: its displacement of Old Syriac readings with new renderings of the Greek; its creation of readings that differ from Old Syriac and Greek. But as an entrée I will begin, not with the Good Samaritan, but with two examples from another Lucan parable, the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus in Luke 16.19–31. Both examples are wordplays, chosen because they strikingly illustrate the parable’s poetic and performative character. To effect the first play at the beginning of this parable (Luke 16.21),6 the Peshitta has to depart from the Greek and from both Old Syriac versions,7 which follow the Greek. The context of this wordplay is one of contrasts: And he (that is, Lazarus) ܶ ܽ longed to fill his belly with the fragments (‫̈ܪܬܘܬܐ‬ ‫ ) ܱܦ‬that ܶ ܽ fell from the rich man’s table (‫ܬܘܪܗ‬ ‫) ܴܦ‬. The Greek has τῶν πιπτόντων the things falling and the Old Syriac ‫ܡܕܡ ܕܢܦܠ‬ ‫ ܗܘܐ‬anything that fell. The Peshitta wordplay’s audial context contains even more alliterations and assonances:

ܶ ܶ ‫ܡܠ ܰܟ‬ ܶ ܰ ‫ܘܡ‬ ‫ܪܣܗ‬ ܷ ‫ܬܝ ܱܐܒ ܶ ̱ܗ ܳܘܐ ܕܢ‬ ܽ ‫ܶܡܢ ܱܦ‬ ‫̈ܪܬܘ ܶܬܐ ܳܕܢܦܠܝܢ‬ ܳ‫ܕܗ ܻܘ ܰܥܬܝܪܐ‬ ܽ ‫ܶܡܢ ܴܦ‬ ܰ ‫ܬܘܪܗ‬ ܻ ܰ ܶ ܶ ܽ݁ ܰ݁ ܶ ܶ ܶ ݁ ܳ ܺ ܶ ‫ܡܠ ݁ ܰܟ‬ The full verse reads: ‫ܘܬܐ ݁ܕ ܳܢ ݂ܦܠܝܢ ܶܡܢ‬ ‫ܪܣܗ ܺ ܡܢ ܶ ܳ ܦ ܳ̈ܪܬ‬ ‫ܘܡ ݂ܬ ܰܝܐ ݂ܒ ̱ܗܘܐ ܕ ܶܢ‬ ݂ ܳ ݁ ܰ ‫ܠܒܐ ܐܬܝܢ ܗ ܰܘܘ‬ ܳ ܰ ̈ ̈ ܺ ݂ ‫ܡܠ‬ .‫ܘܗܝ‬ ̱ ܷ ݂ ܴ ܷ ݁ ‫ ݁ܦ ݂ܬ ܽܘܪܗ ݁ܕ ܰܗܘ ܰܥܬܝܪܐ ܐ ܶܠ ܐ ݂ܦ ݁ ܰܟ‬. Most nota̱ ‫ܚܟܝܢ ܽܫܘܚܢ‬ ܶ ܶ ܽ ‫ ܡܢ ܱܦ‬and ‫ܬܘܪܗ ܕ‬ ܽ ‫ܡܢ ܴܦ‬, the fourfold Mim, fiveble are the phrases ‫̈ܪܬܘ ܷܬܐ ܕ‬ ܳ ܳ ܽ fold Taw, three with a soft (‫ )ܪܘܟܟܐ‬pronunciation and two with a hard ܽ ) pronunciation, fivefold Nun, fourfold Resh, and eightfold (‫ܩܘ ܳܫ ܳܝܐ‬ ܶ◌ (Revāṣā)8 6 This example is discussed in T.C. Falla, “Translation, Genre, and Lexicography: A Study of the Syriac Versions of the New Testament,” The Harp 21; Festschrift: Rev. Fr. Emmanuel Thelly (Kottayam, Kerala: St Ephrem Ecumenical Research Institute, 2006): 7–54 (47–48). 7 There is always the possibility that a seemingly pure Peshitta-ism came from a now lost Old Syriac text type. But that only adds to the intrigue of the text’s history and does not take away from its final form. 8 Cf. the rhythmically playful Matt. 15.27 (also Mark 7.28, for ܶ which neither the ܳ Sinaitic ܳ nor ̈ ܽ ‫ܦܠܝܢ ܶܡܢ ܴܦ‬ ܽ ‫ܟܠܝܢ ܶܡܢ ܱܦ‬ ܽ ‫ܕܡ ܰܪ ̈ܝ‬ ܳ ‫ܬܘ̈ܪܶܐ‬ Curetonian versions are extant): ‫ܗܘܢ‬ ܻ ‫ ܐܦ ܰܟܠ ܷܒܐ ܐ‬even ܻ ‫̈ܪܬܘܬܐ ܳܕܢ‬ the dogs eat of the titbits that fall off the tables of their masters. The one difference between the Matthean and Marcan Syriac renderings and the Greek behind them is that the source text has the singular τῆς τραπέζης the table in both instances and the target texts have the ܽ ‫ ܴܦ‬the tables. Whether the difference was introduced for syntactic plural ‫ܬܘ̈ܪܶܐ‬

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The second wordplay is at the parable’s centre (Luke 16.25), where two alliterative words highlight the reversed condition of Lazarus and the Rich Man. ܺ ‫ ܶܡ‬contented. The Rich Man is ‫ܫܬ ܰܢܩ‬ Lazarus is ‫ܬܬܢܝܚ‬ ܱ ‫ ܶܡ‬tormented. These two words are complemented by the sentence’s threefold repetition of the syllable ‫ ܳܗ ܳܫܐ ܳܗܐ … ܳܗܪ ܴܟܐ‬:‫ ܳܗܐ‬:

ܺ ‫ܘܗ ܳܫܐ ܳܗܐ ܶܡ‬ ܳ ‫ܫܬ ܰܢܩ‬ ܱ ‫ܬܬܢܝܚ ܳܗܪ ܴܟܐ ܰܘܐܢ̱ܬ ܶܡ‬ And now, look, he is here contented and you are tormented

ܺ ‫( ܶܡ‬Ethpeel ‫ )ܢܘܚ‬assuaged, satisfied, contented, The wordplay is created by ‫ܬܬܢܝܚ‬ at rest. This is a departure from the underlying Greek. It has παρακαλεῖται comforted, which has no variants. The technically correct Syriac correspondence ܰ ‫( ܶܡ‬Ethpaal ‫ )ܒܝܐ‬comforted, consoled.9 Semantically, for παρακαλεῖται is ‫ܬܒ ܰܝܐܐ‬ ܺ ‫ ܶܡ‬is much sharper, accentuating the intended contrast,10 and permit‫ܬܬܢܝܚ‬ ting nearly all the letters in the sentence to alliterate.

Methodology for Determining Poetics in an Ancient Translation

In a few moments, we will turn to the Parable of the Good Samaritan. But first a much-needed question. How do we know that wordplay in the Old Syriac and Peshitta is intentional? How can we prove that a poeticism was probably

 and/or alliterative reasons must remain open to question, though it is of interest that the literalistic Harklean version also has the plural. Moreover, the evidence suggests that the Matthean and Marcan wordplays are, no less than ܶ ܽ the Peshitta one in Luke 16.21, the result of lexical choice regarding the ܶ plural noun ‫̈ܪܬܘܬܐ‬ ‫ ܱܦ‬the crumbs. In all three verses, the ܽ ‫ ܱܦ‬the crumbs with ‫̈ܪܟܘ ܶܟܐ‬ ܽ ‫ ܰܦ‬the titbits, the fragments, Harklean version has replaced ‫̈ܪܬܘܬܐ‬ the morsels, the scraps. It is a word of similar meaning that is employed by early Syriac writers, including Ephrem (see Payne Smith, Thesaurus Syriacus, vol. 2: column 3263; Sokoloff, A Syriac Lexicon, 1241), and that presumably would have been an option for the translators responsible for these wordplays in the Curetonian (Matt. 15.27), Sinaitic (Mark 7.28) and Peshitta versions (Matt. 15.27; Mark 7.28; Luke 16.21). ܺ ‫ ܶܡ‬in Luke 16.25, every word of the root ‫ ܢܘܚ‬in 9 With the exception of the wordplay ‫ܬܬܢܝܚ‬ the Peshitta Gospels finds its Greek correspondence in a παύω-word. Conversely, with only two exceptions, every παύω-word in the Gospels finds its Peshitta correspondence in a word of the root ‫( ܢܘܚ‬ἀναπαύω corresponds to Aphel ‫ ܢܘܚ‬Matt. 11.28; ἀναπαύομαι to Ethpeel ‫ ܢܘܚ‬Matt. 26.45; Mark 6.31; 14.41; Luke 12.19; ἐπαναπαύομαι to Ethpeel ‫ܢܘܚ‬ Luke 10.6; ἀνάπαυσις to ‫ ܳܢܝ ܳܚܐ‬Matt. 11.29; 12.43; Luke 11.24; παύομαι to Peal ‫ ܢܘܚ‬become calm, be at rest, of the sea Luke 8.24). The two exceptions translate the only two other occurrences of παύομαι in the Gospels. The first is Pael ‫ ܫܠܡ‬finish, conclude with reference to praying Luke 11.1. The second is Peal ‫ ܫܬܩ‬cease, be silent from speaking Luke 5.4. ܺ ‫ ܶܡ‬with one Taw. 10 Both Old Syriac versions have ‫ܬܢܝܚ‬

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a deliberate creation? Artistic, poetic prose with a premeditated purpose? A few decades ago, Sebastian Brock in one of his beautifully hand-written letters asked me a question that changed forever the course of my study of Peshitta poetics. How can we discern, he asked, whether a translator intentionally created a perceived piece of artistic prose or wordplay? His question led to my devising a methodology that allows the researcher to distinguish between intentional poetic elements and what might be coincidental ones. What the methodology allows? The methodology allows the researcher to distinguish between intentional poetic elements and what might be coincidental ones. Did the translator have a lexical choice? Did the translator manipulate the text towards a poetic end? They are the key questions. As to the translator’s creative process, that is another question. Was the moment of choice conscious or subliminal? Was it the result of long deliberation? Was it instantaneous? We cannot know. What we do know is that whatever the creative process, it does not inhibit our ability to follow a translator’s trail. In this regard, two factors are on our side in the study of the Peshitta Gospels. One is that we know they are the revision of an Old Syriac text-type. The other is that we know that the translators made them adhere more closely to their underlying Greek text. This means we can observe divergences in the Peshitta Gospels from both the Old Syriac as it has come down to us in the Sinaitic and Curetonian texts and from the Greek. The methodology, which has two parts to it, is demanding and detailed, but it does allow one to determine whether: (a) Preference was given to one of two or more competing synonyms, or (b) The text deviates from its usual and semantically appropriate correspondence in order to achieve a poeticism, or (c) The text adheres to the Greek but syntax and word order give it an unquestionably poetic presentation, or (d) What we have is the consequence of a coincidental collocation of similar sounding words, even though in retrospect the result may have delighted the translator. Part one of the methodology ascertains the Greek behind the key Syriac terms in question, and behind every other occurrence of those Syriac terms, and conversely every Syriac correspondence for every occurrence of the Greek terms involved until the web of correspondences in the corpus concerned becomes clear and one can see the prevailing patterns of Syriac-Greek and Greek-Syriac correspondences from Gospel to Gospel, book to book. In this regard, it is important to remember that the Peshitta Gospels and the rest of the Peshitta New Testament are not the product of a single translator, but are a collective

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work. This means that what is true of the relationship between Syriac-Greek correspondences in one book may not – and often does not – apply to another book.11 Where a Syriac rendering proves to deviate from the Greek, it is necessary also to check every major critical edition of the Greek New Testament to ensure the Syriac is not rendering a variant Greek reading. This related task demands a separate text-critical methodology. Part two of the methodology analyses syntax, word order, and elements of discourse analysis in the totality of their narrative setting. Context when taken in conjunction with lexical choice can therefore be a vital consideration. Indeed, there are places where a poeticism agrees with and is the most appropriate rendering of the Greek, but its context shows it to be a part of the artistry of the passage. Now for the Parable of the Good Samaritan. For the moment, we will skip the felicitous way in which the Peshitta begins and ends it and go straight to the parable’s centre-point where in Luke 10.30 we are told about the traveller who is waylaid by a gang of robbers. In the Peshitta, his stripping, beating, and abandonment is depicted by three one-word sentences followed by a subordinate clause and a final one-word sentence. To accomplish this sequence, the Peshitta not only apparently revises the Old Syriac, but also resets the structure and rhetorical effect of the Greek’s syntax. The result displays its loyalty to the spirit rather than the letter and is quite stunning. Instead of trying to emulate a long Greek relative clause embedding a string of typical Lucan participles along with an indicative aorist verb, the Peshitta, inspired by the Old Syriac, transforms the source text into a series of sharp, self-contained one-word sentences, each with a subject, verb, object, each brief, brilliant, brutal, permitting the audience no escape from the senseless and needless violence:

ܽ ‫ܘܫ‬ ܰ ‫ܡܚ ܽܐܘ ̱ܗܝ‬ ܰ ܽ ‫ܘܫ‬ ܰ ‫ܘܗܝ ܰܘ‬ ‫ܘܗܝ‬ ̱ ‫ܒܩ‬ ̱ ‫ܠܚ‬ and they stripped him and they beat him and they abandoned him These three stark images spill over into another one: a subordinate clause that forms a pool of intense, tight alliterations in which we see a man, beaten, almost lifeless, lying inert: 11 See T.C. Falla, “The Collective Authorship of the Peshitta New Testament.”

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ܳ ‫ܰܟܕ ܰܩ ܺܠܝܠ ܰܩ ܳܝ ܳܡܐ ܶܒܗ ܰܢ‬ ‫ܦܫܐ‬ little life left in him Alliteratively, the ear cannot miss the forceful cadence of the initial Kaf followed by the twofold Qof as the first letter of the second and third words combined with the repetitive ܰ (Peṯoḥo) on the first consonant of four of the five words of the clause and the threefold ܳ (Zeqofo). The Greek has one word, the accusative adjective ἡμιθανῆ half dead, which does not occur elsewhere in the New Testament. The Old Syriac, closer to the letter of the Greek, has three: ‫ܶܒܝܬ‬ ‫ ܺܡܝܬ ܰܠܚܝ‬between dead (‫ ) ܶܒܝܬ ܺܡܝܬ‬and alive (‫ ܠ‬+ ‫)ܚܝ‬.12 The Peshitta scene ends with another crisp one-word Peshitta sentence, ܰ which takes six English words to translate: ‫ ܶܘܐܙܠ ̱ܘ‬and they went on their way. Let us hear the cadence of this poetic excerpt as a whole:

ܰ

.‫ܶܘܐܙܠ ̱ܘ‬

ܽ ‫ܘܫ‬ ܳ ‫ܘܗܝ ܰܟܕ ܰܩ ܺܠܝܠ ܰܩ ܳܝ ܳܡܐ ܶܒܗ ܰܢ‬ ܰ ‫ܡܚ ܽܐܘ ̱ܗܝ‬ ܰ ܽ ‫ܘܫ‬ ܰ ‫ܘܗܝ ܰܘ‬ ‫ܦܫܐ‬ ̱ ‫ܒܩ‬ ̱ ‫ܠܚ‬

And they stripped him and they beat him and they abandoned him, little life left in him. And they went on their way. Enter a Samaritan travelling down the same road, a scene that brings us to what we may consider as our eighth example, a wordplay in Luke 10.34. Unlike the priest and the Levite, characterizing our instinctual fear of the unknown, of becoming involved, of psychological contamination, of piety reduced to the evil of banality, the Samaritan stops. And here in his act of compassion, the audience hears the heartbeat of its own common humanity. He administers oil and wine to the wounded man. He puts him on his own animal. It is these three agents of neighbourliness and healing – oil, wine, animal – that the Peshitta takes and turns into a gentle unmissable wordplay, a play that further softens the Samaritan’s story, the fleeting edge of its wing brushing a tenderness in its telling. The Peshitta and Curetonian text’s inversion of ἔλαιον oil and οἶνον wine ܳ ‫ ܰܚ‬wine and oil) heightens the euphony (just as in English “oil and ܶ ‫ܡܪܐ‬ ܳ (‫ܘܡܫܚܐ‬ wine” is more pleasing to the ear than “wine and oil”),13 but it is the two key 12 William Cureton translated: “between dead and alive,” in his Remains of a very Ancient Recension of the Four Gospels in Syriac (London: John Murray, 1858). A.S. Lewis, A Translation of the Four Gospels from the Sinaitic Palimpsest (London: Macmillan, 1894), has “between death and life.” 13 The reversal of this paired item has a witness in only one Greek manuscript (579). It also has a witness in the Arabic Diatessaron and Persian Diatessaron – see H.F. von Soden, Die

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ܳ

ܳ

ܳ ass, donkey that create the wordplay. And “donkey” is words ‫ ܰܚܡܪܐ‬wine and ‫ܚܡܪܐ‬ not what the Greek has. It has κτῆνος beast, mount, pack animal.14 The correct ܳ ܺ domestic animal, animal used for riding or Syriac equivalent for κτῆνος is ‫ܒܥܝܪܐ‬ ܳ ܺ would not a wordplay make. Only ‫ܚܡ ܳܪܐ‬ ܳ , carrying.15 But in our parable, ‫ܒܥܝܪܐ‬ spelt the same as wine except for one vowel, does that. ܶ ܳ ‫ܘܡ‬ .‫ܫܚܐ‬

ܳ ‫ܝܗܝܢ ܰܚ‬ ܰ ‫ܰܘ ܰܢܨܠ‬ ܶ ‫ܥܠ‬ ‫ܡܪܐ‬ ܶ ܳ ܰ ܳ ‫ܘܣ ܶܡܗ ܥܠ ܚܡܪܗ‬

ܳ

ܳ ‫ ) ܶܡ‬on them and he poured wine (‫ ) ܰܚܡܪܐ‬and oil (‫ܫܚܐ‬ ܶ ܳ ) ܳ ܶ and put him (‫ )ܣܡܗ‬on his donkey (‫ܚܡܪܗ‬ The twofold repetition of the syllable ‫ ܰܥܠ‬and threefold Waw add to the alliteration. With the exception of one revision, the vocabulary, alliteration, and assonance of the Peshitta wordplay’s context has a precedent in the Curetonian ܳ version, which differs dramatically from the Sinaitic. The revision is ‫ܘܣ ܶܡܗ ܰܥܠ‬ ܶ ܳ [ and he put him on [his donkey]. The Curetonian and Sinaitic versions ]‫ܚܡܪܗ‬ Schriften des Neuen Testaments in ihrer ältesten erreichbaren Textgestalt, vol. 2 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1913) and the International Greek New Testament Project, eds., The Gospel According to Luke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). But such diatessaric witnesses do not automatically permit the assumption that the Peshitta has inherited a reading from Tatian’s Diatessaron. On the problem of verifying diatessaric readings, see W.L. Petersen, Tatian’s Diatessaron: Its Creation, Dissemination, Significance, and History in Scholarship (Leiden: Brill, 1994). Although he doesn’t cite Luke 10.34, see also P.J. Williams on paired terms in the Peshitta New Testament, Early Syriac Translation Technique and the Textual Criticism of the Greek Gospels (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2004), 210–235. 14 See BAGD, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (2nd ed.; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979 [1957]). The Greek has no variant readings the Syriac might have followed. ܳ 15 In both its singular and plural forms, ‫ ܒ ܻܥܝܪܐ‬is mostly a collective noun. There are many instances in the Peshitta Old Testament where it used in the singular (for example, Ex. 19.13; 22.14; Lev. 20.15, 16; 24.21; 27.10). In at least one case, the singular specifically refers to an ̇ individual animal used for riding: ‫ܥܠܝܗ‬ ‫ܘܒܥܝܪܐ ܠܝܬ ܗܘܐ ܥܡܝ܆ ܐܐܠ ܐܢ ܒܥܝܪܐ ܕܪܟܝܒ ܗܘܝܬ‬ I had no animal except the animal on which I rode Neh. 2.12. The later mirror translation of the Harklean version (see the text prepared by Andreas Juckel in Kiraz, Comparative Edition of the Syriac Gospels), which as a matter of translational principle employs a litܳ eral rendering of κτῆνος in Luke 10.34, also has the singular of ‫ܒܥ ܻܝܪܐ‬. Conversely, in all the ܳ early Syriac versions, including the Harklean, ‫ܚܡܪܐ‬ ܴ ass, donkey, is, with two exceptions, invariably the equivalent of ὄνος, which also has the meaning “(domesticated) ass, donkey” (Matt. 21.2, 5, 7; Luke 13.15). One of the two exceptions is John 12.15 where the Sinaitic, Peshitta, and Harklean versions (Curetonian is not extant) agree in rendering πῶλον ὄνου by ‫ ܺܥ ܴܝܠ ܰܒܪ ܐ ܱ ܴܬܢܴܐ‬the foal of an ass. The other is our verse, Luke 10.34, which, for the sake of ܳ rather than ‫ܒܥ ܳܝܪܐ‬ ܺ . wordplay, has ‫ܚܡܪܐ‬ ܴ

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have ]‫ ܘܐܪܟܒܗ ܥܠ [ܚܡܪܗ‬and he made him ride/and he mounted him/and he set him on [his donkey]. The Peshitta’s choice seems to be more sensitive to the seriously wounded man’s predicament in that probably he would have been ܳ also incapable of riding in the normal sense of the term. The Semkath in ‫ܘܣ ܶܡܗ‬ ܰ ܳ ‫ ܶܡ‬. ܰ ‫ ܘ‬and Shin in ‫ܫܚܐ‬ adds more alliterative colour to the preceding Ṣadhe in ‫ܢܨܠ‬ One final, fourfold, and very different kind of example. A primary feature of the Parable of the Good Samaritan is its rhetorical framing. The parable itself is set within a dialogue between a lawyer and Jesus. In the Greek, both the introduction and conclusion of this dialogue is accentuated by discourse markers which give prominence, first to the lawyer, then to Jesus, then again to the lawyer. The Peshitta equals, perhaps surpasses, this rhetorical framing of the Greek by replicating four of five Greek markers with Classical Syriac markers.16 All four are in accord with normal Lucan lexical choice. The Peshitta has:

ܳ vs. 25 ‫ܘܗܐ‬ ܽ ‫ ܽܗܘ ܶܕܝܢ [ ܶܝ‬vs. 26 ]‫ܫܘܥ‬ ܶ ‫ ܽܗܘ ܕܝܢ‬vs. 29 ‫ ܽܗܘ ܶܕܝܢ‬vs. 37 The Greek has: Καί ἰδοὺ vs. 25 Ὁ δὲ [Ἰησοῦν] vs. 2617 Ὁ δέ vs. 29 Ὁ δέ vs. 37 Are these discourse markers an example of poetics? For methodologically they do not depart from the Greek. They do not individually pass the test of a lexical choice that can be proved to be intentional. Therefore, could it not be that they are the result of the translator automatically employing the obvious 16

17

It is of interest that the Peshitta does not replicate ὁ δέ in Luke 10.27, the second of the four occurrences of this syntagma in the parable. Intriguingly, it is the only one of the four occurrences that both Old Syriac versions do translate and both use the expected ‫ ܽܗܘ ܶܕܝܢ‬. Why the Peshitta omits ὁ δέ in Luke 10.27 is a matter of conjecture. But could it be because its replication in the Peshitta would not have contributed to the rhetorical framing of the parable in the same way as the other four markers do? If this were the case, then the translator may have seen the inclusion of this fourth ‫ ܽܗܘ ܶܕܝܢ‬in Luke 10.26 as not only unnecessary, but a distraction. For the well-attested variant reading Ἰησοῦν see, American and British Committees of the International Greek New Testament Project, eds. The Gospel According to Luke. Part One, Chapters 1–12.

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equivalents, so that poetics doesn’t come into it? Yes. Except for one thing: context – the indisputable poetic character of the parable as a whole. In this light, it would be difficult to then say that the translator chose his discourse markers simply because he considered them to be expected correspondences. As it is, in this instance, we can hear poetic intention in all aspects of the translation process. As to the Syriac discourse markers, take away the Peshitta parable’s rhetorical framing and the translation suddenly loses a significant part of its performative potency. Moreover, when we compare the Old Syriac with the Peshitta, the silence of the absence of discourse markers in the former is conspicuous. Let us compare Greek with Peshitta a little more closely. In the Greek, the first of the discourse markers is the small but compelling Greek construction καί ἰδοὺ in verse twenty-five. It is the very first phrase of the frame introducing the parable. Conventionally, it is translated “And behold”: “And behold a lawyer stood up to test him.” However, in this context καί ἰδοὺ conveys at least four layers of meaning:18 (a) it arrests the audience’s attention, creating anticipation and expectation; (b) it emphasizes the importance of what follows; (c) it indicates that what follows is new or unusual; and (d) it evokes a sense of transitional immediacy, a kind of “and just then,” “and at this moment” element: “And what do you know, at that very moment a lawyer stood up to test him.” The Peshitta elegantly encapsulates all these emphases with one authoritatively arresting word composed ܳ of the inseparable conjunction Waw prefixed to the presentative particle ‫ܗܐ‬: ܳ‫ܘܗܐ‬, which conventionally has also been translated “And behold.” In Peshitta ܳ occurs sixteen times, usually, as in this case, as the translation of καί Luke, ‫ܘܗܐ‬ ἰδοὺ. As the first word in the framing of the parable, it is a perfect fit. It brings us home to the true correspondence for καί ἰδοὺ. However, it more than mimics the Greek. In oral performance, detail is everything. As Jean-François Racine observes, “Anyone who has a basic familiarity with discourse analysis knows that the rhetorical effects of a text can be modified by moving around the elements of the discourse or by omitting or adding a few words and clauses.”19 In this instance, the Peshitta translator modifies the Old Syriac text-type by the ܳ and three occurrences of ‫ ܽܗܘ ܶܕܝܢ‬. From a discourse and introduction of ‫ܘܗܐ‬ ܳ , the first of the four markers, matches both the performative perspective, ‫ܘܗܐ‬ rhetorical and semantic force of its source text. Indeed, in Classical Syriac, this 18 BDAG, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, 468. 19 J.-F. Racine, review of K.R. Maxwell, Hearing between the Lines: The Audience as FellowWorker in Luke-Acts and Its Literary Milieu (New York: T&T Clark, 2010), in Review of Biblical Literature Blog 2011.04.15.

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particle prompts or summons attention and thus emphasizes the importance of what follows. It combines immediacy, anticipation and expectation. As the first word in the framing of the parable, it is a perfect fit. It too in the context of our parable may be translated “And what do you know, at that very moment.” It brings us home to the true correspondence for καί ἰδοὺ. ܳ ܶ This is in contrast to the Old Syriac versions. They have ‫ ܰܟܕ ܐ ܰܡܪ ܳܗܠܝܢ‬while he was saying these things. It is a graceful rendering. But it echoes only the transitional immediacy of καί ἰδοὺ. It lacks the succinctness, semantic intensity, ܳ . Like the Old Syriac, English and semantic elasticity of the later Peshitta ‫ܘܗܐ‬ translations struggle to convey the multiple emphases of καί ἰδοὺ. Like the Old Syriac – and in contrast to the Peshitta – they inevitably sacrifice most of them. ܳ in verse twenty-five introduces the lawyer, so the second disJust as ‫ܘܗܐ‬ course marker, ‫ ܽܗܘ ܶܕܝܢ‬, in verse 26, introduces Jesus: ‫ ܽܗܘ ܶܕܝܢ ܶܝ ܽܫܘܥ‬and he, Jesus. The presence of the personal name ‫ ܶܝ ܽܫܘܥ‬, which has a witness in both Old Syriac versions and the variant Greek reading Ἰησοῦν,20 is an effective paralܶ ܶ ܳ lel to ‫ ܳܣܦܪܐ‬, and the whole phrase ‫ ܽܗܘ ܶܕܝܢ ܶܝ ܽܫܘܥ ܐܡܪ ܠܗ‬and he, Jesus, said to ܳ ܶܰ ܳ him an effective rhetorical and syntactic parallel to ‫ܝܘܗܝ‬ ̱ ‫ܘܗܐ ܳܣܦܪܐ ܰܚܕ ܳܩܡ ܱܕܢܢܣ‬ and what do you know, at that very moment a lawyer stood up to test him. We should also note the efficacy of the function of ‫ ܽܗܘ ܶܕܝܢ‬before a noun, in this case a personal name, already mentioned in the same context to topicalize and emphasize that noun21 – a function used only sparingly and tellingly in Luke and the other Gospels.22 20 See BDAG, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, 468. On the function of the Greek article preceding a personal name, as a general rule to indicate that the person is known, see H.R. Balz and G. Schneider, Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), 490; BDAG, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, 687; Blass-Debrunner, A Greek Grammar of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature: A Translation and Revision of the ninth-tenth German edition by Robert W. Funk (University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1961), §260, 135–136; A.T. Robertson, A Grammar of the Greek New Testament in the Light of Historical Research (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1934), 759–760. 21 See Falla, A Key to the Peshitta Gospels, 2:5, §1. (iv), and J. Joosten, The Syriac language of the Peshitta & Old Syriac Versions of Matthew: Syntactic Structure, Inner Syriac Development & Translation Technique (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 36–37. As in Luke 10.26, the third person personal pronoun can be separated from its noun by a conjunction andܳ other elements, cf. ܳ ‫ ܽܗܘ ܶܕܝܢ ܰܣ‬and the blind man Mark 10.50, 51; ‫ ܺܗܝ ܶܕܝܢ‬in ‫ ܺܗܝ ܶܕܝܢ ܰܐܢ̱ܬܬܐ‬now the ‫ ܽܗܘ ܶܕܝܢ‬in ‫ܡܝܐ‬ ̈ܰ ܶ ܳ ܶ ܽ ܶ ܽ ܶ ܽ woman Mark ܺ ܶ 7.26; ‫ ܗܘ ܓܝܪ‬in ‫ ܗܘ ܓܝܪ ܡܚܪ‬for the morrow Matt. 6.34; ‫ܡܢ ܻܦܐܪܘ ̱ܗܝ ܗܘ ܓܝܪ‬ ܳ ‫ܬ ܰܝܕܥ ܐ‬ ܳ‫ܝܠܢܐ‬ ‫ ܡ‬for by its fruits the tree is known Matt. 12.33. Without an intervening conjuncܻ tion: Matt. 14.19; Mark 6.28; 12.22; Luke 5.37; 7.12; John 1.1, 5; 5.36; 8.32; 11.38; 20.10. 22 It could be argued that in the context of Luke 10.26, ‫ ܽܗܘ ܶܕܝܢ‬simply translates ὁ δὲ as the latter’s normal equivalent in Luke and the other Gospels and not so that ‫ ܽܗܘ‬might precede the personal name (noun) ‫ ܶܝ ܽܫܘܥ‬. But the fact remains that ‫ ܽܗܘ‬does precede and topicalize the noun and that a conjunction – in this case ‫ ܶܕܝܢ‬, which helps create a discourse marker – can interpose between ‫ ܽܗܘ‬and the noun it precedes.

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Finally, there is the relationship of ‫ ܶܕܝܢ‬in verse twenty-six as a genuine Classical Syriac adverbial conjunction23 in the syntagma24 ]‫ ܽܗܘ ܶܕܝܢ [ ܶܝ ܽܫܘܥ‬to the third and fourth ‫ ܽܗܘ ܶܕܝܢ‬markers in verses twenty-nine and thirty-seven, where they also translate the Greek syntagma ὁ δὲ.25 As the first ‫ ܽܗܘ ܶܕܝܢ‬paralܳ , introduces and topicalizes Jesus, and helps frame the beginning of the lels ‫ܘܗܐ‬ parable, so the third occurrence of ‫ ܽܗܘ ܶܕܝܢ‬in verse twenty-nine returns the audience to the person of the lawyer and reinforces the framing. The Greek has: ὁ δὲ θὲλων δικαιῶσαι ἑαυτὸν εἶπεν πρὸς τὸν Ἰησοῦν, Кαὶ τίς ἐστίν μου πλησίον But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbour?” The Peshitta has:

ܰ ܰ ܳ ܶ ܽ ܶ ‫ܡܙܕ ܽܩܘ ܰܢ‬ ܰ .‫ܦܫܗ ܶܐ ܰܡܪ ܶܠܗ‬ ‫ܘܡ ܽܢܘ ܰܩ ܺܪܝܒܝ‬ ܴ ‫ܗܘ ܕܝܢ ܱܟܕ ܨܒܐ ܠ‬ But he, as he wanted to justify himself, said to him,26 “And who is my neighbour?” Following the parable’s key question by Jesus in verse thirty-six, the third and final ‫ ܽܗܘ ܶܕܝܢ‬in verse thirty-seven again returns the audience’s attention to the lawyer and his response. In Greek, the question is highly alliterative: τίς τούτων τῶν τριῶν πλησίον δοκεῖ σοι γεγονέναι τοῦ ἐμπεσόντος εἰς τοὺς λῃστάς

23 See W. van Peursen and T.C. Falla, “The Particles ‫ ܶܓܝܪ‬and ‫ ܶܕܝܢ‬in Classical Syriac: Syntactic and Semantic Aspects,” in Foundations for Syriac Lexicography II, ed. P.J. Williams (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2009), 63–98 (66). 24 The term “syntagma” refers to a syntactic unit or phrase forming a syntactic unit that is used in multiple contexts. 25 For the syntactic function of ὁ δέ to mark the continuation of a narrative, see BDAG, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, 686; Blass-Debrunner, Grammatik, §249, 131. 26 The Peshitta, unlike the Sinaitic and Curetonian versions, replaces τὸν Ἰησοῦν in εἶπεν πρὸς ܶ τὸν Ἰησοῦν with ‫ܠܗ‬, butܳ in agreement with the Greek and the Curetonian version retains ܶ ܽ ܽ ܶ ܶ ‫ ܝܫܘܥ‬in ‫ ܐ ܰܡܪ ܠܗ ܝܫܘܥ‬at the beginning of the next verse, verse thirty, though the rendering is not exact as the Greek has ὑπολαβὼν ὁ Ἰησοῦς εἶπεν. While we do not know the reason for the Peshitta translator’s exclusion of ‫ ܶܝ ܽܫܘܥ‬in verse twenty-nine and its inclusion in verse thirty, it is tempting to conjecture that the choice was in order to maintain a judicious rhetorical balance that omits the name where it is not needed, but reserves it in order to introduce the core story of the assaulted man and his Samaritan rescuer.

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Which of these three does it seem to you was a neighbour to the one who fell into the hands of the robbers? The Peshitta, however, intensifies its own alliterations and assonances by adding ‫ ܳܗ ܺܟܝܠ‬therefore (which does not have a correspondence in either the Greek or the Old Syriac), and revising Dalath in ‫ ܕܗܘ ܕܢܦܠ‬of that one who fell in the ܰ ܰ to that one who fell. By these two Old Syriac versions to Lamadh in ‫ܠܗܘ ܰܕܢܦܠ‬ simple alterations, the Peshitta creates an extra He and ◌ܻ (Ḥvoṣo), and two extra Lamadhs (making a total of six Lamadhs):

ܶ ܳ ܶ ܰ ܰ ܰ ܳ ܶ ܶ ܳ ܳ ܺܳ ܽ ܰ ܳ ܺܰ ܳ ‫ܓ ܴ̈ܝ ܶܣܐ‬ ܱ ‫ܡܢܘ ܗܟܝܠ ܡܢ ܗܠܝܢ ܬܠܬܐ ܡܬܚܙܐ ܠܟ ܱܕܗܘܐ ܩܪܝܒܐ ܠܗܘ ܕܢܦܠ ܻܒ ̈ܐܝ ܰܕܝ‬ Which therefore of these three does it seem to you was a neighbour to the one who fell into the hands of the robbers? It is at this point that the Peshitta, taking its cue from the Greek, departs from the Old Syriac versions by inserting the third ‫ ܽܗܘ ܶܕܝܢ‬. As the last in the series of markers, it introduces the lawyer’s response and elicits from Jesus an obligation of general applicability. Appropriately, all three Syriac versions employ ܳ followed by the active participle to express this the perfect non-enclitic ‫ܗܘܐ‬ ܰ ܳ ܶ ܳ obligation; namely, ‫ ܐܦ ܐܢ̱ܬ ܳܗ ܰܟ ܳܢܐ ܼܗ ܰܘܝܬ ܥܒܕ‬Go, you also do likewise:27

ܶ ܰ ܳ ܳ ܰ ܰ ‫ ܐܢ̱ܬ ܳܗ ܰܟ ܳܢܐ ܼܗ ܰܘܝܬ‬28‫ ܶܙܠ ܐܦ‬.‫ܐ ܰܡܪ ܶܠܗ ܶܝ ܽܫܘܥ‬. ‫ܘܗܝ‬ ̱ ‫ ܰܗܘ ܷܕܐܬܪ ܰܚܡ ܥܠ‬.‫ܽܗܘ ܶܕܝܢ ܐ ܳܡܪ‬ ‫ܳܥ ܶܒܕ‬ And he said, “The one who had compassion on him.” Jesus said to him,29 “Go, you also do likewise.” A few decades ago, at the end of a long day slogging away at composing a handwritten concordance to the Peshitta Gospels, I began re-reading the Syriac text in front of me; the sort of thing one might do in any job when overtired instead of sensibly retiring for the night. As I struggled with the text something extraordinary seemed to meet the eye. Barbara Herrnstein Smith says 27

28 29

ܳ followed by the active participle or adjective indicates a wish, The perfect non-enclitic ‫ܗܘܐ‬ advice, or obligation of general applicability, but not a command for immediate execution, for which the imperative is used; see T. Muraoka, Classical Syriac: A Basic Grammar with a Chrestomathy (2nd rev. ed.; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005), §87; Falla, A Key to the Peshitta Gospels, 2: 24, §4. The Old Syriac versions have ‫ܘܐܦ‬. The Peshitta and Old Syriac omit καί or οὖν in εἶπεν καί (or οὖν) αὐτῷ.

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that “As soon as we perceive that a verbal sequence has a sustained rhythm, that it is formally structured according to a continuously operating principle of organization, we know that we are in the presence of poetry and we respond to it accordingly.”30 Berris, my wife, tells me it was two nights and three days later that I left the desk. What I saw was alliteration, assonance, parallelism, wordplay, and even rhythm in one place after another, sprinkled about like star dust, not of course in some kind of versified form, for the Syriac text is continuous as in a prose novel. To my astonishment, Syriac scholar Arthur Vööbus at Chicago University, informed me that as far as he knew the extent of this poetic dimension was unknown to Western scholarship, and perhaps in these days to Eastern scholarship also. Syriac wordplays had been identified previously by Agnes Smith Lewis and her sister Margaret Gibson in the Sinaitic palimpsest.31 Arnold Meyer,32 and Matthew Black quoting Lewis and Meyer, cite a few instances,33 but none of these scholars recognize poetics as a basic characteristic of the Peshitta. Rather, they cite their examples as typical of Aramaic’s ancient Semitic love of wordplay. Those three days and two nights cast a spell on me from which I have never emerged. Why, though, should this insight be surprising? Is not the Hebrew Bible crammed with poetry, and with aesthetic prose as in the book of Ruth? And is not poetry a basic feature of early Syriac literature? Might we not therefore expect that poetics would find at least an echo in a translation that is Semitic? Well, yes, if it were not for the fact that scholarship, including the best Jewish scholarship, has demonstrated that by the time of these early Syriac translations “the Rabbis were examining Scripture with eyes blind to parallelism” and all other forms of poetry.34 The rabbinic doctrine of biblical “omnisignificance” demanded that: Nothing in the Bible … ought to be explained as the product of chance, or, for that matter, as an emphatic or rhetorical form, or anything similar, nor ought its reasons to be assigned to the realm of the Divine unknowables  … Such authorial concerns, which would involve the critic in

30 B.H. Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 23. 31 Lewis, A Translation of the Four Gospels from the Syriac of the Sinaitic Palimpsest, xv–xvii. 32 A. Meyer, Jesu Muttersprache (Freiburg: Mohr, 1896), 81. 33 M. Black, An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (3rd ed.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 161. 34 G.B. Gray, Forms of Hebrew Poetry (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1915), 27.

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viewing the text as if humanly composed, are just the sort of question omnisignificance ruled out.35 Poetics was regarded as a human enterprise and therefore had no place in the sacred text. Hebrew writers did retain parallelism in the rabbinic period, but, as demonstrated by Gordis, only “in proverbs and apothegms,” “a few lyrical fragments imbedded in the Talmud,” and “the oldest, basic prayers of the Jewish liturgy.”36 In the rabbinic tradition, say these scholars, God did not communicate in poetic form. The contrast between this loss of recognition of biblical poetics and what we find in the earliest Syriac versions of the New Testament is immense. It reveals much about the emergence of “Scripture” in the early Middle Eastern Church. Translators quick to recognize parallelisms and other poetic forms in their Greek manuscripts do not hesitate to heighten them. Numerous wordplays have no correspondence in the Greek. Unlike the relationship between the Hebrew Bible and the rabbinic tradition, the earliest versions of the Gospels and New Testament provide an unbroken witness to the continuance of an ancient poetic Semitic form. There is however a quantum leap between identifying poetics in various forms in the Peshitta New Testament and recognizing within that translation whole narratives shaped for the purpose of public oral performance. It is still a relatively new insight on my part and much research remains to be done. Nevertheless, the examples from the two parables that we have discussed in this essay illustrate that the poetics of the Peshitta is more than a collective plenitude of individual phenomena. Furthermore, the four discourse markers in the Parable of the Good Samaritan are a good reminder that Peshitta poetics is not only the result of departures from the source text, but can also be the consequence of sensitivity to the poetics of that text.37 The Peshitta translators, proficient in the finest nuances of Greek syntax, combine a creative freedom with a bi-lingual, trans-cultural artistry to produce an “oral performance of words” in which poetics, spirituality, theology, exegesis, pedagogy and liturgy merge and are one, and in which we find, through translation, the reclamation 35 J.L. Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 104–105. 36 R. Gordis, Poets, Prophets, and Sages: Essays in Biblical Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), 85, 86. 37 Cf. the poetic symmetrical structure and innovative word-order that the Peshitta has given to the Greek versicle in 2 Tim. 2. 11–13; see Falla, “Translation, Genre, and Lexicography,” 9–36, and the Peshitta rendering of Luke 12.6–7, which exhibits parallelism, alliteration, assonance, wordplay and rhythm, and in which syntax becomes the sinew of rhetoric and the servant of poetics; see T. Falla, Ancient Near Eastern Language: Syriac (Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 2011), 104–106, 122–124.

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ܶ

ܳ ‫ܢܓ ܻܠ‬ ܶ ‫ )ܐ ܰܘ‬in an Aramaic dialect close in a Hellenized era of the Evangelion (‫ܝܘܢ‬ to that spoken by Jesus. Seen in this way, the Peshitta New Testament adds an enduring dimension to an already rich cultural heritage, for as we have seen poetics was already part of the Old Syriac Gospels and already at the heart of early Syriac Christian tradition before the Peshitta reached its final form. Indeed, the poetic character of this tradition, says Sebastian Brock, is perhaps “one of its most distinctive features.”38 Poetry and poetics were seen as vehicles through which to express spirituality and theology in a way impossible in mundane prose. Ephrem was a formative influence. In his work, poetics – spirituality – theology were one. Plus another vital element: liturgy. “Profoundly liturgical,” is how Kees den Biesen describes Ephrem’s poetic art of language.39 So much so that Ephrem’s “performative requirements” shaped his “literary presentation,” says Susan Ashbrook Harvey.40 At a translational level, is this not the ethos that permeates the Peshitta? Translators weave poetics into their work with a view to public reading, to its performative and liturgical purpose. By way of conclusion, is there, however, a yet wider horizon against which we might view our subject? What we might say about the presence, purpose, and impact of translational poetics from the perspective of the arts and aesthetic in human endeavour? Do they not tell us something for our own time about the intricate relationship between prose and poetics and meaning and the complexity between hurt and “the harmony that lies hidden in the flux of created things?”41 “The Soul has Bandaged moments – When too appalled to stir –,” writes Emily Dickenson.42 In these moments, to hear the word-made-poetry can help; a still-point in our psyche where memory and imagination meet. Like music, the poetic has multitudinous forms that can open us to the mysterious, the familiar, the awesome; to the unconscious, unknowable, terrifying, and beautiful, ravishing or seeping into our being unbidden and uncensored. Thus in the Peshitta – in contrast to the later Harklean version – the song of parallelism, euphony, rhythm, assonance, alliteration, and the simplest paronomasia, the soul music out of which the translation arose,43 play out “within 38 S.P. Brock, Bride of Light: Hymns on Mary from the Syriac Churches (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2010), 1. 39 K. den Biesen, Simple and Bold: Ephrem’s Art of Symbolic Thought (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2014), 325. 40 S.A. Harvey, “Revisiting the Daughters of the Covenant: Women’s Choirs and Sacred Song in Ancient Syriac Christianity,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 8, no. 2 (2005). 41 J. Press, The Fire and the Fountain: An Essay on Poetry, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1955), 143. 42 R.W. Franklin, The Poems of Emily Dickenson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999), poem 360. 43 B. Hill, Broken Song: T.G.H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession (Sydney: Knopf, 2002), 446.

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the limits of sacred space and time.”44 They enrich semantics, sculpt syntax. They work both rhetorically and psychologically. To cite Den Biesen from a different context, they give voice, to “a vision whose artistic expression through language and ritual is able to transform life thanks to its correspondence to the symbolic nature of all of reality and the inner world of each human being.”45 This, I suggest, is the gift of the translators whose work we inherit and begs further research; translators who – to use the words of George Steiner in his book Real Presences – make the past text “a present presence.”46 Two days before the conference honouring Sebastian Brock at which this essay was presented as a paper, my colleague Beryl Turner and I followed the return track from Sigtuna to the village of Wenngarn. It was a lovely summer day with the Swedish sunlight dappling the deeply shadowed forest and winding path. My colleague broke the silence quietly recalling lines from a Robert Frost poem: The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep. We did have miles to go, but as we made our way between lichened rocks and ancient roots, these lines became a new metaphor for our lifelong lexical work and of the Syriac poetics that flowed from it. Simultaneously, they evoked the call of the conference to the future of Syriac studies. For the multi-authored Peshitta New Testament, this future surely invites the further exploration of poetics as oral performance and the relationship of these Peshitta poetics to the Old Syriac and to the underlying Greek. Bibliography Achtemeier, P. “Omne Verbum Sonat: The New Testament and the Oral Environment of Late Western Antiquity,” Journal of Biblical Literature 109 (1990): 3–27. Balz, H.R. and G. Schneider, Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993). 44 Den Biesen, Simple and Bold, 325. 45 Den Biesen, Simple and Bold, 333. 46 G. Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 13; see also 156–165, 182–183.

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BAGD = Bauer, W., et al., ed. A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (2nd ed.; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979 [1957]). BDAG = Bauer, W., et al., ed. A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (3rd ed.; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001 [1957]). den Biesen, K. Simple and Bold: Ephrem’s Art of Symbolic Thought (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2014). Black, M. An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (3rd ed.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). Blass-Debrunner = F. Blass and A. Debrunner, A Greek Grammar of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature: A Translation and Revision of the ninth-tenth German edition by Robert W. Funk (University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1961). Brock, S.P. Bride of Light: Hymns on Mary from the Syriac Churches (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2010). Burkitt, F.C., ed. Evangelion da-Mepharreshe; The Curetonian Version of the Four Gospels, with the Readings of the Sinai Palimpsest…, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904). Crystal, D. Dictionary of Linguistics & Phonetics (5th ed.; Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 2003). Cureton, W., ed. Remains of a very Ancient Recension of the Four Gospels in Syriac (London: John Murray, 1858). Falla, T.C. A Key to the Peshitta Gospels, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2000). Falla, T.C. “Translation, Genre, and Lexicography: A Study of the Syriac Versions of the New Testament,” The Harp 21; Festschrift: Rev. Fr. Emmanuel Thelly (Kottayam, Kerala: St Ephrem Ecumenical Research Institute, 2006): 7–54. Falla, T. Ancient Near Eastern Language: Syriac (Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 2011). Franklin, R.W., ed. The Poems of Emily Dickenson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999). Gordis, R. Poets, Prophets, and Sages: Essays in Biblical Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971). Gray, G.B. Forms of Hebrew Poetry (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1915). Harvey, S.A. “Revisiting the Daughters of the Covenant: Women’s Choirs and Sacred Song in Ancient Syriac Christianity,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 8, no. 2 (2005). Hill, B. Broken Song: T.G.H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession (Sydney: Knopf, 2002). International Greek New Testament Project, eds. The Gospel According to Luke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). Joosten, J. The Syriac Language of the Peshitta & Old Syriac Versions of Matthew: Syntactic Structure, Inner Syriac Development & Translation Technique (Leiden: Brill, 1996). Juckel, A. in G.A. Kiraz, Comparative Edition of the Syriac Gospels Aligning the Sinaiticus, Curetonianus, Peshîttâ & Harklean Versions, 4 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1996).

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Kiraz, G.A., ed. Comparative Edition of the Syriac Gospels Aligning the Sinaiticus, Curetonianus, Peshîttâ & Harklean Versions, 4 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1996). Kugel, J.L. The Idea of Biblical Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). Lewis, A.S., trans. A Translation of the Four Gospels from the Sinaitic Palimpsest (London: Macmillan, 1894). Lewis, A.S., ed. The Old Syriac Gospels, or Evangelion da-Mepharreshê; being the text of the Sinai or Syro-Antiochian Palimpsest, including the latest additions and emendations, with the variants of the Curetonian text … (London: Williams & Norgate, 1910). Meyer, A. Jesu Muttersprache (Freiburg: Mohr, 1896). Muraoka, T. Classical Syriac: A Basic Grammar with a Chrestomathy (2nd rev. ed.; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005). New Testament in Syriac (London, British and Foreign Bible Society, 1905–1920; repr. 1950). Payne Smith, R., et al., eds. Thesaurus Syriacus, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879–1901; repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1981). Petersen, W.L. Tatian’s Diatessaron: Its Creation, Dissemination, Significance, and History in Scholarship (Leiden: Brill, 1994). van Peursen, W. and T.C. Falla. “The Particles ‫ ܶܓܝܪ‬and ‫ ܶܕܝܢ‬in Classical Syriac: Syntactic and Semantic Aspects,” in Foundations for Syriac Lexicography II, ed. P.J. Williams (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2009), 63–98. Press, J. The Fire and the Fountain: An Essay on Poetry (2nd ed.; London: Methuen, 1955). Pusey, Ph.E. and G.H. Gwilliam, eds. Tetraeuangelium Sanctum juxta simplicem Syrorum versionem ad fidem codicum, Massorae, editionum denuo recognitum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901; repr. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2003). Racine, J.-F. Review of K.R. Maxwell, Hearing between the Lines: The Audience as FellowWorker in Luke-Acts and Its Literary Milieu (New York: T&T Clark, 2010), in Review of Biblical Literature Blog 2011.04.15. Robertson, A.T. A Grammar of the Greek New Testament in the Light of Historical Research (Nashville, Broadman Press, 1934). Smith, B.H. Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). von Soden, H.F. Die Schriften des Neuen Testaments in ihrer ältesten erreichbaren Text­ gestalt, vol. 2 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1913). Sokoloff, M. A Syriac Lexicon: A Translation from the Latin: Correction, Expansion, and Update of C. Brockelmann’s Lexicon Syriacum (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns; Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2009). Steiner, G. Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Williams, P.J. Early Syriac Translation Technique and the Textual Criticism of the Greek Gospels (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2004).

Severus of Antioch on Ancient Church Customs: The Significance of Cyprian’s Letters as Quoted by Severus and Oriental Canonical Collections Alberto Camplani This article deals with the significance of Syriac canonical literature, as well as Severus of Antioch’s witness, through the prism of their use of Cyprian of Carthage’s letters, for recovering the oldest layers of the Greek canonical collections. Drawing on relevant studies, including those of Schulthess, Nau, Vööbus, Selb, Kaufhold and Moss, I will show how the Syriac literature and Severus, alongside a canonical collection in Gǝʿǝz, translated from Greek, contribute to our knowledge of the circulation, growth, and reworking of the oldest Greek canonical literature. Emerging documentation in the Gǝʿǝz language can enlighten the study of Cyprian of Carthage’s letters concerning the rebaptism of heretics who wished to return to the Catholic Church as well as the history of the letters’ circulation in Greek translation and in Oriental languages. It can also shed light on the awareness of the letters’ contents in Eastern Christian intellectual and clerical milieus. I refer especially to the Aksumite canonico-liturgical collection identified by Alessandro Bausi in 1999 in a Gǝʿǝz manuscript of the thirteenth century.1 This collection (=  Σ) includes texts composed until the end of the fifth century and collected in Egypt, probably in Alexandria, a history of the Alexandrian episcopate (Historia episcopatus Alexandriae  = HEpA), narrating events and canonical reforms in Alexandria and Egypt from the second to the fourth century.2 A portion of the history was already known through an eighth-century Latin canonical manuscript, Codex veronensis LX (58) (= V) 1 For a general presentation of the contents of the manuscript, see A. Bausi, “La Collezione aksumita canonico-liturgica,” Adamantius 12 (2006): 43–70, and A. Bausi, A. Brita, M. Di Bella, D. Nosnitsin, I. Rabin and N. Sarris, “The Aksumite Collection or codex Σ (Sinodos of Qǝfrǝyā, MS C3-IV-71/C3-IV-73, Ethio-SPaRe UM-039): Codicological and palaeographical observations. With a note on material analysis of inks,” COMSt Bulletin 6/2 (2020): 127–171. 2 For the edition of the text, see A. Bausi and A. Camplani, “The History of the Episcopate of Alexandria (HEpA): Editio minor of the fragments preserved in the Aksumite Collection and in the Codex Veronensis LX (58),” Adamantius 22 (2016): 249–302. See also the presentation and analysis of the material in A. Bausi and A. Camplani, “New Ethiopic Documents for the History of Christian Egypt,” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 17 (2013): 215–247. The following abbreviations will be used here:

© Alberto Camplani, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004537897_010

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edited by Scipione Maffei already in 1738.3 In its narration of the episcopate’s history, this historical writing reveals the leading function of Alexandria’s patriarchate in the universal Church. Notably, the writing is preserved within two canonical collections, in Latin and Gǝʿǝz, because it was viewed by the compilers of both V and Σ as a collection of canons and customs dealing with episcopal governance and hierarchy. This particular situation of transmission allows us to surmise that the first canonical collections and specific kinds of historiography share some features. The former occasionally represent history, while the latter may have been understood, at least by ancient readers, as containing information about ecclesiastical customs that evolved over time. In certain canonical collections, the textual materials are organized chronologically  – thematic order would be imposed by John the Scholastic later, in the mid-sixth century. Conversely, histories such as the HEpA may have canonical purposes, especially when the historical vicissitudes of a patriarchate are the basis for promoting the particular position of the church of Alexandria in the eastern Mediterranean, a real “geo-ecclesiology.”4 Here, I will discuss the presence in Σ of Cyprian of Carthage’s Epistle 70, preceded by an interesting premise, which is known also in Greek canonical collections. A number of questions arise: Why was Cyprian’s letter quoted after the history of the early bishopric of Alexandria (HEpA)? What is the significance of the premise to the Cyprianic letter? Is it possible to compare this textual situation with that occurring in other canonical collections, in particular, with what we know about Severus of Antioch’s interest in the history of canons and Church customs? In the first part of this article, I will review the Aksumite collection, paying particular attention to the canonical elements inserted in the HEpA. In the second part, I will examine the premise preserved in Σ and some Greek and Syriac canonical collections, while the third part is devoted to Severus of Antioch’s witness. HEpA = History of the Episcopate of Alexandria. Σ = Ms Tǝgrāy, ʿUrā Masqal, Ethio-SPaRe UM-039 (manuscript in Gǝʿǝz). V = Codex Veronensis LX (58), Verona, Biblioteca capitolare. 3 S. Maffei, “Frammento insigne di storia ecclesiastica del quarto secolo,” in Opuscoli Ecclesiastici, appendix to Istoria Teologica delle dottrine e delle opinioni Corse ne’ cinque primi secoli della Chiesa in proposito della divina Grazia, del libero arbitrio, e della Predestinazione (Trento: Giambattista Parone Stampatore Episcopale, 1742), 254–272, reprint of the contribution already published in Osservazioni letterarie 3 (Verona 1738). 4 Ph. Blaudeau, “What is Geo–Ecclesiology: Defining Elements Applied to Late Antiquity (Fourth–Sixth Centuries),” in Late Antiquity in Contemporary Debate, ed. R. Lizzi Testa (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), 156–173.

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175

The Historical Significance of the Aksumite Collection

The following is a list of the main contents of Σ according to the reconstructed, presumably original order offered by Alessandro Bausi: (1) The Ecclesiastical canons (ff. 1r–5r); (2) The History of the Episcopate of Alexandria (ff. 5r–13v), including: – Letter of the four martyrs to Melitius; – Letter of Peter to the community of Alexandria; – Short intermediate narrative (3) Cyprian of Carthage, Epistle 70, preceded by a premise (ff. 13v–16v); (4) The Apostolic Tradition (ff. 16v–29v); (5) The parallel section to Apostolic Constitutions VIII (ff. 29v–35r); (6) The treatise On the charisms (ff. 35r–38v); (7) A list of Apostles and disciples (ff. 39r–40v); (8) The names of the months (f. 40v); (9) The Baptismal ritual (ff. 41r–46r); (10) Prayers (ff. 46r–62v); (11) The 81 Apostolic canons (ff. 63r–69v); (12) The synod and the names of the fathers of Nicaea (ff. 69v–73v); (13) The canons of the Council of Nicaea (ff. 73v–78v); (14) The epistle of Constantine to the Alexandrians (ff. 78v–79v); (15) The epistle of Constantine on Arius (ff. 79v–80r); (16) Athanasius, epistle to Epictetus (ff. 80ra–88ra); (17) The treatise on the unity of God (ff. 88r–100r); (18) The synod and the names of the fathers of Serdica (ff. 100r–102v); (19) The canons of the synod of Serdica (ff. 102v–109v); (20) The canons of the synod of Neocaesarea (ff. 109v–111r); (21) The canons of the synod of Ancyra (ff. 111r–114v); (22) The canons of the synod of Neocaesarea, mutilous (f. 114v); (23) The synod of Gangra, acephalous (ff. 115r–116r); (24) The canons of the synod of Gangra (ff. 116r–118r); (25) The synod of Antioch (f. 118r–v); (26) The canons of the synod of Antioch (ff. 118v–124r); (27) The synod and canons of Laodicea (ff. 124r–128v); (28) The canons of the council of Chalcedon (ff. 128v–133v); (29) The canons of the synod of Constantinople (ff. 133v–134v); (30) The council of Ephesus (ff. 134v–135v); (31–35) Sylloge of Timotheus Aelurus (ff. 135v–160v): (31) The epistle to the Alexandrians (ff. 135v–145v); (32) The epistle to the Constantinopolitans (ff. 145v–150v);

176

Camplani

(33) The twelve chapters of Cyril of Alexandria (ff. 150v–152r); (34) The refutation of the council of Chalcedon (ff. 152r–157v); (35) The treatises of Gregory of Nazianzus; (36) The canonical answers of Peter of Alexandria (actually of Timothy I) (ff. 160v–162v). As the above makes clear, in Σ, besides the occurrence of a form of the Collectio antiochena, a noteworthy position is occupied by apostolic and synodical canons and liturgical texts, which explains inter alia the presence of an unknown version of the Traditio apostolica (no 4), first edited by Alessandro Bausi.5 A section in Σ (nos 31–35) is connected to Timothy Aelurus (d. 477), both as author of letters and collector of patristic florilegia.6 Of crucial importance for this investigation is the presence of Epistle 70 of Cyprian of Carthage (no 3). This and other Cyprianic letters are also preserved in other anti-Chalcedonian traditions, for instance in Syriac collections, as we will see below.7 In order to understand the function of Cyprian’s letter and its premise in this canonical collection, we have to examine its literary context. Thus, it is to this context that we now turn. HEpA’s initial section is structured into two subunits. In the first, there is an account of the institution of the patriarchate and the rules concerning the election of the Alexandrian bishops, whose succession is recorded. In the second subunit, a list of the Alexandrian patriarchs is offered to Peter, enriched in some cases with historical information about their activity, the appointment of bishops in Egypt, and the building of churches and cemeteries. Below is Bausi’s translation (§§1–3): 5 A. Bausi, “La ‘nuova’ versione etiopica della Traditio apostolica: edizione e traduzione preliminare,” in Christianity in Egypt: Literary Production and Intellectual Trends. Studies in Honor of Tito Orlandi, ed. P. Buzi and A. Camplani, Studia Ephemeridis Augustinianum, 125 (Roma: Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum, 2011), 19–69. Other texts are more traditional in manuscripts of canon law, such as Athanasius’ Epistle to Epictetus, the Ecclesiastical canons, the Apostolic canons. Noteworthy is the occurrence of the names of the bishops of the Council of Serdica, of the canons of the same council and those of the Council of Chalcedon (of course, without the mention of the Christological definition, which is criticized in Timothy’s works preserved in the final section of the codex). 6 On the historical importance of this bishop, see Ph. Blaudeau, Alexandrie et Constantinople (451–491). De l’histoire à la géo-ecclésiologie, Bibliothèque des Écoles Françaises d’Athène et de Rome 327 (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2006), 150–176, 272–274. 7 See W. Selb, Orientalisches Kirchenrecht. Band II. Die Geschichte des Kirchenrechts der Westsyrer (von den Anfängen bis zur Mongolenzeit), Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-historische Klasse. Sitzungsberichte 543 (Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1989), nos. 27, 30 in Synopsis II, 106–109 (noteworthy the presence of African materials n. 25); Synopsis III, nos. 4, 7, 120.

Severus of Antioch on Ancient Church Customs

177

Māriqos Evangelist entered ʾAlǝksǝndǝ⟨r⟩yā on the seventh year of Neronǝs; he appointed 12 presbyters and seven deacons, and he gave them the following rule: After the bishop of ʾƎlaksǝndǝryā has died, the presbyters will gather and they will lay their hands in the faith of God upon the one, among them, that they all will have selected, and thus they will appoint him as their bishop, at the presence of the corpse of the dead bishop. This doctrine has remained for the bishops whom they elect among the presbyters, from ʾAniyānos until the blessed Ṗeṭros, who is the sixteenth bishop of ʾƎlaksǝndǝryā. This happened, not because there was any preference for the juridical principle that the presbyters should ⟨appoint⟩ – this had not been granted – yet because, on the contrary, a bishop had not yet been appointed for every region. The final sentence, which has a clear apologetic intent, is meant to answer the objection over the legitimacy of the bishop’s ordination by presbyters who are hierarchically inferior to him. This objection is obviously anachronistic if it refers to the period in which it is assumed that these patriarchs were in office. It acquires meaning, however, if it linked to the period of the redaction of the HEpA, the end of the fourth century/beginning of the fifth, when the bishop’s consecration is perceived as a religious act that may be performed only by colleagues in ministry.8 The reform of this system is then noted in the text (§5): After the blessed Ṗeṭros, it was established that the appointment of those to be appointed would be done by the bishops. Thus, the reader of the HEpA learns early on about the peculiarities of the patriarch’s election and consecration, a unique custom in the Mediterranean world, and the reasons behind it. Notably, not only is the custom described but also its reform after Peter of Alexandria (by his successors Achillas or Alexander?). It appears that even historically entrenched customs and rules change to adapt to new ecclesiastical situations. We will return to this topic when dealing with Severus of Antioch’s attitude towards this ancient custom.9 8 On the articulated and complex process, see P.F. Bradshaw, Rites of Ordination. Their History and Theology (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 2014), 39–63. 9 A. Camplani, “Un’antica teoria della successione patriarcale in Alessandria,” in Aegyptiaca et Coptica. Studi in onore di Sergio Pernigotti, ed. P. Buzi, D. Picchi and M. Zecchi (Oxford: Archeopress, 2011), 138–156, and A. Camplani, “Tempo delle origini e tempo della storia nella percezione dell’episcopato di Alessandria durante la tarda antichità,” in Time and History in Africa / Tempo e storia in Africa, ed. A. Bausi, A. Camplani, and S. Emmel, Africana Ambrosiana 4 (Milano: Biblioteca Ambrosiana, 2019), 3–32.

178

Camplani

Another episode in which there is a clear connection with canonical legislation is that of Bishop Peter’s excommunications of the Melitians and Arius’ expulsion from the clergy (§§63–64, text of Σ): [Peter] due to the iniquities, one upon the other, of the Melitians, excommunicated them so that they were foreign to the Church and to its rites. Having Aryos heard this, that the Melitians were excommunicated, and their baptism, he was enraged. This passage is also found in Sozomenus, Historia ecclesiastica 1,15, who knows the HEpA, when he outlines Arius’ career: ἦρξε δὲ τούτων τῶν λόγων Ἄρειος πρεσβύτερος τῆς κατ’ Αἴγυπτον Ἀλεξανδρείας. ὃς ἐξ ἀρχῆς σπουδαῖος εἶναι περὶ τὸ δόγμα δόξας νεωτερίζοντι Μελιτίῳ συνέπραττε· καταλιπὼν δὲ τοῦτον ἐχειροτονήθη διάκονος παρὰ Πέτρου τοῦ Ἀλεξανδρέων ἐπισκόπου· καὶ πάλιν αὖ παρ’ αὐτοῦ τῆς ἐκκλησίας ἐξεβλήθη, καθότι Πέτρου τοὺς Μελιτίου σπουδαστὰς ἀποκηρύξαντος καὶ τὸ αὐτῶν βάπτισμα μὴ προσιεμένου τοῖς γινομένοις ἐπέσκηπτε καὶ ἠρεμεῖν οὐκ ἠνείχετο. Arius, a presbyter of the church at Alexandria in Egypt, initiated these disputations. He was at first zealous about doctrine and upheld the innovations of Melitius. Eventually, however, he abandoned him and was ordained deacon by Peter, bishop of Alexandria, but was then expelled by him from the church, because, when Peter anathematized the zealots of Melitius and rejected their baptism, Arius assailed him for these acts and could not be restrained in disputing him.10 Severus of Antioch, in a work against the Julianist Felicissimus, asserts that according to Timothy Aelurus in his Liber historiarum, Arius was expelled from the Church not for heresy, but, exactly as the HEpA and Sozomenus say, “because he was angry for the reason that the holy Peter had excommunicated the Melitians from the churches for the great multitude of their misdeeds and Peter had not accepted their baptism.”11 From this sentence we can argue that 10 J. Bidez and G.C. Hansen, ed., Sozomenus Kirchengeschichte, GCS Neue Folge 4 (2nd ed.; Berlin: De Gruyter, 1995), 32–33. 11 The text is edited by A. Camplani, “A Syriac fragment from the Liber historiarum by Timothy Aelurus (CPG 5486), the Coptic Church History, and the archives of the bishopric of Alexandria,” in Christianity in Egypt: Literary Production and Intellectual Trends. Studies in Honor of Tito Orlandi, ed. P. Buzi and A. Camplani, Studia Ephemeridis

Severus of Antioch on Ancient Church Customs

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Timothy, in his lost historical work, was strictly dependent on the HEpA. In sum, there was a tradition, accepted by the HEpA and by those who quoted it (Sozomenus, Timothy Aelurus), according to which Peter applied to every kind of dissenter – schismatic and heretic – the use of rebaptism, as Cyprian of Carthage had done fifty years before. This differed from the more moderate attitude of his predecessor Dionysius and from the decisions taken at the Council of Nicaea, explicitly mentioned in the HEpA (the document is preserved in V), in which there is no trace of rebaptism of Melitian believers or “technical” reordination12 of the clergy chosen by Melitius.

Cyprian’s Epistle 70

It is well-known that African material is lacking in the first Greek and Latin canonical collections. At a certain point, before the end of the seventh century, the famous third-century quarrel between Carthage and Rome about the rebaptism of heretics, in which Cyprian of Carthage and his bishops were involved in favor of a rigorous position, enters lost Greek canonical collections, as attested by some Syriac collections (which however are not the oldest ones). We will deal here with this material because (a) it occurs in Σ and we should try to explain why and when; (b) it appears quite late in the Greek canonical collections as we know them today; (c) it becomes known in Oriental languages through Greek translation(s); and (d) it is presented as an example of church customs of a venerable past, which had been issued by a bishop martyr in certain dioceses and had a limited validity in space and time. The existence of a Greek version of Cyprian’s Epistle 70 and related materials is attested by two witnesses, as has been discussed by Alessandro Bausi and Paolo Bernardini. The latter has devoted to the Sententiae LXXXVII episcoporum a book that deals with the reception history of the text.13 The first witness Augustinianum 125 (Roma: Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum, 2011), 205–226. This narrative and the documents it quotes are essential for understanding the origins of the Melitian schism, see A. Martin, Athanase d’Alexandrie et l’Église d’Égypte au IVe siècle (328–373), Collection de l’École Française de Rome 216 (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1996), 261–298; A. Camplani, “Melitianer,” in Reallexicon für Antike und Christentum 35 (Stuttgart: Anton Hiermann, 2012), 629–639; H. Hauben, Studies on the Melitian Schism in Egypt (AD 306–335), ed. P. Van Nuffelen, Variorum Collected Studies Series, CS 1001 (Farnham [UK] – Burlington [VT]: Ashgate, 2012). 12 Cheirotonia mystikotera could mean a simple act of reconciliation, not involving a kind of consecration. See A. Martin, Athanase d’Alexandrie, 257–258. 13 P. Bernardini, Un solo battesimo, una sola Chiesa (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2009), 392–431. For the Ethiopic contribution to this question, see A. Bausi, “L’Epistola 70 di Cipriano di

180

Camplani

is Canon 2 of the Trullan Synod of 692, which makes reference to the “canon” established by Cyprian and his synod, meaning both Cyprian’s Epistle 70 and the Sententiae episcoporum: ἔτι μὴν καὶ τὸν ὑπὸ Κυνπριανοῦ, τοῦ γενομένου ἀρχιεπισκόπου τῆς Ἄφρων χώρας καὶ μάρτυρος, καὶ τῆς κατ’ αὐτὸν συνόδου ἐκτεθέντα κανόνα, ὃς ἐν τοῖς τῶν προειρημένων προέδρων τόποις καὶ μόνον, κατὰ τὸ παραδοθὲν αὐτοῖς ἔθος ἐκράτησε also the canon originated with Cyprian, bishop of the African region and martyr, and by the synod under him, which had validity only in the places of the above-mentioned bishops according to the custom given to them.14 Two elements are prominent in this declaration: the sanctity of Cyprian, the great bishop and martyr, and the limited spatial and chronological validity of the norm under discussion. The second witness is a Syriac collection attested by the famous Paris syr. 62 (Sangermanensis 38), as well as by other Syriac codices,15 where Epistle 70 is followed by Epistles 64 and 71 (so the Cyprianic material is richer than in the later Greek canonical collections), and by a note that says, “all what was translated then from the Latin to the Greek is rendered now, in the year 998 of the Greeks, from Greek into Syriac.”16 Hence, the translation from Greek into Syriac was made in 687/688, perhaps by Jacob of Edessa or one of his collaborators. We are uncertain about the date of the first translation from Latin into Greek. Von Soden has illustrated that the quality of the Greek text from which the Syriac translation was made was higher than the Greek translation of Epistle 70 preserved in the canonical manuscripts at our disposal.17 It could be interesting to seek traces of this little collection of Cyprianic material in Greek authors. Severus of Antioch merits our attention from this point of view.

14 15 16 17

Cartagine in versione etiopica,” Aethiopica 1 (1998): 101–130, and A. Bausi, “Note aggiuntive sull’Epistola 70 di Cipriano,” in Scritti in onore di Giovanni M. D’Erme, ed. M. Bernardini and N.L. Tornesello (Napoli: Università degli Studi di Napoli L’Orientale, 2005), 99–109. P.P. Joannou, ed., Discipline générale antique, vol. I.1 (Grottaferrata: Tipografia ItaloOrientale “San Nilo,” 1962), 214. For other codices, see Selb, Orientalisches Kirchenrecht, 108–109 (under nos 24–25): Mardin 309, 310, 320. A.P. de Lagarde, Reliquiae iuris ecclesiastici antiquissimae syriace (Lipsiae: Teubner, 1856), 98 [Syr.]. H.F. von Soden, Sententiae LXXXVII episcoporum. Das Protokoll der Synode von Karthago am 1. September 256, textkritisch hergestellt und überlieferungsgeschichtlich untersucht. II. Untersuchung, Nachrichten von der Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, Philologisch-historische Klasse (Göttingen, 1909), 296.

Severus of Antioch on Ancient Church Customs

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In addition, in several Greek manuscripts,18 as well as in the Syriac version and in Ethiopic text of Σ19 (but not in the other witnesses of the Ethiopic version),20 the Cyprianic material is preceded by a premise that was probably written by a Greek compiler. Since the edition of this Ethiopic premise is still in preparation, we will limit this investigation to the text of some Greek manuscripts, according to Joannou’s edition,21 and the Syriac version preserved in Paris Syr. 62, edited by A.P. de Lagarde:22

̇ ‫ܚܫܒܬܗ‬ ‫ܐܠܨܝܬܐ‬ ̇ ‫ܐܘ‬ ‫ܪܚܡ ܐܠܗܐ܆‬ ̇ ‫ ܕܠܘ ܠܗܝ‬.‫ܕܐܘܕܥܟ‬ ‫ܒܠܚܘܕ ܛܘܒܬܢܐ‬ ‫ ܐܟܪܙ‬:‫ܩܘܦܪܝܐܢܘܣ‬ ‫ܘܐܣܠܝ ܠܐ̈ܪܛܝܩܘ‬ ̈ ̇ ‫ܘܐܚܪܡ ܐܦ‬ ‫ܘܠܣܕܝܩܐ‬ ̇ ‫ܠܡܥܡܘܕܝܬܐ ܗܝ‬ ‫ܕܝܠܗܘܢ܆‬ ἀλλά γε καὶ ἐξ ἀρχαίων ‫ܐܠܐ ܐܦ ܡܢ‬ ̈ ̈ ἱκανοί, τέλειοι καὶ ἔμφρο- ‫ܐܦܝܣܩܘܦܐ‬ ‫ܥܬܝܩܐ܆‬ ̈ ̈ νες ἐπίσκοποι περὶ τοῦτον ‫ܣܓܝܐܐ ܡܫܡܠܝܐ‬ ̈ συνελθόντες καὶ κοινῇ ‫ ܟܕ ܡܛܠ‬:‫ܘܝܕܝܥܐ‬ ̇ σκεψάμενοι, ὥρισαν τοὺς ‫ܗܕܐ ܐܬܟܢܫܘ‬ ̇ σχισματικοὺς ἐρχομένους ‫ܐܬܚܫܒܘ‬ ‫ܘܓܘܢܐܝܬ‬ ̇ εἰς τὴν ἐκκλησίαν ἀναβα‫ ܕܐ̈ܪܛܝܩܘ‬:‫ܡܘ‬ ̇ ‫ܬܚ‬ ̈ πτίζεσθαι, ἀκυροῦντες καὶ ‫ܟܕ ܐܬܝܢ ܘܣܕܝܩܐ‬ ἀναθεματίζοντες τὸ παρὰ ‫ܢܥܡܕܘܢ‬ ‫ܠܥܝܕܬܐ܆‬ ̣ τῶν αἱρετικῶν ἤτοι σχισμα‫ ܟܕ‬.‫ܡܢܕܪܝܫ‬ ̈ τικῶν διδόμενον βάπτισμα. ‫ܡܒܛܠܝܢ ܘܡܚܪܡܝܢ‬ ‫ܠܡܥܡܘܕܝܬܐ ̇ܗܝ‬ ‫ܕܡܬܝܗܒܐ ܡܢ‬ ‫ܐ̈ܪܛܝܩܘ ܐܘ ܟܝܬ‬ ̈ .‫ܣܕܝܩܐ‬ Ἀναγκαῖον δὲ ἡγοῦμαι, ὦ Θεόφιλε, δηλῶσαι σοι, οὐ μόνον ὡς ὁ μακάριος ἀπεκήρυξε τοὺς σχισματικοὺς καὶ τὸ βάπτισμα αὐτῶν ἀναθεμάτισεν,

18

I deem it necessary, o Theophilus (or “God-loving one”) to inform you that not only did the blessed (Cyprian) proscribe and cast away heretics and schismatics and anathematize their baptism, but, from ancient (times), many bishops, perfect and learned, when being assembled for that reason and meditating collegially (on the issue), determined that heretics and schismatics, when entering the Church, should be baptized again, declaring null and anathematizing the baptism conferred by heretics and schismatics.

For example, Vaticanus 827 (13th cent.), Vallicellianus F 10 (10th cent.), Oxoniensis Laud. 39 (9th cent.). See P.P. Joannou, ed., Discipline générale antique (IVe–IXe s.), vol. 2: Les canons des Pères Grecs (Grottaferrata: Tipografia Italo-Orientale “San Nilo”, 1963), 303–304. 19 Personal communication by A. Bausi. On the textual relationship between Ethiopic and Syriac translations, see Bausi, “Note aggiuntive sull’Epistola 70 di Cipriano,” 99–109. 20 Bausi, “L’Epistola 70 di Cipriano di Cartagine in versione etiopica,” 105–106, 112–118. 21 Joannou, ed., Discipline générale antique (IVe–IXe s.), 303–304. 22 Lagarde, ed., Reliquiae iuris ecclesiastici antiquissimae syriace, 62 [Syr.].

182 Καὶ περὶ τούτου σύνο‫ܘܡܛܠܗܕܐ ܣܘܢܘܕܘܣ‬ δον συνεκάλεσαν εἰς τὴν ‫ܩܪܘ ܠܡܬܟܢܫܘ‬ Καρχηδόνα ἐπισκόπων τὸν ‫ܒܟܪܩܝܕܘܢܐ܆‬ ̈ ἀριθμὸν πδ´, μεθ᾿ ὧν καὶ ‫ܕܐܦܝܣܩܘܦܐ‬ Κυπριανὸς ὁ ἀρχαῖος καὶ ‫ܒܡܢܝܢܐ ܬܡܢܐܝܢ‬ διάσημος ἐπίσκοποπος. ‫ ܕܥܡܗܘܢ‬.‫ܘܫܒܥܐ‬

‫ܐܦ ܩܘܦܪܝܐܢܘܣ‬ ‫ܐܦܝܣܩܦܐ ܥܬܝܩܐ‬ ‫ܘܡܫܡܗܐ ܐܝܬܘܗܝ‬ .‫ܗܘܐ‬ Καὶ τὰς ἀποφάσεις ἑκάστου ‫ܐܦ ܝܨܦܬ ̣ܕܝܢ‬ δηλῶσαι ἐσπούδασα, οὐ ‫ܐܦܘܦܐܣܝܣ ܐܘ ܟܝܬ‬ μὴν ἀλλὰ καὶ τῶν ἐπισκό- ‫ܦܣܩܐ ܕܟܠܚܕ ܡܢܗܘܢ‬ πων ἐπιστολήν, γραφεῖσαν ‫ ܐܠܐ‬.‫ܐܫܘܕܥ ܠܟ‬ ̈ παρ᾿ αὐτῶν περὶ τοῦ βαπτί- ‫ܟܬܝܒܬܐ‬ ‫ܬܘܒ ܐܦ‬ ̈ σματος ἔτι καὶ τοῦ μεγάλου ‫ܕܐܦܝܣܩܘܦܐ‬ ̈ Κυπριανοῦ ἀποστεῖλαι σοι ‫ܕܐܬܟܬܒܝܢ ܡܛܠ‬ ἐσπούδασα. ‫ܡܥܡܘܕܝܬܐ‬ ‫ ܬܘܒ‬.‫ܕܐ̈ܪܛܝܩܘ‬ ‫ܕܝܢ ܐܦ ܕܪܒܐ‬ ‫ܘܩܦܪܝܐܢܘܣ܆ ܠܡܟܬܒ‬ .‫ܠܗ ܐܬܚܦܛܬ‬

Camplani

For that reason, they convened a synod, to be assembled in Charkedon, of bishops who in number were eighty-four/seven, with whom there was also Cyprian the ancient and famous bishop. I took care to make known to you the “apophasis” or sentence, but also the writings that the bishops have written about the baptism of the heretics, and again (the one) of the great Cyprian I diligently wrote to you.

It is not easy to decipher the author’s position regarding the African decisions. My impression is that he wished to express his admiration towards Cyprian and the ancient bishops, but at the same time suggest that those decisions were part of the past, however glorious it may have been, and not suitable for the current situation of the church. It is noteworthy that the terminology of this premise, ὁ μακάριος ἀπεκήρυξε τοὺς σχισματικοὺς καὶ τὸ βάπτισμα αὐτῶν ἀναθεμάτισεν, recalls the fragment of the HEpA §64 that I discussed above. This fragment was quoted by Sozomenos, Historia ecclesiastica, I 15,2: καθότι Πέτρου τοὺς Μελιτίου σπουδαστὰς ἀποκηρύξαντος καὶ τὸ αὐτῶν βάπτισμα μὴ προσιεμένου, and by both Severus and Timothy Aelurus. HEpA’s mention of the excommunication of the schismatics and the denial of the validity of their baptism by the bishop and martyr Peter of Alexandria – which implicitly implied the necessity of rebaptism for those Melitians who wished to come back to the Catholic Church  – must be counterposed against the contrary, well-known decisions of the Council of Nicaea, which included no trace of rebaptism for the Melitians. In particular, in the Letter of the Council to the Alexandrian Church, probably part of the HEpA, there is a kind of mystikotera cheirotonia

Severus of Antioch on Ancient Church Customs

183

for bishops (probably an act of reconciliation and not of re-ordination), but nothing for priests and simple believers. Put differently, the HEpA mentioned Peter’s decisions, but also illustrated the possibility of a different attitude in more recent times (from the Council of Nicaea onwards). As we have already seen, the changing of customs – about a different matter – was explicitly mentioned in the first chapter of the HEpA.

Severus of Antioch and Cyprian

In a detailed and important contribution on Severus’s relation to canon law, H. Kaufhold has demonstrated Severus’ dependence on canonical collections that resemble, but are not identical to, the Greek ones, in the sense that his writings exhibit some peculiarities which are found only in Syriac collections that reflected an older, lost Greek corpus.23 For example, in the Syriac collections, three letters of Cyprian are quoted instead of the two quoted in Greek canonical manuscripts, exactly as indicated by Severus (Juvian, Quintus and Magnus). It means that despite the late date of the Syriac manuscripts (eighth–ninth century), they reflect an older situation, which is no more attested by the Greek collections. It is therefore possible to suppose that, already at the time of Severus’ episcopacy (512–518), there were lost Greek collections which contained Cyprian’s materials. Kaufhold describes these: He had a canonical collection at hand for which there is no Greek example extant. It contained continuously numbered canons of the imperial councils (Nicaea to Laodicea and perhaps beyond, that is the Corpus canonum), Canons of the Apostles, the Synod of Carthage (A.D. 256), the responsa of Timothy of Alexandria, the testament of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and perhaps the letters of Ignatius. The Syrian collections are based on this material.24 Some passages by Severus will allow me to formulate a complex motivation for the occurrence of the “canon” of Carthage (Cyprian’s letters and the Synod 23 H. Kaufhold, “Welche Kirchenrechtsquellen kannte Patriarch Severos von Antiochia (512–518)?” in Ius canonicum in Oriente et Occidente. Festschrift für Carl Gerold Fürst, ed. H. Zapp, A. Weiß and S. Korta, Adnotationes in Ius Canonicum 25 (Frankfurt: International Academic Publishers, 2003), 259–274, in particular 270–274. 24 H. Kaufhold, “Sources of Canon Law in the Eastern Churches,” in The History of Byzantine and Eastern Canon Law to 1500, ed. W. Hartmann and K. Pennington (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 215–342, in particular 224.

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of 256) in the later canonical collections. On one hand, there was the need to mention the Cyprianic canon as a sign of appreciation for rules which were produced by a large group of bishops, led by a bishop martyr, with the intention to build a church on firm grounds, a canon already quoted by the rigorist members of the anti-Chalcedonian party. On the other, this canon had a validity limited in space and time and could thus be reformed, adopting a different attitude and limiting rebaptism only to those heretics very far from main-stream Christianity. The manuscript tradition of the Syriac translation of Severus’ letters titled one of the epistles in the following way (V, 6): “Of the same against those who say that men who have communicated with the Synod of Chalcedon, and are penitent and anathematize those who call our one Lord and God Jesus Christ two natures after the ineffable union and come over to the orthodox faith must be re-anointed. (From those during episcopacy, from the ninth book, first letter).”25 Severus is aware that a connection can be established between the position of those of his contemporaries, members of his party, who had a very rigorous attitude towards the Chalcedonians, asking to be accepted in Severus’ church, and the decisions taken by Cyprian of Carthage and his bishops in the middle of the third century (as well as Peter of Alexandria at the beginning of the fourth century): Now, when Cyprian held a prominent position at Carthage in Africa, and God-loving bishops assembled there, who were in number eighty-seven, some from the same Africa itself, some from Mauretania and Numidia, they determined that those who come from all heresies should be perfected by the true baptism of the church, as if they had not been baptized at all, not distinguishing the character of each of the heresies, but bringing all under one pronouncement. It was from God-loving zeal that these adopted this resolution: as is clearly shown by the words which the holy Cyprian who has been mentioned wrote in epistles to Juvian and Quintus and Magnus, where he also includes a reference to those who are baptized on their beds during sickness.26

25 Epistle V, 6, in The Sixth Book of the Select Letters of Severus, ed. and trans., E.W. Brooks (Oxford: Text and Translation Society, 1903–1904), vol. 1 (Text), Part II, 330–359 (330), vol. 2 (Translation), Part II: 294–317 (294). See also the variants to the text of this title at 330. 26 Epistle V, 6, 332–333 [Syr.], 296–297 [trans.].

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Severus’ assessment of Cyprian’s decisions is unequivocal: excess zeal prevented the holy bishops from distinguishing the different kinds of heresy. The position of both Dionysius of Alexandria and the bishops of the Council of Nicaea appears to be more flexible: And soon afterwards Dionysius to whom it fell at that time to feed the church of the city of the Alexandrines, writing to Dionysius his namesake and Stephen, who presided over the holy church of the city of the Romans, made a distinction, saying that those who had been baptized in the name of the three substances, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, even though it were by heretics that they were baptized, but still such as confess the three substances, should not be re-baptized: but converts from the other heresies should certainly be perfected by the baptism of the church. This opinion the three hundred and eighteen fathers who assembled at Nicaea also followed, and those who fed the churches after them. Those who assembled in Africa in the days of Cyprian, looking at the common name of the heresies only, applied a single method of cure. But the contemporaries of the great Dionysius and those who came after him distinguished the varieties of diseases, and so applied to each of them the cure suited for it (…). The nineteenth canon of the three hundred and eighteen fathers requires those who come from Paul of Samosata to be re-baptized: but in the case of converts from Photinus and Novatus to the orthodox church the hundred and tenth canon, which was enacted by the synod that assembled at Laodicea in Phrygia, decided that they should be perfected by chrism: although much the same folly gives birth to the miserable heresy of Paul of Samosata and of Photinus, and they do not differ from one another except to a slight extent.27 Severus insists that decisions about rebaptism are to be contextualized in the history of each heresy and schism. The same Cyprian, though insisting that converts from all heresies should be perfected by baptism, in his letter to Quintus enjoins a more moderate attitude for the sake of the union of the church. During the Council of Ephesus and after it, those believers and clerics who had adhered to Nestorius and wanted to anathematize his doctrine were not obliged to a new baptism or a new chrism. In the case of ordinations, too, according to Severus, the rules needed to be adapted to the typology of heresy. At this point in his discussion, Severus mentions the apparently contradictory decisions of Timothy Aelurus (d. 477): 27 Epistle V, 6, 333–334 [Syr.], 296–297 [trans.].

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For neither has Timothy of holy memory, who fed the church of the Alexandrines in apostolic fashion, been shown to have been inconsistent with himself, as you vainly suppose. When the people under the influence of ardent enthusiasm were unwilling even to look at those who had received ordination from Proterius, he, wishing to soften their sternness and to follow a course opposed to them, spoke to them in such words as these, “Regard them just as if they had received ordination from me”; or, as you say, “I have determined to give them ordination” (for we will allow it to be thus): and, after seeing that by the application of this remedy the sternness of the zeal was softened, he did not in the matter of the reception of those who derived ordination from Proterius transgress against the moderation of the canons, nor was he carried away by the violence of zeal; but he restrained enthusiasm by the cords of politic action; and he induced them to acquiesce in the established canons. And, when he accepted the repentance of the converts, he did not give them ordination at all, a thing contrary to the intention of the canons; nor did he recur to the strictness of the men of early days and their stem method. As to the principle that these things are rather matters of politic administration, and not inconsistent, the divine Paul also signifies it to be so in that he circumcised Timothy by reason of the policy which he adopted towards certain persons, as the Book of the Acts clearly states, saying: “And he took and circumcised him, because of the Jews who were there in the country. For all these knew that his father was a Gentile” (Act. 16,3).28 Severus discusses this topic in other letters as well: Therefore, as, when Cyprian in Africa with the synod under him said that all who had been baptized by heresy ought to receive the laver of regeneration, as if they had never originally been baptized at all, but at last the opinion of Sixtus of Rome, and of Dionysius of Alexandria and of the others prevailed, so that those who had been baptized by heretics in the name of the three substances, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, were not re-baptized, no one of sound intelligence said that those saintly bishops contradicted themselves, but that upon later consideration they chose a better and more canonical course, so also the holy Timothy too at first, owing to the blasphemy and the impenitent heart of the Proterians as it was at the beginning, and the zeal of the orthodox people of the city of the Alexandrines, said that he would not accept those who had 28 Epistle V, 13, 304–305 [Syr.], 344–345 [trans.].

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been ordained by the opposite party: but at last, when they canonically repented and he lawfully accepted them, he did not show himself self-contradictory, but rather very consistent, since he said those things on account of the zeal of the believers, but allowed the canons to prevail, and accepted those who repented in accordance with the final conclusions of the fathers, and further by signing the Encyclical united himself to all the bishops in the world.29 For in ecclesiastical regulations enactments carefully made at a later time in the churches allow no play to those of ancient date. For example, Cyprian the divine among bishops, who adorned the chief throne of Africa with all excellencies, but above all with a crown of martyrdom, once assembled a synod of the saintly bishops under him and ruled that converts from heresy must not be accepted, unless they have received the baptism given by the orthodox. And in modern times, now that the highpriests who fed the churches in the West and in the East, as well as the great and holy synod of the three hundred and eighteen, have discussed the quality of heresies, and enacted that we ought not in the case of all of them to accept penitents through baptism, no one presumes contrary to this conclusion to apply baptism to those who come from all heresies, as seemed right at an earlier time to Cyprian: but, if anyone contrary to the law which has prevailed shall presume to re-baptize, he will fall within the grasp of the canons as having performed unlawful actions.30 Paolo Bernardini has shown that in other letters as well, Severus discusses Cyprian’s position and mentions the Council of Carthage of 256.31 It is interesting to note that extracts from Severus’ letters, and in particular the above-mentioned V, 6, are also preserved in the Synodicon occidentale, edited by A. Vööbus, following the Cyprianic material.32 This co-occurrence indicates that ancient canonists were brought to read Cyprian’s documentation through the lens offered by Severus. 29 Epistle V, 1, 314 [Syr.], 279–280 [trans.]. 30 Epistle II, 3, 237–238 [Syr.], 212–213 [trans.], written during the exile, after 518. 31 Y. Moss, Incorruptible Bodies: Christology, Society, and Authority in Late Antiquity (Oakland: California University Press, 2016), 70, expressed in clear words Severus’ position: “Canon law is historically determined. Different laws pertain to different movements at different times and in different places (…) Changing times required different measures for combating different heresies. In some places Severus explicitly admits that canon law is an evolving historical product.” 32 A. Vööbus, ed., The Synodicon in the West Syrian Tradition I, CSCO 367, Scr. Syri 161 (Louvan: Secréteriat du CSCO, 1975), 185–187 (Syriac), 175–177 (trans.).

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Yonatan Moss has convincingly contextualized this letter in the debate that developed within the anti-Chalcedonian community concerning the issue of how to deal with Chalcedonians who desired to enter the church. According to Severus, some required rebaptism and, for the clergy, reordination, some only chrism. We know that this extreme position was rejected by important leaders of the anti-Chalcedonian party: Timothy Aelurus required only the anathema of the Council and the Tomus of Leo, and in addition, for the clergy, a period of penance. Severus was clearly on his side.33 The question arises as to whether Timothy inspired Severus’ position. While it is not possible to provide a decisive answer, the closeness of the two leaders’ positions is worth stressing. In letter II, 3, Severus mentions the method of election of ancient patriarchs of Alexandria described at the beginning of the HEpA: The bishop also of the city of the Alexandrines renowned for its orthodox faith was in old times appointed by presbyters. But in modern times, in accordance with the canon which has prevailed everywhere, the solemn institution of their bishop is performed by bishops: and no one makes light of the accurate practice that prevails in the holy churches and recurs to the earlier condition of things, which has given way to the later clear and accurate, deliberate and spiritual injunctions.34 In this case as well an ancient custom is quoted, but its obsolete character is shown by the fact that a reform imposed the election and consecration of Alexandria’s bishop by other Egyptian bishops. This is exactly what we found in the HEpA: Peter’s reform superseded the strange original method of election and ordination of the bishop of Alexandria. What was Severus’ source? Jerome knew the custom, but I doubt that Severus depended on him.35 More likely, his 33

Moss proposed very interesting considerations on the link between Severus’ Christology and ecclesiology, in Incorruptible Bodies, 72: “For Theodotus, for his followers, and for the ecclesiastical tradition upon which they drew, the doctrinal and disciplinary purity of the body of Christ outweighed its unity. What sense was there to unity with corrupt members? Theodotus and others who demanded rebaptism or rechrismation thought that a corruptible body, by its very definition, could not be considered the body of Christ. Severus and the elements of the tradition upon which he relied challenged this assumption. Contrary to Theodotus, Severus thought the body of Christ could indeed allow the inclusion of less than pure members in its midst. Although performed by heretics, Chalcedonian baptisms and ordinations were valid, since the social body of Christ can in fact support a degree of corruptibility.” 34 Brooks, ed., The Sixth Book of the Select Letters of Severus, 1: 237–238 [Syr.], 213 [trans.]. 35 Camplani, “Un’antica teoria della successione patriarcale in Alessandria.”

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source was the Liber historiarum by Timothy, which in turn, as we have seen, quoted the HEpA. Some of Severus’ positions in canon law could have been anticipated by Timothy Aelurus or by other leaders, belonging either to the anti-Chalcedonian or the pro-Chalcedonian party, who were engaged in the debate about acceptance of members coming from the opposite party. It is possible that Cyprian, his letters, and his synod, were already used at the end of the fifth century.

Conclusions

Let us return to our main question: why was Cyprianic material quoted in an Ethiopic canonical collection of Alexandrian provenance (Σ), with a premise written to justify its redaction? It seems that this material was used in debates about the rebaptism of “heretics” which took place after the councils of Chalcedon. Severus’ position appears defensive in regard to the use of Cyprian’s letters by the rigorist anti-Chalcedonian sectors willing to impose rebaptism and reordination. His strategy was to accept citations of the rulings of Cyprian, but to underline that these rulings were tied to specific historical circumstances and should be modified when necessary.36 Bishop Timothy Aelurus, who occupies a position of prominence in the final section of the Ethiopic collection Σ, was also mentioned by Severus. In addition, we should recall that Timothy quotes that section of the HEpA in which Peter excommunicates the Melitians and anathematizes their baptism without expressing his view on the matter, although from other witnesses his hesitation about rebaptism is sufficiently clear. In other words, Timothy has the same attitude later adopted by Severus, suggesting that ancient bishops, especially martyrs, are to be quoted, but this does not mean that their rulings should be accepted. Cyprian’s letter was quoted with the peculiar premise justifying its composition for two reasons. First, in the period reflected in the Aksumite collection (fifth century, obviously after the Council of Chalcedon) the question of rebaptism and reordination was debated and Cyprian’s example and texts were probably used by both sides, and second, Cyprian’s strict attitude was similar to that of Peter of Alexandria, bishop and martyr, mentioned in the HEpA and quoted by Timothy. It is only from the whole of the HEpA that one can argue that its author(s), unlike Cyprian, maintained that canon law was to be adapted to the 36

We should not exclude that a dissension between rigorist and moderate leaders took place in each of the Christological parties, making use of the Cyprianic heritage.

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changing circumstances of history, and that the moderate attitude of Timothy (quoted at the end of the codex as the main dogmatic authority) and Severus (never mentioned in the codex), was the one to be followed. If this interpretation is correct, the Aksumite and other canonical collections such as those in Syriac are witnesses to ancient layers of canonical literature and textual complexes imbued with a historical perspective. It is for this reason that, in Σ, history and canons are so interconnected. Additionally, these collections constitute concrete textual examples of compendia that could have been available to Timothy Aelurus and Severus of Antioch. Bibliography Bausi, A. “L’Epistola 70 di Cipriano di Cartagine in versione etiopica,” Aethiopica 1 (1998): 101–130. Bausi, A. “Note aggiuntive sull’Epistola 70 di Cipriano,” in Scritti in onore di Giovanni M. D’Erme, ed. M. Bernardini and N.L. Tornesello (Napoli: Università degli Studi di Napoli L’Orientale, 2005), 99–109. Bausi, A. “La Collezione aksumita canonico-liturgica,” Adamantius 12 (2006): 43–70. Bausi, A. “La ‘nuova’ versione etiopica della Traditio apostolica: edizione e traduzione preliminare,” in Christianity in Egypt: Literary Production and Intellectual Trends. Studies in Honor of Tito Orlandi, ed. P. Buzi and A. Camplani, Studia Ephemeridis Augustinianum, 125 (Roma: Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum, 2011), 19–69. Bausi, A., A. Brita, M. Di Bella, D. Nosnitsin, I. Rabin and N. Sarris. “The Aksumite Collection or codex Σ (Sinodos of Qǝfrǝyā, MS C3-IV-71/C3-IV-73, Ethio-SPaRe UM-039): Codicological and palaeographical observations. With a note on material analysis of inks,” COMSt Bulletin 6/2 (2020): 127–171. Bausi, A. and A. Camplani. “New Ethiopic Documents for the History of Christian Egypt,” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 17 (2013): 215–247. Bausi, A. and A. Camplani. “The History of the Episcopate of Alexandria (HEpA): Editio minor of the fragments preserved in the Aksumite Collection and in the Codex Veronensis LX (58),” Adamantius 22 (2016): 249–302. Bernardini, P. Un solo battesimo, una sola Chiesa (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2009). Bidez, J. and G.C. Hansen, ed. Sozomenus Kirchengeschichte, GCS Neue Folge 4 (2nd ed.; Berlin: De Gruyter, 1995). Blaudeau, Ph. Alexandrie et Constantinople (451–491). De l’histoire à la géo-ecclésiologie, Bibliothèque des Écoles Françaises d’Athène et de Rome, 327 (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2006). Blaudeau, Ph. “What is Geo-Ecclesiology: Defining Elements Applied to Late Antiquity (Fourth–Sixth Centuries),” in Late Antiquity in Contemporary Debate, ed. R. Lizzi Testa (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), 156–173.

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Bradshaw, P.F. Rites of Ordination. Their History and Theology (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 2014). Brooks, E.W., ed. and trans. The Sixth Book of the Select Letters of Severus, 2 vols. (Oxford: Text and Translation Society, 1903–1904). Camplani, A. “A Syriac fragment from the Liber historiarum by Timothy Aelurus (CPG 5486), the Coptic Church History, and the archives of the bishopric of Alexandria,” in Christianity in Egypt: Literary Production and Intellectual Trends. Studies in Honor of Tito Orlandi, ed., P. Buzi and A. Camplani, Studia Ephemeridis Augustinianum 125 (Roma: Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum, 2011), 205–226. Camplani, A. “Un’antica teoria della successione patriarcale in Alessandria,” in Aegyptiaca et Coptica. Studi in onore di Sergio Pernigotti, ed. P. Buzi, D. Picchi and M. Zecchi (Oxford: Archeopress, 2011), 138–56. Camplani, A. “Melitianer,” in Reallexicon für Antike und Christentum 35 (Stuttgart: Anton Hiermann, 2012), 629–639. Camplani, A. “Tempo delle origini e tempo della storia nella percezione dell’episcopato di Alessandria durante la tarda antichità,” in Time and History in Africa / Tempo e storia in Africa, ed. A. Bausi, A. Camplani, and S. Emmel, Africana Ambrosiana 4 (Milano: Biblioteca Ambrosiana, 2019). Hauben, H. Studies on the Melitian Schism in Egypt (AD 306–335), ed. P. Van Nuffelen, Variorum Collected Studies Series, CS 1001 (Farnham [UK]  – Burlington [VT]: Ashgate, 2012). Joannou, P.P., ed. Fonti Discipline Generale Antique (IVe IXe S.), vol. 1.1: Les Canons Des Conciles Oecumeniques (Grottaferrata: Tipografia Italo-Orientale “San Nilo,” 1962). Joannou, P.P., ed, Discipline générale antique (IVe–IXe s.), vol. 2: Les canons des Pères Grecs (Grottaferrata: Tipografia Italo-Orientale “San Nilo”, 1963). Kaufhold, H. “Welche Kirchenrechtsquellen kannte Patriarch Severos von Antiochia (512–518)?,” in Ius canonicum in Oriente et Occidente. Festschrift für Carl Gerold Fürst, ed. H. Zapp, A. Weiß and S. Korta, Adnotationes in Ius Canonicum 25 (Frankfurt: International Academic Publishers, 2003). Kaufhold, H. “Sources of Canon Law in the Eastern Churches,” in The History of Byzantine and Eastern Canon Law to 1500, ed. W. Hartmann and K. Pennington (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 215–342. de Lagarde, A.P. Reliquiae iuris ecclesiastici antiquissimae syriace (Lipsiae: Teubner, 1856). Maffei, S. “Frammento insigne di storia ecclesiastica del quarto secolo,” in Opuscoli Ecclesiastici, appendix to Istoria Teologica delle dottrine e delle opinioni Corse ne’ cinque primi secoli della Chiesa in proposito della divina Grazia, del libero arbitrio, e della Predestinazione (Trento: Giambattista Parone Stampatore Episcopale, 1742), 254–272, reprint of the contribution already published in Osservazioni letterarie 3 (Verona, 1738).

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Martin, A. Athanase d’Alexandrie et l’Église d’Égypte au IVe siècle (328–373), Collection de l’École Française de Rome 216 (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1996). Moss, Y. Incorruptible Bodies: Christology, Society, and Authority in Late Antiquity (Oakland: California University Press, 2016). Selb, W. Orientalisches Kirchenrecht. Band II. Die Geschichte des Kirchenrechts der Westsyrer (von den Anfängen bis zur Mongolenzeit), Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-historische Klasse. Sitzungsberichte 543 (Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1989). von Soden, H.F. Sententiae LXXXVII episcoporum. Das Protokoll der Synode von Karthago am 1. September 256, textkritisch hergestellt und überlieferungsgeschichtlich untersucht. II. Untersuchung, Nachrichten von der Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, Philologisch-historische Klasse (Göttingen, 1909).

Theodicy in the Letter of Mara Bar Serapion: Connections with Philosophical (Stoic) Accounts of Divine Retribution Ilaria L.E. Ramelli In this article I will analyze the issue of theodicy, namely the philosophicotheological problem of the “justice of God,” in a Stoicizing document from the Syrian Hellenized world of Roman imperial times.1 This document, a letter, was of interest to Christians in Late Antiquity, for two reasons: (1) the manuscript that preserves it (seventh-century Cod. Syr. Add. 14568) also preserves texts that are relevant to the relation between Christianity and Greek philosophy and culture: the Liber legum regionum from the school of Bardaisan, Melito’s Apology in Syriac, and Ambrose’s Hypomnemata, the Syriac version of a brief Greek apology attributed to Justin Martyr; (2) this letter alludes to Jesus, the unnamed “wise king of the Jews,” together with Socrates and Pythagoras, as an example of a philosopher unjustly persecuted, but later vindicated by God in an action of theodicy.2 If the letter dates from the first or second centuries, as I deem possible, this would be one of the first representations of Christ – together with those of the Christian Justin and the “pagan” Lucian – as a philosopher: he is even included among the most important philosophers.3 This remarkable inclusion can be explained from the context of Mara’s letter, which presents Jesus’ unjust death, along with those of Socrates and Pythagoras, and the consequent disasters which embraced entire nations, as expressions of theodicy. In the case of Jesus, who is called “the king of the Jews,” his death is described as unjust and as followed soon after by the destruction of the temple and the loss of Jewish sovereignty. 1 I am profoundly honored to contribute a chapter to this volume in honor of Sebastian Brock, an outstanding and exemplary scholar and person. Many thanks to the editors, and to Sebastian Brock for his immense contribution to Syriac studies. 2 See I.L.E. Ramelli, “Gesù tra i sapienti greci perseguitati ingiustamente in un antico documento filosofico pagano di lingua siriaca,” Rivista di Filosofia Neoscolastica 97 (2005): 545–570: study and Italian translation of Mara’s letter. 3 I offer a discussion of these presentations in I.L.E. Ramelli, “Ethos and Logos: A SecondCentury Apologetical Debate between ‘Pagan’ and Christian Philosophers,” Vigiliae Christianae 69 (2015): 123–156.

© Ilaria L.E. Ramelli, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004537897_011

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The philosophical theory of disasters and their relation to the divine in Mara’s letter will be analyzed against the background of Stoicism and Stoic theodicy. This is one of the many elements that point to a Stoic context for the ideas expressed in this interesting but enigmatic document. This research helps shed light on popular philosophical and religious theories of theodicy in Roman imperial times, and on the connections between Greco-Roman and Syriac philosophical and cultural worlds.

Mara’s Letter

Mara’s Letter to His Son belongs to the first literary and (popular) philosophical witnesses we know of in Syriac along with Bardaisan of Edessa and his school.4 According to Aaron Butts,5 in the first centuries CE, the Syriac language developed within a sociolinguistic context in which inherited Aramaic material was augmented and adapted through contact with Greek. Syriac was the 4 See I.L.E. Ramelli, “Mara bar Serapion,” in Encyclopedia of Ancient Christianity, ed. A. Di Berardino (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity 2014), 2: 668–669. On Bardaisan, see I.L.E. Ramelli, Bardaisan of Edessa: A Reassessment of the Evidence and a New Interpretation (Piscataway: Gorgias, 2009; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019); I.L.E. Ramelli, “Origen, Bardaisan, and the Origin of Universal Salvation,” Harvard Theological Review 102 (2009): 135–168; I.L.E. Ramelli, “Bardaisan (Philosopher and Poet),” in Brill Encyclopedia of Early Christianity, ed. D. Hunter, P. van Geest, B.J. Lietaert Peerbolte (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming); online 2018: https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/browse/brill-encyclopedia-of-early-christianity-online; I.L.E. Ramelli, “The Body of Christ as Imperishable Wood: Hippolytus and Bardaisan of Edessa’s Complex Christology,” in Symposium Syriacum XII, St Lawrence College, Rome 19–21 August 2016, ed. E. Vergani and S. Chialà (OCA 311, Rome: Oriental Institute, 2022), 447–458; I.L.E. Ramelli, “Bardaisan: A Gnostic or a Polemicist against Gnostic Tenets?” Aram 33 (2021): 165–189; I.L.E. Ramelli, “The Logos/Nous One-Many between ‘Pagan’ and Christian Platonism: Bardaisan, Clement, Origen, Plotinus, and Gregory of Nyssa,” Studia Patristica 102 (2021): 11–44; I.L.E. Ramelli, “The Reception of Paul’s Nous in Christian Platonism,” in Der νοῦς bei Paulus im Horizont griechischer und hellenistisch-jüdischer Anthropologie, ed J. Frey and M. Nägele (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021), 279–316; I.L.E. Ramelli, “Bardaisan of Edessa on Freewill, Fate and Nature: Alexander of Aphrodisias, Origen, and Diodore of Tarsus,” in Women’s Perspectives on Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, ed. I. Chouinard, Z. McConaughey, R. Noël, and A. Medeiros Ramos (New York–Zürich: Springer Nature Switzerland AG, 2021), 169–176; I.L.E. Ramelli, “Christian Platonists in Support of Gender Equality: Bardaisan, Clement, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Eriugena,” in Otherwise than the Binary: Towards Feminist Reading of Ancient Greek Philosophy, Magic and Mystery Traditions, ed. D. Layne, J. Elbert Decker, and M. Vielhauer (New York: SUNY, 2022), 313–350; and the whole Patterns of Women’s Leadership in Ancient Christianity, ed. J.E. Taylor and I.L.E. Ramelli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). 5 A.M. Butts, Language Change in the Wake of Empire: Syriac in Its Greco-Roman Context (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2016). See also my “The Importance of the Study of Ancient Syriac Culture for a Scholar in Ancient Philosophy and Religions,” in Syriac Identity, ed. Z. Duygu and K. Akalın (forthcoming).

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Aramaic dialect of Edessa, which was indeed shaped and changed as a result of contact with Greek, especially through Greek loanwords. In fact, Syriac had been in contact with Greek for centuries. I think this is the case not only with the Syriac language, but also with ancient Syriac culture, philosophy, and theology, all of which developed through interrelation with Greek culture, philosophy, and theology. This is the case with the first literary and philosophical (or popular philosophical) text witnesses we know of: Mara (Stoicizing) and Bardaisan (a Christian who absorbed much of imperial Platonism).6 From the philosophical viewpoint, Mara’s letter contains many Stoicizing elements. This is why I included Mara within a systematic treatment of the Roman Stoics in my book published in 2008.7 This characterization of the Stoicizing thought of Mara was taken up by Annette Merz and Teun Tieleman.8 I devoted an article to Mara and his relation to Stoicism, with new arguments both on Stoicism and on the date of the text, in a Brill volume focusing on Mara, which has also served as a preparation for the critical edition and translation by David Rensberger.9 The latter is another supporter of the early dating of the letter. This position was recently embraced also by George van Kooten who concluded: “if indeed – as scholars such as Sebastian Brock, Fergus Millar, Craig A. Evans and Ilaria Ramelli have argued – the letter from the Syrian Stoic philosopher Mara Bar Serapion … is written by a pagan and can be dated to the end of the first century CE.”10

6

As I argued in Bardaisan of Edessa and “Bardaisan of Edessa, Origen, and Imperial Philosophy,” Aram 30 (2018): 1–26. 7 I.L.E. Ramelli, Stoici romani minori (Milan: Bompiani, 2008), 2555–2598; reviewed by G. Reydams-Schils, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2009; referred to in P.W. van der Horst, Studies in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 214; M. Boeri and R. Salles, Los filósofos estoicos (Sankt Augustin: Academia, 2014), 817; J. Rüpke, Il crocevia del mito (Bologna: Dehoniane, 2014), 47; M. Monfrinotti, Creatore e creazione: il pensiero di Clemente Alessandrino (Rome: Città Nuova, 2014), 197; 306. Also I.L.E. Ramelli, “Bardesane e la sua scuola, l’Apologia siriaca ‘di Melitone’ e la Doctrina Addai,” Aevum 83 (2009): 141–168. 8 A. Merz and T. Tieleman, “The Letter of Mara Bar Serapion; Some Comments on Its Philosophical and Historical Context,” in Empsykhoi logoi. Festschrift Van der Horst, ed. A. de Jong, et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 107–133. 9 I.L.E. Ramelli, “Mara Bar Sarapion’s Letter: Comments on the Syriac Edition, Translation, and Notes by David Rensberger,” in The Letter of Mara bar Serapion in Context, ed. A. Merz and T. Tieleman (Leiden, Brill, 2012), 205–231, review J. van Oort, Vigiliae Christianae 67 (2013): 574. 10 G.H. van Kooten, “The Last Days of Socrates and Christ,” in Religio-Philosophical Discourses in the Mediterranean World: From Plato, through Jesus, to Late Antiquity, ed. G.H. van Kooten and A. Klostergaard Petersen (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 219–243 (219–221; quotation 219).

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Mara’s Letter is extant in Syriac and was probably composed by an upper-class Stoic or Stoicizing author from Commagene who became a prisoner of the Romans in the 70s of the first century CE after they had captured Samosata. This is his condition as results from the Letter itself. The dating of this letter is debated; it is mostly dated from the late first century CE to the fourth century or even later.11 However, since Mara probably influenced Aphrahat, and perhaps Bardaisan or his school, his letter must have been in circulation at least by the time of Aphrahat, ca. 270–345, i.e. around 300 CE, if not earlier in the third century, when the Liber legum regioinum was composed.12 Like the scholars mentioned in the previous paragraph, I suspect, for both historical and linguistic/philological reasons, that it might even be much earlier. Catherine Chin considers this letter to be late, a rhetorical exercise in the χρεία tradition, described in the handbooks of rhetoric of Theon and Libanius.13 Mara’s letter, in this perspective, has no historical value, nor does it even document a popular form of Stoicism. It is rather evidence of the diffusion of Greek rhetoric in late antique Syriac literature. Chin is led to this conclusion by the short section that, in the manuscript, comes after the letter and is indeed a χρεία, a witty sentence of Mara in his answer to a question (in conformity with a question-and-answer typology that is attested for this literary genre). According to Chin, the letter is a development of the brief initial χρεία; it is itself a rhetorical exercise, belonging to the prosopopoeia. Mara’s letter should thus be dated to a period in which Greek paideia had entered the curriculum of studies in Syriac culture, that is in the fifth or sixth centuries. However, linguistic, palaeographical and historical arguments point to an earlier date, and it is uncertain or improbable that the χρεία appended to Mara’s letter was written by the same author as the letter, let alone that the letter and the χρεία should be regarded as constituting a single document, or even that the χρεία inspired the letter, rather than the reverse. The letter may rather be earlier and the χρεία may have arisen from it as a rhetorical exercise. Likewise, the pseudepigraphic correspondence between the Roman Stoic Musonius Rufus and Apollonius of Tyana seems to be a rhetorical exercise and cannot be considered to have been part of Musonius’ philosophical diatribes,14 which 11

See the discussion in I.L.E. Ramelli, “Mara Bar Serapion, Letter,” in Encyclopaedia of Second Temple Judaism, ed. L.T. Stuckenbruck and D.M. Gurtner (London: T&T Clark, 2018). 12 I argued for the relation between Mara, Bardaisan, and Aphrahat in “Revisiting Aphrahat’s Sources: Beyond Scripture?,” Parole de l’Orient 41 (2015): 367–397. 13 C. Chin, “Rhetorical Practice in the Chreia Elaboration of Mara bar Sarapion,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 9, no. 2 (2006): 1–24. 14 See I.L.E. Ramelli, Musonio Rufo (Milan: Bompiani, 2001) and Stoici romani minori (Milan: Bompiani, 2008), 689–943.

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are surely authentic – although written by his disciple Lucius – and reflect his teaching of Stoicism. Even less can those pseudepigraphic letters, purportedly exchanged with Apollonius, be regarded as the piece from which Musonius’ diatribes subsequently originated. In the same way, the χρεία that has Mara as a protagonist should be considered separately from the letter. It was probably written later than the letter, whose linguistic features point to an early date and perfectly correspond to the historical framework in which it is set, as I have previously argued. Moreover, the philosophical elements in Mara’s letter are not so generic as to be impossible to relate to a philosophical school. On the contrary, both Tieleman and I pointed out close similarities between the ideas in Mara’s letter and Stoicism, especially Roman Stoicism.

Theodicy and Collective Punishments

The argument from theodicy and its philosophical underpinnings begins at §18. Mara offers examples of wise men persecuted and killed unjustly, and describes how their persecutors, in this case whole peoples, were punished by the divinity in its justice, in accordance with the philosophical argument of collective punishments and deaths.15 Virtuous and wise people unjustly put to death already constituted a widespread topic in Graeco-Roman philosophical literature: for example, the Neoacademic Cicero, strongly influenced by Stoicism, in ND 3.82–83 cited Socrates, Anaxarchus, and Zeno of Elea as philosophers persecuted unjustly; the Middle Platonic Plutarch, also very knowledgeable about Stoic ideas, in Stoic.Rep. 1051B cited Pythagoras, Socrates, and Antiphon as philosophical martyrs.16 The passage from Cicero quoted above comes close to Mara’s argument in that it deals with the notion of divine justice vis-à-vis evildoers, which may be single persons, but also entire cities – just as in Mara’s letter. This suggests that he is using a typical Stoic argument, since the Academic, Cotta, in Cicero’s debate, makes it clear that the opponents of the Stoics refuted the idea that divine punishment could be manifested in the destruction of an entire city. This is precisely what Mara argues in his letter. 15 This was a widespread argument against astrological determinism. See B. Motta, Il Contra Fatum di Gregorio di Nissa nel dibattito tardo-antico sul fatalismo e sul determinismo (Pisa: Serra, 2008); and my review The Mediaeval Review 2009, https://scholar works.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/6611. 16 Editions used in this paper: for Cicero: D. Lassandro and G. Micunco, eds, Opere politiche e filosofiche di M. Tullio Cicerone, vol. 3, De natura deorum, De senectute, De amicitia (Torino: UTET, 2007); for Plutarch: F.C. Babbitt, et al., ed., Plutarch. Moralia, Loeb Classical Library 1–15 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936).

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This observation comes after a reflection on the vanity of possessions in the world. In §12, after the initial questions, “Begin, O wisest among the human race, and tell us, on which possession shall a person rely? Or of what things shall one say that they seem enduring?,” a sequence of questions and answers (what I call a “binomial sequence”) begins: Of great riches? They can be grabbed away. / Of fortified towns? They can be plundered. / Of cities? They can be laid waste. / Of majesty? It can be brought low. / Of magnificence? It can be thrown down.  / Of beauty? It fades. / Of laws, then? They pass away. / Or of poverty? It is despised.17 / Or of children? They die. / Or of friends? They prove false. / Or of honours? Envy goes before them. The second parts of the binomial pairs above (which I marked in italics, each followed by a stroke in order to separate each binomial pair), indicate a sequence of disasters, either collective or individual. The same structure, but in the reverse order, is found in  §13: a binomial sequence, like the above-quoted one, is here not preceded but followed by an example occurring because of the quality mentioned in the first part of the sequence. So, first we have the binomial sequence: So, let a man rejoice in his kingdom – like Darius; / or in his good fortune – like Polycrates; / or in his valour – like Achilles; / or in his wife – like Agamemnon; / or in his offspring – like Priam; / or in his craftsmanship – like Archimedes; / or in his wisdom – like Socrates; / or in his learning – like Pythagoras; / or in his brilliance – like Palamedes. In this sequence, the mythical and historical examples mentioned in the second binomial tag also signify a tragedy, mostly individual but also collective. Virtually all of the characters mentioned are cited because of their violent death, and, in the case of Priam, the death of their children too. Darius could be interpreted as Darius III, who lost his empire when he was defeated by Alexander, or possibly as Darius I, who wanted to conquer Greece but was 17

Poverty was regarded as good for philosophers, and for Christian philosophers: this is why it is found in the first half of the contrasting binomial sequence. See I.L.E. Ramelli, Social Justice and the Legitimacy of Slavery: The Role of Philosophical Asceticism from Ancient Judaism to Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) and, for the Christians, “Christian Slavery in Theology and Practice: Its Relation to God, Sin, and Justice,” in The Cambridge History of Ancient Christianity, ed. B. Longenecker and D. Wilhite (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

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defeated by the Athenians. Archimedes, thanks to his ingenious machines, defended Syracuse against the Romans, but was killed when the city was conquered. Palamedes, because of a machination of Odysseus, was stoned to death as a traitor. Polycrates, the tyrant of Samos, was deceived by the Persian satrap of Ionia and killed by crucifixion. Achilles was killed by the much less valiant Paris. Agamemnon was killed by his wife Clytaemnestra and her lover Aegisthus after the former’s return from the victory over Troy. Then follows Mara’s concluding remark: “People’s lives, my son, vanish from the world; but their praises and virtues endure forever.” Mara does not mention the immortality of the soul, a Platonic tenet, let alone the resurrection of the body, a Jewish-Christian doctrine he does not seem to embrace.18 This is understandable if he is adopting a “pagan” Stoicizing stance. In both binomial sequences, in §12 and §13, there is an opposition between the first and the second term of the binomial line. First, in the questions and answers in §12, the answer puts down the expectation implicit in the question: “Of beauty? – It fades; Of children? – They die,” and so on. Then, in §13, the example that follows the general statement in each binomial line shows how the virtue or capacity exalted in the first binomial term has proved dangerous and even fatal for the person who embodies the relevant example: one should rejoice and boast “in his wife – like Agamemnon,” who was killed by his wife; “or in his wisdom – like Socrates,” who was put to death because of his philosophical wisdom, etc. In §18, then, after the long initial question, “What else can we say, when the wise suffer violence at the hands of tyrants, their wisdom is taken captive by denunciation, and for all their enlightenment they are dispossessed with no opportunity for defence?,” there comes a threefold binomial sequence, again characterized by an opposition between the first and the second term: What benefit did the Athenians derive from the slaying of Socrates? – For they received the retribution for it in the form of famine and plague. / Or the people of Samos from the burning of Pythagoras? – For in one hour their entire country was covered with sand. / Or the Jews [from the killing] of their wise king? – For from that very time their sovereignty was taken away. Here, the second line in each sequence describes a divine retribution (highlighted in italics) for the injustice described in the first line inflicted on a 18 See I.L.E. Ramelli, “Soma (Σῶμα),” in Das Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum, vol. 30, ed. C. Hornung, et al. (Stuttgart: Hiersemann Verlag, 2021), 814–847.

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philosopher (underlined), in the form of a collective disaster. The divine vengeance against the Athenians took the form of a famine and a plague (although here we witness a historical inversion for the sake of the argument);19 that against the Samians took the form of a flood and the covering of their whole island in sand (a prophecy found in the Sibylline Oracles 3.363, 4.91, 8.166 in the form of the etymological wordplay Σάμος  – ἄμμος, “Samos will become sand”), and that against the Jews consisted in their being deprived of their kingdom. In this case, the lex talionis becomes evident: since “the Jews” (here taken, anti-historically, collectively) had their wise king killed by the Romans, their whole kingdom was taken away from them by the Romans. In the case of Samos and Pythagoras, instead, the lex talionis functions e contrario: Pythagoras was burnt alive by (some) Samians, hence the island of Samos was flooded. Plutarch, in times close to those of Mara, in Stoic.Rep. 1051C attests that Pythagoras died in the fire of his house; in D.Socr. 583A he details that Pythagoras died immediately after the fire.20 However, while all Graeco-Roman sources locate Pythagoras’ death in Southern Italy (to which he had migrated from Samos), Mara identifies Samos as the place of Pythagoras’ death, possibly to link his killing to a vengeance that he knew from the Sibylline Oracles: the aforementioned covering of all Samos with sand. At this point, a connective sentence is inserted about the divinity’s justice in its punishments: “For God rightly exacted retribution on behalf of the wisdom of these three.” Then comes the second double sequence, with 3 + 3 cola; both groups of three are ordered in an ascending climax, from the shortest to the longest: I. For the Athenians starved to death, and the people of Samos were covered by the sea without remedy, and the Jews, massacred and chased from their kingdom, are scattered through every land. II. Socrates did not die, because of Plato; nor did Pythagoras, because of the statue of Hera; nor did the wise king, because of the new laws that he gave.

19

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In Athens, the plague began in the summer of 430 BCE, thirty-one years before Socrates’ death; both the famine, λιμός, and the plague, λοιμός, are mentioned, apparently as alternatives, by Thucydides, 2.54. See O. Luschnat, ed., Thucydidis historiae, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1960). See also Porphyry, V. Pyth. 56–57. É. des Places, ed. and trans., Porphyre: Vie de Pythagore, Lettre à Marcella (Paris: Les Belles Lettres 1982).

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Here, Section I offers an explication (italicized) of the tragedies mentioned in the previous paragraph. The Athenians “starved to death” during the previously mentioned famine (in spite, again, of the chronological inversion); the island of Samos “covered by the sea” reflects the notion of its being “covered by sand” in the previous section; finally, the fate of the Jews is described in more detail here: they were massacred, chased away from their own kingdom, and scattered in the diaspora. Section II describes the compensation that God bestowed on the philosophers killed unjustly: they actually did not die, but not because Mara believed in any kind of immortality (he was neither a Platonist nor a Christian – nor a Christian Platonist), not even an “astral” immortality which the Stoics used to reserve for heroes (as is clear from the Stoicizing tragedy Hercules Oetaeus, preserved in the corpus of Seneca’s tragedies and written in a time very close to that of Mara’s letter), but rather in the sense that Socrates’ ideas were recorded in Plato’s dialogues. Pythagoras (in a confusion between the philosopher and the sculptor) produced a statue of Hera – perhaps connected with the cult of Hera in Samos and its temple of Hera – that survived him by many centuries, and Jesus promulgated “new laws” which, by being followed by his movement, keep his memory alive. In this key passage on the wise king of the Jews and the punishment of his killers,21 the choice of this example, unlike those of Socrates and Pythagoras, must have been determined by its chronological closeness to Mara’s time. This would corroborate the hypothesis of the early dating of the letter. Mara probably received the connection between Jesus’ death and the fall of Jerusalem from a Christian source (no wonder, since Christians were the first and main agents of the circulation of Jesus’ story), but he reflected on this historical exemplum as a Stoic. He does not speak of the resurrection of Jesus (as the debated Testimonium Flavianum, approximately of the same age, does),22 but 21 On the 70 CE facts, see M. Goodman, A History of Judaism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018), section 2. 22 The partial authenticity of the Testimonium (with just a probable Christian addition, “this was the Christ”) is argued for by me, “Alcune Osservazioni circa il Testimonium Flavianum,” Sileno 24 (1998): 219–235 and “Gesù e il Tempio,” Maia 63 (2011): 1–38; further “Jesus, James the Just, a Gate, and an Epigraph,” in Das Gesetzesverständnis der Logienquelle auf dem Hintergrund frühjüdischer Theologie, ed. M. Tiwald (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2013), 203–229. On the Testimonium’s total authenticity, including the statement, “this was the Christ/Messiah,” see C. Thiede, Jesus. Der Glaube, die Fakten (Augsburg: Sankt Ulrich, 2003), 34–35; C. Thiede, Jesus und Tiberius (München: Luchterhand, 2004), 303–337, and, with arguments from the history of religions, U. Victor, “Das Testimonium Flavianum,” Novum Testamentum 52 (2010): 72–82.

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he indicates Jesus’ “new law” (arguably with respect to the Mosaic, “old” Law) as a proof of his “earthly” immortality. These “new laws” given by Jesus are the same that are mentioned in the Book of the Laws of Countries from the School of Bardaisan, which reflects Bardaisan’s ideas in his dialogue Against Fate.23 Here, in BLC 15 Ramelli (fols. 139v–140r),24 Bardaisan speaks of the “laws of Christ” followed by the Christians “always and in every region”: What should we say, then, concerning the new race of us, the Christians,25 whom Christ established in every land and in all regions at his coming? For, lo and behold, in whatever land we are, we are all called Christians, from the one name of Christ. And in the same day, the first of the week [Sunday], we come together, and on the prescribed days we fast. And neither do our brothers who are in Gaul marry men, nor do those who are in Parthia take two wives, nor are those who live in Judea circumcised, nor do our sisters who are among the Gelians or the Kushan have intercourse with strangers, nor do those who are in Persia marry their own daughters, nor do those who are in Media flee from their dead, or bury them while they are still alive, or give them as food to dogs, nor do those who live in Edessa kill their wives who commit fornication, or their sisters, but they separate themselves from them and hand them to God’s judgment. Nor do those who live in Hatra stone thieves, but in whatever land they are, and in whatever place, local laws cannot separate them from the law of their Christ: the principalities’ power does not force them to do or use things that are impure for them, but illness and good health, richness and poverty, all that does not depend on their freewill happens to them wherever they are. Jesus the Philosopher-King The information about Jesus that Mara had learnt, as well as his other examples of older philosophers, perfectly fit the argument of collective deaths as divine punishments as well as his scheme of the wise man unjustly persecuted by an entire people but avenged by the divinity – and also compensated by an eternal reward. This scheme is well attested in Stoicism from Chrysippus 23 See above, n. 4. 24 I.L.E. Ramelli, ed., Bardesane Kata Heimarmenēs (Bologna: ESD, 2009); edition with English translation and commentary (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, forthcoming). 25 Bardaisan has spoken so far of all other peoples, including the Jews, in the third person, but he speaks of the Christians in first person plural, and uses the appellatives “brothers” and “sisters” for the Christians as his fellow-believers.

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to Dio Chrysostom onwards. Even the set of examples is identical, with the only difference being that Mara adds Jesus. Plutarch, Stoic.Rep. 1051BD, quotes the exempla of unjustly persecuted sages adduced by Chrysippus: Socrates and Pythagoras. Dio of Prusa, a Stoicizing contemporary of Mara, and a disciple of the Stoic Musonius, shortly after Mara’s letter, at the beginning of the second century, returns to the theme of the wise who have been unjustly persecuted and adds, like Mara, the detail of the subsequent punishment of the persecutors. Besides Jesus, the examples he adduces are the same as Mara’s: Socrates and Pythagoras (Or. 47.2–7; cf. 43.8–9; 51.7–8). Socrates was killed, Dio remarks, by his fellow-citizens, who were punished with many misfortunes that happened to them afterwards and who were still blameworthy at Dio’s time (Or. 47.7). This was also the time of Mara. Maximus of Tyre, who was influenced both by Stoicism and by Middle Platonism, devoted a whole diatribe (3) to Socrates’ condemnation to death,26 and at the end (§8), he remarks, like Mara, that the Athenians were punished with the plague, their defeat in the Peloponnesian war and the loss of their power: “Socrates died, but the Athenians were condemned, and their judge was God and the Truth … This is how God judges, this is how God condemns.” The attribution of the punishment of the Athenians to God’s justice and the truth is parallel to to the way Mara attributes the punishment of the Jews to God and justice. Even the chronological inversion between the cause and the effect is the same as in Mara: the Peloponnesian war and the plague of Athens were in fact anterior to the condemnation of Socrates. The topos is the same, even to the extent that they share the same historical inaccuracy, clearly overlooked for the sake of the argument; the novelty is that Mara adds to the philosophers the figure of “the wise king of the Jews”: this was an attempt to represent Jesus as a philosopher,27 precisely a philosopher-king. This figure had a prominent antecedent in Solomon, certainly known to Mara: the wise “king of the Jews” celebrated in 1 Kings and 1–2 Chronicles. Even the Christian claim that Jesus was still alive, if Mara ever heard it, was interpreted by him, in line with the Stoic doctrine that denied the immortality of the soul, and even more so resurrection (except at the general παλιγγενεσία at the end of each aeon), as the survival of the “wise king” in the new laws he gave (in respect to the Mosaic Law).

26 See M.B. Trapp, trans. Maximus of Tyre: The Philosophical Orations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 24–25. 27 For its importance in the first moves toward the representation of Christianity as a philosophy, see Ramelli, “Ethos and Logos.”

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Mara’s designation of Jesus as “king of the Jews” exactly corresponds to the titulus crucis placed by the Romans on Jesus’ cross to indicate the reason for his condemnation to death.28 The gospels emphasize Jesus’ prophecy of the destruction of the temple (Mark 13.2; John 2.19). According to Matt. 26.61 (cf. 27.40. and 27.51) and Mark 14.58 and 15.29 (cf. 15.38), this was one of the charges against Jesus in his trial before the Sanhedrin.29 John is the gospel that most of all emphasizes the temple and Jesus’ royalty and glory, to the point of presenting his crucifixion as an exaltation in which he dragged all to himself (12.32),30 but insists that Jesus’ kingdom is not of this world. The evangelist knew that Jesus was accused and condemned because of his alleged aspiration to be the king of the Jews; this is why he highlights that Jesus’ kingdom “is not of this world” (18.36). This is a polemic against Pilate’s titulus, the formal condemnation of Jesus; the fourth gospel, indeed, most insists on the titulus (John 19.19–22). Philip Esler suggests that the temple authorities had the text of Psalms of Solomon 17 and saw enough correspondences with it in Jesus’ preaching as to want him killed.31 Revelation, in continuity with the Johannine gospel, pays special attention to the temple and its liturgy.32 Mara may not have known John, let alone Revelation, but likely knew the mention of the titulus crucis in Matt. 27.37 or its tradition: “This is Jesus, the King of the Jews.” This corresponds perfectly to Mara’s description of Jesus, to which he attached the designation of “wise” in order to assimilate him to the philosophers. Mara’s Stoic interpretation of narratives that could have come to him from Christian sources would seem to be not far from the operation that Stanley Stowers has ascribed to the author of the Gospel of Matthew, who was very close to Mara from a chronological point of view: he received the story of Jesus and attributed his own, Stoically inflected, doctrines to Jesus the Judean sage – whom Mara described as “the wise king of the Jews,” thus designating him the Jewish sage or philosopher. Stowers has pointed out a variety of Stoic themes in 28 Mark 15.26; Matt. 27.37; Luke 23.38; John 19.19–21. See Ramelli, “Gesù e il Tempio”; M.-L. Rigato, I. N. R. I. Il titolo della Croce (Bologna: Dehoniane, 2010), and my review Aevum 85 (2011): 250–252. 29 I.L.E. Ramelli, “Prophecy in Origen: Between Scripture and Philosophy,” Journal of Early Christian History 7, no. 2 (2017): 17–39, and I.L.E. Ramelli, “Jesus of Nazareth,” in Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. S. Goldberg, E. DePalma Digeser, T. Whithmarsh (digital edition; Oxford, Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 30 I.L.E. Ramelli, The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis: A Critical Assessment from the New Testament to Eriugena (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 62, 414–416, 455. 31 P. Esler, “Beware the Messiah! Psalms of Solomon 17 and the Death of Jesus,” in To Set at Liberty: Essays on Early Christianity and Its Social World in Honor of John H. Elliott, ed. S. Black (Sheffield: Phoenix, 2014), 179–193. 32 Ramelli, “Gesù e il Tempio”; Ramelli, “Jesus, James the Just.”

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the Gospel of Matthew.33 I suspect that Mara may even have known something of the tradition of that gospel – whose first redaction, now lost, is reported to have been in Aramaic; Mara most probably knew Greek as well, in addition to Aramaic and Syriac. Another Jewish Hellenistic writing of the first century CE in which Stoic lore is strikingly present, indeed more than in the Gospel of Matthew, is 4 Maccabees, which revolves around the theme of the sovereignty of λογισμός or “rational faculty” over πάθη, “passions” or “bad emotions” (so that Gregory Nazianzen in Or. 15.2 refers to 4 Maccabees as Περὶ τοῦ αὐτοκράτορα εἶναι τῶν παθῶν τὸν λογισμόν, The Rational Faculty Can Completely Control Passions).34 One ought to add Philo to the picture, whose dependence on Stoicism (on the ethical, not the metaphysical plane) is not inferior to his debt to Platonism. These texts show how deeply Stoicism had entered Jewish Hellenism. But only Matthew, the “Stoicizing” gospel, and the earliest Christian narratives, included a narrative about Jesus. Mara probably received such a narrative from Christians, perhaps from the Matthaean tradition, but elaborated it, as I pointed out, in a Stoicizing manner. The Pedagogics of Divine Punishments The Stoics asked how divine providence could be reconciled with the violent deaths of excellent men and especially philosophers, such as Socrates and Pythagoras. Chrysippus argued that the influence of evil demons played a part in this35 – an argument that will resurface in early Christian theology.36 Mara stresses that Socrates, Pythagoras and Jesus have shown that God punished the evildoers later on and that these wise men were then recompensed by eternal fame. He was adopting the Stoic argument that evildoers are always punished 33 S. Stowers, “Jesus as Teacher of Stoic Ethics in Matthew,” in Stoicism in Early Christianity, ed. T. Rasimus, et al. (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2010), 59–76; see also R.M. Thorsteinsson, Jesus as Philosopher: The Moral Sage in the Synoptic Gospels (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 34 I limit myself to referring to R. Renehan, “The Greek Philosophical Background of Fourth Maccabees,” Rheinisches Museum 115 (1972): 223–238; R. Weber, “Eusebeia und Logismos. Zum philosophischen Hintergrund von 4. Makkabäer,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 22 (1991): 212–234; and J.W. van Henten, The Maccabean Martyrs as Saviours of the Jewish People (Leiden: Brill, 1997); H. Görgemanns, “Philosophie, Gesetz und Vorbild. Zu einigen Abschnitten des 4. Makkabäerbuches,” in Quaerite faciem eius semper, FS Albrecht Dihle, ed. A. Jördens, et al. (Hamburg: Kovacs, 2008), 78–90. 35 Ap. Plut. Stoic. Rep. 1051B–D = SVF 2.1178: J. von Arnim, ed., Stoicorum veterum Fragmenta, 4 vols. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1903–1924), 2: 338; Cic. ND 3.79–93, Sen. Prov. 5.6. 36 See, e.g., I.L.E. Ramelli, “Plagues and Epidemics Caused by D(a)emons in Origen and Porphyry and Potential Interrelations,” Vox Patrum 77 (2021): 89–120.

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eventually, a Stoic tenet reported by the Neo-Academic Cicero, ND 3.79–93,37 and the Roman Stoic Seneca, Ep. 110.2, 95.50.38 A rough contemporary of Mara, the “Middle Platonic” Plutarch, who often shows awareness of Stoic ideas, composed De sera numinum vindicta in line with the argument supported by Mara. According to the Stoics (and also Platonists such as Philo, Origen and Gregory of Nyssa when they interpreted Scripture), the divinities punish, but not out of anger at human injustice, since divinities are free of πάθη or “bad emotions,”39 just as they are untouched by unwise prayers. This is clear in the Roman Stoic Persius’ criticism of fool prayers, based not on logos, the essence of the divinity, but on irrationality.40 He too was a near contemporary of Mara. Another later contemporary, the Stoic Hierocles (from late first–early second century CE), claimed that the gods are not responsible for evil – as Plato had done in the Myth of Er in his Republic, which became the basis for subsequent theodicy, including Platonic Christian theology.41 Human vice (Hierocles maintains, as later Origen would do) is the only factor responsible for evil. Divine punishments are beneficial: they attack the bodily, external conditions of the evildoers, with the aim of improving their spiritual, moral level (Sen. Prov. 5.6). This point will be developed at great length by Clement and Origen of Alexandria, Christian Platonists who absorbed many Stoic ethical ideas.42 Thus, divine punishment is actually providential. Hierocles believes that entire nations may be punished in the same way and for the same purpose. Disasters such as earthquakes, famine and pestilence occur mostly because of natural causes, but the gods may also use them sometimes to punish the sins of many people, collectively,43 as Mara suggests in his letter. This is what Hierocles the Stoic, in the time of Mara, observes in his passage excerpted by Stobaeus, from his treatise How Should One Behave toward the Gods?:44 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44

Partially collected in SVF 2.1179, 1180, 1107, 1197; respectively Arnim, ed., Stoicorum veterum Fragmenta, 2: 339; 322; 343. Edition L.D. Reynolds, L. Annaei Senecae Ad Lucilium epistulae morales (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965). E.g., Cic. ND 3.91; on Origen, see my discussion in “Origen’s Philosophical Exegesis of the Bible against the Backdrop of Ancient Philosophy (Stoicism, Platonism) and Hellenistic and Rabbinic Judaism,” main lecture at the Conference, The Bible: Its Translations and Interpretations in the Patristic Time, KUL 16–17.X. 2019, Studia Patristica 103 (2021): 13–58; on Nyssen, I.L.E. Ramelli, “Gregory of Nyssa on the Soul (and the Restoration): From Plato to Origen,” in Exploring Gregory of Nyssa: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives, ed. A. Marmodoro and N. McLynn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 110–141. I.L.E. Ramelli, Stoici Romani Minori (Milan: Bompiani, 2008), 1361–1515. See I.L.E. Ramelli, Hierocles the Stoic (Leiden: Brill, 2009). See Ramelli, Apokatastasis, sections on Clement and Origen. Hierocles ap. Stob. Ecl. I.3.54, p. 64.1–14 Wachsmuth; cf. Seneca, Ep. 95.50; Ben. 7.7.3–4. Stobaeus, Anthology 2.9.7 (2:181,8–182,30 Wachsmuth and Hense). Edition, English translation, and commentary in Ramelli, Hierocles, 67–69.

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I believe that it contributes much to behaving well toward the gods also to consider that a god is never the cause of any evil but that evils befall us as a result of vice alone, whereas the gods, in themselves, are responsible for good and useful things: but we do not welcome their benefactions but rather wrap ourselves in evils freely chosen. I think that a well-known poetic passage is opportune here, in connection with this topic: “mortals blame the gods” as though evils were sent by them, whereas they themselves, by their own faults, have sufferings beyond what is fated. For that a god, in fact, is never in any way responsible for evils one may realize on the basis of many things, but for the present, perhaps, that famous argument of Plato may suffice. For he says that cooling is not a property of heat but rather of the opposite, and warming is not a property of cold but rather of the opposite; so too, then, doing evil is not a property of a benefactor but rather of the opposite. Now, a god is good, filled right from the beginning with all the virtues; thus, a god cannot be a doer of evil, nor a cause of evils for anyone: on the contrary, he furnishes good things to all who are willing to receive them, delighting in good things and, among those that are indifferent, in all those that are in accord with nature in regard to us and productive of things in accord with nature. But vice [κακία] is the one and only thing that is responsible for evils [κακά] It is necessary to consider the following, given that gods are the cause of good things but never of vice or evils: What, then, is the reason for our faring badly? Since, of indifferent things, some are contrary to nature and adverse or, by Zeus, productive of such things, it is worth making a distinction here among these too: I mean, for example, illness, disability, death, poverty, reputation, and similar things. Now vice, too, is naturally so constituted as to bring about many of these things. Many illnesses and many disabilities arise as a result both of lack of self-control and libertinism. And because of injustice many have had a hand cut off or endured other such mutilations, and many have died outright. Even medicine, kindly to men, is often impeded in its application by vice: for the benefits of the art are rendered useless by the disobedience, lack of self-control, and avoidance of effort on the part of those who are sick. Indeed, profligacy and prodigality have made many men beggars and destitute, while a shameful avarice and niggardliness have made many infamous. After vice, however, the second cause of such things is matter. Justice and Providence As Plutarch warned, and as Mara’s letter implies in its exempla, some time may elapse between the evildoing and its punishment. Cicero, ND 3.91, reports that the Stoics deemed the destruction of entire cities as the dispensation of divine

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justice and thereby a sign of providence. Mara’s letter offers thoughts that are in perfect conformity with this idea. Note that Jesus, as reported in the gospels, sometimes criticized the conception of divine retribution both in individual cases of disability,45 such as in John 9.3 concerning the man born blind, where Jesus declares that “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” explaining that this disability was not a punishment of any sin, but was rather aimed at the manifestation of God’s glory; or in Luke 13.1–5, concerning the idea of disasters as collective punishments. Here, Jesus makes it clear that those who are culpable and perish in such tragedies are not more culpable than those who are spared.46 Yet, Jesus, as represented in the gospel, also predicted the destruction of Jerusalem as a punishment for its sins, in particular the killing of prophets, including Jesus himself (Luke 13.34–35): O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, but you were not willing! See! Your house is left to you desolate; and assuredly, I say to you, you shall not see Me until the time comes when you say, “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!” A very similar version of this saying is preserved in Matt. 23.35–39, which directly or indirectly, and probably in its original Semitic form, might have been known to Mara and may have supported his idea of the destruction of Jerusalem as a divine punishment for the killing of Jesus:

45 See argument in I.L.E. Ramelli, “Disability in Bardaisan and Origen. Between the Stoic Adiaphora and the Lord’s Grace,” in Gestörte Lektüre. Disability als hermeneutische Leitkategorie biblischer Exegese, ed. W. Grünstäudl – M. Schiefer (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2012), 141–159, received by H. Marx-Wolf, K. Upson-Saia, “The State of the Question: Religion, Medicine, Disability, and Health in Late Antiquity,” Journal of Late Antiquity 8, no. 2 (2015): 257–272 (271); H.J.W. Drijvers, Bardaisan of Edessa, introduction by J. Willem Drijvers (Piscataway: Gorgias, 2014), xv; C.L. de Wet, The Unbound God (London: Routledge, 2017), 72, 171. 46 “At that very time there were some present who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. He asked them, ‘Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them – do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did’” (New Revised Standard Version).

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And so upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berekiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. Truly I tell you, all this will come on this generation. Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing. Look, your house is left to you desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” Other Stoicizing Elements in Mara’s Letter In general, Mara’s Stoic ideas concerning the divine origin of certain tragedies as vengeance for crimes correspond to the more general Stoicizing concepts, interspersed throughout his letter. For example, at the end of §28, Mara exhorts his son to “obey with virtue rather than obeying with anger.” What he means is the following: “instead of obeying angrily, obey virtuously.” This point expresses an important tenet of Stoicism, one of the several to which Mara in his letter adheres: the wise must accept, and thus obey, fate, with a voluntary adhesion, in virtue, not against his will, and therefore angrily. Fac nollem, comitabor gemens, Cleanthes says in a passage translated by Seneca, reported here with these key concepts highlighted: Duc, o parens celsique dominator poli,  / quocumque placuit; nulla parendi mora est. / Adsum impiger: fac nolle, comitabor gemens, / malusque patiar quod pati licuit bono. / Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt. Lead, o Father, ruler of the high heaven, / wherever you wish: I shall not hesitate to obey. / I am at your service with zeal. In case I should not want, I will be dragged, complaining, / and I will suffer as a wicked person what I could rather have accepted as a good person. / The fates lead the willing person, but drag the unwilling one. One who obeys voluntarily is virtuous, bonus; one who obeys against his will, with anger and sadness, gemens, and in vice: malus. This is exactly the Stoic conception that underlies Mara’s exhortation (on the basis of the interpretation I propose): “instead of obeying angrily, obey virtuously.” Another of the many Stoic features in Mara’s Letter is found in §14, in the sentence “those who conduct themselves outside the law,” who are the fools (φαῦλοι) as opposed to the wise (σοφοί). Here, “law” is to be understood as the Stoic νόμος, the moral law, the law of Zeus. This is a concept that was well

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developed already in Old Stoicism and was put into verses by Cleanthes, who describes Zeus as “first cause and ruler of nature, governing everything with your law.” It was allegorized up to the time of Cornutus,47 and was particularly elaborated by Musonius, who insisted on the “law of Zeus,” which one is to obey, not because one is forced to, but willingly, so as to become σύμψηφος with the divinity.48 In the case of the “wise king of the Jews,” we have already remarked that Mara conceives of his (earthly) immortality, a reward by God, in terms of the “new laws” that he promulgated. There are more Stoic hints in the Letter that confirm a Stoic reading of its theodicy. For instance, at the end of §6, the notion of Fate (“the ups and downs of fate”): Mara could interpret it as the Stoic Εἱμαρμένη, a well-established notion at that time, as is proved by Bardaisan’s work Against Fate,49 in which against 47

On the allegorization of law in Old Stoicism and Cornutus, see Ramelli, Allegoria, 88–90; 108–111; 293–302; on Cleanthes, see J. Thom, Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005). On Cornutus, see I.L.E. Ramelli, Anneo Cornuto (Milan: Bompiani, 2003); G. Boys-Stones, L. Annaeus Cornutus (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2018); my review of Boys-Stones in Classical Journal (2020): 1–4. For a critical edition: L. Annaeus Cornutus, Compendium de Graecae theologiae traditionibus, ed. J. Torres (Bibliotheca Teub­ neriana; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2018). Critical essays: I.L.E. Ramelli, “Annaeus Cornutus and the Stoic Allegorical Tradition: Meaning, Sources, and Impact,” AITIA. Regards sur la culture hellénistique 8, no. 2 (2018): https://journals.openedition.org/aitia/2882; I.L.E. Ramelli, “Allegorising and Philosophising,” in Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Mythography, ed. R. Scott Smith and S.M. Trzaskoma (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 331–348; I.L.E. Ramelli, “Annaeus Cornutus,” in Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Mythography, ed. R. Scott Smith and S.M. Trzaskoma, 170–178. On the reception of Cornutus in Christianity: I.L.E. Ramelli, “Cornutus in Christlichem Umfeld: Märtyrer, Allegorist, und Grammatiker,” in Cornutus: Die Griechischen Götter. Ein Überblick über Namen, Bilder und Deutungen, ed. H.-G. Nesselrath, G. Boy-Stones, H.-J. Klauck, and I.L.E. Ramelli (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 207–231. 48 See I.L.E. Ramelli, “Dio come padre nello Stoicismo Romano,” in Scripta Antiqua in honorem A. Montenegro Duque et J.Mª. Blázquez Martínez, ed. S. Crespo, A. Alonso (Valladolid: Universidad, 2002), 343–351; further I.L.E. Ramelli, “L’interpretazione allegorica filosofica di Zeus come Padre nello Stoicismo,” in Visiones mítico-religiosas del padre en la antigüedad clásica, ed. M. Ruiz Sánchez (Madrid: Signifer, 2004), 155–180 and Ramelli, Stoici Romani, 689–943. 49 Κατὰ Εἱμαρμένης in the title transmitted by Theodoret; Περὶ Εἱμαρμένης in Eusebius. On this work and its relation to the Liber Legum Regionum see above, n. 4, and H.J.W. Drijvers, Bardaisan of Edessa (Assen: van Gorcum, 1966); I.L.E. Ramelli, “Linee generali per una presentazione e per un commento del Liber legum regionum,” Rendiiconti dell’Istituto Lombardo, Accademia di Scienze e Lettere 133 (1999): 311–355 and I.L.E. Ramelli, “Bardesane e la sua scuola tra la cultura occidentale e quella orientale: il lessico della libertà nel Liber legum regionum,” in Pensiero e istituzioni del mondo classico nelle culture del Vicino Oriente, ed. R. Finazzi (Alessandria: Dell’Orso, 2001), 237–255; further I.L.E. Ramelli, Bardesane Kata Heimarmenēs (Bologna: ESD, 2009); Ramelli, “Bardesane  … l’Apologia siriaca,” 141–168.

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the Chaldaean concept of Fate he used the same arguments employed by the Academic Carneades against the Stoic Εἱμαρμένη. Moreover, Bardaisan added at least one argument of his own against the determinism of climatic/ geographical zones, which would be taken up by several Christian authors, plus another argument taken from the diffusion of the Christians throughout all geographic areas.50 Bardaisan attests that many people around Osrhoene, which was very close to Mara’s Commagene, believed in fatalistic determinism. Thus, Mara’s Stoicizing words on Fate corresponded to a belief widespread in his land. As for the presence of Stoicism in the Syriac world at the time of Mara, I would like to point out that in the late sixties of the first century, very shortly before the setting, and probably the composition, of Mara’s letter, a Syriac king attended the preaching of the Roman Stoic Musonius.51 Moral Progress Another notion related to philosophy and especially debated in Stoicism is that of progress. At the beginning of §11, the words “What then can we say of the delusion that makes its home in the world, and progress52 in it is with heavy labour” introduce this crucial Stoic notion, present already in Ancient Stoicism, but particularly valued in Roman Stoicism. Indeed, Diogenes Laertius attests: [The Stoics] believe that there is nothing between virtue and vice, whereas the Peripatetics say that between virtue and vice there is moral progress [προκοπή]. For the Stoics say that a piece of wood must be either straight or crooked, and so too a person must be either just or unjust, and not more just or more unjust; and similarly for the other virtues.53 When Laertius says that for the orthodox Stoics there is nothing intermediate between virtue and vice, he means to say that there is nothing that is partly virtue and partly vice, as one might think is the case with moral progress. It is the Stoics who paid special attention to the notion of moral progress, as is rightly maintained by John Fitzgerald.54 At the same time, it would seem that, among the Stoics, those who made the most of the notion of moral progress

50 See Ramelli, Bardaisan of Edessa, 70–106. 51 See Ramelli, “Stoicismo e Cristianesimo in area siriaca.” 52 ‫ܡܪܕܝ > ܡܪܕܝܐ‬, ‫“ = ܡܪܕܝܬܐ‬progress”: see R. Payne Smith, A Compendious Syriac Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903), 299. 53 Vitae 7.127 = SVF 3.536; Arnim, ed., Stoicorum veterum Fragmenta, 3: 143. 54 J. Fitzgerald, “The Passions and Moral Progress: An Introduction,” in Passions and Moral Progress in Greco-Roman Thought, ed. J. Fitzgerald (London: Routledge, 2008), 15–16.

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were the Middle and Roman Stoics,55 whereas the Old Stoics, in contrast to the Peripatetics, according to Diogenes Laertius,56 did not admit of it. This seems to be the prevailing view among scholars as well.57 On the other hand, a fragment from Zeno (SVF 1.234)58 suggests that for this Old Stoic there exists moral progress: [E]ach person can be aware of his own progress on the basis of his dreams, if he sees that he takes pleasure in nothing shameful and that he does not approve or do anything terrible or strange, but rather, as in the clear depths of a calm sea, without waves, the imaginative and the emotive parts of his soul shine forth, bathed in reason [λόγος]. This fragment indicates that Zeno regarded moral progress as a movement toward the predominance of the rational faculty in a person’s life, actions, and choices. This tension seems to reappear also in later authors, such as Musonius.59 I think that the apparent contradiction between the sources, in particular this fragment of Zeno and the aforementioned passage of Laertius, may be explained if we take into consideration the whole of Chrysippus’ fragments concerning προκοπή. He considers nature to manifest a continual progress, understood as a strengthening and perfecting of the logos: ipsam per se naturam longius progredi, quae etiam nullo docente  … confirmat ipsa per se rationem et perficit (SVF 3.220),60 “Nature on its own progresses further, and although nobody teaches her … she strengthens and brings to perfection reason [i.e., the logos] by herself.” The source, Cicero, Leg. 1.9.27, is reliable and the verb progredi clearly denotes progress. It is not entirely clear whether this 55 On the importance of moral progress in Middle and Neo-Stoicism, see G. Roskam, On the Path to Virtue: The Stoic Doctrine of Moral Progress and Its Reception in (Middle-) Platonism (Leuven: Leuven University, 2005), 33–144; J. Wildberger, “Amicitia and Eros: Seneca’s Adaptation of a Stoic Concept of Friendship for Roman Men in Progress,” in Philosophie in Rom – Römische Philosophie? Kultur-, literatur- und philosophiegeschichtliche Perspektiven / Philosophy in Rome or Roman Philosophy? Cultural, Literary, and Philosophical Historical Perspectives, ed. G.M. Müller and F.M. Zini (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 387–426. 56 In the above-mentioned Vitae 7.227 = SVF 3.536. Arnim, ed., Stoicorum veterum Fragmenta, 3:143. 57 See Roskam, On the Path to Virtue, 15–33; O. Luschnat, “Das Problem des ethischen Fortschritts in der alten Stoa,” Philologus 102 (1958): 178–214. 58 J. ab Arnim, ed., Stoicorum veterum Fragmenta (Leipzig: Teubner, 1903–1924), 3:56. 59 See I.L.E. Ramelli, “Ierocle Neostoico in Stobeo: I καθήκοντα e l’evoluzione dell’etica stoica,” in Deciding Culture: Stobaeus’ Collection of Excerpts of Ancient Greek Authors, ed. G. Reydams-Schils (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 537–575. 60 Arnim, ed., Stoicorum veterum Fragmenta, 3:52.

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is physical or moral progress, given that both seem to be progress toward the logos; one may even suppose that, from the Stoic holistic and monistic point of view, these converge into one and the same progress. A similar notion seems to be expressed in SVF 3.219, deriving from another reliable source, Seneca’s Ep. 49.11:61 dociles natura nos edidit et rationem dedit imperfectam, sed quae perfici posset, “Nature generated us susceptible of education and gave us a reason that was imperfect but capable of becoming perfect.” Here, too, progress is seen as the natural perfecting of the logos. Another fragment confirms that this natural progress of reason was regarded as related to progress in virtue: “the Stoics maintained that since the beginning, by nature, there exists the noteworthy progress [προκοπήν] toward the virtues, which the Peripatetics, too, called ‘natural virtue’” (SVF 3.217).62 This fragment was ascribed by von Arnim to Chrysippus, but, as is often the case, the source, Simplicius in his commentary on Aristotle’s Categoriae, speaks of “the Stoics” in general. The last three fragments quoted seem to point to the natural perfecting of the logos and, with this, a natural progress toward virtue. This kind of progress, linked to the development of the logos, seems to be the same kind as the one referred to in the fragment of Zeno quoted above (SVF 1.234). Natural progress is important, but for the Stoics, perfection in virtue depends not only on nature, but also on paideia. For, “even those who have a poor natural disposition to virtue, if they receive an adequate education, reach moral perfection, and, on the contrary, those who have an excellent natural disposition become evil [κακοί] on account of carelessness” (SVF 3.225, from Clement of Alexandria).63 Training and paideia are linked to moral progress. This is confirmed, to my mind, by a letter of Zeno, quoted by Diogenes Laertius (Vitae 7.8), on the basis of a reliable Stoic source, Apollonius of Tyre. Zeno is replying to Antigonus Gonatas, who asked him to come to Macedonia to give him a paideia in virtue and thus enable him to achieve perfect happiness. Zeno praises the true paideia, which is for him philosophical education, and leads to happiness through moral progress. This is achieved by means of adequate exercise (ἄσκησις) and an energetic teacher. The goal of progress will be “the complete/perfect acquisition of virtue” and thus the attainment of perfect happiness. According to David Hahm, this letter in fact reflects Chrysippus’ teaching on education and moral progress toward perfect virtue and happiness.64

61 62 63 64

Arnim, ed., Stoicorum veterum Fragmenta, 3: 52. Arnim, ed., Stoicorum veterum Fragmenta, 3: 51. Arnim, ed., Stoicorum veterum Fragmenta, 3: 52. D. Hahm, “Zeno before and after Stoicism,” in The Philosophy of Zeno, ed. T. Scaltsas and A. Mason (Larnaka, Cyprus: Municipality of Larnaca, 2002), 29–56, esp. 39.

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Now, in several fragments, all ascribed to Chrysippus in SVF, it is stated that moral progress toward virtue does exist, and virtues themselves are susceptible to increment (SVF 3.226, from Chrysippus’ On Zeus),65 but at the same time it is asserted that those who are still prey to passions and are still approaching virtue without having reached it yet, are as miserable as those who have made no progress at all. This, however, does not mean that moral progress does not exist for the Stoics. A confirmation of this position is given by the fragment SVF 3.535.66 It comes from a decidedly hostile source, Plutarch, who moreover speaks not of Chrysippus but of “the Stoics” in general, and thus it must be treated with caution, but its sense is clear: the Stoics do admit of progress (προκοπή), although Plutarch remarks that this concept of theirs remains an enigma to him, “but those who have not yet liberated themselves from absolutely all passions and illnesses are as miserable [κακοδαιμονοῦντας] as those who have not yet got rid of the worst of them.” The very same idea is expressed in SVF 3.530:142, which comes from a trustworthy source, Cicero (Fin. 3.14.48).67 He records the similes that the Stoics used to illustrate this concept:68 Plutarch, in SVF 3.539,69 reports the same exempla of persons immersed in water and of blind newborn puppies, and exactly the same idea is repeated in SVF 3.532, from Cicero Fin. 4.9.21.70 The sense is the same: those who are approaching virtue but have not yet reached it are as miseri as those who are very far from it. Thus, the Old Stoics did admit of progress toward virtue, but maintained that happiness, which follows only virtue itself, is not achieved until one has reached complete virtue (thus, in SVF 3.53471 it is rightly stated that the Stoics, i.e., the Old Stoics, “grant virtue only to perfect philosophy, whereas the Peripatetics and others grant this honour also to those who are imperfect”; see also 3.510:137–138). This does not mean that the Old Stoics did not ascribe 65 66 67 68

Arnim, ed., Stoicorum veterum Fragmenta, 3: 52. Arnim, ed., Stoicorum veterum Fragmenta, 3: 143. Arnim, ed., Stoicorum veterum Fragmenta, 3: 142. Ut enim qui demersi sunt in aqua nihilo magis respirare possunt, si non longe absunt a summo ut iam iamque possint emergere, quam si etiamtum essent in profundo, nec catulus ille qui iam appropinquat ut videat plus cernit quam is qui modo est natus, item qui processit aliquantum ad virtutis habitum nihilominus in miseria est quam ille qui nihil processit, “Just as those who are immersed in water, if they are not far removed from the surface, so that they can emerge in time, cannot breathe more than if they were still in the depths, and a puppy that is on the verge of seeing can see no more than a newborn pup, so the person who has made some progress toward the state of virtue is no less in misery than the one who has made no progress at all.” 69 Arnim, ed., Stoicorum veterum Fragmenta, 3: 143. 70 Arnim, ed., Stoicorum veterum Fragmenta, 3: 142. 71 Arnim, ed., Stoicorum veterum Fragmenta, 3: 142.

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importance to moral progress. That they spoke of the persons progressing (προκόπτοντες) and distinguished them from both the totally vicious or ignorant and the perfectly virtuous or educated is further attested by Proclus in SVF 3.543:72 the vicious blame others for their own misery; those who are making progress blame themselves for their errors; the virtuous accuse neither others nor themselves, because they do not err and are not miserable. These considerations explain the reason why Laertius reports that for the Stoics there was no intermediate state between virtue and vice because an action is either virtuous or vicious, while a fragment of Zeno attests that the founder of the Stoa admitted of the possibility of progress. Therefore, in Mara’s passage, according to my interpretation (“progress in it is with heavy labour”), Mara would be underlining in a Stoicizing way the difficulties of προκόπτοντες in the world. Passions and Emotions Stoic theories of emotions are likewise embedded in Mara’s letter. In §7, Mara says, in reference to one’s children: “We suffer injury from both things working together: when they are upright their love torments us and we are attracted by their behavior, but when they are corrupt we grow weary of their rebelliousness and are agonized by their depravity.”73 Mara states that “we suffer injury” even from being conquered by our children’s upright behavior, because being conquered by someone’s behavior, just as being tormented by love, is a passion for the Stoics, and all πάθη, unlike εὐπάθειαι and προπάθειαι,74 are evaluated in a negative way. Good emotions, εὐπάθειαι (SVF 3.431 = Diogenes Laertius 7.116),75 are those experienced by sages, and only by them, as opposed to ordinary emotions or πάθη, which are excessive in nature and therefore irrational, and are experienced by those who fall short of wisdom. Chrysippus in Περὶ παθῶν 72 Arnim, ed., Stoicorum veterum Fragmenta, 3: 145. 73 In the relevant note, in his preparatory edition, Rensberger observes that Cureton and Schulthess read the verb “afflicted” as an ethpeel, thus rendering “we are attracted by” (Cureton) or “lassen wir uns hinreissen” (Schulthess), whereas it should be interpreted as an ethpaal, “we are afflicted,” due to a parallel with “their love torments us.” I rendered “siamo conquistati dai loro costumi” (“we are conquered by their behaviour”). This interpretation, closer to Cureton’s and Schulthess’s, makes sense in that, if our children are upright, we are conquered, rather than afflicted, by their behaviour. 74 On Stoic προπάθειαι see M. Graver, Stoicism and Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007), 85–100, who rightly distinguishes feelings and affective responses to them, as a result of judgment (i.e., emotions proper). 75 See my notes to this paragraph in I.L.E. Ramelli, Diogene Laerzio, Vite e dottrine dei più celebri filosofi, ed. G. Reale and I.L.E. Ramelli (Milan: Bompiani, 2005); this is also used as an edition of Laertius throughout. Arnim, ed., Stoicorum veterum Fragmenta, 3: 105.

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described εὐπάθειαι as εὔλογοι ὁρμαί, rational impulses, whereas πάθη are irrational impulses, ἄλογοι ὁρμαί (SVF 3.389).76 Among the impulses experienced by humans, some are practical, in that they concern a future object and involve an action that is still to be accomplished, while others are non-practical and concern a present object. Practical impulses of the irrational kind constitute the πάθη of ἐπιθυμία and φόβος, desire and fear: the former derives from an inclination toward something, the latter from a repulsion. The corresponding rational impulses (εὐπάθειαι) are, respectively, βούλησις and εὐλάβεια, will and circumspection. Non-practical irrational impulses (πάθη) are ἡδονή and λύπη, the former being the consequence of an inclination toward something, the latter of a repulsion. Χαρά is the rational counterpart of ἡδονή, while λύπη has no rational counterpart. Thus, the εὐπάθειαι fall under three heads, rather than four, as in the case of πάθη.77 Similarly Stoic are the ideas expressed in Mara’s letter, that humans are mortal and there is no personal afterlife (105–6, 153–5, 244), that virtue/wisdom is sufficient for living well (23–31), that emotions are to be eradicated rather than mitigated (193–4), and that God and Fate interfere directly in the lives of individuals and nations.

Concluding Remarks

It is not surprising that a letter written by a Stoicizing thinker and replete with Stoic notions also includes a theodicy and a divine explanation of tragedies that correspond to Stoic tenets. The only big difference consists in the inclusion of Jesus Christ, “the wise king of the Jews,” among famous Greek philosophers such as Socrates and Pythagoras, who were unjustly killed, but both avenged and rewarded by God. In this connection, the present research has examined carefully, also in discussion with recent scholarship, the issue of theodicy in a Stoicizing document of the Syrian Hellenized world, stemming from Roman imperial times, against the background of Stoicism and Stoic theodicy. A close literary and philosophical analysis of the relevant passages of the Letter – also comparing it to early Syriac literary texts, such as the Liber legum regionum, and Stoic philosophy from the Ancient Stoa to early imperial times, as well as 76 Arnim, ed., Stoicorum veterum Fragmenta, 3: 94. On εὐπάθειαι Graver, Stoicism and Emotions, 35–60. On πάθη in Stoicism see A. Long and D. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), chap. 65; J. Annas, Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 103–120. 77 Diogenes Laertius 7.115–16; SVF 3.391 = Ps.Andronicus Περὶ παθῶν 1. Arnim, ed., Stoicorum veterum Fragmenta, 3: 95.

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the first documents concerning Jesus Christ – seem to confirm the Stoicizing features of the concept of theodicy that is at the core of Mara’s treatment of Greek philosophers and, along with them, Jesus, “the wise king of the Jews.” Interestingly, Platonic and Christian discourses of otherworldly survival, with reward or punishment, are not deployed in this letter, which adds to its “pagan” Stoic flavour. Bibliography Annas, J. Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind (Berkeley: University of California, 1992). von Arnim, J., ed. Stoicorum veterum Fragmenta, 4 vols. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1903–1924). Babbitt, F.C., et al., ed. Plutarch. Moralia, Loeb Classical Library vols. 1–15 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936). Boeri, M. and R. Salles. Los filósofos estoicos (Sankt Augustin: Academia, 2014). Boys-Stones, G. L.Annaeus Cornutus (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2018). Butts, A. Language Change in the Wake of Empire: Syriac in Its Greco-Roman Context (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2016). Chin, C. “Rhetorical Practice in the Chreia Elaboration of Mara bar Sarapion,” Hugoye 9, no. 2 (2006) §§1–24. Drijvers, H.J.W. Bardaisan of Edessa (Assen: van Gorcum, 1966; repr. Piscataway: Gorgias, 2014). Esler, P. “Beware the Messiah! Psalms of Solomon 17 and the Death of Jesus,” in To Set at Liberty: Essays on Early Christianity and Its Social World in Honor of John H. Elliott, ed. S. Black (Sheffield: Phoenix, 2014), 179–193. Fitzgerald, J. “The Passions and Moral Progress: An Introduction,” in Passions and Moral Progress in Greco-Roman Thought, ed. J. Fitzgerald (London: Routledge, 2008), 15–16. Goodman, M. A History of Judaism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018). Görgemanns, H. “Philosophie, Gesetz und Vorbild. Zu einigen Abschnitten des 4. Makkabäerbuches,” in Quaerite faciem eius semper, FS Albrecht Dihle, ed. A. Jördens, et al. (Hamburg: Kovacs, 2008), 78–90. Graver, M. Stoicism and Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007). Hahm, D. “Zeno before and after Stoicism,” in The Philosophy of Zeno, ed. Th. Scaltsas and A. Mason (Larnaka, Cyprus: Municipality of Larnaca, 2002), 29–56. van Henten, J.W. The Maccabean Martyrs as Saviours of the Jewish People (Leiden: Brill, 1997). van der Horst, P.W. Studies in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity (Leiden: Brill 2014). van Kooten, G.H., “The Last Days of Socrates and Christ,” in Religio-Philosophical Discourses in the Mediterranean World: From Plato, through Jesus, to Late Antiquity, ed. G.H. van Kooten, A. Klostergaard Petersen (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 219–243; 219–221.

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Ramelli, I.L.E. Stoici Romani Minori (Milan: Bompiani, 2008). Ramelli, I.L.E. Bardesane Kata Heimarmenēs (Bologna: ESD, 2009). Ramelli, I.L.E. “Bardesane e la sua scuola, l’Apologia siriaca ‘di Melitone’ e la Doctrina Addai,” Aevum 83 (2009): 141–168. Ramelli, I.L.E. “Cornutus in Christlichem Umfeld: Märtyrer, Allegorist, und Grammatiker,” in Cornutus: Die Griechischen Götter. Ein Überblick über Namen, Bilder und Deutungen, ed. H.-G. Nesselrath, G. Boy-Stones, H.-J. Klauck and I.L.E. Ramelli (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 207–231. Ramelli, I.L.E., ed. and trans. Hierocles the Stoic: Edition, Translation and Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 2009). Ramelli, I.L.E. “Origen, Bardaisan, and the Origin of Universal Salvation,” Harvard Theological Review 102 (2009): 135–168. Ramelli, I.L.E. “Ierocle Neostoico in Stobeo: I καθήκοντα e l’evoluzione dell’etica stoica,” in Deciding Culture: Stobaeus’ Collection of Excerpts of Ancient Greek Authors, ed. G. Reydams-Schils (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 537–575. Ramelli, I.L.E. “Gesù e il Tempio,” Maia 63 (2011): 1–38. Ramelli, I.L.E. “Disability in Bardaisan and Origen. Between the Stoic Adiaphora and the Lord’s Grace,” in Gestörte Lektüre. Disability als hermeneutische Leitkategorie biblischer Exegese, ed. W. Grünstäudl and M. Schiefer (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2012), 141–159. Ramelli, I.L.E. “Mara Bar Sarapion’s Letter: Comments on the Syriac Edition, Translation, and Notes by David Rensberger,” in The Letter of Mara bar Serapion in Context, ed. A. Merz and T. Tieleman (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 205–231. Ramelli, I.L.E. The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis: A Critical Assessment from the New Testament to Eriugena (Leiden: Brill, 2013). Ramelli, I.L.E. “Jesus, James the Just, a Gate, and an Epigraph,” in Das Gesetzesverständnis der Logienquelle auf dem Hintergrund frühjüdischer Theologie, ed. M. Tiwald (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2013), 203–229. Ramelli, I.L.E. “Mara bar Serapion,” in Encyclopedia of Ancient Christianity, ed. A. DiBerardino (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2014), 2: 668–669. Ramelli, I.L.E. “Ethos and Logos: A Second-Century Apologetical Debate between ‘Pagan’ and Christian Philosophers,” Vigiliae Christianae 69 (2015): 123–156. Ramelli, I.L.E. “Revisiting Aphrahat’s Sources: Beyond Scripture?,” Parole de l’Orient 41 (2015): 367–397. Ramelli, I.L.E. Social Justice and the Legitimacy of Slavery: The Role of Philosophical Asceticism from Ancient Judaism to Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Ramelli, I.L.E. “Prophecy in Origen: Between Scripture and Philosophy,” Journal of Early Christian History 7, no. 2 (2017): 17–39.

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Ramelli, I.L.E. “Annaeus Cornutus and the Stoic Allegorical Tradition: Meaning, Sources, and Impact,” AITIA. Regards sur la culture hellénistique 8, no. 2 (2018): https://journals.openedition.org/aitia/2882. Ramelli, I.L.E. “Bardaisan of Edessa, Origen, and Imperial Philosophy,” Aram 30 (2018): 1–26. Ramelli, I.L.E. “Bardaisan (Philosopher and Poet),” in Brill Encyclopedia of Early Christianity, ed. D. Hunter, P. van Geest, B.J. Lietaert Peerbolte (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming); online 2018: https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/browse/brill-encyclopedia-of -early-christianity-online. Ramelli, I.L.E. “Gregory of Nyssa on the Soul (and the Restoration): From Plato to Origen,” in Exploring Gregory of Nyssa: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives, ed. A. Marmodoro and N. McLynn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 110–141. Ramelli, I.L.E. “Mara Bar Serapion, Letter,” in Encyclopaedia of Second Temple Judaism, ed. L.T. Stuckenbruck, D.M. Gurtner (London: T&T Clark, 2018). Ramelli, I.L.E. “Origen,” in A History of Mind and Body in Late Antiquity, ed. S. Cartwright and A. Marmodoro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 245–266. Ramelli, I.L.E. Bardaisan of Edessa: A Reassessment of the Evidence and a New Interpretation (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2009; electronic edition Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019). Ramelli, I.L.E. “The Body of Christ as Imperishable Wood: Hippolytus and Bardaisan of Edessa’s Complex Christology,” in Symposium Syriacum XII, Held at St Lawrence College, Rome 19-21 August 2016, Organized by the Pontifical Oriental Institute on the occasion of the Centenary Celebration (1917–2017), ed. E. Vergani and S. Chialà (Orientalia Christiana Analecta 311, Rome: Pontifical Oriental Institute, 2022), 447–458. Ramelli, I.L.E. “Αnnaeus Cornutus,” in Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Mythography, ed. R. Scott Smith and S.M. Trzaskoma (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 170–178. Ramelli, I.L.E. “Bardaisan of Edessa on Freewill, Fate and Nature: Alexander of Aphrodisias, Origen, and Diodore of Tarsus,” in Women’s Perspectives on Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, ed. I. Chouinard, Z. McConaughey, R. Noël, and A. Medeiros Ramos (New York: Springer Nature Switzerland AG, 2021), 169–176. Ramelli, I.L.E. “Bardaisan: A Gnostic or a Polemicist against Gnostic Tenets?” Aram 33 (2021): 165–189. Ramelli, I.L.E. “The Logos/Nous One-Many between ‘Pagan’ and Christian Platonism: Bardaisan, Clement, Origen, Plotinus, and Gregory of Nyssa,” in Studia Patristica 102 (2021): 11–44. Ramelli, I.L.E. “Origen’s Philosophical Exegesis of the Bible against the Backdrop of Ancient Philosophy (Stoicism, Platonism) and Hellenistic and Rabbinic Judaism,” main lecture at the Conference, The Bible: Its Translations and Interpretations in the Patristic Time, KUL 16–17 October 2019, Studia Patristica 103 (2021): 13–58.

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A Monk and a Fish by the River of Babylon: An Unpublished Edifying Tale Sergey Minov The1 considerable and diverse corpus of hagiographical writings preserved in Syriac presents a rich trove of information for students of the late antique and medieval Middle East.2 However, as Sebastian Brock pointed out more than a decade ago, this body of literature has been rather neglected by scholars.3 Since the time of that remarque, a number of significant contributions to this field of Syriac studies have been made by Brock himself, as well as by other scholars. Nevertheless, several subsets of texts within the Syriac hagiographical corpus remain overlooked. One such understudied group of texts is comprised of relatively short compositions that belong to the genre of so-called “edifying stories,” known also as “spiritually beneficial tales.”4 These, usually brief, narratives were produced and originally circulated in the monastic circles of Egypt and Palestine. Their main purpose was to propagate values and set standards of conduct – originally for those who chose to pursue the monastic way of life, but later on for the secular laity as well. The edifying stories are distinct from the genre of Apophthegmata 1 This research was funded by the Advanced Research Grant “The Cult of Saints” from the European Research Council (Grant 340540). 2 For an overview, see S.P. Brock, “Syriac Hagiography,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography, vol. 1, Periods and Places, ed. S. Efthymiadis (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 259–283; A. Binggeli, ed., L’hagiographie syriaque, Études syriaques 9 (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 2012). A useful online resource is “Bibliotheca Hagiographica Syriaca Electronica,” accessible at http://syriaca.org/saints/index.html. Accessed 8 April 2022. 3 S.P. Brock, “Saints in Syriac: A Little-Tapped Resource,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 16, no. 2 (2008): 181–196 (181). 4 On this genre, see J. Wortley, “The Genre of the Spiritually Beneficial Tale,” Scripta & e-Scripta 8–9 (2010): 71–91; J. Wortley, “Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell in Byzantine ‘Beneficial Tales,’” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 55 (2001): 53–69; A. Binggeli, “Collections of Edifying Stories,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography, vol. 2, Genres and Contexts, ed. S. Efthymiadis (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 143–159. For attempts to catalogize this diverse material, attested in Greek, see F. Halkin, Bibliotheca hagiographica graeca, 3 vols., Subsidia Hagiographica 8a (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1957), 3: 175–182, 191–214; J. Wortley, “The Repertoire of Byzantine ‘Spiritually Beneficial Tales,’” Scripta & e-Scripta 8–9 (2010): 93–306. For a seminal discussion of this genre in the larger context of late antique hagiography, see C. Rapp, “Storytelling as Spiritual Communication in Early Greek Hagiography: The Use of Diegesis,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 6 (1998): 431–448.

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Patrum, the sayings of the Desert Fathers that conveyed their teaching, in that they demonstrate how this theory should be applied in the course of everyday life. By providing “real-life” examples of the enactment of Christian virtues, these stories taught spiritual lessons while aiming at moral improvement. The earliest specimens of this genre appeared during the late fourth century. Such stories circulated as separate units, but could also be incorporated into longer works or aggregated into collections. A considerable number of such stories are scattered throughout Syriac manuscripts, most of which remain unpublished and unstudied.5 While some of them, such as the stories connected with the famous Egyptian ascetic Abba Daniel,6 were translated from Greek, others are original Syriac compositions. In what follows, I would like to explore this little-tapped resource by publishing for the first time a brief account of an unexpected friendship between a monk and a fish. It is attested, as far as my knowledge goes, in two manuscripts, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Syr. f. 12, and Birmingham, Mingana Syr. 71. The manuscript Bodleian Library, Syr. f. 12 is an anthology of different writings. Comprising 183 folios, it is written in a partially vocalized East Syrian script. Unfortunately, both the beginning and end of the manuscript are lost, so that the only explicit information on the circumstances of its production is the name of its scribe, Širinšā, preserved on f. 155r. In an unpublished handlist of the Margoliouth Collection of Syriac manuscripts in the Bodleian Library,7 Sebastian Brock dates this manuscript tentatively to the eighteenth century, on the basis of its script. The anthology in Bodleian Library, Syr. f. 12 is comprised of a diverse assortment of works, which include the Story of Ahikar, several apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, lexicographical works, and some other 5 For an overview of this material, see F. Ruani, “Preliminary Notes on Edifying Stories in Syriac Hagiographical Collections,” Studia Patristica 91 (2017): 257–266. A number of such texts have been published recently by the present author; see S. Minov, “The Therapy for Grief and the Practice of Incubation in Early Medieval Palestine: The Evidence of the Syriac Story of a Woman from Jerusalem,” in Prayer and Worship in Eastern Christianities, 5th to 11th Centuries, ed. B. Bitton-Ashkelony and D. Krueger (London: Routledge, 2017), 210–238; S. Minov, “Friday Veneration among Syriac Christians: The Witness of the Story of the Holy Friday,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society III, 30, no. 2 (2020): 195–222; S. Minov, “Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Syriac Story of the Mystery Hidden in the Eucharistic Offering,” Aramaic Studies 19, no. 2 (2021): 198–214. 6 See S.P. Brock, “A Syriac Narratio Attributed to Abba Daniel of Sketis,” Analecta Bollandiana 113, no. 3–4 (1995): 269–280. See also an English translation of the story of the nun Anastasia (BHO 242) that also belongs to the cycle of Abba Daniel in Holy Women of the Syrian Orient, ed. S.P. Brock and S.A. Harvey, Transformation of the Classical Heritage 13 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 142–149. 7 Available online: https://libguides.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/ld.php?content_id=17931955. Accessed 8 April 2022.

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compositions. Our story appears on ff. 116v–118r, preceded by Pseudo-Basil’s History of Joseph, and followed by the apocryphal Acts of John. The manuscript Mingana Syr. 71 is likewise an anthology of various writings, for the most part hagiographical works.8 Written in a non-vocalized West Syrian Serto script, it comprises 154 folios and, like Bodleian Library, Syr. f. 12, lacks the ending. As for the date of this manuscript, in the absence of a colophon or other scribal notes, one is left to rely on the tentative suggestion by Alphonse Mingana, who dates it to around the year 1600, based on the script. Our text occupies ff. 4r–v, preceded by the lives of Symmachus, Ḥanna, and Isaiah of Aleppo, and followed by another edifying story, one about two monks who lived on an island in the Red Sea. Both manuscripts present basically the same text of the story. Neither of the two textual witnesses could be regarded as an autograph of our work, and there is no compelling reason to prefer one of them over the other. Since the version of Bodleian Library, Syr. f. 12 seems to display better spellings on several occasions, I have chosen it as the main text. The Syriac text of the story is, thus, presented on the basis of this manuscript, with the variant readings from Mingana Syr. 71 given in footnotes.

Syriac Text 10.‫ ܕܥܡܪ ܗܘܐ ܥܠ ܢܗܪܐ ܦܪܬ‬9‫ܬܘܒ ܬܫܥܝܬܐ ܕܣܒܐ ܚܕ ܝܚܝܕܝܐ‬

‫ ܘܒܚܕ‬.‫ ܦܪܬ ̣ܗܘ ܘܬܠܡܝܕܗ‬11‫ ܘܥܡܪ ܗܘܐ ܥܠ‬.‫ܝܚܝܕܝܐ ܚܕ ܣܒܐ ܐܝܬ ܗܘܐ‬ ̈ ‫ܡܢ‬ .‫ | ̈ܡܝܐ ̣ܡܢ ܢܗܪܐ ܐܝܟ ܥܝܕܗ‬f. 117r | ‫ܝܘܡܝܢ ܢܚܬ ܬܠܡܝܕܗ ܕܢܝܬܐ‬ ‫ ܘܫܩܠܗ ܣܒܐ‬.‫ܘܐܫܟܚ ܒܗܘܢ ܢܘܢܐ ܚܕ ܙܥܘܪܐ ܘܐܝܬܝܗ ܠܘܬ ܣܒܐ‬ ‫ ܕܐܝܬ ܗܘܐ ܠܗ‬13‫ ܠܢܘܢܐ ̇ܗܘ ܘܪܒܝܗ ܒܓܘܪܢܐ ܚܕ ܥܠ ܓܢܒ ܒܪܐ‬12‫ܩܕܝܫܐ‬ ‫ ܠܚܡܐ ܘܝܪܩܐ ܘܡܣܬܝܒܪ‬15‫ ܗܘܐ ܠܗ ˺ ̣ܗܘ ܣܒܐ‬14‫ ܘܟܠܝܘܡ ܫܪܐ‬.‫ܒܩܠܝܬܐ‬ 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15

For a description, see A. Mingana, Catalogue of the Mingana Collection of Manuscripts Now in the Possession of the Trustees of the Woodbrooke Settlement, Selly Oak, Birmingham, 3 vols., Woodbrooke Catalogues 1–3 (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1933, 1936, 1939), 1: cols. 180–188. M– M + ‫ܘܢܘܢܗ‬ M + ‫ܢܗܪܐ‬ M– M ‫ܒܐܪܐ‬ M ‫ܣܐܡ‬ M–

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‫ܗܘܐ ܢܘܢܐ ̇ܗܘ‪ .‬ܘܣܡ ܠܗ ܫܡܐ ܘܩܪܝܗܝ‪ 16‬ܩ ̇‬ ‫ܛܘܤ‪˺ 17.‬ܗܢܘ ܕܝܢ ܥܠ ܫܡܗ‬ ‫ܹ‬ ‫̇‬ ‫ܕܗܘ‪ 18‬ܢܘܢܐ ܕܒܠܥ‪ 19‬ܠܝܘܢܢ‪ .‬ܘܟܠܝܘܡ ܩܐܡ‪ 20‬ܗܘܐ ܣܒܐ ˺ܥܠ ܓܢܒ‪21‬‬ ‫̇‬ ‫̇‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܓܘܪܢܐ ˺ܕܡܝܐ ܘܩܪܐ ܗܘܐ ܠܗ‪ 22‬ܘܐܡܪ ˺ ܹܩܛܘܤ ܹܩܛܘܤ‪̣ 23.‬ܗܘ ܕܝܢ ܦܬܚ‬ ‫ܗܘܐ ܦܘܡܗ ܘܫܕܐ ܗܘܐ ܠܗ‪ 24‬ܣܒܐ ܡܐܟܘܠܬܐ‪ .‬ܘܗܟܢܐ ܥܒܕ ܗܘܐ‬ ‫ܟܠܝܘܡ‪ .‬ܥܕܡܐ ܕܪܒܐ ܢܘܢܐ ̇ܗܘ ܘܗܘܐ ܪܒܐ‪ .‬ܘܠܐ ܡܫܟܚ ܗܘܐ ܕܢܬܗܦܟ‬ ‫ܒܓܘܪܢܐ ̇ܗܘ‪ .‬ܗܝܕܝܢ ܐܡܪ ˺ܠܗ ܠܣܒܐ ܬܠܡܝܕܗ‪ | f. 117v | 25‬ܕܗܢܐ ܢܘܢܐ ܥܫܢ‬ ‫ܠܗ‪ .‬ܘܠܡܐ‪ 26‬ܟܕ ܠܐ ܡܫܟܚ‪ 27‬ܠܡܬܗܦܟܘ ܒܓܘܪܢܐ ܢܡܘܬ‪ .‬ܘܢܐܒܕ‪ 28‬ܡܢܢ‪.‬‬ ‫ܐܠܐ ܐܢ ܨܒܐ ܐܢܬ ܡܛܘܝܢܢ ܠܗ‪ 29‬ܝܘܡܢܐ ܘܐܟܠܝܢܢ ܠܗ‪ .‬ܥܢܐ ܕܝܢ ܣܒܐ‬ ‫ܘܐܡܪ ܠܗ‪ .‬ܕܚܤ‪ 30‬ܠܝ ܡܢ ܐܠܗܐ‪ .‬ܕܡܢ ܒܬܪ ܗܢܐ ܙܒܢܐ ܐܪܝܟܐ‪ 31‬ܕܪܒܝܬܗ‬ ‫ܘܬܪܣܝܬܗ‪˺ 32.‬ܡܡܪܚ ܐܢܐ‪ 33‬ܕܐܟܠܝܘܗܝ‪ 34.‬ܘܟܕ‪ 35‬ܝܕܥ ܣܒܐ ˺ܕܦܣܩ ܠܗ‬ ‫ܬܠܡܝܕܗ‪ 36‬ܒܪܥܝܢܗ ܕܢܐܟܠܝܘܗܝ‪˺ .‬ܘܕܠܡܐ ܟܕ ܠܐ ܝܕܥ ̣ܗܘ ܢܣܥܘܪ ܗܕܐ‪37.‬‬ ‫ܫܩܠܗ ˺ ̣ܗܘ ̣ܗܘ‪ 38‬ܣܒܐ ܠܢܘܢܐ‪ 39‬ܒܣܩܐ‪ 40‬ܘܫܕܝܗܝ‪ 41‬ܒܪܫܥܬܗ‪ 42‬ܒܢܗܪܐ ܦܪܬ‪.‬‬ ‫ܘܟܠܝܘܡ ܡܩܕܡ‪ 43‬ܗܘܐ ˺ܣܒܐ ̇ܗܘ ܒܨܦܪܐ‪ 44.‬ܘܩܐܡ ܗܘܐ ܥܠ‪ 45‬ܢܗܪܐ‬ ‫–‪M‬‬ ‫ܩܝܛܘܤ ‪M‬‬ ‫ܫܡ ‪M‬‬ ‫ܕܒܠܥܗ ‪M‬‬ ‫ܐܬܐ ‪M‬‬ ‫ܠܘܬ ‪M‬‬ ‫–‪M‬‬ ‫ܣܝܛܘܤ ܣܝܛܘܤ ‪M‬‬ ‫̇ܗܘ ‪M +‬‬ ‫ܗܘܐ ܬܠܡܝܕܐ ܠܪܒܗ ‪M‬‬ ‫ܕܠܡܐ ‪M‬‬ ‫ܢܫܟܚ ‪M‬‬ ‫ܠܗ ‪M +‬‬ ‫–‪M‬‬ ‫ܚܤ ‪M‬‬ ‫–‪M‬‬ ‫ܘܬܕܣܝܬܗ ‪M‬‬ ‫–‪M‬‬ ‫ܐܟܠܝܘܗܝ ‪M‬‬ ‫ܒܪܡ ‪M‬‬ ‫ܕܬܠܡܝܕܐ ܦܣܩ ܗܘܐ ‪M‬‬ ‫ܘܟܕ ܙܥ ܕܕܠܡܐ ܠܐ ܝܕܐ ܣܒܐ ܢܛܘܝܗ ܬܠܡܝܕܐ‪ .‬ܒܪܫܥܬܗ ‪M‬‬ ‫–‪M‬‬ ‫–‪M‬‬ ‫ܘܐܘܒܠ ‪M +‬‬ ‫ܫܕܝܗܝ ‪M‬‬ ‫–‪M‬‬ ‫ܐܬܐ ‪M‬‬ ‫ܒܨܦܪܐ ܣܒܐ ̇ܗܘ ‪M‬‬ ‫ܓܢܒ ‪M +‬‬

‫ ‪16‬‬ ‫ ‪17‬‬ ‫ ‪18‬‬ ‫ ‪19‬‬ ‫ ‪20‬‬ ‫ ‪21‬‬ ‫ ‪22‬‬ ‫ ‪23‬‬ ‫ ‪24‬‬ ‫ ‪25‬‬ ‫ ‪26‬‬ ‫ ‪27‬‬ ‫ ‪28‬‬ ‫ ‪29‬‬ ‫ ‪30‬‬ ‫ ‪31‬‬ ‫ ‪32‬‬ ‫ ‪33‬‬ ‫ ‪34‬‬ ‫ ‪35‬‬ ‫ ‪36‬‬ ‫ ‪37‬‬ ‫ ‪38‬‬ ‫ ‪39‬‬ ‫ ‪40‬‬ ‫ ‪41‬‬ ‫ ‪42‬‬ ‫ ‪43‬‬ ‫ ‪44‬‬ ‫ ‪45‬‬

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48‫ ܩܛܘܤ‬47.‫ ˺ܘܩܪܐ ܗܘܐ ܠܗ ܟܕ ܐܡܪ‬.‫ ܕܐܪܡܝܗ ܠܢܘܢܐ‬46‫˺ܒܕܘܟܬܐ ̇ܗܝ‬ ‫ ܢܦܩ ܗܘܐ‬49.‫ | ܕܝܢ ܢܘܢܐ ̇ܗܘ ˺ܒܡܥܒܕܢܘܬܐ ܐܠܗܝܬܐ‬f. 118r | ‫ ̣ܗܘ‬.‫ܩܛܘܤ‬ .‫ ܘܝܗܒ ܗܘܐ ܠܗ ܠܣܒܐ‬.‫ ܟܕ ܐܝܬ ܒܦܘܡܗ ܢܘܢܐ ܐܚܪܢܐ‬50‫ܠܘܬܗ ܕܣܒܐ‬ ‫ ˺ܘܫܘܝܐܝܬ ܐܟܠܝܢ ܗܘܘ ܠܗ‬.‫ ܠܘܬ ܬܠܡܝܕܗ‬51‫ܘܡܝܬܐ ˺ܗܘܐ ܠܗ ܣܒܐ‬ ̈ 54‫ ܡܢ‬.‫ ܟܠܗܘܢ ܝܘܡܬܐ ܕܚܝ ܗܘܐ‬53.‫ ܘܗܟܢܐ ܥܒܕ ܗܘܐ ܣܒܐ‬52.‫ܠܢܘܢܐ‬ ‫ ܘܩܡ‬55.‫ ܐܙܠ ܬܠܡܝܕܗ ˺ܐܝܟ ܕܥܒܕ ܗܘܐ ܣܒܐ‬.‫ܒܬܪ ܕܝܢ ܡܘܬܗ ܕܣܒܐ‬ .‫ ܩܛܘܤ‬58‫ ܩܛܘܤ‬57.‫ ܘܫܪܝ ˺ܩܥܐ ܒܩܠܐ ܪܡܐ ܘܐܡܪ‬56.‫ܥܠ ˺ܣܦܬܗ ܕܢܗܪܐ‬ ‫ ܕܐܝܟܢܐ‬.‫ ܘܗܦܟ ̣ܡܢ ܬܡܢ ܟܕ ܡܬܕܡܪ‬59.‫ܩܛܘܤ ܕܝܢ ܠܐ ܢܦܩ ܠܘܬܗ‬ ̈ .‫ ܕܠܗ ܫܘܒܚܐ ܠܥܠܡ ܥܠܡܝܢ ܐܡܝܢ‬.‫ܟܠܡܕܡ ܡܫܬܥܒܕ ܠܕܚܠܘܗܝ ܕܐܠܗܐ‬

English Translation

Again, the story about a certain elder, an anchorite, who lived on the Euphrates River There was a certain elder, an anchorite. He lived on the Euphrates, together with his disciple. One day his disciple went down to bring water from the river, according to his custom. And he found in it [i.e. the water] a small fish and brought it to the elder. The holy elder took the fish and reared it in a water jar standing by the side of the well that he had in [his] cell. Every day the elder would break bread and vegetables and feed the fish. He gave it a name, and called it “Qeṭos” [i.e. “whale”], after the name of the fish that swallowed Jonah. And every day the elder would stand next to the water jar and call it, saying “Qeṭos, Qeṭos!” It, then, would open its mouth, and the elder would throw it the food. Thus he would do every day, until the fish grew up and became [so] big that it was not able to turn around in the water jar. Then the elder’s disciple 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

M ‫ܐܝܟܐ‬ M ‫ܘܐܡܪ‬ M ‫ܣܝܛܘܤ‬ M– M + ‫ܒܡܥܒܕܢܘܬܐ ܕܐܠܗܐ‬ M ‫ܗܘ‬ M ‫ܘܐܟܠܝܢ ܗܘܘ ܫܘܝܐܝܬ‬ M ‫ܥܒܕ ܗܘܐ‬ M– M– M ‫ܕܘܟܬܐ ̇ܗܝ‬ M ‫ܩܪܐ‬ M ‫ܣܝܛܘܤ‬ M ‫ܗܘܐ‬

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said to him, “This fish has grown large, and as it is not able to turn around in the water jar, it might, perhaps, die and be lost to us. If you want, however, we could roast it today, and eat it.” The elder then answered and said to him, “God forbid that I should dare to eat it after such a long time that I have been bringing it up and feeding it!” As the elder knew that his disciple decided in his mind to eat it, and lest he [i.e. the disciple] might do that when he [i.e. the elder] would not know, the elder took the fish in a sack and threw it at once into the Euphrates River. And every day the elder would rise early in the morning and stand by the river, on the spot where he threw in the fish, and he would call it, saying “Qeṭos, Qeṭos!” The fish, then, by divine operation would come toward the elder, while holding in its mouth another fish. It would give it to the elder, and the elder would bring it to his disciple, and they would eat the fish together. The elder would do thus all the days while he was alive. Then, after the death of the elder, his disciple went, as the elder would do, and stood on the river bank, and began to call in a loud voice, saying “Qeṭos, Qeṭos!” The Qeṭos, however, did not come out to him. He returned from there, wondering how everything is subjected to those who fear God, to whom is glory into the ages of ages, amen.

Commentary

As pointed out above, our composition should be related to the literary genre of “edifying stories,” since it presents the audience with a pious narrative of anecdotal nature. Its concise form, simple narrative structure and distinctive message, mark the Story as a typical representative of the genre. The main protagonists of the Story are a paradigmatic couple of the wise and spiritually advanced elderly monk and his obtuse disciple, characteristic of many works of this genre. In accordance with the conventions of the genre, the monk’s name is not mentioned. As a purely instrumental figure, his importance lies only in enacting a particular virtue. In the case of our story, its primary message lies in propagating the virtue of clemency towards living creatures or, as Blake Leyerle puts it, the “ethic of restraint rather than of domination.”60 This virtue is deeply rooted in the vision of return to the lost state of peaceful coexistence between human beings and the animal world as 60 B. Leyerle, “Monks and Other Animals,” in The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies: Gender, Asceticism, and Historiography, ed. D.B. Martin and P.C. Miller (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 150–171(163).

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one of the ultimate goals of the monastic journey on the way to perfection.61 This state, characteristic of the life of the first humans in Paradise, is marked by a harmonious subordination of the latter to the former. As one can see from the lesson encoded into the master’s behavior in our story, by pursuing this merciful attitude the holy man regains the lost Adamic ability of exercising authority over all living beings, including “the fish of the sea,” in accordance with God’s promise in Gen. 1.26 (“Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea’” NIV). The brief account revolves around the figure of the fish. It is through this protagonist that the miraculous element, characteristic of edifying stories as a genre, is introduced into the narrative. At the center of the story stands the miracle of the fish that “by divine operation,” after it had been released back into the river, would still recognize the voice of its former master and repay him by bringing him fresh fish. This miracle is a topos found in a number of hagiographical works, where wild animals are presented as providing services to holy men in life as well as in death.62 Using the auxiliary figure of the monk’s disciple, the narrative makes it explicit in its concluding sentence that the miracle of the fish serving faithfully to the elder is meant to instill in its audience the sense of wonder over the willful subjection of the natural world to holy men.63 The figure of the fish serves also another important narrative purpose, introducing into it an element of humor.64 The humorous aspect of the story finds expression in the nickname given by the elder to the fish, i.e. Qeṭos, a loan word from the Greek noun κῆτος, “sea monster” or “whale.” As it is made explicit in 61 See Leyerle, “Monks and Other Animals,” 158–163; I.C. Jones, “Humans and Animals: St Basil of Caesarea’s Ascetic Evocation of Paradise,” Studia Patristica 67 (2013): 25–32; S. Paschalidis, “Saints et animaux, anticipation du royaume dans la littérature byzantine,” in La restauration de la création: Quelle place pour les animaux? Actes du colloque de l’ERCAM tenu à Strasbourg du 12 au 14 mars 2015, ed. M. Cutino, I. Iribarren and F. Vinel, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 145 (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 213–230. On Syriac tradition, see S.P. Brock, “Animals and Humans: Some Perspectives from an Eastern Christian Tradition,” Journal of Animal Ethics 6, no. 1 (2016): 1–9. 62 For some references, see J. Wortley, “Two Unpublished Psychophelitic Tales,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 37, no. 3 (1996): 281–300 (288–300). 63 On this, see A. Rüth, “Representing Wonder in Medieval Miracle Narratives,” Modern Language Notes 126, no. 4 (2011): 89–114. 64 On humor in hagiography, see E. Giannarelli, “Humour in Monastic and Hagiographic Literature: The Ways Christians Laughed,” Studia Patristica 39 (2006): 361–365; Ch. Gray, “The Monk and the Ridiculous: Comedy in Jerome’s Vita Malchi,” Studia Patristica 69 (2013): 115–122. For Syriac tradition, see J.-N. Saint-Laurent, “Humour in Syriac Hagiography,” Studia Patristica 64 (2013): 199–205.

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the narrative, this name was chosen after the “great fish” that swallowed the prophet Jonah (Jon. 2.1). It is the blatant incongruity between signifier and signified in the act of the little pet fish being named after the giant sea monster that produces a comic effect. Besides its comic aspect, the name given to his pet by the elder hints, perhaps, at the monk’s foresight, since it turns out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy when the fish starts to grow and becomes big enough to outgrow its reservoir and be released back into the river. Taking a closer look at the nickname of the fish helps us to perceive another dimension of the narrative, namely its indebtedness to the scholastic tradition. In order to grasp fully connotations of the name Qeṭos and how it might be perceived by the intended audience of the story, one should bear in mind that it is not a biblical name, in the sense that an ordinary reader of the Bible in Syriac would get acquainted with it simply by reading the biblical story of Jonah. As the narrative explains, the nickname Qeṭos was given by the elder to his pet in order to recall the fish from the biblical account of Jonah. However, in the Peshitta version of the Old Testament, a standard biblical text of Syriac Christians, the Hebrew phrase dāḡ gāḏôl, “great fish,” describing the sea monster in Jon. 2.1, is translated literally as nunā rabā.65 In a similar manner, it is referred to as nunā in one of the passages in the New Testament, where the story of Jonah is evoked, i.e. Matt. 12.40, according to both the Old Syriac and the Peshitta.66 Later on, we see both Narsai and Jacob of Serugh, two great Syriac hymnographers of Late Antiquity, each of whom composed a verse homily on Jonah, referring to the creature that swallowed the prophet as nunā.67 It appears that the Greek loan-word qeṭos began to gain currency as a way of referring to the fish that swallowed Jonah among Syriac Christians only after the seventh century, as a result of two major projects of biblical translation that were carried out during the second decade of the seventh century by the West Syrians, that is, the production of the Syro-Hexaplaric version of the Old Testament by Paul of Tella, and the Harklean translation of the New Testament by Thomas of Harkel. Aiming at providing accurate renderings of the Greek biblical texts, these scholars would often translate them into Syriac as literally as possible. While the loan-word qeṭos (or qeṭā) is attested in Syriac before 65 A. Gelston, ed., The Old Testament in Syriac according to the Peshiṭta Version. Part III, fasc. 4: Dodekapropheton; Daniel–Bel–Draco (Leiden: Brill, 1980), 41. 66 G.A. Kiraz, ed., Comparative Edition of the Syriac Gospels: Aligning the Sinaiticus, Curetonianus, Peshîṭtâ and Ḥarklean Versions, 4 vols., New Testament Tools and Studies 21.1–4 (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 1: 169. 67 For Narsai’s mēmrā, see A. Mingana, Narsai doctoris Syri homiliae et carmina, 2 vols. (Mosul: Typis Fratrum Praedicatorum, 1905), 1: 134–149; for Jacob’s, see P. Bedjan, Homiliae selectae Mar-Jacobi Sarugensis, 5 vols. (Paris: Otto Harrassowitz, 1905–1910), here 4: 368–490.

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this time, it is their translations that seem to provide the earliest attestations of its use for referring to the fish in Jonah: in the Syro-Hexaplaric version of Jonah, based on Origen’s recension of the Septuagint, the phrase κῆτος μέγας in Jon. 2.1 is translated as qeṭos rabā;68 in a similar manner, the Harklean version of the Gospel of Matthew renders κῆτος of Matt. 12.40 as qeṭos.69 Although this exegetical tradition originated, as it appears, in the West Syrian milieu, it soon gained currency among East Syrian scholars as well. For instance, one comes across it in the works of exegetes such as Theodore bar Koni (eighth c.),70 and Ishodad of Merv (ninth c.),71 or lexicographers, such as Bar Bahlul (tenth c.).72 The appearance of the noun qeṭos in our story thus bears witness to the influence of the high scholastic tradition upon the monastic milieu in which it was produced and circulated. Finally, one should not overlook an additional layer of meaning in the Story, related to the use of the image of a fish. This image would be of particular significance for the Story’s target audience, deeply rooted in the tradition of monastic paideia, where fish was sometimes used as a symbol for monk. In such capacity, this image appears in the Apophthegmata. There one comes across a saying attributed to Antony the Great, who likens the monk living in the stillness of his cell to a fish in its natural element: “Just as fish die if they are on dry land for some time, so do monks who loiter outside their cells or waste time with worldlings release themselves from the tension of hēsychia.”73 Due to the popularity of the Apophthegmata, this imagery gained currency in Syriac monastic tradition as well.74 For example, Jacob of Serugh

68 H. Middeldorpf, ed., Codex syriaco-hexaplaris, 2 vols. (Berlin: T.C.F. Enslin, 1835), 1: 212. 69 Kiraz, ed., Comparative Edition, 1: 169. 70 A. Scher, ed., Theodorus bar Kōnī. Liber Scholiorum, 2 vols., CSCO Syr. II.65–66 (Paris: Typographeo Reipublicae, 1910, 1912), 1: 284. 71 C. van den Eynde, ed., Commentaire d’Išoʿdad de Merv sur l’Ancient Testament, IV: Isaïe et les Douze, CSCO 303, Scr. Syr. 128 (Louvain: Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, 1969), 95. 72 R. Duval, ed., Lexicon syriacum auctore Hassano bar Bahlule, 3 vols., Collection orientale 15–17 (Paris: Typographeo Reipublicae, 1888–1901), 2: 1690. 73 J. Wortley, trans., The Book of the Elders: Sayings of the Desert Fathers, the Systematic Collection (Cistercian Studies Series 240; Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012), 15. For the Alphabetical Collection, see B. Ward, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, Cistercian Studies 59 (2nd rev. ed.; Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1984), 3. 74 It appears in the Syriac translation of the Apophthegmata included into the collection of ʿEnanisho (7th c.); see E.A.W. Budge, The Paradise or Garden of the Holy Fathers, Being Histories of the Anchorites, Recluses, Monks, Coenobites, and Ascetic Fathers of the Deserts of Egypt between A.D. CCL and A.D. CCCC circiter, 2 vols. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1907), 2: 8.

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(ob. 521) makes a creative use of this symbolism in one of his homilies, dedicated to the solitary ascetics: A breath of water sustains the fish and if the fish goes up onto dry ground, it has crossed the boundary which keeps it alive. In the Son of God a life-giving Spirit exists for the human race, and whoever strays from Him has perished. Swim in Him spiritually, as in a great sea, but if you depart from Him, there is death filled with woes. Inhale Him and live for unless you are in Him, you cannot live. Let Him be water to you, and you, a fish in Him, feeding on life.75

Concluding Remarks

In conclusion, it should be pointed out that there is no compelling internal or external evidence that suggests that the Story is not an original Syriac composition but rather translated from Greek or another language. Unfortunately, contrary to some other edifying stories, it provides no clues that might help us to establish the time of its composition with any certainty. The same uncertainty applies to its milieu, besides the general understanding that it originated in the monastic circles of Mesopotamia and that it circulated among both East and West Syrians. Yet, notwithstanding the difficulties that one faces while trying to contextualize this brief narrative, it still retains its value as a witness to how the tradition of monastic storytelling, which had its beginning in late antique Egypt, continued in the Christian communities of medieval Mesopotamia, where it was adapted to resonate with the local imaginaire. Bibliography Bedjan, P., ed. Homiliae selectae Mar-Jacobi Sarugensis, 5 vols. (Paris: Otto Harrassowitz, 1905–1910). Binggeli, A., ed. L’hagiographie syriaque, Études syriaques 9 (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 2012).

75 C.A. Scott and M. Reed, trans., Jacob of Sarug’s Homilies on the Solitaries, Texts from Christian Late Antiquity 41 (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2016), 20–22.

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Binggeli, A. “Collections of Edifying Stories,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography, vol. 2, Genres and Contexts, ed. S. Efthymiadis (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 143–159. Brock, S.P. “A Syriac Narratio Attributed to Abba Daniel of Sketis,” Analecta Bollandiana 113, no. 3–4 (1995): 269–280. Brock, S.P. “Saints in Syriac: A Little-Tapped Resource,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 16, no. 2 (2008): 181–196. Brock, S.P. “Syriac Hagiography,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography, vol. 1, Periods and Places, ed. S. Efthymiadis (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 259–283. Brock, S.P. “Animals and Humans: Some Perspectives from an Eastern Christian Tradition,” Journal of Animal Ethics 6, no. 1 (2016): 1–9. Brock, S.P. and S.A. Harvey, trans. Holy Women of the Syrian Orient, Transformation of the Classical Heritage 13 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Budge, E.A.W., ed. and trans. The Paradise or Garden of the Holy Fathers, Being Histories of the Anchorites, Recluses, Monks, Coenobites, and Ascetic Fathers of the Deserts of Egypt between A.D. CCL and A.D. CCCC circiter, 2 vols. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1907). Duval, R., ed. Lexicon syriacum auctore Hassano bar Bahlule, 3 vols., Collection orientale 15–17 (Paris: Typographeo Reipublicae, 1888–1901). van den Eynde, C., ed. Commentaire d’Išoʿdad de Merv sur l’Ancient Testament, IV: Isaïe et les Douze, CSCO 303, Scr. Syri. 128 (Louvain: Peeters, 1969). Gelston, A., ed. The Old Testament in Syriac according to the Peshiṭta Version. Part III, fasc. 4: Dodekapropheton; Daniel–Bel–Draco (Leiden: Brill, 1980). Giannarelli, E. “Humour in Monastic and Hagiographic Literature: The Ways Christians Laughed,” Studia Patristica 39 (2006): 361–365. Gray, Ch. “The Monk and the Ridiculous: Comedy in Jerome’s Vita Malchi,” Studia Patristica 69 (2013): 115–122. Halkin, F. Bibliotheca hagiographica graeca, 3 vols., Subsidia Hagiographica 8a (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1957). Jones, I.C. “Humans and Animals: St Basil of Caesarea’s Ascetic Evocation of Paradise,” Studia Patristica 67 (2013): 25–32. Kiraz, G.A., ed. Comparative Edition of the Syriac Gospels: Aligning the Sinaiticus, Curetonianus, Peshîṭtâ and Ḥarklean Versions, 4 vols., New Testament Tools and Studies 21.1–4 (Leiden: Brill, 1996). Leyerle, B. “Monks and Other Animals,” The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies: Gender, Asceticism, and Historiography, ed. D.B. Martin and P.C. Miller (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 150–171. Middeldorpf, H., ed. Codex syriaco-hexaplaris, 2 vols. (Berlin: T.C.F. Enslin, 1835).

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Mingana, A., ed. Narsai doctoris Syri homiliae et carmina, 2 vols. (Mosul: Typis Fratrum Praedicatorum, 1905). Mingana, A. Catalogue of the Mingana Collection of Manuscripts Now in the Possession of the Trustees of the Woodbrooke Settlement, Selly Oak, Birmingham, 3 vols., Woodbrooke Catalogues 1–3 (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1933, 1936, 1939). Minov, S. “The Therapy for Grief and the Practice of Incubation in Early Medieval Palestine: The Evidence of the Syriac Story of a Woman from Jerusalem,” in Prayer and Worship in Eastern Christianities, 5th to 11th Centuries, ed. B. Bitton-Ashkelony and D. Krueger (London: Routledge, 2017), 210–238. Minov, S. “Friday Veneration among Syriac Christians: The Witness of the Story of the Holy Friday,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society III, 30, no. 2 (2020): 195–222. Minov, S. “Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Syriac Story of the Mystery Hidden in the Eucharistic Offering,” Aramaic Studies 19, no. 2 (2021): 198–214. Paschalidis, S. “Saints et animaux, anticipation du royaume dans la littérature byzantine,” in La restauration de la création: Quelle place pour les animaux? Actes du colloque de l’ERCAM tenu à Strasbourg du 12 au 14 mars 2015, ed. M. Cutino, I. Iribarren and F. Vinel, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 145 (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 213–230. Rapp, C. “Storytelling as Spiritual Communication in Early Greek Hagiography: The Use of Diegesis,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 6 (1998): 431–448. Ruani, F. “Preliminary Notes on Edifying Stories in Syriac Hagiographical Collections,” Studia Patristica 91 (2017): 257–266. Rüth, A. “Representing Wonder in Medieval Miracle Narratives,” Modern Language Notes 126, no. 4 (2011): 89–114. Saint-Laurent, J.-N. “Humour in Syriac Hagiography,” Studia Patristica 64 (2013): 199–205. Scher, A., ed. Theodorus bar Kōnī. Liber Scholiorum, 2 vols, CSCO Scr. Syri. II.65–66 (Paris: Typographeo Reipublicae, 1910, 1912). Scott, C.A. and M. Reed, ed. and trans. Jacob of Sarug’s Homilies on the Solitaries, Texts from Christian Late Antiquity 41 (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2016). Ward, B., trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, Cistercian Studies 59 (2nd rev. ed.; Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1984). Wortley, J. “Two Unpublished Psychophelitic Tales,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 37, no. 3 (1996): 281–300. Wortley, J. “Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell in Byzantine ‘Beneficial Tales,’” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 55 (2001): 53–69. Wortley, J. “The Genre of the Spiritually Beneficial Tale,” Scripta & e-Scripta 8–9 (2010): 71–91. Wortley, J. “The Repertoire of Byzantine ‘Spiritually Beneficial Tales,’” Scripta & e-Scripta 8–9 (2010): 93–306. Wortley, J., trans. The Book of the Elders: Sayings of the Desert Fathers, the Systematic Collection, Cistercian Studies Series 240 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012).

Notes on Syriac Learning in South India in the Middle Ages and Early Modernity István Perczel with a contribution by Radu Mustață It is for no little reason that Sebastian Brock, whom we are celebrating in this volume, is called Malphono Rabo – the Great Teacher – and Malphono d-Malphone – the Teacher of all the Teachers. In fact, not only there is no area of Syriac studies that he would not have touched or promoted, but there is none among us in the younger generation who would not have benefitted from his teaching, advises, corrections. This is particularly true of me, who have never had the chance to be his formal pupil in Oxford, who started Syriac studies at a mature age as a quasi-autodidact, benefitting only from the Syriac seminars of Professor Boudewijn Dehandschutter in Leuven in the academic year 1992/93. Yet ever since I met Sebastian Brock in 1998, he always received with great benevolence my, often stupid, questions and erroneous ideas and hypotheses, and patiently corrected them. This became extremely important when I adventurously went to India to discover for myself, and to add to the knowledge of the world on, the Syrian Christians of Kerala.1 I am still trembling 1 This study forms part of the results of a project which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement nº 647467 – JEWSEAST). Although this study was written by István Perczel, it presents results of decades-long teamwork and contains little individual achievement. It owes particularly much to all those who helped and financed the SRITE project of digitizing Indian Christian manuscripts, namely Central European University, the University of Tübingen, the German Research Foundation (DFG) and Hill Museum of Manuscript Library, whose director, Father Columba Stewart, was standing continuously next to me and gave his institutional and moral assistance in everything. Special thanks are due to those who personally supported the work and contributed to it, among whom the first place of honour should be given to Mar Aprem, Metropolitan of the Chaldean Syrian Church, without whom I could not have made even the first steps. I also thank from all my heart my Indian collaborators, Fr Ignatius Payyappilly, Susan Thomas, Geejo George, and P.J. Cherian, who acted as the President of our Indian NGO, the Association for the Preservation of the Saint Thomas Christian Heritage, active between 2007 and 2015, as well as Fabian de Costa, the project’s photographer and Attila Baticz, its IT guru. I thank my colleague at CEU, Carsten Wilke who is working on the Jewish aspects of the documents found, and my Ph.D. students, Radu Mustață and Emy Merin Joy, who are working on the publication and interpretation of the material found. Radu’s contribution to the present study, which is greatly based on his individual results, too, was paramount. Last but not least, very little could have been done without the constant sympathetic assistance of two great Syriac scholars, Sebastian Brock and Hubert Kaufhold.

© István Perczel and Radu Mustață, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004537897_013

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when I remember how many false preconceptions and vain expectations I had, and how long it took until I understood that I had found a treasure trove of new knowledge, not what I had expected, but about what I had not dreamed in my boldest dreams. Were it not for the constant help of two senior scholars – Sebastian Brock and Hubert Kaufhold – who were watching with great sympathy over my staggering steps on the Indian soil, and to whom I could turn in every difficult situation, the Indian Syriac manuscripts would have been perhaps digitized but I would never have reached a correct understanding of the material found. To cite only one example: as I am an enthusiastic student of the Pseudo-Dionysian Corpus, I was excited to find two copies, one in India, in the Library of the Ernakulam-Angamaly Archdiocese of the Syro-Malabar Church,2 and another in Cambridge, in the Buchanan collection,3 of a hitherto unknown Syriac translation of the Mystical Theology, extant only in manuscripts of Indian provenance. As we know about two extant Syriac translations of the Dionysian Corpus, and a second edition of the second translation,4 and as Patriarch Timothy I in a letter speaks about a third translation by Athanasios Balad, of which no traces could be found to the present date, I expected to have found part of this translation in India, or perhaps another early, hitherto unknown, translation. I made some analyses meant to prove that this Indian text was an independent ancient translation, and sent them to Sebastian, together with the photos of the Ernakulam manuscript. He took my analyses and the photos, immediately saw that the translation contained clear Latinisms, and went to the Bodleian Library to check the Latin original in Chevalier’s interlinear edition containing all the extant Latin translations of the Dionysian Corpus.5 Then, he sent me a long, handwritten letter dated 2 On this manuscript, see I. Perczel, “What Can a Nineteenth-Century Syriac Manuscript Teach Us about Indian Church History?,” Parole de l’Orient 33 (2008): 245–265. The Mystical Theology can be found on fol. 508r–512r. 3 Cambridge Oo. 1. 29. For the description of the manuscript, see W. Wright, A Catalogue of the Syriac Manuscripts Preserved in the Library of the University of Cambridge, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1901), 1095–1109; see also J.P.M. van der Ploeg, O.P., The Christians of St. Thomas in South India and their Syriac Manuscripts (Rome and Bangalore: Center for Indian and Inter-Religious Studies and Dharmaram Publications, 1983), 219–220. In these two descriptions, the existence of this Syriac translation is mentioned, but no study has been conducted on this extremely interesting manuscript, with the sole exception of my “Have the Flames of Diamper Destroyed All the Old Manuscripts of the Saint Thomas Christians?,” in Festschrift Jacob Thekeparampil: The Harp: A Review of Syriac and Oriental Ecumenical Studies 20 (2006): 87–104. 4 Sergius of Reshaina, Phokas Bar Sargis of Edessa, Kuriakos Bar Shamona. 5 P. Chevallier, ed. Dionysiaca: Recueil donnant l’ensemble des traductions latines des ouvrages attribués à Denys l’Aréopagite (Bruges: Desclée de Brouwer, 1937).

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21 October 2004, written in beautiful Latin and Syriac characters (an important manuscript itself), proving that the newly found Syriac Dionysius was made in the early modern, or modern times, based on Ambrogio Traversari’s (1386–1439) Latin translation. Sebastian suggested that one such erudite person, capable to do this job, could have been the Chaldean patriarch Joseph of Amid (patriarch between 1696 and 1713). My disappointment was indescribable. However, later I understood that the discovery of this early modern translation was important from another aspect: it was one of the many examples of an incredible early modern blossoming of Syriac studies in the Malabar Coast, triggered by special circumstances. If now we are celebrating Sebastian Brock’s immense contribution to Syriac studies while trying to delineate the new paths that Syriac studies might follow in the future, it is perhaps convenient to delve into this little known past history of Syriac studies. It is this story that I would like to outline here.

The Persianate Period

Among their many names, the Saint Thomas Christians call themselves in their native tongue, Malayalam, Suṟiyāni Nasrāṇikal, which is normally translated as “Syrian Christians,” or even, with a more recently introduced term, “Syriac Christians.” This translation is correct in the sense that it denotes a community that, in the medieval times, belonged to one of the Syriac Christian Churches and until recently celebrated their liturgy in Syriac. Also, an interesting bilingual document from the early eighteenth century, extant in a Malayalam original and a contemporary Syriac translation (MSS Leiden Or. 1213 and 1214),6 6 MS Leiden Or. 1214 contains the Malayalam original of the text and Leiden Or. 1213 its Syriac translation by Mattai Vettikunnel. For the Syriac, see J.P.N. Land, Anecdota Syriaca, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 1862), 24*–30* (Syr.), 123–127 (Latin), commentaries on 179–184 and “Brevis notitia historica circa Ecclesiae Syro-Chaldaeo-Malabaricae statum,” in Samuel Giamil, Genuinae relationes inter sedem apostolicam et Assyriorum Orientalium seu Chaldaeorum Ecclesiam: nunc maiori ex parte primum editae, historicisque adnotationibus illustratae, ed. S. Giamil (Rome: Ermanno Loescher et Co., 1902), 552–564. On the Malayalam version see a brief note in I. Perczel, “Cosmopolitismes de la Mer d’Arabie: Les chrétiens de saint Thomas face à l’expansion Portugaise,” in Cosmopolitismes en Asie du Sud: Sources, intinéraires, langues (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle), ed. C. Lefèvre, I.s Županov and J. Flores, Collection Puruṣārtha 33 (Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2015), 143–169 (163 n8), and now two dissertations dedicated to the complex questions around these manuscripts: 1. S. Knight, “Narratives of Religious Identity: The Self-perception of the Jacobite Syrian Christians of Kerala,” Ph.D. dissertation, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 2009. Accessible at https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/34855/ (accessed 12 Dec. 2021); the transcription of the Malayalam

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translates the Malayalam plural Suṟiyānikal as Suryāyē. However, the meaning Syrian/Syriac for Suṟiyāni is secondary, as this is a Persian loanword in Malayalam. Soryāni was the name of the Christian ethnicity of the Sasanian Empire, who were called so not only because of their Syriac liturgy, but also because their native tongue was originally Syriac. The adoption of this name in Malayalam shows that, since at least the sixth century onwards, the Indian community considered itself as, and was considered as belonging to and an extension of, the Persian Christian Church community. Naturally, their native tongue was not Syriac, but Malayalam. Nor was the lingua franca connecting the mother Church with the Indian community Syriac but Persian, a fact that is testified to by the earliest locally preserved extensive document of the community, the Tarisāppaḷḷi copper plates, also called the Kollam copper plates.7 The copper plates contain a grant given by Ayyaṉ Aṭikal Ṭiruvaṭikaḷ (“His Highness the Ruler of Ay”), the governor of Vēṇāṭu,8 in the fifth year of the Cēra king Stāṇu Ravi, that is, in 849 CE, to a sanctuary and the community around it, called the Tarisāppaḷḷi, headed by a person bearing a Syriac-Persian compound name: Maruvān Sapir Īśōʿ. Tarisāppaḷḷi is most probably a Persian-Malayalam hybrid name, formed from the Malayalam paḷḷi “settlement,” “non-Hindu sanctuary,” and tarsā, the Early New Persian variant of the Middle Persian tarsāk (tlsʾkˈ), derived from tars (tls), “fear,” and meaning “the one who fears,” “God-fearer,” “a Christian,” so that Tarisāppaḷḷi would mean “a Christian place of worship.”9 The last copper manuscript (Leiden Or. 1214) is in vol. 2 (Appendices), 12–30. An English translation of the Malayalam text is given in vol. 1, 63–76; 2. E.M. Joy, “Christian Manuscripts of Kerala (India): Revisiting Popular Histories of the Syrian Christians in the Early Modern Period,” MA thesis at Central European University Budapest, in 2019, accessible at https://sierra.ceu.edu /search?/aJoy%2C+Emy+Merin/ajoy+emy+merin/-3%2C-1%2C0%2CB/frameset&FF=ajoy +emy+merin. This thesis contains a translation, in many respects different from Knight’s, of both the Malayalam and the Syriac versions (pp. 58–68). 7 See the edition with an English translation of the Malayalam text of the Tarisāppaḷḷi copper plates in M.G.S. Narayanan, Cultural Symbiosis in Kerala (Trivandrum: Kerala Historical Society, 1972), 91–94. There is a new edition of the Malayalam text of the copper plates in M.R. Raghava Varier and K. Veluthat, Tarisāppaḷḷippaṭṭayam (Caritram) (Kottayam: Sahithya Pravarthaka C.S. Ltd. 2013), 109–113. 8 Vēṇāṭu was one of the regions under the rule of the Cēra king. Later it became the kingdom of Travancore. 9 D.N. McKenzie, A Concise Pahlavi Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971, reprint with corrections: 1986), 82. I owe the decipherning of the meaning of the word Tarisāppaḷḷi to Philip Wood, who convinced me that my earlier interpretation was wrong. This has opened my eyes to the fundamental role of Persian in the history of the Indian Christians. As far as I know, this interpretation was first suggested in W.B. Henning, “Mitteliranisch” in Handbuch der Orientalistik. 1.4: Iranistik, 1: Linguistik (Leiden: Brill, 1958), 20–130 (51):

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plate of the collection contains a series of signatures, apparently by members of a merchant guild, believed to be the Añcuvaṇṇam and/or Manigramam mentioned in the text of the Tarisāppaḷḷi plates. The signatories are – in this order – Muslims, signing in Arabic, in Kufic script, Christians signing in Early Modern Persian in Pahlavi script, Zoroastrians, also signing in Persian and Pahlavi script, and finally Jews, signing in Judeo-Persian, in Hebrew script. My hypothesis is that the signatures are not part of the original document but are there to authenticate a copy, which must be later than the date of the original.10 Here, we can see that the common language of communication of the three ancient merchant communities  – Christians, Zoroastrians and Jews – was Persian, while the Muslim merchants were using Arabic. Most probably, Persian replaced Greek in the Arabian Sea trade as a lingua franca in Late Antiquity and preserved its importance until as late as the ninth century. An odd note in the Chronicle of Seʿert also confirms the role of Persian in India: the Chronicle reports that, at the beginning of the sixth century, Ma‌ʾana, metropolitan of Fars, translated liturgical texts from Syriac to Middle Persian and sent the books “to the maritime lands (the Persian Gulf) and India.”11 In my interpretation, this means that the liturgical texts were sung in Syriac, but the Soryani/Suriyani members of the Persian Church, both in the Persian Gulf and India, that is, the traveling merchants and their Indian co-religionaries, needed a Persian translation to understand the changing parts of the liturgy.12 The earliest Christian inscriptions in South Asia are also in Middle Persian. These are the inscriptions on the so-called Persian Crosses. There are eight inscribed Persian Crosses. According to the Persianists who have studied the inscriptions, the original of all the Persian crosses in India is the one in Mailapur. All the others are copies of the original, either reproducing the original inscription faithfully, or just imitating it without any meaning.13 This phenomenon gives food for thought. I think that the spread of the inscribed Persian crosses in Kerala could be connected to the ninth-century migration of  “Zunächst die ins 9te Jhdt. Datierte Quilon-Kupfertafel mit Zeugenbeischriften in arabischer, Pehlewi und jüdisch-persischer Sprache ; sie gehört zu einer Verleihung von Privilegien an die persich-christliche (“Tarisa” = pers. Tarsā) Kirche, die ein Sabr-Išō in Quilon gegründet hatte.” 10 See I. Perczel, “Syriac Christianity in India” in The Syriac World, ed. D. King (London: Routledge, 2019), 653–697 (667–670). An ampler treatment of the question is forthcoming. 11 A. Scher, ed. and trans., Histoire nestorienne inédite: Chronique de Séert. Patrologia Orientalis 4, no. 3 (1908), 5, no. 2 (1910), 7, no. 2 (1911), 13, no. 4 (1913), (7, no. 2, 117). 12 See Perczel, “Syriac Christianity in India,” 663. 13 See C.G. Cereti, L.M. Olivieri and J. Vazhuthanapally, “The Problem of the Saint Thomas Crosses and Related Questions: Epigraphical Survey and Preliminary Research,” East and West 52, no. 1/4 (2002): 285–310 (297–298).

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Christians from the Coromandel Coast to Malabar, due to persecutions attributed in local Christian histories to the person of Māṇikkavācakar, one of the founders of the Hindu devotional movement of the Śaiva bhakti.14 Apparently, the cross on Saint Thomas Mount was considered a particularly holy object, so that the migrant community erected its replicas in its new devotional centres. The more or less faithful copying of the inscription testifies to the fact that the knowledge of Persian and Pahlavi was kept for a while until it got lost.

MS Vatican Syriacus 22 and Syriac Learning in India during the Middle Ages

It is difficult to assess the role of Syriac in this Persianate period of the Indian Christian community. Definitively, the liturgical books were in Syriac, although no ancient liturgical books have been transmitted to us. The very first direct testimony of Syriac learning at the Malabar Coast is the oldest extant liturgical book copied in India,15 a book of the “Apostolic readings for the Sundays of the entire year, the feasts, the commemorations, and the rogations of the fasts.”16 It is kept in the Vatican library and is dated 1301. As this is the only known extant medieval manuscript written in India by a native scribe, and as it had an interesting history until it ended up in the Vatican, it is worth dwelling on this manuscript, although it had been studied in the early modern and modern times, first by Assemani,17 and then by Levi della Vida, who added some important notes on those who had used the manuscript in the early modern times.18 Finally, Van der Ploeg has also briefly described the manuscript.19 On fol. ivr, there is an Italian note in a late sixteenth-century handwriting. Beneath, there are two short Syriac texts, one indicating the readings from Genesis and Isaiah for the first Sunday of Advent, the other containing a prayer. Comparing it to Ms. Vat. Ar. 137, which on fol. 134r contains an autograph letter by Mar Joseph Sulaqa, Chaldean Metropolitan of India, Levi della 14 Māṇikkavācakar is a historical person, whose persecutions are remembered in the local histories of the Indian Christians. On this migration, see more amply in Perczel, “Syriac Christianity in India,” 664–665. 15 This is MS Vaticanus Syriacus 22 (https://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.sir.22). 16 This is the title of the Apostolicon given on fol. 1v. 17 J.S. Assemani, Bibliothecae Apostolicae Vaticanae codicum manuscriptorum Catalogus, vol. 2 (Rome: Apud heredes Barbiellini, 1758), 174–188. 18 G.L. della Vida, Ricerche sulla Formazione del più antico fondo dei manoscritti orientali della Biblioteca Vaticana, Studi e testi 92 (Città del Vaticano, 1939), 176–177 and Tavola X/2. 19 Van der Ploeg, The Christians of St. Thomas, 3–4 and 187–189.

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Vida has recognized in these notes the handwriting of Mar Joseph. Mar Joseph arrived in Malabar in 1558 but was captured by the Portuguese Inquisition and was deported to Lisbon in 1562.20 He returned in 1564, but in 1568 was deported again, this time to Rome, where he died in 1569.21 The manuscript must have been given to the Metropolitan for his personal use, who took it with him to his final trip to Rome, where it must have been collected from his legacy and placed in the Vatican Library. The Italian note on the top of fol. ivr must originate from this time. Mar Joseph must have received the book from the Portuguese, because on the same page there is a Portuguese calligraphic ownership mark, illegible for me, which Levi della Vida has deciphered as João da Cruz.22 Throughout the manuscript, there are notes and emendations of the text by Mar Joseph’s handwriting, who intervened while using the book. Thus, besides the Italian note on fol. ivr, Latin notes of Assemani on fol. 1r and its recopying, full of errors, by a later hand on fol. iiiv, Mar Joseph’s interventions in the manuscript are the last. There was also another oriental hand involved before Mar Joseph, who, on fol. vv, wrote a list of the reading signs, corrected the original text, and added marginal notes to it. The colophon has been entirely transcribed and translated into Latin by Assemani,23 but I give in the Appendix a new transcription and an English translation of its last part, which concerns the scribe.24 In fact, the last folios of the manuscript have been damaged, and Assemani filled out the lacunae thus created without indicating his conjectures, which are often erroneous. I don’t find his Latin translation sufficiently precise either and an English is badly needed now that Latin is not any more the lingua franca of scholarship. This colophon, by the first native Indian Syriac scribe known, is a precious testimony not only to the ecclesiastic situation in South India by the beginning of the fourteenth century, but also to the structure of Syriac learning and schooling in the Malabar Coast. In fact, apparently, the situation in early fourteenth century, as it can be gleaned not only from this colophon but from the entire manuscript, is the one that remained that of early modernity, which the European missionaries found, to which they accommodated, and which 20 Vida, Ricerche sulla Formazione del più antico fondo, Tavola X/2. 21 On this, in more detail, see I. Perczel, “Accommodationist Strategies on the Malabar Coast: Competition or Complementarity?,” in The Rites Controversy in the Early Modern World, ed. P.A. Fabre and I. Zupanov (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 191–232 (199–200). 22 Vida, Ricerche sulla Formazione del più antico fondo, 176. 23 Assemani, Bibliothecae Apostolicae Vaticanae, 186–187. 24 On the usual structure of the later East Syriac colophons, see H. Murre-van den Berg, Scribes and Scriptures: The Church of the East in the Eastern Ottoman Provinces (1500–1850), Eastern Christian Studies 21 (Leuven: Peeters, 2015), 113–142.

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determined the subsequent Syrian Orthodox missions, too. So, what does the colophon of Vat. Syr. 22 teach us? The colophon gives the place of writing: This holy book was copied in the royal (arśakaytā), famous and celebrated city of Śengli, which is in Malabar in the realm of India, in the holy church named after Mar Quriaqos, the glorious Martyr.

ܿ

The name of the city is vocalized as ‫ ܸܫܢܓ ܹܠܐ‬, which should correspond to a Śenglē or Śenglī pronunciation. Assemani transcribed the name as Scengela in his note on fol. vir, and as Scengala in the Catalogus, which was also followed by Van der Ploeg, who writes Shengala. Earlier, I was wavering between the Śenglē and Śenjlī readings, because of the upper dot above the gamal.25 However, a closer study of the manuscript shows that the scribe was meticulous in placing the upper dot on the begadkephat to indicate the hard pronunciation, and the lower dot to indicate the soft pronunciation of the letters. Thus, the pronunciation of the city’s name should be Śenglē or Śengli, but rather the latter, as this corresponds to the name Shingly of the Cochini Jewish traditions of �‫ ) ش�����ن�� ك‬of the Arab geographers.26 Assemani identiorigin, and to the Śinklī (�‫��ل‬ ‫ي‬ fied Śengli with Cranganore/Kodungallur (fol. vir: ex Scengela seu Chrongalor Malabariae urbe) and this coincides with the general conviction on the place of the legendary Shingly of the Jews.27 Ophira Gamliel expressed doubts concerning this location of Shingly, rightly challenging the early modern myth of the existence of an isolated, self-ruled Jewish settlement.28 Yet, the identification with Kodungallur is quite plausible, as the city was situated in the mouth of the Changala river (the right branch of the river Periyar), from which it might have taken its name.29 According to P.M. Jussay, the name Śenglī is an abbreviated form of Ceṅṅala aḻi (Jussey writes Changala Azhi), meaning “the mouth of the Changala river.”30 After the dissolution of the Cēra kingdom in the twelfth century, Kodungallur was a small principality ruled by the Paṭiññāṯṯēṭattu Svārupam princely family, but this would not justify calling Kodungallur a 25 Perczel, “Syriac Christianity in India,” 656. 26 O. Gamliel, “Back from Shingly: Revisiting the premodern history of Jews in Kerala,” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 55, no. 1 (2018): 53–76 (64). 27 See P.M. Jussay, “A Jewish Settlement in Medieval Kerala,” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 1996, 57 (1996): 277–284. 28 Gamliel, “Back from Shingly,” (esp. 70–72). 29 The a/e variation is quite normal in Malayalam. 30 Jussay, “A Jewish Settlement in Medieval Kerala,” 278.

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“royal, or capital (arśakāyā) city.” However, earlier, as long as the kingdom of the Cēra Perumals subsisted, comprising roughly the present-day Kerala State, that is, until the twelfth century, Kodungallur (Magodāyapattanam) was the capital of the kingdom and its royal see. It is most probably for this reason that, after the destruction of the Mailapur community in the Coromandel Coast in the ninth century, Kodungallur/Śenglī became the see of the Metropolitan Bishop of India. If we can believe the testimony from 1607 of a certain Syrian Christian priest (presbytero da Serra), the vicar of Malayattur, called Jacob of Jesus, in his time there was also known another ancient Syriac manuscript, by then “four hundred years old,” that is, copied around the year 1200, in whose colophon the see of Kodungallur and its holder Mar John were mentioned, and it was said that the metropolitan bishop of Kodungallur also held the title of “bishop of China and Socotra.”31 The testimony was noted down during a litigation about respective jurisdictional-territorial rights between the first European bishop of the Suriyani Christians of India, Francisco Roz S.J., then bishop of Angamaly, and the Latin bishop of Cochin, Frey Andreas a Santa Maria OFM. So, if we can believe the date of the manuscript, established by Jacob of Jesus, here we have an even earlier – true: only indirect – testimony about the metropolitan see of Kodungallur, which, thus, should be identical with Shingly. Moreover, one of the main churches of Kodungallur, apparently the one that served as the cathedral church of the city, was dedicated to Saint Quriaqos.32 In 1524, the Jewish and Christian communities of Kodungallur were looted and destroyed by the Zamorin of Calicut and his Muslim allies, and the two communities migrated to the territory of the Cochin kingdom.33 Thus, this colophon is decisive evidence for identifying the city of Shingly with Kodungallur. This example also shows the need of writing an integrated history of Hindus, Jews, Christians and Muslims in Malabar, instead of the communal history writing that is the traditional way of treating these issues. The colophon names the supreme head of the Indian Church: 31 The document, Archivum Romanum Societatis Jesu Goa-Malabar, 65, is mentioned in A. Mecherry, Testing Ground for Jesuit Accommodation in Early Modern India: Francisco Ros SJ in Malabar (16th–17th centuries) (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatus Iesu [IHSI], 2019), 268–269. Courtesy of Radu Mustață, who looked for the document at ARSI and obtained a digital copy thereof. The testimony, given under oath, with the witness placing his hand on the book of the Gospels, is on fols. 3r–4r. 32 See P. Malekandathil, trans., Jornada of Dom Alexis de Menezes: A Portuguese Account of the Sixteenth Century Malabar (Kochi: LRC Publications, 2003), 19–20. 33 Malekandathil, Jornada of Dom Alexis de Menezes, 20.

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The Father of the Fathers, our blessed and holy Father Mar Yahbalaha the Fifth, the Turk, Catholicos Patriarch of the East … This is, in fact, Yahbalaha III (Patriarch between 1281–1317).34 He was an ethnic Uyghur born in the vicinity of Khān Bālīq (Beijing), and his monastic name was originally Markos. The Patriarch’s Uyghur ethnicity is expressed by the scribe’s calling him “the Turk.” The narrative about the travel of the monk Markos, together with his teacher, Rabban Ṣawma, between 1275 and 1281, from Beijing to Baghdad, where Markos was consecrated Catholicos Patriarch of the East upon the death of Mar Denḥa I, as well as the narrative of Rabban Ṣawma’s subsequent embassy to the West, is written by Rabban Ṣawma himself.35 Why the scribe calls him “Mar Yahbalaha the Fifth,” is unclear. Perhaps, this is a simple error. It is important that at that time the lingua franca of the Church of the East was still Persian and so, most probably, Rabban Ṣawma wrote his diary in Persian. However, the Persian original was lost, and only a shortened Syriac version is extant.36 Does this mean that the Persian language still played some role in India? This is difficult to assess, given the lack of any evidence on this question. The evidence that the Vatican manuscript provides is about the great importance of Syriac learning at that time. The colophon also mentions the name of the Metropolitan bishop of India, whose see was in the Mar Quriaqos Sāhdā Church in Kodungallur/Śenglī: Bishop Mar Jacob, Metropolitan, Superintendent and Governor of the holy see of the Apostle Mar Thomas, that is, Governor of us and of all Christian India. This note is important, because we know the names of very few metropolitan bishops of India before the late fifteenth century. Besides the legendary Persian bishops accompanying the merchant Maruvān Sapir Īśōʿ, and having their seat in the Tarisāppaḷḷi of Kollam, Mar Śābūhr and Mar Afrahāt, we only 34 See J.P. Amar, “Yahbalaha III,” in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage: Electronic Edition, ed. S.P. Brock, et al. (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2011; online ed. Beth Mardutho, 2018). (https://gedsh.bethmardutho.org/Yahbalaha-III) (accessed 18 May 2022). 35 See Amar, “Yahbalaha III” and J.P. Amar, “Ṣawma, Rabban,” https://gedsh.bethmardutho.org /Sawma-Rabban (accessed 18 May 2022) as well as E.A.W. Budge, trans., The Monks of Ḳûblâi Khan, Emperor of China or the History of the Life and Travels of Rabban Ṣâwmâ, Envoy and Plenipotentiary of the Mongol Khâns to the Kings of Europe, and Marḳôs Who as Mâr Yahbh-allâhâ III Became Patriarch of the Nestorian Church in Asia, Translated from the Syriac (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1928). 36 See Amar, “Ṣawma, Rabban.”

Notes on Syriac Learning in South India

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have the aforementioned indirect testimony of Jacob of Jesus about a bishop of Kodungallur called John, who also had the title of bishop of Socotra and China. Apparently, already in those medieval times, the see of Kodungallur was considered an apostolic see founded by Saint Thomas. According to the Saint Thomas legends, Saint Thomas was preaching the gospel not only in India but also in Socotra and China, so that the jurisdiction of the Indian see extended to these lands, too. Yet, Antonio de Gouvea must be right when he explains the extension of the jurisdiction of the see of Kodungallur to Socotra and China by the fact that “it was easier to govern and care for these two churches from India, than from Babylon, because of the continuous maritime contact.”37 So also did become South India later the basis for the Portuguese missions in China and Japan. The most interesting part of the colophon is when the scribe speaks about himself. Behind the formulaic expressions and the obligatory modesty of the scribe, we can feel his sincere efforts in appropriating the Syriac learning and can also sense the structure of Syriac schooling in the Malabar Coast: This holy book with all its due and [necessary] parts was completed on a Wednesday, the […] of the month of Ḥ-ziran (June), in the year [1]612 of the Greeks, and to [God] be glory and may his love and mercy be abundantly shed upon us! Yes, and Amen. It was copied by a certain feeble and sinful student, Zacharias, son of Joseph, son of Zacharias, from the aforementioned city of Śenglī, one of the pupils and ⟨spiritual⟩ sons of our aforementioned Father and Governor, one who is called a deacon but in deed is as far from, and as inferior to, the perfection of the requirements of his rank, as man is inferior to the angel, or as east is far away from the west (Ps. 103.12). He asks and supplicates and demands in the Grace ⟨of God⟩ from all those who read this book and find a mistake or an error, not to throw curses on [the scribe], which is not becoming to […] and wise men, but to bestow upon me instead [of this], one [holy?] prayer and to say this: Lord, [have mercy] on the feeble scribe, who toiled according to his power, being a fourteen year-old boy and being a foreigner [to reading] and speaking Syriac, [in]capable to read ⟨aloud⟩,38 and who wrote [that] what he wrote 37 A. de Gouvea, Jornada do Arcebispo de Goa Dom Frey Aleixo de Menezes Primaz da India Oriental, Religioso da Orden de S. Agostino (Coimbra: Officina de Diogo Gomez, 1606), fol. 6r; English trans., Malekandathil, Jornada of Dom Alexis de Menezes, 26. 38 That is, to pronounce correctly.

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without reading [it] ⟨aloud⟩, and who wrote this apology because of this. And to God [Most High?], in whose power I began and in the succour of whose grace I completed, let there be glorification, honour, thanksgiving and worship from my insane and humble self and from all the rational beings, be they composite or simple.39 Deacon Zacharias, who accomplished the complicated task of copying this text of the apostolic readings with all its vocalization and reading signs at the astonishingly young age of fourteen, defines himself as a student (‫)ܐܣܟܘܠܝܐ‬, and as a pupil and spiritual son of Mar Jacob, the metropolitan bishop of Kodungallur ̈ ̈ (].‫)ܡ[ܢ] ܬܠܡܝܕܘܗܝ ܘܒܢܘܗ[ܝ] ܕܐܒܘܢ ܘܡܕܒܪܢܢ ܥܗܝܕ[ܐ‬. Apparently, the task of the metropolitan delegated from the patriarchal see of the Church of the East was not only to govern his huge diocese, but also to serve as universal teacher transmitting the knowledge of the liturgical practices and, first, the knowledge of Syriac. We know from later histories that erudite monks from Mesopotamia were designated for this task and that the good knowledge of Syriac gave a particular prestige and a leading position to those priestly members of the community who were proficient in Syriac. Also, I suppose, although without positive evidence that, by that time, the role of Persian as language of communication had been replaced by Syriac. In fact, by this period, Arabic had largely replaced Persian as the lingua franca of the Arabian Sea trade, as can be seen in the Cairo Genizah documents of the eleventh–twelfth century, in which the Jewish India merchants are communicating in Judeo-Arabic. Yet, it seems that Syriac had become the language of communication between the Christian communities of Mesopotamia and India. Apparently, the bishop-teacher was surrounding himself with children of the aristocratic priestly families  – priesthood was hereditary among the Christians of the Malabar Coast  – and taught them Syriac erudition from a very young age. Copying a liturgical manuscript, such as this one, besides of its utility also had its use as a school exercise. Thus, it was a prestigious thing for these families to send their children to the school of the bishop, as this prepared them for leading positions in the Indian Church. From later times, we have ample testimony to this social institution. It was precisely this institution, which the European missionaries adopted when they wanted to create the local Catholic clergy, the only difference being that they called these schools, upon the European pattern, “seminaries.” First, in 1540/41, Vicente 39

The words in square brackets are my conjectures for supplementing the parts missing due to the damage of the last folios of the manuscript.

Notes on Syriac Learning in South India

247

de Lagos founded a seminary in Kodungallur, where the language of teaching was Latin. This school had very modest success. Although some priestly families were happy to send there their children for education, the communities did not receive the priests thus formed, as they did not know Syriac.40 The breakthrough happened when the Jesuits founded the Vaipicotta Seminary in Chennamangalam, where the language of teaching was Syriac. The seminary began its teaching in 1584.41 Its first professor of Syriac, Francisco Roz, a linguistic genius and an accomplished Semiticist, was to transform Syriac learning in the Malabar Coast. While the usual modesty of the scribes is not always to be taken seriously,42 here the words of Deacon Zacharias are very suggestive, showing his difficulties in grappling with the task of copying. His repeated stress on his lack of an active knowledge of Syriac and on his difficulty in pronouncing what he reads,43 indicates real obstacles in exerting the sophisticated art of manuscript copying by young learners whose mother tongue is not Semitic. In fact, this difficulty of pronunciation and, as a result, of understanding the text copied, is mirrored by the many errors made not only in the course of copying but also in writing the colophon, for which Deacon Zacharias must have had formulaic ̈ (zedqāṯā), examples. Typical examples are the misspelling of the word ‫ܙܕܩܬܐ‬ ̈ , due to the influence of used here in the sense of “requirements,” as ‫ܙܕܩܕܐ‬ Malayalam, or missing the correct grammatical form when writing “in the succour of His grace” (writing ‫ ܒܥܘܕܪܢܗ ܛܝܒܘܬܗ‬instead of the grammatically correct ‫)ܒܥܘܕܪܢ ܛܝܒܘܬܗ‬.44 The errors in the text copied were corrected during the utilisation of the manuscript, first by an anonymous second hand, and then, by Mar Joseph Sulaqa.

40 M. Mundadan, History of Christianity in India, vol. 1, From the Beginning up to the Middle of the Sixteenth Century (up to 1542) (Bangalore, Theological Publications in India 1984), 326–341. 41 D. Ferroli, The Jesuits in Malabar, vol. 1 (Bangalore City, Bangalore Press, 1939), chapter 5 reprinted in George Menachery, ed., Indian Church History Classics, vol. 1, The Nazranies (Pallinada, Ollur, Thrissur: The South Asia Research Assistance Services, 1998), 1: 546–558. 42 On the self-depreciating style of the East Syriac colophons, Murre-van den Berg, Scribes and Scriptures, 124–125. ܿ 43 This is how the emphatic expression ‫ܩܪܐ‬ ܸ ‫[ܕܠܐ] ܚܝܠܐ ܕܩܪܝܢܐ ܘܟܬܒ [ܗܝ] ܕܟܬܒ ܟܕ ܠܐ‬ ܿ ]‫[( [ܠܗ‬in]capable to read ⟨aloud⟩, and who wrote [that] what he wrote without reading [it] ⟨aloud⟩) should be understood: Assemani’s Latin translation: nec in lectione quidem exercitato: qui quod scripsit antea non legit, is not helpful in this case. 44 See Appendix, notes 7 and 18.

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The Renewal of Syriac Learning in Early Modernity

Our historical sources are unanimous in stating that, during the major part of the fifteenth century, the Indian Christians lost contact with the Church of the East. The descriptions of the resulting situation are dramatic: according to Antonio de Gouvea who is referring to local histories of the Indian Christians, as there were no bishops coming (apparently from the Middle East, but Gouvea confuses this situation with the much earlier destruction of Christianity in the eastern Coromandel Coast), there were no priests consecrated either, so that there remained only one deacon who had to administer the sacraments and celebrate the liturgy.45 This must be an exaggeration, but the fact is that, in 1490, there was a deacon, Joseph the Indian, and a lay person, George Pakalomaṭṭam, who were sent to Gazarta d-Beth Zabdai, where the Catholicos Patriarch Mar Shimʿon IV (1437–1497) resided, to renew the contacts and to bring bishops to India. Both were consecrated to the priesthood, and George, who was from an aristocratic priestly family, and was well versed in Syriac, received the rank of an archdeacon. Apparently, this was the time when the characteristic leadership pattern of the Indian diocese of the Church of the East: a Middle Eastern Metropolitan being the spiritual leader of the community and a local leader called the Archdeacon and Gate of All India, being the pragmatic leader of the community, was created.46 Probably, the pattern existed even before without the name of the archdeaconate, but according to our sources, the first Archdeacon was George Pakalomaṭṭam, whom these sources tend to date much earlier, and there is no trace for an earlier appearance of the term “Archdeacon.”47 As the Archdeacon had to be proficient in Syriac, the task of teaching Syriac was shared between the Metropolitan and the Archdeacon. Later, apparently during the time of the native Mar Thoma metropolitans, a new teaching function emerged, that of the Great Malankara Malpan, who was the priest who knew Syriac the best, and acted as the main teacher of the Church.

45 de Gouvea, Jornada do Arcebispo de Goa Dom Frey Aleixo de Menezes, fol. 5v–6r; English translation, Malekandathil, Jornada of Dom Alexis de Menezes, 25–26. 46 See my reconstruction of the story in Perczel, “Cosmopolitismes de la Mer d’Arabie,” 151–158. 47 See also Perczel, “Four apologetic Church Histories from India,” 202–205. In this early publication of mine I gave the wrong date 1502 for the consecration as Archdeacon of George Pakalomaṭṭam, which I took from J. Kollaparampil, The Archdeacon of All-India, The Syrian Churches series vol. 5 (Kottayam, Catholic Bishop’s House, 1972), 81–82. This error was corrected in “Cosmopolitismes de la Mer d’Arabie.”

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Mar Abraham (?–1597), Francisco Roz S.J. (1559–1624) and Roz’s Indian Disciples

When the European missions arrived in India and tried to convert the local Christians, they remained inefficient for a long time. The last Persian Metropolitan of the Indian Diocese, who arrived first in the 1550s as a Nestorian, and went over to the Chaldean Church in 1558, Mar Abraham, was efficient both in accommodating with the Europeans and with organizing the resistance of the community against assimilation to Tridentine Catholic Christianity. His great weapon against the Latinizing influence was his supreme Syriac learning. He resisted the obligation of the Portuguese authorities, having on their side the Raja of Cochin, to correct the liturgical books, or to discard the theological books of Nestorian origins. Also, having travelled to Rome and obtained re-appointment from the Pope, he was able to use his Catholic allegiance against the Portuguese ecclesiastic authorities.48 For a long while, the European missionaries, among whom the Jesuits were the most prominent, did not find a valid strategy to counter Mar Abraham’s influence, until someone congenial, equally proficient in Syriac and opposing his European erudition to Mar Abraham’s Middle Eastern erudition appeared on the scene. This was the Catalan Francisco Roz (originally called Francesc Ros), a Jesuit missionary who arrived in India in November 1584. He became Professor of Syriac at the Vaipicotta Jesuit Seminary, had a major role in the preparations of the Diamper Synod of 1599, and became the first European bishop of the Suriyani, inheriting Mar Abraham’s see of Angamaly, and later Archbishop of Cranganore/Kodungallur, trying to restore the prestige of the “See of Saint Thomas.”49 Yet, the most important achievement of Roz and his circle, consisting of European Jesuits and of local Indian disciples, was cultural. They have produced a vast corpus of literature, created on Indian soil in a joint effort of Europeans and native Christians, both in Syriac and Malayalam, which was meant to replace the readings brought to India by the missionary Metropolitans 48

I tried to present the activities of Mar Abraham in several publications. See especially Perczel, “Accommodationist Strategies on the Malabar Coast” and I. Perczel, “Some Early Documents about the Interactions of the Saint Thomas Christians and the European Missionaries,” in Malabar in the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism in a Maritime Historical Region, ed. M. Kooria and M.N. Pearson (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018), 76–120. 49 On Roz, now the most comprehensive monograph is that of Mecherry, Testing Ground for Jesuit Accommodation in Early Modern India. See also Perczel, “Accommodationist Strategies on the Malabar Coast,” 214–225.

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of the Church of the East. Roz had the dream to create a local and specific Indian Christianity, headed by a native clergy taught at the Jesuit Seminary of Vaipicotta in Chennamangalam, but a Christianity that would continue the local traditions within the Catholic fold. He was favourable to the consecration of Indian bishops and accused Mar Abraham of a kind of racism, because Mar Abraham tried to prevent the consecration of his Archdeacon, George of Christ. In 1622, he wrote about this the following: The aforementioned Archdeacon  … was elected bishop of Palur by an order of the Holy Father and the consent of the Patriarch of Babylon. Yet, Mar Abraham had never wanted to ordain him, saying that this nation was not apt for this dignity because they are too proud.50 We learn about the way in which Roz was seen by his Indian disciples from a Syriac panegyric ʿonithā, a double acrostichon by his best pupil and close collaborator, the gifted Syriacist poet Kadavil Chandy Kattanar (1588–1673), who signed his Syriac poetry as Aleksandros L-mēnāyā51 – Alexander of the Port – but was known in Rome as Aleksandros Hendwāyā – Alexander the Indian. The poem was found in a unique copy in MS Mannanam Syr 63, fols. 106v–116r.52

50

Cited in Portuguese by Kollaparambil in The Archdeacon of All-India, 92, n42. My translation. For an ampler treatment of this subject, see Perczel, “Accommodationist Strategies on the Malabar Coast,” 198–208. 51 Chandy (mis-)translated in this way his house-name, Kaṭavil. Kaṭavu is the wharf, where the boats are landing in the many backwaters of Kerala. See H. Gundert, A Malayalam and English dictionary (Mangalore, London: C. Stolz; Trübner & Co., 1872; online at https://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/gundert/), 193. Thus, the locative kaṭavil means “at the wharf.” Chandy is the Malayalam equivalent of the Greek/Syriac Aleksandros. 52 On the recently discovered poetic oeuvre of Kadavil Chandy Kattanar see I. Perczel, “Alexander of the Port/Kadavil Chandy Kattanar: A Syriac Poet and Disciple of the Jesuits in Seventeenth-century India,” Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 14 (2014): 30–49. There I identified seven ʿonyāthā, written upon the pattern of the poetry of Gabriel Qamṣā, Metropolitan of Mosul (thirteenth century). While preparing the catalogue of the Thrissur Chaldean Syrian Collection, whose custodian is Mar Aprem, Radu Mustață discovered another volume, not mentioned in my study of 2014: MS Thrissur Syr 62, which contains, besides poems found in the Mannanam manuscript, Catholic canticles in the meter of Narsai, absent from the Mannanam manuscript, which should equally be attributed to Chandy. On this, he has written a substantive study: “Entangled Literary Genres in Syriac from Malabar in the Aftermath of the Synod of Diamper (1599).” The study is published in a volume dedicated to the Indian Ocean, edited by Alexandra Cuffel, of the online journal Entangled Religions (https://er.ceres.rub.de/index.php/ER/article/view/9901).

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The poem consists of three introductory stanzas without numbering and then, of two times 22 stanzas numbered from alap to taw and from taw to alap. As Chandy writes, Roz was a humble person, and so, except for the official documents that he issued as a bishop,53 he never signed his compositions, as a result of which it is not easy to identify his works, found during the digitization, by our SRITE project, of the Kerala Syrian Christian manuscript archives. However, by the combination of philological methods, such as stylistic analysis and external references, it is possible to establish Roz’s authorship in many cases. A most valuable external reference to Roz’s literary oeuvre is precisely Kadavil Chandy’s panegyric:54 32. (112v) ʿE. In abundant love and kindness He translated to the sons of Christianity 33. Semkhat. Many from among the Latin books, Translating them to an exquisite Syriac, (113r) And also from the volumes of the Syrians to Latin, Without any mistake and, so, any imprecision. 34. Nun. This chaste patron, Who was called by all the Christians A blond Thomas55 And a wonderful Apostle, 35. Mem. Humiliated himself in martyrdom Which he witnessed writing sermons, He was a son of humility Rejecting all pride, 36. (113v) Lamad. A divine tongue, Which made them know the mysteries Of the Hebrews, the Syrians, The Greeks and the Romans. 53

Such are his Statutes of Francisco Roz, written in Garshuni Malayalam, kept in the Cochin State Archives in Ernakulam, also digitized in the framework of the SRITE project (MS Cochin Gar. Mal. 1). 54 The numbers below indicate the number of the stanza in the poem. 55 Literally, a “yellow Thomas” (‫ܟܝܬܪܝܢܐ‬ ܼ from the Greek κίτρινος).

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37. Kap. This venerable one was knowledgeable, He was as if he had been born among them,56 He was among them as admired by everybody, He was like a deep stupor.57 38. Yod. Also, he knew many (114r) languages That are in the foul world, That of the warlike Portuguese, The Indian [language]58 and many others.59 In the following, I will try to identify, based on the discoveries made during the digitization work of the SRITE project, Roz’s works listed in a general way in the panegyric: – Roz “translated to the sons of Christianity many from among the Latin books, translating them to an exquisite Syriac.” Now, there is a great number of hitherto unknown translations that we found during the digitization, such as that of the Mystical Theology of Pseudo-Dionysius translated from the Latin translation of Ambrogio Traversari, mentioned at the beginning of the present study. That Roz is the translator, is rather plausible, as in almost all the works of Roz that we were able to identify, there is a predilection for Dionysius.60 Most probably the Syriac translations of Dionysius the Carthusian, found in many Indian manuscripts, are also of Roz’s authorship. I am recognizing Roz’s style also in a treatise on the seven sacraments, found in numerous Indian manuscripts by Pedro Gomez, translated from the Latin.61 “And also, from the volumes of the Syrians to Latin, without any mistake and, so, any imprecision.” As far as I know, no Latin translations of entire Syriac works have been found. I am afraid that Chandy meant Roz’s two 56 57 58 59

That is, he was as if he had been born among the Indian Christians. “Deep stupor” (‫ܕܘܡܪ ܡܢ ܸܫܠܝܐ‬ ܼ ) is a typical expression of East Syriac mystical doctrine. That is, Malayalam. Earlier, in “Accommodationist strategies in the Malabar Coast,” I have seriously misread this stanza. See the edition of its Syriac text in Appendix 2. 60 On Roz’s predilection for Pseudo-Dionysius, see Perczel, “Alexander of the Port/Kadavil Chandy Kattanar,” 42. On the Dionysian influence on the “Sermon on Saint Thomas, the Beloved Apostle” found in two Indian manuscripts, see R. Mustață, Sermon on Saint Thomas, the Beloved Apostle: A Syriac Catholic Panegyric from Seventeenth Century Malabar (Piscataway NJ: Gorgias Press, 2019), 23–24, 44–45, 75, 79. 61 On this work, see Perczel, “Accommodationist Strategies on the Malabar Coast,” 219–220.

Notes on Syriac Learning in South India

253

Latin works, De syrorum orientalium erroribus62 and De erroribus Nestorianorum qui in hac India orientali versantur,63 written to accuse of heresy the Syriac texts used in India and Mar Abraham, de Syrian bishop of the native Christians, which were then used for the condemnations of the Diamper Synod in 1599.64 – Roz “humiliated himself in martyrdom, which he witnessed writing sermons.” In fact, we have discovered a collection of Syriac sermons, extant in several Indian manuscripts (MSS Mannanam Syr. 46 and 47, Thrissur Syr. 17, Ernakulam Syr. 31, and Thozhiyur Syr. 1),65 which for centuries served as a basis for Syriac preaching in the Malabar churches, and were used not only by the Catholics, but also by the Jacobites (this is the case with Thozhiyur 1).66 Radu Mustață has baptized this collection The Malabar Sermonary. Although the Sermonary was most probably collected by Roz, not all the individual sermons were written by him. One of them, On Oath and on those Who Make an Oath, bears a date: “11 Ilul (September)  1567” (MS Mannanam Syr 46, fol. 35va–37vb and MS Thozhiyur Syr. 1, fol. 68v–75r, but the date is only in the Mannanam MS). In fact, this sermon is extant in its fuller version only in the Thozhiyur manuscript, where it is reworked into a Jacobite text. In 1567, Roz was eight years old, but this was the time when both Mar Joseph Sulaqa and Mar Abraham were in India. So, the sermon On Oath could be the work of any one of them, or of someone else. It must have been written for an Indian audience, as nothing similar is known – as 62

This work of Roz was discovered recently in the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu and edited with translation and commentaries by A. Mecherry S.J., De Syrorum Orientalium Erroribus Auctore P. Francisco Ros S.I.: A Latin-Syriac Treatise from Early Modern Malabar (1586) (Piscataway NJ: Gorgias Press, 2021). 63 I. Hausherr, ed., De erroribus Nestorianorum qui in hac India orientali versantur auctore P. Francisco Ros S.I. Inédit latin-syriaque de la fin de 1586 ou du début de 1587, retrouvé par le P. Castets S.I., missionaire à Trichinopoly, annoté par I. Hausherr, Orientalia Christiana 11, no. 1 (1928): 1–35. 64 For the evolution of the condemnations, beginning with the early work of Roz, De Syrorum Orientalium Erroribus, to the condemnations of the Diamper Synod, see Mecherry, De Syrorum Orientalium Erroribus, 95–109. 65 For a first description, see the description of MS Mannanam Syr. 46 from my unpublished Catalogue of the Syriac and Garshuni Malayalam Manuscripts of the Collection of Saint Joseph’s CMI Monastery, Mannanam, published as an Appendix in R. Mustață, Sermon on Saint Thomas, the Beloved Apostle, 97–103, and R. Mustață’s catalogue description of MS Thrissur Syr. 17, in Mustață, Sermon on Saint Thomas, the Beloved Apostle, 103–112. 66 This sermonary is the subject of R. Mustață’s Ph.D. thesis, written at Central European University: The Malabar Sermonary: The Syriac Legacy of Francisco Roz SJ (1559–1624) in South India. The thesis was defended in October 2022.

254

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far as we know – from the Middle East. The pieces of the Sermonary were collected and written for the vicars of the churches to be delivered on the feast days, but their composition was also an invention of genius for general teaching. They are using European sources written in Latin, Portuguese and Spanish, and are transmitting this material in a concise form to an Indian audience. Many among the poems of Kadavil Chandy are based on these sermons, cast into a poetic form, and thus, testify to a close collaboration between the European teacher and his best Indian disciple.67 – “[He was] a divine tongue, which made them know the mysteries of the Hebrews, the Syrians, the Greeks and the Romans” – One of the great virtues of Francisco Roz, for which he was admired by his Indian subjects and disciples, was his universality. He was commissioned to learn Syriac by Alessandro Valignano, and he learned the language, until then a great hurdle for the missionaries, in Goa in a few months.68 The material discovered in Kerala by our project gives the clue to this rapid progress: Roz must have studied Semitic languages, namely Hebrew and Aramaic, while studying at the University of Valencia, and thus, Syriac was his third Semitic language. I consider as his work having the highest literary value a series of five Dialogues, which we have baptized the Paravur Dialogues. They are written in Malayalam with embedded Syriac, Hebrew and Aramaic texts, in Garshuni Malayalam characters and are contained in a unique manuscript in St Joseph’s CMI Monastery, Mannanam (MS Mannanam Syr 74 = Mal. Gar. 2). The dialogue is conducted between a Christian (Roz’s alter ego), “Rabbi Jacob,” the Rabbi of the Paravur synagogue north of Cochin and near Chennamangalam, a Jew, a Muslim, and a Hindu. Their venue is the synagogue of Paravur, at just ten minutes’ walk from Vapicotta Seminary. Unlike its European models, this work lacks any animosity. It witnesses to the continued good relations between Jews and Christians even in the Portuguese era and also to the author’s peaceful dispositions. The local tradition of the CMI Fathers had held that the author was Mar Joseph Kariattil (1742–1786), a Catholic Syriac Christian erudite priest, who was consecrated in Lisbon, in 1783, bishop of the native Christians. He died in Goa on his journey home, in 1786 in mysterious conditions, before

67

On this collaboration between Roz and Chandy, see Perczel, “Alexander of the Port/Kadavil Chandy Kattanar” and Mustață, “Entangled Literary Genres in Syriac from Malabar.” 68 See Mecherry, Testing Ground for Jesuit Accommodation in Early Modern India, 93–95. Mecherry notes the enthusiasm of Valignano, expressed in his letter to the Jesuit general Acquaviva, dated 17.12.1585, in Documenta Indica XIV: 104.

Notes on Syriac Learning in South India

255

he reached Malabar. This view was also represented by Emmanouval Attel.69 I criticized this view in a study published in 2014,70 and Attel also changed his view in a new publication.71 Emy Merin Joy, Ph.D. student at Central European University is working now, in collaboration with Carsten Wilke and I. Perczel, on the edition and translation of this work. Comparing the language of the Paravur Dialogues to Roz’s only Malayalam work signed by him, namely the Statutes, and discovering the sources of the Dialogues among the texts printed in Latin, Spanish, Hebrew and Aramaic in sixteenth-century Europe, the three of us were able to establish Roz’s authorship.

Conclusions

I believe that Roz’s greatest contribution was not his activity as an inquisitor, nor that of a Church administrator, not even that of a promoter of Jesuit accommodation, but that of a teacher and scholar. As an inquisitor, he was the child of his times, but as a humanist scholar unifying the best Indian, Middle Eastern and European traditions, he was well ahead of his times. The first Catholic Indian Archbishop, Mar Chandy Parampil, was appointed almost forty years after Roz’s death, in 1663, but the creation of a local clergy including native bishops was definitively an idea cherished by Roz, as we have seen. Also, he, his collaborators, and their Indian students, have created a literature in Syriac and in Malayalam, which was to aliment for centuries the erudite circles of the Suriyani in India. By all means, to edit and study this literature, which until recently has remained unknown, is an important task for future Syriac studies. This study stops short of treating the period following Roz’s death in 1624, when his project declined in the hands of his less gifted and less foresighted successors, when the Indian Christian community split into several branches, and the European missionaries had to face the new challenge of Middle Eastern competitors coming from diverse Churches, including the Jacobite Syrian Orthodox, the Church of the East, the Chaldean and the Syrian Catholic 69 See E. Attel, Vēdatarkkattinṯe bhāṣāśāstrabhūmika [Philological Introduction to the Exposition of Theology] (Trivandrum: Carmel International Publishing House, 2010). 70 I. Perczel, “Garshuni Malayalam: A Witness to an Early Stage of Indian Christian Literature,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 17, no. 2 (2014): 263–323. 71 E. Attel, “Vedatharkam: A Manuscript Par Excellence,” in Revisiting a Treasure Trove: Perspectives on the Collection at St Kuriakose Elias Chavara Archives and Research Centre, ed. J.C. Chennattusserry and I. Payyappilly (Bengaluru, India: Centre for Publications CHRIST [Deemed to be University], 2019), 105–110.

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Churches. Following the cultural traditions of the Indian Christian communities, this competition meant a Kulturkampf conducted in Syriac. Thus, Syriac studies and culture kept its importance in India until the twentieth century. The institution of the Great Malankara Malpan has survived until our days. I had the great chance to have met the last one, Fr. Kurien Kaniamparampil, who translated the Syrian Orthodox liturgy into Malayalam and wrote poetry in Syriac. He was an ecumenical figure, teaching the members of all the confessions of the Indian Syrian Christians. Also, I was lucky enough to organize a meeting between the two great Malphone, Sebastian Brock and Kurien Kaniamparampil, which happened at the Catholicosate of the Malankara Jacobite Syrian Orthodox Church at Puthenkurishu, on 16 February 2009. Naturally, the conversation between the two great Malphone was conducted in Syriac, but in writing, as by that time Father Kaniamparampil was deaf. He started studying Syriac when he was 14, just like Deacon Zacharias, and died in 2015, at the age of 104. Thus, he was practicing his Syriac learning for ninety entire years.

The conversation between Sebastian Brock and Fr. Kurien Kaniamparampil on 16 February 2009, at Puthenkurishu. At that time, Fr. Kaniamparampil was 96 years old.

Notes on Syriac Learning in South India



257

Appendix 1. Colophon of MS Vatican Syr. 22

Vat syr 22, fol. 93vb–94va, colophon English translation

Syriac text

This holy book was copied in the royal (arśakaytā), famous and celebrated city of Śengli, which is in Malabar in the realm of India, in the holy church named after Mar Quriaqos, the glorious Martyr. May his prayer be on the community of the faithful! Amen. […]

‫[ ܐܬܟܬܒ ܟܬܒܐ ܗܢܐ ܩܕܝܫܐ‬93vb] ‫ܒܡܕܝܢܬܐ ܐܪܫܟܝܬܐ ܘܝܕܝܥܬܐ‬ ܿ ‫ܘܡܫܡܗܬܐ ܫ‬ ‫ܢܓ ܹܠܐ ܕܒܡܠܒܪ‬ ܸ ‫ ܒܥܕܬܐ ܩܕܝܫܬܐ‬.‫ܕܒܐܘܚܕܢܐ ܕܗܢܕܘ‬ .‫ܕܥܠ ܫܡ ܡܪܝ ܩܘܪܝܩܘܣ ܣܗܕܐ ܢܨܝܚܐ‬ ܿ ̈ […] .‫ܕܡܗܝܡܢܐ ܐܡܝܢ‬ ‫ܠܓܘܐ‬ ‫ܨܠܘܬܗ‬

The Father of the Fathers, our blessed and holy Father Mar Yahbalaha the Fifth, the Turk, Catholicos Patriarch of the East […]

̈ ‫ܕܐܒܗܬܐ ܐܒܘܢ ܡܒܪܟܐ‬ ‫ܘܐܒܐ‬ ‫ ܡܪܝ ܝܗܒܐܠܗܐ ܚܡܝܫܝܐ‬.‫ܘܩܕܝܫܐ‬ ‫ܛܘܪܟܝܐ ܩܛܘܠܝܩܐ ܦܛܪܝܪܟܝܣ ܕܡܕܢܚܐ‬

Bishop Mar Jacob, Metropolitan, Superintendent and Governor of the holy see of the Apostle Mar Thomas, that is, Governor of us and of all Christian India. […]

‫] ܘܡܪܝ ܝܥܩܘܒ ܐܦܣܩܘܦܐ‬94ra[ ‫ܡܝܛܪܦܘܠܝܛܣ ܩܝܘܡܐ ܘܡܕܒܪܢܐ‬ .‫ܕܟܘܪܣܝܐ ܩܕܝܫܐ ܕܡܪܝ ܛܐܘܡܐ ܫܠܝܚܐ‬ ܿ ‫ܘܕܟܠܗ ܥܕܬܐ‬ ‫ܐܘܟܝܬ ܡܕܒܪܢܐ ܕܝܠܢ‬ ]…[ ‫ܩܕܝܫܬܐ ܕܗܢܕܘ ܕܟܪܣܛܝܢܘܬܐ܀‬

This holy book with all its due and [necessary] parts was completed on a Wednesday, the […] of the month of Ḥ-ziran (June), in the year [1]612 of the Greeks, and to [God] be glory and may his love and mercy be abundantly shed upon us! Yes, and Amen. a b c d

̈

[…]

‫ܐܫܬܠܡ ܟܝܬ ܟܬܒܐ ܩܕܝܫܐ ܒܟܠ‬ ̈ a]‫] ܙܕܩܘܗܝ ܘܡܬܒ‍[‍ܥ ܢܝܬܘܗܝ‬94rb[ ‫ ܒܚܙܝܪܢ ܝܪܚܐ‬b]…[ ‫ܝܘܡ ܐܪܒܥܒܫܒܐ‬ ̈ ‫ܪܝ̄ܒ‬.‫ ̄ܬ‬c]‫ܫܢܬ [ܐܠܦ‬ ‫ܕܝܘܢܝܐ‬ ]‫ ܫܘܒܚܐ ܘܥܠܝܢ ̈ܪܚܡܘܗ[ܝ‬d]‫ܘܠ‍[‍ܐ ܠܗܐ‬ ]‫ܘܚܢܢܗ ܢܫܬܦܥܘܢ ܐܝܢ ܘܐܡܝܢ [܀‬

]‫ ܘܡܬܒ‍‍[ܥ ܢܝܬܘܗܝ‬Assemani’s conjecture. Here the indication of the day of the month is missing. [‫ ]ܐܠܦ‬Assemani’s conjecture. ]‫ ܘܠ‍‍[ܐ ܠܗܐ‬Assemani’s conjecture.

258

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(cont.)

Vat syr 22, fol. 93vb–94va, colophon English translation

Syriac text

It was copied by a certain feeble and sinful student, Zacharias, son of Joseph, son of Zacharias, from the aforementioned city of Śenglī, one of the pupils and ⟨spiritual⟩ sons of our aforementioned Father and Governor, one who is called a deacon but in deed is as far from, and as inferior to, the perfection of the requirements of his rank, as man is inferior to the angel, or as east is far away from the west (Ps. 103.12).

‫�ܲܟ ܼܬ ܿ ܹܒܗ ܓܝܪ ܐܢܫ ܐܣܟܘܠܝܐ ܡܚܝܠܐ‬ ‫ܘܚܛܝܐ ܙܟܪܝܐ ܒ‍‍[ܪ] ܝܘܣܦ ܒܪ ܙܟܪܝܐ‬ ̈ ̈ ‫ܘܒܢܘܗ[ܝ] ܕܐܒܘܢ‬ ‫ܬܠܡܝܕܘܗܝ‬ ]‫ܡ[ܢ‬ ܿ ‫ܡܢܗ ܕܡܕܝܢܬܐ‬ ].‫ܘܡܕܒܪܢܢ ܥܗܝܕ[ܐ‬ ‫ܥܗܝܕܬܐ ܫܢܓܠܐ ܕܒܫܡ ܡܫܡܫܢܐ‬ ܵܿ ‫ ܕܝܢ ܪܚܝܩܐ ܘܒܨܝܪܐ ܼܡܢ‬e‫ܒܥܒܕܐ‬ ̈ ‫ܫܘܡܠܝ‬ ‫ ܕܕܪܓܗ ܐܝܟ‬f)sic( ‫ܙܕܩܕܐ‬ ‫ܕܒܨܝܪ ܒܪܢܫܐ ܼܡܢ ܡܠܐܟܐ ܘܐܝܟ‬ .‫ܡܢ ܡܥܪܒܐ‬ ܼ ‫ܕܪܚܝܩܐ ܡܕܢܚܐ‬

He asks and supplicates and demands in the Grace ⟨of God⟩ from all those who read this book and find a mistake or an error, not to throw curses on [the scribe], which is not becoming to […] and wise men, but to bestow upon me instead [of this], one [holy?] prayer

ܿ ‫ܟܕ‬ ܿ ‫ ܘܡܬܟܫܦ‬g‫ܒܥܐ ܘ‬ ‫ܘܫܐܠ ܒܛܝܒܘ‬ ܿ ܿ ‫ܼܡܢ ܟܠ ܡܢ ܕܩܪܐ ܒܟܬܒܐ ܗܢܐ‬ ‫ܘܡܫܟܚ ܵܦܘܕܐ ܐܘ ܛܥܘܢܐ ܕܠܐ‬ ̈ h‫] [ܟܬܘܒܐ ܠ‍‍]ܘ ܛܬܐ‬94va[ ‫ܢܫܡܪ ܥܠ‬ ̈ ]‍‍‫ܕܠܐ ܦܐܝܐ [… ܘܠܚ‬ ‫ ܐܠܐ ܚܠܦ‬i‫ܟܝܡܐ‬ ]‫ ܠܝ ܚܕ ܨܠܘܬܐ [ܩܕܝܫܬܐ؟‬j ‫[ܗܕܐ ܢܫ‍‍]ܟܢ‬ l ‫ ܗܟܢܐ ܡܪܝܐ[ܚܣ‍]‍ܐ‬k‫ܘܢܐܡܪ‬

̈ e ‫ܒܥܒܕܐ‬ Assemani, wrongly. ̈ ̈ , f ‫( ܙܕܩܕܐ‬sic) is the form used in the manuscript. Assemani has silently corrected this to ‫ܙܕܩܐ‬ which would be the grammatically correct version. However, I think that the scribe wanted ̈ to write ‫ܙܕܩܬܐ‬, but made an unvoluntary mistake because he was pronouncing the Syriac words in a Malayalam way. In Malayalam, the ta sound (modern Malayalam ത, transcribed in Garshuni Malayalam as ‫ )ܬ‬becomes voiced between two vowels and is pronounced as d. ̈ So, he might have pronounced ‫ ܙܕܩܬܐ‬as zedqādā, hence the error. g The ‫ ܘ‬at the end of the line is that of the next word (‫ )ܘܡܬܟܫܦ‬which the scribe restarted writing in the next line. It serves to fill the space in the line. ̈ h ‫ ܥܠܝ ܡܠܬܐ ܕܠܘܛܬܐ‬Assemani, wrongly. ̈ i ‫ ܠܚܟܝܡܐ‬Assemani. However, there is space in the damaged part of the line for another word. j ‫ ܚܠܦ ܗܝ‬Assemani. k ‫ ܨܠܘܬܐ ܘܢܐܡܪ‬Assemani. However, at the damaged part, after ‫ܨܠܘܬܐ‬, there is space for one more word, whose final ālap can be seen. l ‫ ܚܣܐ‬is Assemani’s conjecture.

Notes on Syriac Learning in South India

259

(cont.)

Vat syr 22, fol. 93vb–94va, colophon English translation and to say this: Lord, [have mercy] on the feeble scribe, who toiled according to his power, being a fourteen year-old boy and being a foreigner [to reading] and speaking Syriac, [in]capable to read ⟨aloud⟩,m and who wrote [that] what he wrote without reading [it] ⟨aloud⟩, and who wrote this apology because of this. And to God [Most High?], in whose power I began and in the succour of whose grace I completed, let there be glorification, honour, thanksgiving and worship from my insane and humble self and from all the rational beings, be they composite or simple. God be blessed forever, and his Name be glorified!

Syriac text

‫ܥܡܠ‬ ܼ ‫ܠܟܬܘܒܐ ܡܚܝܠܐ [ܕ]ܐܝܟ ܚܝܠܗ‬ ̈ ‫ܛܠܝܐ [ܒ‍‍]]ܪ ܐܪܒܥܣ̈ܪܐ‬ ‫ܫܢܝܢ ܢܘܟܪܝ‬ ]‫ [ܕܠܐ‬n‫[ܩܪܝ‍]‍ܢܐ ܘܡܡܠܠܐ ܣܘܪܝܝܐ‬ ‫ ܘܟܬܒ [ ܿܗܝ] ܕܟܬܒ ܟܕ‬o‫ܚܝܠܐ ܕܩܪܝܢܐ‬ ܿ [ ‫ܠܐ ܩܪܐ‬ ‫ܥܒܕ ܗܢܐ‬ ܼ p‫ܠܗ ܘ]ܡܛܠܗܢܐ‬ ܸ q]‫[ܡ‍‍]ܦܩܒܪܘܚܐ ܕܠܐܠܗܐ [ܥܠܝܐ؟‬ ‫ܕܥܠ ܚܝܠܗ ܫܪܝܬ [ܘܒ‍‍]ܥܘܕܪܢܗ ܛܝܒܘܬܗ‬ ܿ ‫ ܫܘܒܚܐ ܘܐܝܩܪܐ ܘܬܘܕܝܬܐ‬r‫ܫܠܡܬ‬ ‫ܘܡܢ‬ ܼ ‫ ܘܒܨܝܪܘܬܝ‬s‫ܘܣܓܕܬܐ ܼܡܢ ܫܢܫܘܬܝ‬ ̈ ̈ ̈ ‫ܘܦܫܝܛܐ ܐܝܢ‬ ‫ܡܚܝܕܐ‬ ‫ܡܠܝܠܐ‬ ‫ܟܠܗܘܢ‬ ‫ܘܐܡܝܢ܀܀‬

.‫ܒܪܝܟ ܐܠܗܐ ܠܥܠܡ ܘܡܫܒܚ ܫܡܗ‬

m That is, to pronounce correctly. n ‫ ܢܘܟܪܝ ܠܫܢܐ ܘܡܡܠܠܐ ܣܘܪܝܝܐ‬Assemani. However, compare Pseudo-Zacharias Rhetor, Ecclesiastic History, about Sergius of Reshaina: ‫ܘܣܘܪܝܝܐܝܬ ܚܟܡ ܗܘܐ ܩܪܝܢܐ ܘܠܫܢܐ‬: “he knew Syriac, both reading and speaking” (E.W. Brooks, ed., Historia ecclesiastica Zachariae Rhetori vulgo adscripta, vol. 2., CSCO 84, Scr. Syri 39 [Louvain: L. Durbecq, 1953], 136, l. 8). Scribe Zacharias wants to say that he, as a Malayalee, is a stranger to both reading (aloud) and speaking Syriac. o ‫ ܘܠܐ ܩܢܐ ܚܝܠܐ ܕܩܪܝܢܐ‬Assemani. However, in the damaged part of the line, there is not enough space for ‫ܘܠܐ ܩܢܐ‬. More precisely, there is space enough only for three letters. p ‫ܩܪܐ ܠܗ ܘܡܛܠܗܢܐ‬ ܸ ‫ ܘܟܬܒ ܡܕܡ ܕܟܬܒ ܟܕ ܠܐ‬Assemani. q ‫ ܕܠܐܠܗܐ ܫܘܒܚܐ‬Assemani. However, ‫ ܫܘܒܚܐ ܘܐܝܩܪܐ‬comes later, after ‫[ܘܒ‍‍]ܥ ܘܕܪܢܗ‬ ܿ ‫ܫܠܡܬ‬ ‫ܛܝܒܘܬܗ‬. r So is it in the manuscript. ‫ ܘܒܥܘܕܪܢܗ ܕܛܝܒܘܬܗ ܫܠܡܬ܁‬Assemani. Apparently, ‫ܘܒܥܘܕܪܢܗ‬ ‫ ܛܝܒܘܬܗ‬is a grammatical error for ‫ܘܒܥܘܕܪܢ ܛܝܒܘܬܗ‬. s ‫ ܚܠܫܘܬܝ‬Assemani. However, the letters are clearly visible and the scribe wrote ‫ܫܢܫܘܬܝ‬, most probably an error for ‫ܫܢܝܘܬܝ‬.

260

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Appendix 2. Edition and Translation of Stanza 38 in Chandy Kadavil Kattanar’s Panegyric on Francisco Roz, MS Mannanam Syr. 63, 113v–114r

Yod. Also, he knew many languages That are in the foul world, That of the warlike Portuguese, The Indian [language], and many others.

ܲ

ܵ ‫܀ܝ܀ ܝܕܥ‬ 72:‫ܗܘܐ �ܐܦ ܸܠ ̈ܫ ܹܢܐ‬ ܲ ܲ ܲ ܵ ‫ܒܥ‬ :‫ܠܡܐ �ܕܣ ܹܢܐ‬ � ‫ܣܓܝ �ܕ‬ ܲ 73:‫ܕ �ܦ̈ܪܢܓܝܐ ܸܡܬܟܬܫ ܹܢܐ‬ 74:‫ܘܣܓܝ ܐܚ̈ܪ ܹܢܐ‬ ‫ܘܗܢܕܘܝܐ‬ ܼ

Chandy is loose in observing the syllabic rule of the verse, and thus the first three verses of the stanza are seven-syllable, while the fourth is nine. However, he is always strict on the rhyme, whose pattern in this poem is aaaa. So, in this stanza the rhyme is always ē. This was not recognized by the scribe, who changed the plural ending of verses 1, 3 and 4 to singular. In an earlier publication I misread the last word of verse 2, thinking that it was the first word ܲ of line 3, and emended ‫ �ܕܣ ܹܢܐ‬to ‫ܕܨܝ ܵܢܐ‬ ܼ . Thus, I claimed falsely that Rozܲ knew ܵ also Chinese.75 In the third verse the manuscript reads ‫ܬܟܬܫܢܐ‬ ‫ܕ �ܦܓ̈ܪܓܝܐ ܸܡ‬. I am ܲ emending this to ‫ܕ �ܦ̈ܪܢܓܝܐ ܸܡܬܟܬܫ ܹܢܐ‬, d-Parangāyē meṯkaṯśānē. The name Parangi denotes in the Malabar parlance the Portuguese. Roz was a Catalan and had to learn Portuguese for the Indian mission. Bibliography Amar, J.P. “Ṣawma, Rabban,” https://gedsh.bethmardutho.org/Sawma-Rabban. Accessed 18 May 2022. Amar, J.P. “Yahbalaha III,” in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage: Electronic Edition, ed. S.P. Brock, et al. (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2011; online ed. Beth Mardutho, 2018) https://gedsh.bethmardutho.org/Yahbalaha-III. Accessed 18 May 2022. Assemani, J.S. Bibliothecae Apostolicae Vaticanae codicum manuscriptorum Catalogus, vol. 2 (Rome: Apud heredes Barbiellini, 1758). Attel, E. Vēdatarkkattinṯe bhāṣāśāstrabhūmika [Philological Introduction to the Exposition of Theology] (Trivandrum: Carmel International Publishing House, 2010).

72 73 74 75

ܵ ‫ ܸܠ‬. ‫ ܸܠ ̈ܫܢܐ‬emendavi, MS: ‫ܫܢܐ‬ ܵ ܵ ‫ ܕ �ܲܦ̈ܪܢܓܝܐ ܸܡܬܟܬܫ ܹܢܐ‬emendavi, MS: ‫ܬܟܬܫܢܐ‬ ‫ܕ �ܲܦܓܪܓܝܐ ܸܡ‬. ܵ ‫ ܐܚ̈ܪ ܹܢܐ‬emendavi, MS: ‫ܐܚܪܢܐ‬.

In Perczel, “Accommodationist strategies in the Malabar Coast,” 223.

Notes on Syriac Learning in South India

261

Attel, E. “Vedatharkam: A Manuscript Par Excellence,” in Revisiting a Treasure Trove: Perspectives on the Collection at St Kuriakose Elias Chavara Archives and Research Centre, ed. J.C. Chennattusserry and I. Payyappilly (Bengaluru, India: Centre for Publications CHRIST [Deemed to be University], 2019), 105–110. Brooks, E.W. ed. Historia ecclesiastica Zachariae Rhetori vulgo adscripta, vol. 2, CSCO 84, Scr. Syri 39 (Louvain: L. Durbecq, 1953). Budge, E.A.W., trans. The Monks of Ḳûblâi Khan, Emperor of China or the History of the Life and Travels of Rabban Ṣâwmâ, Envoy and Plenipotentiary of the Mongol Khâns to the Kings of Europe, and Marḳôs Who as Mâr Yahbh-allâhâ III Became Patriarch of the Nestorian Church in Asia, Translated from the Syriac (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1928). Cereti, C.G., L.M. Olivieri and J. Vazhuthanapally. “The Problem of the Saint Thomas Crosses and Related Questions: Epigraphical Survey and Preliminary Research,” East and West 52, no. 1/4 (2002): 285–310. Chevallier, P., ed. Dionysiaca: Recueil donnant l’ensemble des traductions latines des ouvrages attribués à Denys l’Aréopagite (Bruges: Desclée de Brouwer, 1937). Ferroli, D. The Jesuits in Malabar, vol. 1 (Bangalore City: Bangalore Press, 1939). Gamliel, O. “Back from Shingly: Revisiting the premodern history of Jews in Kerala,” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 55, no. 1 (2018): 53–76. Giamil, S., ed. Genuinae relationes inter sedem apostolicam et Assyriorum Orientalium seu Chaldaeorum Ecclesiam: nunc maiori ex parte primum editae, historicisque adnotationibus illustratae (Rome: Ermanno Loescher et Co., 1902). Gouvea, A. de. Jornada do Arcebispo de Goa Dom Frey Aleixo de Menezes Primaz da India Oriental, Religioso da Orden de S. Agostino (Coimbra: Officina de Diogo Gomez, 1606). Hausherr, I., ed. De erroribus Nestorianorum qui in hac India orientali versantur auctore P. Francisco Ros S.I. Inédit latin-syriaque de la fin de 1586 ou du début de 1587, retrouvé par le P. Castets S.I., missionaire à Trichinopoly, annoté par le P.I. Hausherr S.I. in Orientalia Christiana 11, no. 1 (40) (1928): 1–35. Henning, W.B. “Mitteliranisch” in Handbuch der Orientalistik. 1.4: Iranistik, 1: Linguistik (Leiden: Brill, 1958), 20–130. Joy, E.M. “Christian Manuscripts of Kerala (India): Revisiting Popular Histories of the Syrian Christians in the Early Modern Period,” MA thesis, Central European University, 2019. Jussay, P.M. “A Jewish Settlement in Medieval Kerala,” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 57 (1996): 277–284. Kollaparampil, J. The Archdeacon of All-India, The Syrian Churches series 5 (Kottayam: Catholic Bishop’s House, 1972).

262

Perczel and Mustață

Knight, S. “Narratives of Religious Identity: The Self-perception of the Jacobite Syrian Christians of Kerala,” Ph.D. dissertation, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 2009. Land, J.P.N. Anecdota Syriaca, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 1862). Malekandathil, P., trans. Jornada of Dom Alexis de Menezes: A Portuguese Account of the Sixteenth Century Malabar (Kochi: LRC Publications, 2003). McKenzie, D.N. A Concise Pahlavi Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971, repr. with corrections: 1986). Mecherry, A. Testing Ground for Jesuit Accommodation in Early Modern India: Francisco Ros SJ in Malabar (16th–17th centuries) (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatus Iesu [IHSI], 2019). Mecherry, A.S.J. De Syrorum Orientalium Erroribus Auctore P. Francisco Ros S.I.: A LatinSyriac Treatise from Early Modern Malabar (1586) (Piscataway NJ: Gorgias Press, 2021). Menachery, G., ed. Indian Church History Classics, vol. 1, The Nazranies (Pallinada, Ollur, Thrissur: The South Asia Research Assistance Services, 1998), 546–558. Mundadan, M. History of Christianity in India, vol. 1, From the Beginning up to the Middle of the Sixteenth Century (up to 1542) (Bangalore: Theological Publications in India, 1984). Murre-van den Berg, H. Scribes and Scriptures: The Church of the East in the Eastern Ottoman Provinces (1500–1850), Eastern Christian Studies 21 (Leuven: Peeters, 2015). Mustață, R. Catalogue description of MS Thrissur Syr. 17, published in the Appendix to R. Mustață, Sermon on Saint Thomas, the Beloved Apostle: A Syriac Catholic Panegyric from Seventeenth Century Malabar (Piscataway NJ: Gorgias Press, 2019). Mustață, R. Sermon on Saint Thomas, the Beloved Apostle: A Syriac Catholic Panegyric from Seventeenth Century Malabar (Piscataway NJ: Gorgias Press, 2019). Mustață, R. “Entangled Literary Genres in Syriac from Malabar in the Aftermath of the Synod of Diamper (1599),” in Entangled Religions 11, no. 5 (2022), ed. A. Cuffel, https://er.ceres.rub.de/index.php/ER/article/view/9901/9481. Narayanan, M.G.S. Cultural Symbiosis in Kerala (Trivandrum: Kerala Historical Society, 1972). Perczel, I. “Have the Flames of Diamper Destroyed All the Old Manuscripts of the Saint Thomas Christians?,” in Festschrift Jacob Thekeparampil: The Harp: A Review of Syriac and Oriental Ecumenical Studies 20 (2006): 87–104. Perczel, I. “What Can a Nineteenth-Century Syriac Manuscript Teach Us about Indian Church History?,” Parole de l’Orient 33 (2008): 245–265. Perczel, I. “Alexander of the Port/Kadavil Chandy Kattanar: A Syriac Poet and Disciple of the Jesuits in Seventeenth-century India,” Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 14 (2014): 30–49.

Notes on Syriac Learning in South India

263

Perczel, I. “Garshuni Malayalam: A Witness to an Early Stage of Indian Christian Literature,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 17, no. 2 (2014): 263–323. Perczel, I. “Cosmopolitismes de la Mer d’Arabie: Les chrétiens de saint Thomas face à l’expansion Portugaise,” in Cosmopolitismes en Asie du Sud: Sources, intinéraires, langues (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle), ed. C. Lefèvre, I.s Županov and J. Flores, Collection Puruṣārtha 33 (Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2015). Perczel, I. “Accommodationist Strategies on the Malabar Coast: Competition or Complementarity?,” in The Rites Controversy in the Early Modern World, ed. P.A. Fabre and I. Zupanov (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 191–232. Perczel, I. “Some Early Documents about the Interactions of the Saint Thomas Christians and the European Missionaries,” in Malabar in the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism in a Maritime Historical Region, ed. M. Kooria and M. Naylor Pearson (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018). Perczel, I. Catalogue of the Syriac and Garshuni Malayalam Manuscripts of the Collection of Saint Joseph’s CMI Monastery, Mannanam, Description of MS Mannanam Syr 46, published in the Appendix to Radu Mustață, Sermon on Saint Thomas, the Beloved Apostle: A Syriac Catholic Panegyric from Seventeenth Century Malabar (Piscataway NJ: Gorgias Press, 2019). Perczel, I. “Syriac Christianity in India,” The Syriac World, ed. D. King (London: Routledge, 2019), 653–697. van der Ploeg, J.P.M., O.P. The Christians of St. Thomas in South India and their Syriac Manuscripts (Rome and Bangalore: Center for Indian and Inter-Religious Studies and Dharmaram Publications, 1983). Raghava Varier, M.R. and K. Veluthat. Tarisāppaḷḷippaṭṭayam (Caritram) (Kottayam: Sahithya Pravarthaka C.S. Ltd., 2013). Scher, A. ed. and trans. Histoire nestorienne inédite: Chronique de Séert. Patrologia Orientalis 4, no. 3 (1908), 5, no. 2 (1910), 7, no. 2 (1911), 13, no. 4 (1913). della Vida, G.L. Ricerche sulla Formazione del più antico fondo dei manoscritti orientali della Biblioteca Vaticana, Studi e testi 92 (Città del Vaticano, 1939). Wright, W. A Catalogue of the Syriac Manuscripts Preserved in the Library of the University of Cambridge, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1901).

Part 3 Going Where We Have Not Been

∵

Bringing the Syriac Climacus to the Twenty-First Century Jeff W. Childers In the first part of the seventh century the head of the Monastery of Sinai was a man named John, formerly a hermit who had acquired extensive experience of various forms of the ascetic life practiced in the Sinai desert, and especially in the vicinity of Mt. Sinai, at the site of the fortification and chapel built by Justinian in the mid-sixth century.1 We have little reliable information about John’s life and the circumstances of his leadership of the monastery; even his dates are disputed, with scholarly proposals for the time of his death ranging from ca. 600 to 670–80, with ca. 649 being the most commonly accepted. John is most well-known as the author of an influential Greek treatise on the spiritual life known as the Ladder of Divine Ascent (Κλίμαξ, i.e. Scala Paradisi),2 a composition apparently written at the request of the monastic leader John of Raithu. The Ladder of Divine Ascent (LDA) rapidly became a classic text in eastern monastic circles. Today it is read during Lent in Orthodox monasteries, so that some monks will have heard it read aloud some 50–60 times during the course of their lives.3 This manual of spiritual practice organizes ascetic wisdom topically into a series of 30 themes, or steps, picturing the spiritual life as a ladder of ascent to heaven.4 Hence, the author is widely known as John Climacus, i.e. John “of the Ladder” (also John Scholasticus), and his work is revered as a spiritual classic, not only among monks but many lay-people as well. Kallistos Ware remarks, “[w]ith the exception of the Bible and the service books, there is no work in Eastern Christendom that has been studied, copied, and translated more often than the Ladder of Divine Ascent.”5 1 See J. Pauli, “John Climacus,” in Dictionary of Early Christian Literature, ed. S. Dopp and W. Geerlings, trans. M. O’Connell (New York: Crossroad, 2011), 336–337. For an outstanding translation and analysis of the text, see R.M. Parrinello, Giovanni Climaco: La Scala del Paradiso, Letture cristiane del primo millenio 41 (Milan: Paoline, 2007). 2 Climacus’ Scala paradisi (CPG 7852) and his Liber ad pastorem (CPG 7853) typically occur together in the manuscripts. 3 C. Luibheid and N. Russell, John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Classics of Western Spirituality (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1982), 1. 4 The Ladder’s iconographic tradition is very rich. See especially J.R. Martin. The Illustration of the Heavenly Ladder of John Climacus, Studies in Manuscript Illumination 5 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954). 5 Luibhead and Russell, John Climacus, 1.

© Jeff W. Childers, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004537897_014

268

Childers

We have many Greek manuscripts of LDA and a few Greek editions of fair quality, though the latter do not take account of the oldest manuscripts. A thorough and more critical edition of the Greek text is needed.6 The LDA text circulated in many ancient versions as well, with portions surviving in Armenian, Georgian, Slavonic, Arabic, Ethiopic, and Syriac. The present article details a project to edit and study the Syriac version of John Climacus’ Ladder of Divine Ascent in ways that combine traditional and emerging methods. The subject and aims of the project not only build on Sebastian Brock’s own work in the study of Syriac texts from Sinai, but its methods respond to the opportunities of a twenty-first century digital research environment in ways that resonate with Brock’s legacy of academic generosity and global collaboration.

The Syriac Sources

̈

The Syriac version circulated with the titles, ‫( ܟܬܒܐ ܕܡܣܩܢܐ‬Book of Steps) ̈ or ‫( ܟܬܒܐ ܕܡܣܩܢܐ ܕܣܒܠܬܐ ܪܘܚܢܝܬܐ‬Book of Steps of the Spiritual Ladder), or even, as Barhebraeus dubs it, ‫( ܟܬܒܐ ܡܣܩܢܝܐ‬Book of Ascent).7 It is known to survive in six substantial manuscripts,8 once we discount the lamentable loss of the ninth-century Melkite compilation MS Hiersemann 500/2 (Louvain G 197)9 in the fire of the Library of Louvain in 1940, with its excerpts of LDA. Sinai syr. 68 (formerly designated Sinai syr. 56)10 comes from around 6

See T.G. Popova, “The Most Ancient Greek Manuscripts of the Ladder of John Climacus,” Scrinium 12 (2016): 368–374. The Greek editions are: M. Rader, ed., Sancti patris nostri Ioannis Scholastici abbatis Montis Sina qui vulgò Climacus appellatur, opera omnia (Paris: Sébastien Cramoisy, 1633); a reprint of Rader with some corrections in J.-P. Migne, PG 88 ((Paris, 1864), 632–1208); a corrected and revised reprint of Rader in P. Trevisan, ed., S. Giovanni Climaco. Scala Paradisi, Corona Patrum Salesiana, Series Graeca 8–9 (Torino: 1941); Sophronius Hermites, ed. Κλίμαξ Ἰωάννου τοῦ Σιναΐτου (Constantinople: Vretou, 1883; reprint Athens: Astir, 1970); Archimandrite Ignatios, ed., Tοῦ Ὁσίου Πατρὸς ἡμῶν Ἰωάννοῦ Καθηγουμένου τοῦ Σιναΐτου Κλίμαξ (Oropos, Attikes: Holy Monastery of the Paraclete, 1978 [7th ed. 1997]). 7 See H.G.B. Teule’s important exploratory article, “L’Échelle du Paradis de Jean Climaque dans la tradition syriaque: premières investigations,” Parole de l’orient 20 (1995): 279–293 (282). 8 A. Baumstark incorrectly identified two other manuscripts (Baumstark, Geschichte der syrischen Literatur [Bonn: A. Marcus and E. Webers, 1922], 165–166, 339, 350); see Teule, “L’Échelle du Paradis de Jean Climaque,” 281–282. 9 See the entry in Karl Hiersemann’s Katalog 500. Orientalische Manuskripte arabische, syrische, griechische, armenische, persische Handschriften des 7.–18. Jahrhdrts. (Leipzig, 1922), 5; also Baumstark, Geschichte, 339. 10 See M. Kamil, Catalogue of All Manuscripts in the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mt. Sinai (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1970), 153.

Bringing the Syriac Climacus

269

the eighth century and contains a condensed form of LDA on 56 folios.11 The sectional and even apophthegmatic nature of large portions of the text made LDA susceptible to such abridgments. The first part of the text in this source was presumed lost until Brock identified a fragment of it filling out a large portion of the lacuna in that veritable encyclopedia of Syriac fragments from Sinai, Ambrosianus A 296 inf. in Milan, i.e. Chabot 45.12 The Melkite compilation MS Hiersemann 500/3, probably of the ninth century, includes the text of Step 28, “On Prayer.”13 Two British Library manuscripts preserve the complete text of LDA: British Library (BL) Additional MS 12169 is of the eighth or ninth century and BL Additional MS 14593 was copied in Edessa in 817.14 The thirteenth-century Leiden Or. 3246 (formerly Hebrew Warner 57) contains the whole of LDA and, as Herman Teule reports, has the same version as Sinai syr. 56/68.15 The celebrated Codex climaci rescriptus (CCR) occupies a significant place on the list. Though this palimpsest may be considered more famous for its underwritings, particularly in Christian Palestinian Aramaic and Greek, Agnes Smith Lewis dubbed it climaci rescriptus because of the superior writing,16 a ninth-century copy of the Syriac LDA, somewhat defective but mostly complete, having the same version as occurs in the other manuscripts.17 To these six we should add the fragment Sinai syr. NF Sp. 38, a damaged bifolium from the eighth or ninth century, identified by Brock as having portions of

11 Teule, “L’Échelle du Paradis de Jean Climaque,” 282. 12 See S.P. Brock, “Syriac on Sinai: The Main Connections,” in ΕΥΚΟΣΜΙΑ. Studi miscellanei per il 75º di Vincenzo Poggi S.J., ed. V. Ruggieri and L. Pieralli (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbetino, 2003), 102–117 (108, n20); also P. Géhin, “Manuscrits sinaïtiques dispersés II: les fragments théologiques syriaques de Milan (Chabot 34–57),” Oriens Christianus 91 (2007): 1–24 (14). 13 Also known as Codex syriacus secundus. W. Strothmann produced a facsimile of the manuscript, formerly held by the Cincinnati Historical Society and auctioned off with the Cornelius Hauck collection of rare books in 2006 (Strothmann, Codex Syriacus secundus: Bibel-Palimpsest aus d. 6./7. Jh. [Katalog Hiersemann 500/3], Göttinger Orientforschungen I. Reihe, Syriaca 13 [Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1977], 8, 45–48). See Teule, “L’Échelle du Paradis de Jean Climaque,” 283. 14 W. Wright, Catalogue of Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum Acquired Since the Year 1838 (London: Longmans & Co., 1871), 2: 589–590. 15 Teule, “L’Échelle du Paradis de Jean Climaque,” 283–284; M.J. de Goeje, Catalogus codicum orientalium Bibliothecae Academiae Lugduno-Batavae (Leiden: Brill, 1873), 5: 67–69. 16 A.S. Lewis, Codex Climaci Rescriptus. Fragments of Sixth Century Palestinian Syriac Texts of the Gospels, of the Acts of the Apostles and of St. Paul’s Epistles, Horae Semiticae 8 (Cambridge: University Press, 1909), xii. 17 Several of these manuscripts (CCR; British Library Additional MSS 12169 and 14593; Leiden Or. 3246) originally included additional works connected with Climacus and LDA in the manuscript tradition: a prefatory letter to John of Raithu known as the “Spiritual Tablets” ̈ (‫ )ܠܘܚܐ ̈ܪܘܚܢܝܬܐ‬and a treatise appended to LDA, “To the Shepherd” (‫)ܠܘܬ ܪܥܝܐ‬.

270

Childers

Steps 5 and 7. The fragment does not belong to Sinai Syr. 68 but it has the same translation as the others.18

The Syriac Version

It is evident that the Syriac translation of LDA that must have been done prior to 817, the date of BL Additional MS 14593. Furthermore, the manuscript tradition has a strong connection to Sinai. The manuscripts Sinai syr. 68 and the fragment Sinai syr. NF Sp. 38 are from Sinai. As for CCR, whereas its provenance is not perfectly known, it is believed to derive from Sinai. The work done by the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library for the Sinai Palimpsests Project has made eight additional folios of CCR available online (designated Sinai Syriac NF 38 and available online through UCLA’s Digital Library19), confirming the link between this manuscript and Sinai. Brock cites the colophon of BL Additional 14593 as just one piece of evidence pointing to a significant connection between Edessa and Sinai in the period from the eighth to the tenth century.20 In his view, this colophon and the presence of early Syriac manuscripts of LDA at Sinai, “[make] it quite likely that the Syriac translation was actually made on Sinai.”21 Climacus was Chalcedonian, though his ascetic text enjoyed broad appeal. Brock and Teule have proposed that the translation most likely originated in Melkite circles.22 In particular, Teule describes the ways in which the texts and scribes of various manuscripts handle a mention of Evagrius in Step 14. The Greek is not flattering, betraying the Melkite appraisal of Evagrius since his condemnation at Constantinople in 553: “Evagrius, afflicted by an evil spirit, imagined himself to be the wisest of the wise both in thought and expression. But he was deceived, poor man, and proved to be the most foolish of fools 18 S.P. Brock, Catalogue of Syriac Fragments (New Finds) in the Library of the Monastery of Saint Catherine, Mount Sinai (Athens: Mount Sinai Foundation, 1995), 35, 105–106, plates 230–231. 19 St. Catharine’s Monastery of the Sinai, Egypt, Sinai Palimpsests Project. https://sinai.lib rary.ucla.edu (accessed 10 September 2021); see also Hieromonk Justin of Sinai, “Newly Recovered Manuscripts of the Scriptures from Saint Catharine’s Monastery, Sinai,” Restoration Quarterly 59 (2017): 19–23. 20 Brock, “Syriac on Sinai,” 107–108. 21 Brock, “Syriac on Sinai,” 108. 22 Teule, “L’Échelle du Paradis de Jean Climaque,” 285–287; S.P. Brock, “Melkite Literature in Syriac,” in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage, ed. S.P. Brock, et al. (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2011), 285–286 (285); see also Baumstark, Geschichte, 339.

Bringing the Syriac Climacus

271

in this among other things.”23 Thereupon follows a piece of counsel that the author immediately rejects as idealistic and ill-advised. In BL Additional 12169, this portion of text has been largely erased and a later hand has provided a different assessment: “The divine Evagrius, the wisest of the wise in divine things in word and thought” (fol. 72v). A still later hand has provided a more literal rendering of the Greek in the margin, setting the matter straight again. In this interaction, we are witnessing a debate about Evagrius between a user of the book, one of presumably miaphysite commitment who appreciates Evagrius, with the original translator, who does not respect the latter – or who at least represents faithfully the denunciation of Evagrius we find in the Greek. The text as it is preserved in the CCR manuscript retains the denunciation as well, without any bickering in the margins (fol. 56v–57r). As for BL Additional 14593, we know it to have originated in Edessa but it has a lacuna and therefore omits the section altogether.24 Yet the manuscript appears to have been used in miaphysite circles as well. In Step 28, the Greek has, “Some say that prayer is better than the remembrance of death, but I praise two natures in one person”25 (ἐγὼ δὲ μιᾶς ὑποστάσεως δύο οὐσίας ὑμνῶ); the Greek has ousias. That is, just as Christ is two ousias in one person, so the ascetic ought to combine both types of practices in one person. The Syriac wording here in most of the manuscripts ̈ is ‫ܐܢܐ ܕܝܢ ܬ̈ܪܬܝܢ ܐܘܣܝܣ܆ ܕܚܕ ܩܢܘܡܐ ܡܫܒܚ ܐܢܐ‬, i.e. “but I praise two ousias of one hypostasis.” However, in BL Additional 14593 the clause has ̈ ‫ܬ̈ܪܝܗܘܢ‬, been erased, and a later hand has emended the text to include, ‫ܙܢܝܐ‬ thereby yielding the exclamation, “I extol both kinds” (fol. 163v), and removing any mention of ousias. It would seem that the scribe had no problem with the author’s equal affirmation of both types of ascetic practice, but finds the “dyophysite” Christological analogy to be offensive, so he changed it. These interactions speak to the popularity and use of Climacus in different communities but they also indicate that the Syriac translation itself originated in Melkite circles, after which it was subject to sporadic revision at the hands of miaphysite scribes. So much Melkite literature in Syriac comes from western Syria, but given the sinaitic origin of LDA, the long Syriac connection at Sinai during that period, and the strong manuscript tradition for the Syriac LDA at

23 24

25

English translation of the Greek by L. Moore, The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Saint John Climacus (revised; Brookline, MA: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1979), 99. Although Teule manifests suspicions of foul play (“le passage sur Évagre manque [!]”), an entire leaf is missing from the manuscript between fol. 80 and 81, so we have no reason to suppose scribal suppression of the passage (cf. Teule, “L’Échelle du Paradis de Jean Climaque,” 287). English translation in Moore, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, 218.

272

Childers

Sinai, the Syriac version probably originated at Sinai, and no later than about the beginning of the ninth century.

A Project for the Twenty-First Century

The Syriac LDA invites our appreciation as the creative product of Melkite Syriac scholarship, a source of ascetic inspiration and guidance within that tradition, and a monument to the Syriac heritage connected with Sinai. As it has come down to us in the manuscripts, the tradition also gives us insight into Melkite-Syrian Orthodox relationships. As a versional witness, the Syriac LDA brings important early testimony to the Greek text. Though much more extensive translation analysis is needed, Teule’s preliminary study shows that the version tends to be very close  – following Greek word order, representing Greek particles carefully, precisely representing the components of Greek compound words, and so forth.26 A comparison of the Syriac with existing Greek editions of LDA reveals immediately that the Syriac supports certain streams of the Greek textual tradition and not others, underscoring its value as a textual witness to LDA in all its versions. This important versional text has become the focus of a current project that entails key elements destined to characterize the future of Syriac studies, so far as text editing and analysis are concerned: the use of digital resources, traditional paleographic and editing methods, publication of a text and translation edition, and global collaboration by means of the internet, including the participation and mentoring of younger scholars. It was the sale of CCR in 2009 that catalyzed the current project on the Syriac LDA. Upon her death in 1926, Agnes Smith Lewis left CCR to Westminster College in Cambridge, but the College sold it. Once it came into the possession of the private Green Collection in 2009, the Green Scholars Initiative and the affiliated Museum of the Bible began to encourage research on every aspect of the manuscript – not just the underwriting, but its upper text as well, i.e. the Syriac LDA. Under the direction of the Center for the Study of Ancient Religious Texts at Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas, the “Syriac CCR Project” has emerged as an editing project having fairly standard aims: to prepare an edition and English translation of the Syriac text of LDA, not just on the basis of CCR, but utilizing all the known evidence.27 The project also 26 Teule, “L’Échelle du Paradis de Jean Climaque,” 287–289. 27 See Museum of the Bible, Collaborative Projects. https://www.museumofthebible.org /research/scholars-initiative/collaborative-projects (accessed 10 September 2021).

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entails study on related matters, such as codicology and paleography, translation technique, and so forth. But the project further leverages current technology in order to create fresh collaborative and pedagogical opportunities. Perhaps the best way to illustrate is simply to describe the salient features of the project method. First, a number of high-quality digital images have been made of the CCR manuscript. These include images owned by the Green Scholars Initiative as well as images done as part of the Sinai Palimpsest Project by UCLA and hosted on their site.28 Much of the photography involves intensive multispectral imaging for the sake of better reading the palimpsest undertext. The Syriac CCR Project does not need such intensive photography, since it focuses on the upper text. Yet although there can often be no substitute for direct examination of a manuscript, the quality of these digital images is so good that they are adequate for most of what one needs in order to read the manuscript and edit the text. Hence, technology helps us overcome the traditional limitations of geography and travel funding. Images of CCR are complemented by digital images of the Sinai manuscripts at St. Catharine’s, the two British Library manuscripts, and the Leiden manuscript. Global collaboration is made possible by means of the Virtual Manuscript Room (VMR), an internet resource hosted jointly by the Institut für Neutestamentliche Textforschung in Münster (INTF) and the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing at the University of Birmingham (ITSEE).29 These institutes are helping to lead efforts to produce a new critical edition of the Greek New Testament, the Editio critica maior (ECM),30 a project that has taken many years to develop but has accelerated in recent years due to the use of the VMR in text transcription and collation. For example, in 2018 the instituted have reported that their projects have transcribed more than 10,000 pages of majuscule Greek New Testament text, or about 40% of the whole. Yet gathering data from the Greek minuscule manuscripts of the New Testament poses severe challenges because so many manuscripts exist. Through the VMR it is possible to put scores of skilled transcribers in virtual contact with hundreds of manuscripts and thereby make better progress. Through the VMR the material is available anywhere in the world that a transcriber has internet access. For instance, in the project’s current work on the Greek Paul, transcribers may log on to the VMR and bring up an assigned manuscript of the Epistle to the 28 St. Catharine’s Monastery of the Sinai, Egypt, Sinai Palimpsests Project. https://sinai .library.ucla.edu (accessed 10 September 2021). 29 See the respective sites: http://ntvmr.uni-muenster.de and http://vmr.bham.ac.uk (both accessed 10 September 2021). 30 “The Editio Critica Maior (ECM),” The Institute for New Testament Textual Research. https://www.uni-muenster.de/INTF/ECM.html (accessed 10 September 2021).

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Philippians. They transcribe the manuscript by revising the standard Greek base text, annotating it as needed, and finally submitting their transcriptions for expert review. One very nice feature of this project is that students and young scholars can be coached in paleography and allowed to contribute to the project from various parts of the world. When the present author began contributing transcriptions of Greek minuscules of the Gospel of John to this very same enterprise as part of the International Greek New Testament Project in the 1980s, the work was done on paper. Some years later, we were training transcribers to edit electronic documents and submit them for review and reconciliation. Now contributors are trained to produce transcriptions digitally and online, streamlining the process even further. The success of the VMR for Greek biblical transcriptions has been undeniable, as INTF, ITSEE, and the editors of ECM can attest. But would it be possible to revise the online resource in order to accommodate the Syriac language, whose script and other features do not always meld well with tools designed for western, left-to-right languages? Adjustments would also need to be made in order to accommodate a non-biblical text like LDA. Perhaps most pointedly – would it be possible to progress towards a scholarly edition on the basis of the very limited resources that such projects tend to have available to them? The last two years have seen decisive progress in the development of just such a tool hosted within the VMR, known as the “Syriac CCR Project.” Producing a complete Syriac base text against which to transcribe the manuscripts was an onerous but crucial part of the work. Additionally, it has taken considerable programming effort to modify the VMR for Syriac and for the LDA text, but now a workable tool is available. For instance, transcribers assigned to work on LDA Step 9 can bring up a high-quality image of fol. 50v of CCR in their web browser, load the Syriac base text corresponding to that portion, and edit the base text according to what they see in the manuscript. Most of the editing is done simply in the text window, but they may also annotate the text in other ways, to indicate scribal corrections, marginal notations, to flag uncertain letters, or to show where manuscript breaks are. After years of use and revision in preparation of the Greek ECM, the mark-up tools contained in the Online Text Editor of the VMR are robust and intuitive. Individual transcribers are assigned different portions of the manuscript on which to work and the VMR enables regular interaction between transcribers and supervisors. Transcribers save their work, which is subjected to the five-point quality control process common to VMR transcriptions: 1. Transcriber A transcribes the assigned portion 2. Transcriber B transcribes the same assigned portion 3. An advanced transcriber reconciles the two transcriptions

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4. An expert reconciler checks the reconciled transcription 5. In post-assessment, the editorial team spot-checks the transcriptions At the end of this process, the data is ready for editing and publication, whether print or electronic, or for use as the base of a translation or as the object of other studies. In the case of the Syriac CCR Project, the principal aim is a print publication. Alongside CCR, it is possible to incorporate other manuscripts into the VMR to enhance the project, such as Sinai syr. 68, Leiden Or. 3246, BL Additional 12169, and Additional 14593. The project has also produced a Greek base text of LDA to include with the tool, facilitating comparison with the Greek. Although not all the earliest Greek LDA manuscripts are available online as of yet, many of them are, and links to them provide access through the VMR. The Monastery of St. Catharine, Sinai, has also invited the Syriac CCR Project to use what is likely the earliest known witness to LDA, Sinai Greek NF MΓ71, dated to within about a century of Climacus’ time.31 The monastery has made images of that manuscript available to the project. Indeed, it would not be difficult to launch a project transcribing the Greek manuscripts of LDA utilizing the VMR, with the aim of producing a new and more comprehensive Greek edition. Though beyond the scope of the Syriac CCR Project the foundations for such a Greek editing project now exists.

A Collaborative Future for Research and Instruction

The VMR is simply a tool for gathering and checking transcriptions of Syriac manuscripts. However, because of the ubiquity of access, the VMR makes it possible to collaborate in a wider way. Also, as has proven to be the case with the Greek projects using the VMR, the approach described here encourages teachers and scholars of Syriac to utilize the resource as a way of instructing students in paleography, while also contributing to a worthy research and publication project – while getting credit for doing so. As scholars, we presume the abiding need for careful methods and the assurances of quality control in the research, including projects of editing and translation. The need for diligent care has always been present and no advanced methodology has ever yet fully eliminated the possibility of error or misjudgment, whether executed by 31 See G.R. Parpulov, “The Greek and Latin Manuscripts of Mount Sinai and the Scholarly World,” in St Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai: Its Manuscripts and their Conservation. Papers Given in Memory of Professor Ihor Ševčenko, ed. C. Mango, et al. (Saint Catharine Foundation, 2011), 39–40.

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a single expert scholar or by a team and in stages. However, in the twenty-first century we shall see the legacy of fairly solitary and isolated research, with its emphasis on individual ownership and accomplishment, giving way more to the shared endeavors of collaborative projects, which emphasize opportunities for mutual instruction and learning. The Syriac CCR Project is already seeing signs that students and early career scholars are eager to push out towards the frontiers of global collaboration through the digital humanities, contributing their efforts to the editing of a classic spiritual text. The project has created tools to assist them, such as a manual for Syriac transcription using the VMR and modules related to key aspects of method, such as Syriac paleography. The project hosts equipping webinars. On the journey to the destination of a printed scholarly edition and translation, the project will provide ample opportunities to engage different lines of inquiry, whether codicology and paleography, transmission history, studies of Syriac translation techniques, analyses of ascetic terminology, work with other versions of LDA, and the textual criticism of the Greek LDA. As for the final print edition, the exercise of sound paleographical principles and editorial checks will naturally play a crucial role in readying the material for publication, so as to ensure the quality of the final products. However, the model described here seeks to leverage collaboration and, rather than insisting that the outcome be the product of just one or a few scholars, the project aims to use technology in order to distribute research opportunities in more cooperative ways. Hence, the aims and methods of the Syriac CCR Project fit the trajectories of twenty-first-century scholarship, trajectories that are happily resonant with the legacy of Sebastian Brock. It is unlikely that Brock would claim to be at the leading edge of the digital revolution. However, careful manuscript work and text editing have been a staple of his scholarly activities. His decades-long work explicating Syriac translation literature remains foundational. He has added greatly to the map by which we are able to understand the wealth of materials at Sinai, especially the Syriac connection, including the Melkite version of LDA. But also, and perhaps most of all, in the scores of his articles and studies and lectures, in the bibliographies and outlines he has so freely made available, we encounter a gifted teacher who is dedicated to sharing what he knows and empowering others in their own work, unconcerned about asserting academic ownership or controlling information. He has traveled far and seen much in the realm of Syriac studies, and by his labors he charts the edges of the frontiers he has himself explored, thereby launching scholars, young and old, on their own journeys of discovery. It is to be hoped that the same generous distribution of opportunity will characterize the future of Syriac studies, as Syriac

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scholars learn better to combine traditional and emerging methods in a landscape of expanded opportunities for fruitful and peaceful global collaboration. Bibliography Baumstark, A. Geschichte der syrischen Literatur (Bonn: A. Marcus and E. Webers, 1922). Brock, S.P. Catalogue of Syriac Fragments (New Finds) in the Library of the Monastery of Saint Catherine, Mount Sinai (Athens: Mount Sinai Foundation, 1995). Brock, S.P. “Syriac on Sinai: The Main Connections,” in ΕΥΚΟΣΜΙΑ. Studi miscellanei per il 75º di Vincenzo Poggi S.J., ed. V. Ruggieri and L. Pieralli (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbetino, 2003), 102–117. Brock, S.P. “Melkite Literature in Syriac,” in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage, ed. S.P. Brock, et al. (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2011), 285–286. “Editio Critica Maior (ECM),” The Institute for New Testament Textual Research. https://www.uni-muenster.de/INTF/ECM.html. (Accessed October 1, 2018). Géhin, P. “Manuscrits sinaïtiques dispersés II: les fragments théologiques syriaques de Milan (Chabot 34–57),” Oriens Christianus 91 (2007): 1–24. de Goeje, M.J. Catalogus codicum orientalium Bibliothecae Academiae Lugduno-Batavae, 5 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1873). Ignatios, Archimandrite, ed. Tοῦ Ὁσίου Πατρὸς ἡμῶν Ἰωάννοῦ Καθηγουμένου τοῦ Σιναΐτου Κλίμαξ (Oropos, Attikes: Holy Monastery of the Paraclete, 1978 [7th ed. 1997]). Justin of Sinai, Hieromonk. “Newly Recovered Manuscripts of the Scriptures from Saint Catharine’s Monastery, Sinai,” Restoration Quarterly 59 (2017): 19–23. Kamil, M. Catalogue of All Manuscripts in the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mt. Sinai (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1970). Karl Hiersemann’s Katalog 500. Orientalische Manuskripte arabische, syrische, griechische, armenische, persische Handschriften des 7.–18. Jahrhdrts. (Leipzig, 1922). Lewis, A.S., ed. Codex Climaci Rescriptus. Fragments of Sixth Century Palestinian Syriac Texts of the Gospels, of the Acts of the Apostles and of St. Paul’s Epistles, Horae Semiticae 8 (Cambridge: University Press, 1909). Luibheid, C. and N. Russell, trans. John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Classics of Western Spirituality (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1982). Martin, J.R. The Illustration of the Heavenly Ladder of John Climacus, Studies in Manuscript Illumination 5 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954). Migne, J.-P. Patrologia Graeca 88 (Paris: 1864), 632–1208. Moore, L., trans. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Saint John Climacus (revised; Brookline, MA: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1979). Parpulov, G.R. “The Greek and Latin Manuscripts of Mount Sinai and the Scholarly World,” in St Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai: Its Manuscripts and their

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Conservation. Papers Given in Memory of Professor Ihor Ševčenko, ed. C. Mango, et al. (Saint Catharine Foundation, 2011), 39–40. Parrinello, R.M., ed. Giovanni Climaco: La Scala del Paradiso, Letture cristiane del primo millenio 41 (Milan: Paoline, 2007). Pauli, J. “John Climacus,” in Dictionary of Early Christian Literature, ed. S. Dopp and W. Geerlings, trans. M. O’Connell (New York: Crossroad, 2011), 336–337. Popova, T.G. “The Most Ancient Greek Manuscripts of the Ladder of John Climacus,” Scrinium 12 (2016): 368–374. Rader, M., ed. Sancti patris nostri Ioannis Scholastici abbatis Montis Sina qui vulgò Climacus appellatur, opera omnia (Paris: Sébastien Cramoisy, 1633). Sophronius Hermites, ed. Κλίμαξ Ἰωάννου τοῦ Σιναΐτου (Constantinople: Vretou, 1883; reprint Athens: Astir, 1970). Strothmann, W. Codex Syriacus secundus: Bibel-Palimpsest aus d. 6./7. Jh. [Katalog Hiersemann 500/3], Göttinger Orientforschungen I. Reihe, Syriaca 13 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1977). Teule, H.G.B. “L’Échelle du Paradis de Jean Climaque dans la tradition syriaque: premières investigations,” Parole de l’orient 20 (1995): 279–293. Trevisan, P. ed., S. Giovanni Climaco. Scala Paradisi, Corona Patrum Salesiana, Series Graeca 8–9 (Torino: 1941). Wright, W. Catalogue of Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum Acquired Since the Year 1838, 3 vols. (London: Longmans & Co., 1871).

Towards a Syriac Semantic Web from the Perspective of 2020 George A. Kiraz Towards the end of the summer of 1990, I was sitting on a bus in England for the very first time in my life.1 The bus was taking me on a journey that would change the course of my life. The destination: Oxford. The objective: to read ̈ Syriac with ‫ܡܠܦܢܐ ܘܪܒܐ ܕܡܠܦܢܐ‬, the legendary Sebastian P. Brock. The plan: to spend one year on Syriac and then go back to a life of engineering in Los Angeles. I came prepared, equipped with a laptop holding 20 megabytes of hard disk space. To put this in perspective, the Surface Pro 7 tablet I am writing this paper on has the storage capacity of 23,200 such laptops. Sebastian  – as all his students call him informally  – used a different set of tools. There was his Adler Syriac typewriter, originally produced for the Peshitta Institute in the late 1960s,2 with which he wrote all his papers. And he had an elegant Estrangela hand that people like me who were taught Syriac calligraphy at a young age did not possess. While Sebastian was aware of the digital world that had just begun to take hold around him, there was no sign of it in his Oxford office of 1990. I was surprised as I knew he had purchased a set of Syriac fonts and the DOS-based Multi-Lingual Scholar word processor from Alaph Beth Computer Systems, the one-man shop I ran in Los Angeles. Why would he have obtained these if he didn’t have a computer? I kept my surprise to myself. Sebastian’s office exhibited another feature that made up for the lack of a computer – a feature that I very much identified with. It was the first thing that I noticed the moment I entered his office: a huge mess of books and papers piled up across a long table. Now I could tell my parents that I was normal! Sebastian obviously knew where everything was. Anytime we had to read Syriac for class – I was the only student in that year’s cohort until some months later, when Muriel Debié audited the class – Sebastian had to make some room for us, a square foot or two at most. On our first meeting, I showed Sebastian a program that I wrote to generate a concordance to the Syriac New Testament from a database that I obtained from the Claremont School of Theology (they had obtained it from The Way 1 This paper was written at the Institute for Advanced Study. I am deeply grateful to my colleagues and the library staff for all their help. Hannah Stork kindly copy edited the final draft. 2 On the history of the Adler typewriter, see G.A. Kiraz, Tūrāṣ Mamllā: A Grammar of the Syriac Language, vol. 1, Syriac Orthography (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2012), 369 ff. © George A. Kiraz, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004537897_015

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International). Unknown to me at the time, scholars considered such a concordance to be a desideratum; Bruce Metzger, a name I did not know at the time, apparently said so.3 I was initially hesitant to bring up computing, but I was glad that I did: Sebastian’s eyes opened wide when he heard of the possibility. “How intriguing,” he said, a frequent phrase of his, often accompanied by a small bounce of enthusiasm. He immediately asked if I needed anything to complete the project. I told him that I could not bring my heavy 1987 HP LaserJet II printer all the way from Los Angeles. Sebastian offered to purchase the printer, the beginning of a series of generous gifts that made the completion of my graduate studies possible. Apparently, Sebastian was planning to hop on the digital bandwagon; this was the reason he had obtained the Syriac fonts and the MLS program before my arrival. A few days later, he called me to his office and asked me to help him select a computer and install MLS and the Syriac fonts. I set him up with an IBM machine with a laser printer of his own. If I remember correctly, I may have even written a small .bat file that displayed a menu when he turned the computer on, providing him with selections to start MLS so that he wouldn’t have to deal with typing DOS commands. Sebastian was excited about the prospect of a “successful marriage of Syriac scholarship with the ‘Electronic Age,’ specifically the field of Literary and Linguistic Computing.”4 (The term digital humanities had not been born yet.) He provided me with Syriac tech support not only for the concordance project but also for various subsequent projects. In 1992, Sebastian and I formed, though informally at the time, the Syriac Computing Institute (the forerunner of today’s Beth Mardutho), which we nicknamed SyrCOM. It was Sebastian’s idea to produce an aligned text of the Syriac Gospels, for which I wrote a program in the C programming language.5 It was also his idea to produce a frequency-based dictionary of Syriac words found in the New Testament modeled after Bruce Metzger’s Lexical Aids.6 Sebastian was also involved in the Syriac HyperText project, the forerunner of the online Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage [gedsh.bethmardutho.org]. Once, I believe, we designed a database schema for manuscript colophons. We continued to collaborate well beyond my Oxford-Cambridge years. While Sebastian himself 3 B.M. Metzger, The Early Versions of the New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), 63. 4 G.A. Kiraz, A Computer-Generated Concordance to the Syriac New Testament, According to the British and Foreign Bible Society’s Edition, Based on the SEDRA Database, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 9. 5 G.A. Kiraz, Comparative Edition of the Syriac Gospels: Aligning the Sinaiaticus, Curetonianus, Peshīttâ and Harklean Texts (2nd ed.; Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2004 [1996]). 6 B.M. Metzger, Lexical Aids for Students of New Testament Greek (New ed.; Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 1997).

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never wrote a single line of code, he was a digital humanist at heart before the age of the digital humanities, a claim I shall shortly justify. I dedicate this paper to him, asking God ‫ ܕܢܣܡܘܟ ܚܛܘܪ ܣܝܒܘܬܗ‬for many years to come.

…

This paper is an attempt to advocate for a Syriac Semantic Web. I shall argue that the Syriac digital humanities have already begun to build the foundations of such a web. But in order to understand the existing building blocks, I shall take the reader through a historical journey of Syriac computing from its “ancient” days of the 1960s, more or less covering the Pre-Internet Age up to Web 1.0, the “read-only” web as Tim Berners-Lee, the 1989 inventor of the World Wide Web, called it. I shall then cover Web 2.0, the so-called Participated or Social Web, where the user not only interacts with digital content but builds upon it. The paper will then conclude with a brief section on how to build a semantic web for Syriac studies during the next decade. I shall point out how a spirit of Sebastianutho – the embodiment of generosity, dedication, passion, and hard work – will be necessary to achieve such a goal.

Syriac Computing (1960s–2010)

Lexica All historical accounts begin with a prehistorical period; so does the history of Syriac computing, whose initial foundations are mired with obscurity and an oral “tradition.” The isnād, the chain of human reporters, is quite authentic but contains gaps, especially in names: I, G.A. Kiraz, personally heard the late Stanislav Segert, the great UCLA scholar of Northwest-Semitic languages and author of Altaramäische Grammatik (1975), saying that he heard from someone  – whose name I no longer recall  – that a UCLA scholar  – whose name I also no longer recall – had encoded Carl Brockelmann’s Lexicon Syriacum on a mainframe computer during the 1960s. Ed Cook, one of Segert’s students, recalls that Segert had a stack of punch cards encoding Brockelmann’s 2nd edition. This was around 1981, a few years before I met Segert sometime between 1984 and 1986. My recollection from what Segert told me, though my memory could be failing me, is that after he joined UCLA in 1969 or 1970, Segert attempted to recover the data from the 1960s to no avail.7 But it seems that he was able to recover at least the punch cards that 7 G.A. Kiraz, “Forty Years of Syriac Computing,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 10, no. 1 (2007): 37–60.

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Cook saw around 1981. “I can see them in my mind’s eye,” Cook recalls. “They had Syriac ASCII transliterations with Latin glosses.”8 Segert’s son and daughter, Jan Segert and Eve Segert-Tauger, assured me recently that no such cards were in his Los Angeles home when it was sold in 2014. “I don’t recall coming across material related to linguistic computing when I sorted through [my father’s] records in the weeks before the house was sold,” Jan wrote to me. “The linguistic computing is something I probably would have taken an interest in and saved, since it had been an interesting topic of conversations between us. I don’t recall finding computer punch cards at that point.”9 While Segert himself was not technical, he was always interested in the prospects of Aramaic computing. Concordances We have more concrete data about Syriac computing during the 1970s. Two concordance projects are known. Werner Strothmann led a group of researchers and computer scientists in creating various concordances to the Old Testament; their project was known as Der Göttinger Syrischen Konkordanz. The Syriac text was encoded in ASCII format on data cards, which were then keyed in to produce punch cards. The punch cards, in turn, acted as the input to the concordance engine. The engine itself was written in the Fortran IV programming language and produced its output on a vector graphics plotter. The text was tagged with parts of speech and other morphological features.10 Also during the 1970s, The Way International, a “nondenominational, nonsectarian Biblical research, teaching and fellowship ministry” (as it describes itself on its website) produced a database of the New Testament text with full morphological tagging: part-of-speech, measure (Pʿal, Paʿʿel, etc.), nominal state, verbal tense, number, person, and gender – as well as number, person, and gender for the pronominal suffixes. It took their team fifteen years to manually tag the text. ASCII encoding was also used for this project. They produced a wordlist with biblical references,11 and the relational database was exported to flat files and deposited at the Claremont School of Theology in the mid-1980s. 8 Cook to G.A. Kiraz, email August 21, 2020. 9 J. Segert to G.A. Kiraz, email August 21, 2020. 10 On the technical aspects, see M. Zumpe, Technische Aspekte der Göttingen Syrischen Konkordanz (Deutsche Arbeitsgemeinschaft Vorderer Orient, September 2001). The published concordances are: N. Sprenger, Konkordanz zum Syrischen Psalter (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1976); W. Strothmann, K. Johannes, and M. Zumpe, Konkordanz zur Syrischen Bible: Der Pentateuch (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1986); W. Strothmann, K. Johannes, and M. Zumpe, Die Propheten (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1984). 11 The Way International Research Team, The Concordance to the Peshitta Version of the Aramaic New Testament (American Christian Press, 1985).

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Lexica Both projects, as well as the UCLA 1960s project, were done on mainframe computers that occupied at least 2,000 square feet. With the advent of personal computing in the 1980s, individuals began to embark on their own projects. Pier Giorgio Borbone developed software for concordance generation and published a few concordances;12 his software was further developed for the Peshitta Institute, which later produced a concordance for the Pentateuch in 1997.13 I began to encode the Syriac-English portion of Louis Costaz’s SyriacFrench-English-Arabic dictionary, as well as Margoliouth’s Compendious Syriac Dictionary. These were complemented with data obtained from the Claremont School of Theology (data from The Way International) to produce the SEDRA database. A “crowd sourcing” attempt was made to have scholars encode lexical data with specific tagging (see Figure 1). A six-volume concordance to the Syriac New Testament and a frequency list were produced.14 Also during the 1980s, Steven Kaufman led a team of scholar to create a comprehensive Aramaic lexicon. The project was supported by NEH from 1986 to 2004. Kaufman developed a system for morphological analysis for Aramaic that also handled Syriac. It was rule- and data-based, written in the C programming language under Unix but later converted to PHP and MySQL as the web

Figure 1

Tagging Margoliouth’s dictionary (ca. 1988)

12 P.G. Borbone, Un programma per l’elaborazione di testi siriaci e un progetto di redazione di concordanze della Peshitta (Rome: Pontifica Institutum Studiorum Orientalium, 1990). 13 P.G. Borbone, et al., The Old Testament in Syriac According to the Peshitta Version: Concordance, vol. 1, The Pentateuch (Leiden: Brill, 1997). 14 On the technical aspects, see G.A. Kiraz, “Automatic Concordance Generation of Syriac Texts,” in VI Symposium Syriacum 1992, ed. R. Lavenant, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 247 (Rome: Pontificio Istituto Orientale, 1994), 461–475. The publications are: G.A. Kiraz, A Computer-Generated Concordance to the Syriac New Testament, According to the British and Foreign Bible Society’s Edition, Based on the SEDRA Database, 6 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1993); G.A. Kiraz, Lexical Tools to the Syriac New Testament, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Manuals 7 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994; 2nd ed., Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2002).

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developed. The data is still available on the project’s website and is linguistically impeccable. One would be hard-pressed to find a parsing mistake. Text Analysis Parenthetically, during the 1990s, I was involved in computational linguistics as a graduate student at the University of Cambridge working on Semitic templatic morphology. A prototype morphological analyzer called SemHe, named after Bar ʿEbroyo’s grammar, was built; it had a lexicon of sample roots of various types, morphophonological rules, and an engine written in the Prolog programming language. Given an input string (a word with prefixes and suffixes), the engine provided full morphological analysis, including the root, prefixes/suffixes, morphological template, vocalization, measure, number, person, and gender. The lexicon, however, contained only a dozen or so entries that reflect the range of root types found in the language. The prototype, regrettably, was never expanded to become a full-fledge morphological analyzer.15 Between 1998 and early 2001, Brigham Young University, under the direction of Jan Wilson, commissioned me to build an electronic Syriac lexicon, which was implemented in Access. The schema abstracted the data from Margoliouth’s dictionary in a relational database that provided fields for all possible lexical and morphological features; this would have permitted the user to run reports on morphological productivity. In addition, a morphological generator was written in Perl that produced all possible surface forms for purposes of using it in reverse for morphological lookup in the absence of a morphological analyzer. Data was populated up to the letter mim. Fonts While all of the above projects were done for academic purposes, the Syriacusing community began to use computer technology for word processing and desktop publishing. While the earliest Syriac printing using computer technology was the Göttingen plotter, which was mentioned above, the Assyrian Church of the East in Chicago commissioned a digital system in the early 1980s that produced photographic output. The system was used to produce a large-sized lectionary in East Syriac, published in two columns in 1987.16 By 15 G.A. Kiraz, “ṢEMḤE: A Generalised Two-Level System,” in Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics (Santa Cruze, CA, 1996). The dissertation was later published: G.A. Kiraz, Computational Nonlinear Morphology, with Emphasis on Semitic Languages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). ̇ 16 ‫ܕܟܠܗ ܫܢܬܐ ܐܝܟ ܛܟܣܐ ܕܥܕܬܐ ܫܠܝܚܝܬܐ ܘܩܬܘܠܝܩܝ‬ ‫ܟܬܒܐ ܕܐܘܢܓܠܝܘܢ ܡܦܪܫܐ‬ ‫( ܕܡܕܢܚܐ‬Church of the East Press ‫ܡܛܒܥܬܐ ܕܥܕܐ ܕܡܕܢܚܐ‬, 1987).

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the mid 1980s, a number of individuals began to design fonts for the personal computer. Within a few years, by 1990, printing Syriac texts on a personal computer became a common affair. Laser printers allowed for professional output that could be used for publications as “camera-ready copy” – i.e., the publisher can take photographs from the printer printouts to produce files for printing.17 Encoding One problem loomed. Every programmer decided on their own encoding system for storing texts by means of the ASCII encoding intended for basic Latin characters. One system would assign the letter Olaph a particular code; another system would choose another code. As such, files were not easily sharable. One had to convert a file from one format to another to be able to use it. The following table gives the encodings used by some of the early projects: ‫ܕ ܓ ܒ ܐ‬ CAL Leiden Peshitta Way/ Sedra3

‫ܪ ܩ ܨ ܦ ܥ ܣ ܢ ܡ ܠ ܟ‬

‫ܬ ܫ‬

d h w Z x T y d h w Z H T y

K l K l

m n s m n s

( p c < p S

q r q r

$ t $ t

A B G D H O Z K Y ;

C L

M N S

E I

X R W T

) b g > b g

‫ܙ ܘ ܗ‬

‫ܝ ܛ ܚ‬

/

While the above encodings were easily decodable by humans, files produced by fonts and word processing software were not. Using the Alaph Beth Computer Systems fonts, the word ‫ ܣܘܪܝܝܐ‬was encoded as uO#aaA. This is simply because the designer chose to place ‫ ܐ‬in the A slot (ASCII 65), final ‫ܐ‬ in the B slot (ASCII 66), stand-alone ‫ ܒ‬in the C slot (ASCII 67), etc.18 The reason the ‫ ܝ‬of ‫ ܣܘܪܝܝܐ‬appears as a in both instances (initial and medial) is because the software was smart enough to save only the stand-alone characters and replace them with the correct form on the screen or the printer on the fly. This in itself was an advancement from earlier fonts that had to save in the file a separate code for each contextual glyph. Figure 2 gives the ASCII chart for the Alaph Beth fonts produced for MLS.

17 For a history of font development, see Kiraz, Orthography, 379 ff. 18 G.A. Kiraz, Alaph Beth Font Kit (Los Angeles: Alaph Beth Computer Systems, 1990), 13.

286

Figure 2

Kiraz

ASCII chart of the MLS Alaph Beth Computer Systems Syriac fonts

Towards a Syriac Semantic Web

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Unicode The mid-1990s witnessed the emergence of the web, where static pages were placed on servers and users could access them with a web browser. Displaying Syriac using the web was quite problematic. There was the problem of encoding: if people did not agree on a code for a glyph, there was no way to display that glyph on different computers under different operating systems. And even if users agreed on such an encoding, browsers needed to handle bidirectional texts. Computers needed to have fonts with the same encoding installed. Operating systems, or at least the web browsers, needed to handle the Syriac script with its contextual letters, diacritics, and other aspects of the writing system. None of this was available. One had to produce Syriac on one computer, output it as an image, and then embed the image on a web page for everyone to read. Remnants of such systems can still be seen on websites that were captured by archive.org – such as Syriac Orthodox Resources, initially published by Thomas Joseph on his student account on a UCLA server. This also applied to the Syriac Computing Institute webpage, which was published on my student account on the University of Cambridge server. When the born-digital Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies was published in 1998, it faced the same problem. It could not publish Syriac texts in the Syriac script. Something needed to be done. As the encoding problem manifested itself in many non-Latin script languages, the international community realized that an international standard was needed. Unicode provided the solution. Each glyph in every language would be designated an internationally agreed-upon code. Syriac was added to Unicode following a proposal by Paul Nelson, Sargon Hasso, and myself in 1998. The proposal was accepted after some emendations, and a Syriac block with the range U+0700 to U+074F was created in Version 3.0. Subsequently, six additional glyphs to handle Persian and Sogdian writing were proposed by Nicholas Sims-Willimas and Michael Everson; they were added within the same block in Version 4.0. Malayalam garshunographic writing was proposed by Anshuman Pandey (with the help of István Perczel) in 2015. As a result, a “Syriac Supplement” block was added to Version 10.0 (it was assigned the U+0860 column). Ben Yang, Sebastian Kenoro Kiraz, and George Kiraz proposed the addition of the single diacritic dot placed between two letters.19 These were tentatively accepted in 2020 and are being processed by the Unicode Consortium. 19 B. Yang, S. Kenoro Kiraz, and G.A. Kiraz, “Proposal to encode COMBINING DOT BELOW LEFT for Syriac,” (2020) [Unicode document],http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19338 -syriac.pdf.

288

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It is because of the addition of Syriac to Unicode that one can now pick up a mobile phone from any store and it will recognize Syriac. The inclusion in Unicode meant that one no longer had to produce software to support Syriac. Any software that supports Unicode, if implemented correctly, automatically supports Syriac. This advanced Syriac computing beyond the imagination of its advocates. By the turn of the millennium, Syriac began to propagate through computer systems. Most software, though by no means all, began to implement Unicode and its bidirectional algorithm, meaning that Syriac was supported to one degree or another. Issues still remain, and these will be discussed further in the last section of this paper. eLibraries So far, no large-scale online content was available for Syriac scholars. BYU and Beth Mardutho independently embarked on projects to create an online Syriac library of eBooks. This was before major institutions and corporations began to digitize books. Once BYU and Beth Mardutho heard of each other’s projects – it is a small world after all  – a three-way collaboration with The Catholic University of America resulted in digitizing around 1,000 books. The primary bibliography was supplied by David Taylor and was then augmented by Monica Blanchard, the librarian at CUA. Beth Mardutho also secured the participation of the Duke Divinity School through the mediation of Lucas van Rompay; a few dozen books were digitized there. Princeton Theological Seminary was one of the earliest institutions to join, but no digitization took place until some years later when Gorgias funded the digitization of some books. Yale Divinity School librarians snubbed the project, questioning the longevity of digital files. BYU was the first to make its books available online. Beth Mardutho lacked the resources to acquire a portal (eBook portals were not readily available at the time) and made its collection available after some years through HMML. BYU was the first to be involved in the digitization of Syriac manuscripts. Mar Bawai Soro, then of the Church of the East, approached the Vatican Library and BYU to digitize some of their Syriac manuscripts. Thirty-three manuscripts were published on CD-ROM. As we shall see shortly in the next section, HMML would become the largest provider of manuscript digitization. Web 1.0 This section concludes with the static web, or Web 1.0. This is the “read-only” web: one user publishes a static text on a web page and other users read this text. There was nothing else that the user could do. In the case of Syriac computing, most pages were created in a static manner. For example, Hugoye was published using HTML 5. Thomas Joseph, the Technical Editor at the time, encoded

Towards a Syriac Semantic Web

289

every paper using a text editor in HTML. There was no content-management system like WordPress that provided an editing interface. By 2010, things had drastically changed. Not only had content-management systems become more ubiquitous, but other advancements in computing in the humanities had taken hold. An anthology of papers on the subject transformed the field of Literary and Linguistic Computing and gave it a new name. The publisher of this anthology named it A Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by John Unsworth, Susan Schreibman, and Ray Siemens (2004). Next, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) picked up the name and launched the Digital Humanities Initiative in 2006 (later renamed Office of Digital Humanities in 2008), which solidified the digital humanities as a field on its own. Computational linguistics, alas, had always developed separate from humanities computing.20 Now, humanists – non-coders – became more integrated in the field. A humanist was able to create a digital humanities project from scratch without having to write a single line of code. One could rely on off-the-shelf computing platforms to build a coherent digital humanities portal. These developments were reflected in the field of Syriac studies. We all abandoned “Syriac Computing” (and its cool abbreviation, SyrCOM), which was modeled after “Humanities Computing,” for the “Syriac digital humanities.” As digital humanists are not expected to get their hands dirty with coding, it is only fair that we crown Sebastian P. Brock, the non-coder, with a klilo for being the first proto-digital humanist in our modern times, in recognition of his various contributions, at least to all the digital projects that I was personally involved in.

Syriac Digital Humanities (2010–2020)

The 2010s witnessed many advancements in the Syriac digital humanities. Consider a Google search on the term “Syriac.” In 2010, the search came back with 1.8 million hits. The top autocomplete search terms were “Syriac Orthodox Church,” “language,” “Bible,” “alphabet,” “Christianity,” and “Peshitta.” The following year yielded 4.1 million hits, with the autocompletes Syriac Orthodox Church, Bible, Catholics, Christianity, studies, alphabet, and Peshitta; “Syriac studies” occupied the fifth position. In 2012, there were 8.2 million hits, with the following top autocompletes: Syriac Orthodox Church, Bible, alphabet, 20 S. Hockey, “A History of Humanities Computing,” in A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. S. Schreibman, et al. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 3–19, esp. 13.

290

Kiraz

voice, people, Christianity, Orthodox Church India, and dictionary. The number of hits in 2013 rose to 13.5 million, with similar autocomplete strings.21 Web 2.0 This period differs substantially from the previous “read-only” Web 1.0, where users simply consumed the pages that were published. Recall that Thomas Joseph would create a page for a particular Hugoye article. All users would be able to read it; but apart from reading it, there was nothing much that they could do. The Web 2.0, or “read-write” web, as Berners-Lee calls it, allows for user participation. Yes, BYU can make 600 digitized books available online. But now Jack Tannous, for example, can also upload digitized books to a media content website such as the Internet Archive (archive.org). In fact, between 2012 and 2018, Tannous uploaded more than 150 eBooks. His contribution is not recognized unless one really pays attention to the username of who uploaded a book. eLibraries The Web 2.0 period witnessed a surge of Syriac content. By far the largest content creation project is HMML’s digitization of Syriac and Garshuni manuscripts. Prior to HMML, BYU embarked on a similar project in Lebanon, which it later abandoned; István Perczel initiated a similar project in Kerala, with impressive results considering the limitations of funding; and Beth Mardutho extended its eBethArké project to cover manuscripts, without much success. But nothing matched the success of HMML in creating a vast library of digitized manuscripts. While most of the manuscripts held in Western libraries belong to the first millennium – and, as such, skewed scholarly research in favor of that period – HMML’s initiative makes available the manuscripts of the second millennium, especially the Early Modern and Modern Eras. This is crucial to our understanding of the transmission of earlier literature under the rubrics of New Philology. But of equal importance, it is now possible to write the history of Syriac literature during the second millennium. HMML’s project, since it relies on community participation, has the prospect of acquiring a crucial Sebastianutho, “the coming together of Syrian Orthodox [including other traditions, of course] and Western academic scholarship,” a topic we shall come back to in the concluding remarks. In fact, the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate, under the leadership of Roger Akhrass, and the Syriac Catholic Patriarchate, under the leadership of Youssef Dergham, established their own manuscript 21

Based on data I collected between 2006 and 2014.

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digitization projects, the latter in collaboration with a European team including Françoise Briquel-Chatonnet, Muriel Debié, Alain Desreumaux and André Binggeli. The availability of eBooks and digital manuscripts during the Web 2.0 Era was not limited to institutions that were specifically running Syriac projects. Google Books, Microsoft (which abandoned its project after some years), the Internet Archive, and the HathiTrust, inter alia, are contributing indirectly to the global Syriac digital library. Likewise, the Vatican Library, the British Library, and BnF Gallica, inter alia, are gradually making their manuscripts available online, which indirectly increases the Syriac offerings available online. Libraries with specific Syriac content, such as the Goussen Library and the Syrian Orthodox Patriarchal Library, are also enriching this global Syriac digital library. Having digital images of primary sources, such as manuscripts, and secondary sources, such as editions and monographs, is great. But at the end of the day, there would be no Syriac studies if there were no Syriac literature. How about the corpus itself? Corpora It has long been recognized that a searchable corpus of Syriac texts is a desideratum. The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon portal, under the direction of Steve Kaufman, already began to publish Syriac texts, tagged with linguistic information, back in the day; it continues to add texts gradually. As of now, there are approximately 1.5 million words and over 173,000 lines/verses in the CAL corpus from many genres of Syriac.22 Between 2004 and 2017, the BYU-Oxford Corpus of Syriac Literature project, under the direction of Kristian Heal and David Taylor, managed to get six million words typed manually, mostly by Michael Oez, William Toma, and Roger Akhrass. Heal described the plan for this corpus in a Hugoye article.23 The texts were added to BYU’s WordCruncher corpus engine, and a small part was made available to the public. The larger corpus, however, was only accessible to a few select scholars.24 (Aaron Butts, for example, used it for his Ph.D. dissertation, which was later published.25) CAL remained the only publicly available corpus. 22 S. Kaufman to G.A. Kiraz, email Aug 24, 2020. 23 K. Heal, “Corpora, eLibraries, and Databases: Locating Syriac Studies in the 21st Century,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 15, no. 1 (2012): 65–78. 24 K. Heal and J.E. Walters, “History of the Digital Syriac Corpus,” https://syriaccorpus.org /history.html. 25 A.M. Butts, Language Change in the Wake of Empire: Syriac in Its Greco-Roman Context (University Park: State University Press, 2016).

292

Kiraz

During 2017 and 2018, James Walters demonstrated how a Syriac digital corpus could be built using TEI/XML encoding. The BYU-Oxford data was handed over to Walters, who, with the advice of an international committee, single-handedly oversaw the publication of more than 20% of the texts currently found at syriaccorpus.org. Walters also demonstrated how one could edit Syriac texts that are born-digital.26 During 2020, the GREgORI corpus project from Louvain launched its online corpus with a dozen or so texts.27 OCR/HTR Beth Mardutho Fellows in the Digital Humanities took a brute-force approach to the creation of a searchable corpus. Within a short period of nine months (between February and November 2019), these DH Fellows worked with William Clocksin, a computer scientist long interested in OCR technology, managing to harness a seven-million-word corpus and launching the Simtho portal (simtho.bethmardutho.org). To be sure, the accuracy of OCR will never be 100%, and the results are not as accurate as typing and proofreading. One also does not get a document structure like that found in the texts encoded manually by syriaccorpus.org. But there are seven million words to play with. These are the tradeoffs that one needs to make between a depth-first approach and a breadth-first approach. In addition to advancement in content (digital books and manuscripts and the limited corpora mentioned above), there was also advancement in technology and, most importantly, advancements in OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and HTR (Handwritten Text Recognition). These technologies permit one to convert an image of text, be it printed or handwritten, into a searchable text as if someone typed it. In the past, such technologies would aim to resolve the problem for one language or another; but then computer scientists figured out an AI (Artificial Intelligence) method that doesn’t need to know anything about the specific language. All that is needed now is to feed an AI system a set of images – lines of texts – and the corresponding correct transcriptions. The AI system will then learn how to map these images to their respective texts; it does not need to know anything about Syriac. Back in 2003, when Beth Mardutho presented Paul Nelson the Mtakhnono (‫ )ܡܛܟܢܢܐ‬Award in recognition of his contributions to Syriac Computing – he is the one who managed to program Syriac into the Windows Operating System – I said to myself that the next Mtakhnono Award should go to whoever 26 J.E. Walters, “The Digital Syriac Corpus: A Digital Repository for Syriac Texts,” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 24, no. 1 (2020): 109–122. 27 https://uclouvain.be/fr/instituts-recherche/incal/ciol/the-concordances-of-the-gregori -project.html.

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solves the OCR problem with a usable product. But this is not possible now; the computer scientists who solved this problem are unknown to us – at least, to the Syriac studies community. Syriac scholars only realized that Syriac OCR existed when users like Grigory Kessel and Roger Akhrass noticed that Google searches for Syriac words were now landing on digitized books with Syriac content. Maybe Kessel and Akhrass should get the award! It turned out that the OCR was being performed by Google’s Tesseract system. A group of DH Fellows at Beth Mardutho evaluated it and determined that it was trained using texts automatically generated with the Meltho fonts. A few years ago, computer scientists and digital humanists at Leipzig announced that Arabic OCR was now possible using a similar AI system called Kraken, developed by Benjamin Kiessling. Beth Mardutho worked with Kiessling and developed an Estrangela OCR model for Kraken, which showed very high accuracy. Abigail Pearson, one of the Beth Mardutho Fellows, learned about another AI system called Transkribus. Beth Mardutho Fellows began to build models for it and digitized more than three million additional words for Simtho during the summer of 2020. While there are still advancements that can be made in Syriac OCR, there are now a few reasonable options available.28 Authority Controls Let’s go back to the choice between depth-first and breadth-first approaches. Syriaca.org, under the leadership of David Michelson, envisioned a Syriac reference portal for Syriac literature.29 We are talking about authors and their works. What are we to do with the manuscripts that contain these works and the catalogues that describe the manuscripts? How about the critical editions produced by earlier scholars, not to mention related monographs and research papers? Then there are the bibliographies that describe these publications. This is a never-ending project. Where to start? David Michelson and his team took a depth-first approach. No, they did not select one author, then one work of that author, then one manuscript of that work, etc. They left Syriac content aside and took a depth-first approach to digital humanities best practices. They learned very fast that without standards, the reference portal they planned to build would end up being one big mess.

28 E. Chesley, J. Marcantonio and A. Pearson, “Towards Digital Syriac Corpora: Evaluation of Tesseract 4.0 for Syriac OCR,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 22, no. 1 (2019): 109–192. 29 D.A. Michelson, “Using Linked Open Data to Model Cultural Heritage Information: The Research Questions and Data Structures of the Syriaca.org Knowledge Graph,” in Linked Open Data for the Ancient Mediterranean: Structures, Practices, Prospects, ed. S.E. Bond, P. Dilley, and R. Horne, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World Papers 20 (2021): http://hdl.handle.net/2333.1/69p8d8cc.

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Kiraz

Let’s assume that they began to work on Isaac of Antioch. You and I know that he is not Isaac of Nineveh. But tell that to a computer. Syriaca.org worked with VIAF (the Virtual International Authority File), the entity that assigns a unique code to each author the same way Unicode assigns a unique code to each Syriac glyph. As a result, all the major Syriac writers are now assigned international codes. Isaac of Antioch is VIAF 70782576. No one else can have this code. Isaac of Nineveh is VIAF 401332. In fact, Syriaca.org was given the authority to create new VIAF records for Syriac authors and also for Syriac literary works. The necessity of this might not be obvious to the Syriac scholar, but imagine that you are reading Bob Kitchen’s Hugoye article “The Ascetism of Isaac of Nineveh” (vol. 15, 2012). Now, imagine how pleased you would be if Hugoye offered a side bar with automatically generated links to: 1. The entry for Isaac (the right Isaac!) in the e-GEDSH encyclopedia. 2. HMML’s manuscripts that contain the works of Isaac. 3. BYU’s and Beth Mardutho’s digital books that contain critical editions and monographs on Isaac. 4. General bibliographies on Isaac from syri.ac and CBSC (both to be discussed below). TEI, RDF This is the semantic web that I aim to advocate for in the next section. Syriaca.org also demonstrated the power of the semantic web when they made use of RDF (Resource Description Framework) and TEI (Text Encoding Initiative). RDF enables various platforms to connect, borrow data from each other, and present the user with results unimaginable. TEI provides a mechanism to encode texts in a structured manner, telling the computer that Isaac of Nineveh is VIAF 401332. David Michelson, Ute Possekel, and Daniel L. Schwartz utilized these technologies when they transformed the Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage into e-GEDSH. Contrast this approach with syri.ac, a comprehensive annotated bibliography of Syriac resources created by Jack Tannous, Scott Johnson, and Morgan Reed. This resource, as well as the Comprehensive Bibliography on Syriac Christianity (CBSC) created by Sergey Minov, are by far the largest digital bibliographical references in our field, making use, of course, of Sebastian Brock’s various printed bibliographies. These projects chose not to go the technology depth-first route, but rather the content breadth-first. Thanks to their approach, we have two extremely useful sets of data. A positive biproduct of the Syriaca.org project is the Srophé app, developed by Winona Salesky. The name is borrowed from the Syriac word ‫ܣ̈ܪܦܐ‬ (“seraphim”), with srp standing for Syriac Reference Portal. While Srophé was

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intentionally intended to be the app for Syriaca.org, its reliance on RDF and TEI made it useful for other projects. Today, the Digital Syriac Corpus (syriac corpus.org), Hugoye (hugoye.bethmardutho.org), e-GEDSH (gedsh.bethmar dutho.org), and the Surayt corpus of Aramaic Online (surayt.bethmardutho .org) are all instances of (i.e. implement) the Srophé app (available from srophe.app). Let us summarize, then, what the field of Syriac studies has accomplished during the past decade. In terms of content, thousands of manuscripts are now accessible online (via, e.g., HMML and other libraries). Thousands of secondary resources in the form of books and journal articles are also available online (eBethArké, archive.org, etc.). We have two major bibliographical portals (syri.ac and CBSC). There are four corpora portals (CAL, Digital Syriac Corpus, GREgORI, and Simtho). And we have the authority controls and the data associated with them (e.g. the Gazetteer, Qadishe, etc.) that were built as part of the Syriaca.org effort. But this is not all. There are at least a half dozen important projects that we did not even mention. There is important work in computational linguistics being carried out in Amsterdam under the direction of Willem van Peursen. BYU also did important computational linguistics work earlier in connection with the BYU-Oxford corpus project. Slavomír Čéplö, a computational linguist with special interests in corpus linguistics, is developing corpus techniques (including part-of-speech tagging) in connection with the HUNAYNNET project, under the direction of Grigory Kessel, which aims at building a digital trilingual and linguistically annotated parallel corpus of Greek classical scientific and philosophical literature and the Syriac and Arabic translations thereof. DASH (dash.standord.edu), under the direction of Michael Penn at Stanford, provides a digital analysis of Syriac handwriting. ThAles (lectionary .eu) is a lectionary portal that incorporates Syriac lections. We are also lucky to have James W. Bennett’s implementation of SEDRA 4.0. And let’s not forget the Dukhrana multi-dictionary portal. The Qaṭraīt project provides a toponymical survey of Beth Qaṭraye, in collaboration with Syriaca.org (hosted on Beth Mardutho’s page). The Oxford-based Stories of Survival project, under the direction of John-Paul Ghobrial, makes available datasets on manuscripts, scribes, and literary works from the Early Modern period. There is also the Beth Gazo Portal, a mobile app that provides Syriac liturgical texts with their recitation. There must also be other projects that have escaped my attention; in the company of ancient manuscript scribes, I beg your forgiveness if I have failed you. Obviously, there is no room to review all of these projects. But their sheer multitude in a small field is indeed impressive. If the past decade gave birth to all these platforms, one can only imagine what the next decade or two will

Figure 3

Syriac computing (1960–1920)

296 Kiraz

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297

bring. I am constantly contacted by scholars applying for grants, especially in Europe. They all want to include a DH component to their projects. This is the reason to start thinking of a Syriac Semantic Web; otherwise, we will end up with a plethora of systems that are unable to talk to each other. We will end up with digital chaos. Figure 3 provides a historical snapshot of Syriac computing. Items above the diagonal are Syriac projects; items below depict advancements in various technologies. No claim of completeness is made here.

Building the Syriac Semantic Web

We have seen the “read-only” Web 1.0 during the 1990s and early 2000s, where users consumed web pages. We have also seen the “read-write” Web 2.0 during the last decade, where users also contributed to the web content. We now come to describe how Syriac will fit into the Web 3.0, the Semantic Web. According to Tim Berners-Lee, this is the “read-write-execute” web,30 a web where portals are interconnected with each other. This connectivity is possible when web pages are marked with hidden, agreed-upon metadata – for example, when it is indicated that Bob Kitchens Hugoye article mentioned earlier deals with the Isaac whose VIAF code is 401332. To be sure, the Semantic Web has its critics.31 They argue that expecting users to manually tag web pages is a fantasy. While this is true if one is to consider the entirety of the web, it is quite doable for domain-specific fields. This is especially doable for Syriac studies because of the small size of our data set. The 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains just under 300,000 entries. The Syriac lexicon is no more than 25,000 entries, or even fewer: the Brock-Kiraz dictionary is under 15,000 words, and Margoliouth’s Compendious is under 20,000. The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) contains the works of over 3,200 authors; the Syriac corpus belongs to just over 500 authors (GEDSH includes around 600 articles, some of which are not on authors). Likewise, the TLG consists of over 115 million words. The Syriac corpus is unlikely to exceed 50 million, though 30 million might be a more reasonable number: Simtho Beta has over seven million, and the next version will most likely just exceed 30 For the evolution of the Web from 1.0 to 4.0, see M.R. Solanki and A. Dongaonkar, “A Journey of Human Comfort: Web 1.0 to Web 4.0,” International Journal of Research and Scientific Innovation 3, no. 9 (2016): 75–78. 31 S. Target, “What Happened to the Semantic Web,” Two-Bit History (27 May, 2018), [https:// twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-web.html].

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Figure 4

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Envisaging a Syriac semantic network beyond 2020

10 million. The BYU-Oxford corpus is between six and seven million words, overlapping with Simtho. The key component of the Semantic Web is the strict use of and adherence to standards: the Unicode standard for Syriac texts and various authority controls for ontologies. While Syriac was included in Unicode just over 20 years ago, some issues are still looming, though they will not stop us from

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proceeding with our plans. But the authority controls for ontologies are still in their infancy. Syriaca.org has pioneered in this regard. We should follow its model. But first, a caveat! Syriac is already behind. Specialists have assigned 2010– 2020 to the Web 3.0, and it might seem silly to publish a paper in 2020 calling for a Syriac Semantic Web to be built. However, this is not a step that can be skipped. Future generations of the web operate on the underlying assumption that web portals are now interconnected with common standards. Being at the tail end of innovation is not necessarily a bad thing; it means that we can make use of best practices that have already been established and tested. The real failure, however, will be if we fail to take notice and keep our existing systems from developing as the rest of the world advances. The world around us is now moving towards a mobile web (Web 4.0) that is emotionally aware (Web 5.0). We all need to prepare to build a strong Syriac Semantic Web, ‫ܝܬܝܪ ܡܫܘܕܥܢܐܝܬ‬, that is mobile ready. Maybe we can let go of emotional awareness; we are scholars, after all! How are we to achieve this? This is where I get to pontificate.

Unicode and Digital Orientalism

As we rely more and more on generalized software that is not designed specifically for Syriac, it is crucially important for us that the Syriac writing system is supported globally. However, we still live in a world where developers only think left-to-write and do not realize that other languages and writing systems may also use their software. It is astounding that platforms that aim at analyzing texts – be they open source text editors such as Notepad++, XML editors such as Oxygen, or OCR platforms like Transkribus – do not support bidirectionality properly. Take, for example, Beth Mardutho’s library catalog at librarycat.org/lib/Beth _Mardutho, which uses TinyCat. The catalog has serious search problems. The platform does not know how to ignore diacritics: if a cataloguer entered ܳ ‫ܣܘܪܝܝܐ‬ (with the shown vowel), the user will never find the entry if the vowel is missing from the search term. Arabic is even ‫ آ‬worse; consider that the user must know if the cataloguer entered ‫ا‬, �‫إ‬, or � . Obviously, Beth Mardutho reported this to TinyCat; but how many of their users are facing this problem? As we now rely on off-the-shelf platforms for various applications, we first must test whether they support Unicode (the Syriac block, Combining Diacritical Marks, and a font to go with them), bidirectionality, and such search capabilities.

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This brings us to digital orientalism, the ((un)intentional) disregard of the writing systems of the East and, hence, of their cultures. Digital orientalism takes place when large corporations dismiss the cultures of minority writing systems. For as long as I was involved in Unicode – that is, since 1998 – efforts lobbying Apple to support Syriac have been to no avail. Almost a decade later, Syriac got the support it deserves. Google added Estrangela to its Noto font, which we are very grateful for. But the fact that some letters look as if a child scribbled them does not seem to bother Google; we are simply expected to get used to them. I personally have had the best luck with Microsoft; but the “best luck” means reporting a bug, not hearing any acknowledgement or feedback, and not being asked to test. I simply have to wait a few months and check whether recent updates fixed the problem. There is no outreach from these major corporations to language communities. The height of digital orientalism, vis-à-vis Syriac, is when an international standard accepts “Jacobite” and “Nestorian” as script names. When we complain that these terms are historically derogatory, we are told by those who proposed them that it is too late. We have to live with it. Imagine if an international body responsible for setting standards for language varieties (dialects) used the N-word for Ebonics. This would clearly be inacceptable; how is it, then, that these scripts have been suffering from similar attitude for decades? But since there are worse prejudices in this world, let us move on to Unicode issues. The Unicode standard already handles most of what a typical user needs: all Syriac consonants, all vowels, and most diacritical marks. This does not mean there is no room for improvement. In the summer of 2019, Sebastian Kenoro Kiraz and I put together a draft proposal to extend the existing Unicode range. The initial draft took a maximalist approach, calling for addition of the following glyphs: 1. Marks which have thus far been utilized from the Combining Diacritical Marks block (the U+0300 block), such as Seyāme, the supralinear dot, the sublinear dot, etc. 2. Garshuni Letters such as a dotted Gomal (as opposed to a dashed Gomal (U+0714)), a dashed Pe for Armenian Garshuni, and a dotted Pe. 3. The ancient Mim variant and the right-joining Simkath, as in ‫ܢܣ‌ܒ‬ for ‫ܢܣܒ‬. 4. Musical notations found in manuscripts. 5. The various diacritical marks in Segal that cannot be easily reproduced with current Unicode symbols. 6. Diphthong Greek vowels such as    . 7. The linear vowels of Jacob of Edessa:      . 8. The Old Syriac numbers:     .

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It is worth discussing item no. 1 in detail as it frequently pops up in Syriac discussions. Should Seyāme have its own code, or should it use COMBINING DIAERESIS, ◌̈ ? The same question applies to the supra- and sub-linear dots, the mbaṭlānā line, the sublinear tilde used in Neo-Aramaic, etc. When Syriac Unicode was proposed in 1998, there were two schools of thought. The first called for the use of existing Unicode characters, changing their features to become bidirectional. This approach allows these characters to be used with any language, regardless of the writing direction. With this solution, Seyāme and the other diacritics should not have their own codes in the Syriac block. The second school of thought acknowledged that the first approach is the most efficient from an encoding and algorithmic perspective but argued that since Syriac is most likely the only language that requires the existing Combining Diacritical Marks to be used bidirectionally, software developers will not pay attention to this nuance and texts will not be rendered correctly. Accordingly, Seyāme and the other diacritics should have their own codes within the Syriac block. The first school won. The matter was discussed again in 2019 with the Unicode Script Ad Hoc Group. The Group reiterated its initial position: the Unicode Consortium will not entertain the possibility of having the diacritical marks of the Combining Diacritical Marks blocks duplicated in a Syriac block. The Group shifted the responsibility of correct implementation to vendors. While the Group’s decision is computationally sound, alas, enterprise vendors whom we rely upon for software are not attuned to our needs. In the early 2000s, for example, Microsoft Office had problems with the diacritics breaking connections between letters. But as bugs got fixed, the texts appeared correctly. Recently, new bugs were introduced, and these were reported by Beth Mardutho; hopefully, they will get resolved at some point. Those of us on Android devices remember when, during the mid-2010s, our mobile phones showed Seyāme and dots but no Syriac letters. This was so because the fonts in our devices contained the Combining Diacritical Marks but not Syriac characters. With the passage of time, Syriac fonts became standard on mobile devices, especially the Noto font, and now one can see the full texts. Resolving such problems, whenever they appear, then becomes an advocacy issue. Users must reach out and report bugs when things do not work properly. This is the only way to have them resolved. As for the rest of the items in the above list, it became apparent from our discussions with the Group that the proposal had to be divided into sperate proposals in order to guarantee a smooth workflow. As the process of adding characters to Unicode takes about two years, one does not want to jeopardize

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an entire proposal in case some characters will be rejected. As such, Kiraz and Kiraz (!) decided on a minimal proposal for a diacritical point between letters, e.g. ‫ ݁ܗܘ‬. A supralinear dot already exists in Unicode (COMBINING DOT ABOVE LEFT, U+1DF8). The proposal was prepared in collaboration with Ben Yang. It proposes a new COMBINING DOT BELOW LEFT with the recommended position of U+1DFA. The remaining items await submission.

Ontologies and Semantic-Web Readiness



The Semantic Web Comes to life when people immersed in a certain field or vocation  … agree on common schemes for representing information they care about. As more groups develop these taxonomies, Semantic Web tools allow them to link their schemes and translate their terms, gradually expanding the number of people and communities whose Web software can understand one another automatically.32

Syriaca.org began this important work for us. I repeat the analogy with the Unicode standard. Without Unicode, we cannot share files. Without authority controls of ontologies, our websites will never be able to communicate with each other effectively. Understandably, there is legacy content that is difficult – but not impossible – to remedy. CAL, for example, goes back to the 1990s and would require a major overhaul to make it Semantic-Web compliant. Hugoye, which was initially published in the late 1990s, also belongs to the era of Web 1.0. While the portal was updated to use the Srophé app, which permits encoding the pages for the Semantic Web, much of the old content still awaits conversion. e-GEDSH was built using Srophé and is expected to be Semantic-Web-ready. But its entries still lack VIAF codes. It also needs to provide for a mechanism to update its current articles and allow the addition of newly written articles. Sedra provides an API, but it lacks further Semantic Web intelligence such as triplestore, which allows semantic queries. Syri.ac missed the Semantic Web boat when it was created. It still provides us with rich bibliographical data, especially on out-of-copyright material. But if it does not rebuild itself with better DH practices, it risks being overtaken 32 L. Feigenbaum, I. Herman, T. Hongsermeier, E. Neumann, and S. Stephens, “The Semantic Web in Action,” Scientific American (January 19, 2009) [https://www.scientificamerican .com/article/semantic-web-in-actio].

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by a more advanced portal. It is currently compiled as if it were a “paper” project with the advantage that it is online. The CBCS bibliography is built on EndNotes and can also benefit from an integration with a system that is Semantic-Web-ready. The HMML platform is a special case. Due to agreements with the libraries from which the images were extracted, one cannot expect it to be completely open with an API. Its cataloguing data, however, can be made accessible through APIs. Cataloguing data is a perfect candidate for authority controls. Obviously, there is the challenge that the more depth-first one chooses to go, the less cataloguing gets done. But it is crucially important to get things right from the beginning as it will be unlikely that someone will revisit the cataloguing simply to add hidden metadata tags. There are plans to sync Simtho and the Digital Syriac Corpus. In the absence of funding, this has to wait until there is a coding volunteer who can accomplish this for us. Part of this plan is shown in the OCR diagram in Figure 5. Required Technologies In my “Forty Years of Syriac Computing” (2007), I outlined a few items as future considerations. The first was the necessity to resolve the OCR issue. While one can now claim “mission accomplished,” there is much that needs to be done. Today, one can choose from a number of available OCR engines; and within each engine, one can build multiple models. An architecture can be built to enhance the quality of OCR as depicted in the following diagram. This technique builds on the previous experience of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, which relied on two individuals manually transcribing the same text.

OCR/HTR Platform 1

Text Image Library

⋮

DIFF & Merge

POS Tagging

OCR/HTR Platform n

Publish in Simtho & SyriacCorpus.o

Figure 5

A proposed OCR system with multiple engines/models

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A DIFF program, which points out the differences between the two versions, was then applied. A third, more seasoned transcriber resolved the discrepancies. This notion can be further developed algorithmically, where the number of engines/models will be odd and the DIFF & Merge process can take a vote. Models can even be assigned weights of accuracy, allowing the DIFF & Merge stage to take a more intelligent vote. The process is based on the extremely low probability that two transcribers (in the case of TLG) or OCR models (in our case) will make the same mistake. The second item was to develop a “general knowledge base” that embodies connections between texts, bibliographies, manuscript catalogues, and various content. That was a precursor view of what we are now calling the Syriac Semantic Web. But now, in 2020, we are in a much better position. Syri.ac and CBCS already gathered much of the bibliographic data for us. Beth Mardutho, BYU, and other library digitization efforts made available most of the out-ofcopyright publications. HMML and other libraries holding Syriac manuscripts put thousands of manuscript images at our disposal. CAL, Dukhrana, and Sedra are giving us unprecedented access to lexical material. The Digital Syriac Corpus (incorporating the BYU-Oxford corpus), GREgORI, and Simtho are making available millions of words in a searchable format. Hugoye and e-GEDSH, as well as e-publications by corporate publishers, are creating new content online. The Beth Gazo portal is even making available audio recordings of liturgical material. The “general knowledge base” is out there. The dream has come true. But it is disconnected and incomplete. Figure 4 envisages how these systems can be interconnected. One additional major component continues to be missing: text analysis. There have been some efforts in this regard in the past. We know that CAL has an in-house text analysis program. Amsterdam, BYU, and Louvain have all done some sort of text analysis research. But to this date, we do not have an out-of-the-box part-of-speech tagger, a tokenizer, or a morphological analyzer. This is a desideratum. The technical approaches to resolving text analysis are known – i.e., we are not awaiting breakthroughs in technology. There is the finite-state approach (my 1990s research), there is the morphological generation followed by database lookup approach, and there are various statistical methods. Beth Mardutho recently tested Helmut Schmid’s TreeTagger for part-of-speech tagging, with encouraging initial results. What is required is a dedicated team that consists of a computational linguist (no, not me) and a small set of graduate students with good knowledge of Syriac. The system needs to interface with the outside world: not only with an API, but also with a user-friendly web interface and a command-line interface to maximize its usage.

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In fact, the foundation for these efforts is currently being laid by a team coordinated by Slavomír Čéplö (Austrian Academy of Sciences); it includes fellows of Beth Mardutho and students from Tel Aviv University. The main goal of the team is to annotate Syriac texts with linguistic information – such as token division, part of speech, and lemma  – as well as to develop accurate Syriac lexica. This data will then be used to develop basic computational tools for Syriac, like a tokenizer, a lemmatizer, a part-of-speech tagger, and a morphological analyzer, using statistical methods and cutting-edge machine learning techniques. In connection with text analysis, Sedra needs to clean up its data store. Crowd-sourcing and automatic importing of data led to about 3,000 duplicate records. Sedra also needs to revisit its verbal paradigm algorithm. Currently, it can handle verbs that belong to one root category (e.g. initial-‫ ܢܢ‬or final-‫)ܐ‬, but it fails on roots that are both initial-‫ ܢܢ‬and final-‫ܐ‬. Its algorithm needs to move away from providing templates at the stem level to providing templates at the radical level.

Digital Savviness

Digital humanists can benefit from learning certain techniques, especially if they are dealing with data regularly. XML and TEI encodings are important for the digital representation of any historical text. Regular expressions are extremely useful as powerful search expressions as well as for textual transformations (including cleaning up data). Let us say that you want to search for any word that begins with a ‫ ܒܕܘܠ‬prefix. You can search for *‫ܒ‬, which gives you everything that starts with ‫ܒ‬. And you can also search for *‫ܘ‬, which gives you everything that starts with ‫ܘ‬. But you can also search for *[‫]ܒܕܘܠ‬. The square bracket denotes a disjunction. This expression searches for everything that starts with any of the letters in the square brackets. But it does not stop here. Consider the following scenario. One of my duties editing the Antioch Bible was to add all the Rukkākhā and Quššaya dots. Adding them for each volume used to take four to eight weeks. After doing this for a few volumes, I realized that in most cases, one can determine the dotting from the word form, especially when the text is already vocalized. I began to use search-and-replace operations using regular expressions in Microsoft Word. (This is accomplished by checking the “Use wildcards” checkbox in the search dialog box.) Of course, I had to be careful: each search-replace operation had to operate only on undotted letters. Also, the order of my operations was important. I saved all of the search/replace expressions in a spreadsheet.

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Now, I could open a new text, copy and paste my search/replace terms into the replace dialog box, and click “Replace All.” The entire process takes a day or two. I did not need to know any programming to achieve this. I only needed to know how to use regular expressions. But what if I knew just a bit of programming? I could write a program that asks me to select a Word file (containing the vocalized Syriac text) and the spreadsheet (containing the search/replace expressions). The program could then read each row in the spreadsheet, perform the search-and-replace in the Word file, and save the Word file and close the input files. Now, the entire Antioch Bible volume can be dotted in a minute or two of my own time. If I have too many search/replace expressions, it may take longer – say 15 minutes or so. But that would be computer time. I could do something else while my computer is dotting. I am glad that I went the programming route, because as I did more volumes, my few dozen search/replace expressions grew to a few hundred expressions. Doing the search-and-replace manually would have taken a long time and would have most certainly introduced human errors. How much programming did I need to know? Well, not much, really. The steps of the algorithm were outlined above: open a Word file, open a spreadsheet file, read each row in the spreadsheet, perform the search-and-replace in the Word file, etc. To be honest, despite my forty-year experience in programming, I did not know how to do any of these things. I simply looked up how to do them online. There are tons of code snippets online. I just needed to know enough programming to copy these code snippets and put them together in a coherent program. I needed to know the basics of computer programming. Programming, at the level we are talking about here, is not rocket science. Anyone who is serious about the digital humanities must take an introductory programming course. Life will become so much easier. The digital humanist can accomplish so much more. Consider the following two scenarios from the Simtho project. During 2019, Digital Humanities Fellows at Beth Mardutho (usually graduate students) OCRed over seven million words of text, as was mentioned above. This was done during a short period of nine months. About six of these months were spent working with William Clocksin to better his OCR engine and the Estrangela and Serto models. Once we were confident of the results, we blindly fed the OCR machine with text images. This was done by placing our images in a Dropbox folder. Clocksin wrote a script that downloaded the files, ran them through the OCR engine, and saved the output in another Dropbox folder. It took just over a month to actually process the seven million words. Contrast this with the 2020 experience. We had a similar amount of text. But now, we used Transkribus as the OCR engine. Unlike Clocksin’s system,

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which runs on his own machine, Transkribus is a web portal. This in itself is quite positive: anyone can access it and use it. However, clicking here and there to upload files, waiting for the files to be uploaded, clicking here and there to choose an OCR model and run it, waiting for the results, and finally clicking here and there to download the results is a huge amount of unnecessary labor. Not having direct access to the engine meant that during a longer period of time than in 2019, we were able to OCR only three million words. At some point, one needs to process files in batch mode. And for that, one needs to learn some programming, especially batch processing. Again, this is not rocket science, but something that one should learn. There is certainly a fear of computing out there. But we are only talking about the basics of computing. As we require every student who enters college to take writing courses and every graduate student to take intro to research seminars (at least in the United States), there must be DH 101 courses for all students, graduate and undergraduate, who enter any field in the humanities. Stop reading now and go learn regular expressions and some programming. You will not miss much if you skip the concluding remarks!

Concluding Remarks

My bus trip to Oxford was the best bus trip I have ever taken in my life. While my initial plan was to take a year off from engineering and read Syriac with Sebastian Brock, the first week in Oxford altered everything. I would abandon engineering for a life of Syriac. I had taken with me a my copy of James Allen’s Natural Language Understanding (1987); a few years earlier, it had caught my attention in a Los Angeles book shop as its cover illustration featured hieroglyphics with a series of bits (zeros and ones). I showed the book to Sebastian and told him that there seemed to be a field that dealt with language and computing. He introduced me to Susan Hockey, then a specialist of humanities computing at Oxford University Computing Services. She connected me with computational linguists at the University of Cambridge, and the rest is history. What Oxford taught me – in addition to much English vocabulary as I had to translate Syriac texts for class – is the spirit of Sebastianutho. It requires no definition, but it is a major ingredient in the Syriac Semantic Web that this paper is advocating for. A collaborative spirit is required: we are lucky that, in Syriac studies, our field is quite friendly. Openness is required: systems that do not provide an API to allow other systems to connect to them will end up being left out, and other systems will most likely overtake them. Generosity is required: we are in

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a field where funding is lacking, and we must offer our time as volunteers to some extent. Finally, outreach to the heritage communities is required. I will elaborate more on this point. Sebastian’s support for students of the heritage community is unprecedented at an elite university like Oxford. I am not sure if Oxford would have taken me with my Northridge 3.2 GPA. Oxford for sure would not have taken the vast majority of heritage students who hailed from Tur Abdin, other areas of the Middle East, and India. Sebastian accepted them. There are many rising scholars in the heritage community who are now computer savvy, and one can involve them in digital humanities projects. In fact, there are scholarly tasks that they can do that no Western scholar can do: they can catalog all the liturgical manuscripts, type Syriac as fast as you can type in your native language, and create data records and clean messed up data. If trained, they can tag much of the Semantic Web intelligence that we need. Employing them will help the local economies or will help those who are struggling in the diaspora. But our relationship with them cannot be transactional. It is our duty as scholars to promote Syriac studies within heritage communities. It is not enough to involve members of these communities only when we need them or when we need their manuscripts. If you have worked with a monastery or a heritage entity, you need to maintain that relationship well beyond the conclusion of the project. You need to find ways to promote our field within the heritage communities. Raising their awareness in Syriac studies is not only their problem and the problem of their leadership. It is everyone’s problem. We should not look at them as the other.

̈ ‫ܚܫܘܒܝܬܐ܆ ܠܐ ܬܚܫܘܒ ܒܘܨ̈ܪܝ ܡܪܝܐ܀‬ ‫ܫܠܡ ܗܠܝܢ ܥܠ‬ Bibliography Borbone, P.G. Un programma per l’elaborazione di testi siriaci e un progetto di redazione di concordanze della Peshitta (Rome: Pontifica Institutum Studiorum Orientalium, 1990). Borbone, P.G., et al. The Old Testament in Syriac According to the Peshitta Version: Concordance, vol. 1, The Pentateuch (Leiden: Brill, 1997). Butts, A.M. Language Change in the Wake of Empire: Syriac in Its Greco-Roman Context (University Park: State University Press, 2016). Chesley, E., J. Marcantonio and A. Pearson, “Towards Digital Syriac Corpora: Evaluation of Tesseract 4.0 for Syriac OCR,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 22, no. 1 (2019): 109–192.

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Feigenbaum, L., I. Herman, T. Hongsermeier, E. Neumann and S. Stephens, “The Semantic Web in Action,” Scientific American (January 19, 2009) [https://www.scien tificamerican.com/article/semantic-web-in-actio]. Heal, K. “Corpora, eLibraries, and Databases: Locating Syriac Studies in the 21st Century,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 15, no. 1 (2012): 65–78. Heal, K. and J.E. Walters, “History of the Digital Syriac Corpus,” https://syriaccorpus .org/history.html. Accessed 1 May 2022. Hockey, S. “A History of Humanities Computing,” in A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. S. Schreibman, et al. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 3–19.

̇ ‫ܕܟܠܗ ܫܢܬܐ ܐܝܟ ܛܟܣܐ ܕܥܕܬܐ ܫܠܝܚܝܬܐ‬ ‫ܟܬܒܐ ܕܐܘܢܓܠܝܘܢ ܡܦܪܫܐ‬ ‫( ܘܩܬܘܠܝܩܝ ܕܡܕܢܚܐ‬Church of the East Press ‫ܡܛܒܥܬܐ ܕܥܕܐ ܕܡܕܢܚܐ‬, 1987).

Kiraz, G.A. A Computer-Generated Concordance to the Syriac New Testament, According to the British and Foreign Bible Society’s Edition, Based on the SEDRA Database, 6 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1993). Kiraz, G.A. Alaph Beth Font Kit (Los Angeles: Alaph Beth Computer Systems, 1990). Kiraz, G.A. “Automatic Concordance Generation of Syriac Texts,” in VI Symposium Syriacum 1992, ed. R. Lavenant, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 247 (Rome: Pontificio Istituto Orientale, 1994), 461–475. Kiraz, G.A. Lexical Tools to the Syriac New Testament, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Manuals Manuals 7 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994; 2nd ed., Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2002). Kiraz, G.A. Comparative Edition of the Syriac Gospels: Aligning the Sinaiaticus, Curetonianus, Peshīttâ and Harklean Texts (2nd ed.; Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, [1996] 2004). Kiraz, G.A. “ṢEMḤE: A Generalised Two-Level System,” in Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics (Santa Cruze, CA, 1996). Kiraz, G.A. Computational Nonlinear Morphology, with Emphasis on Semitic Languages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Kiraz, G.A. “Forty Years of Syriac Computing,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 10, no. 1 (2007): 37–60. Kiraz, G.A. Tūrāṣ Mamllā: A Grammar of the Syriac Language, vol. 1, Syriac Orthography (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2012). Metzger, B.M. The Early Versions of the New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977). Metzger, B.M. Lexical Aids for Students of New Testament Greek (New ed.; Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 1997). Michelson, D.A. “Using Linked Open Data to Model Cultural Heritage Information: The Research Questions and Data Structures of the Syriaca.org Knowledge Graph,” in Linked Open Data for the Ancient Mediterranean: Structures, Practices, Prospects, ed. S.E. Bond, P. Dilley, and R. Horne, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World Papers 20 (2021): http://hdl.handle.net/2333.1/69p8d8cc.

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Solanki, M.R. and A. Dongaonkar, “A Journey of Human Comfort: Web 1.0 to Web 4.0,” International Journal of Research and Scientific Innovation 3, no. 9 (2016): 75–78. Sprenger, N. Konkordanz zum Syrischen Psalter (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1976). Strothmann, W., K. Johannes and M. Zumpe, Die Propheten (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1984). Strothmann, W., K. Johannes and M. Zumpe, Konkordanz zur Syrischen Bible: Der Pentateuch (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1986). Target, S. “What Happened to the Semantic Web,” Two-Bit History (27 May, 2018) [https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-web.html]. Walters, J.E. “The Digital Syriac Corpus: A Digital Repository for Syriac Texts,” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 24, no. 1 (2020): 109–122. Way International Research Team, The Concordance to the Peshitta Version of the Aramaic New Testament (American Christian Press, 1985). Yang, B., S. Kenoro Kiraz, and G.A. Kiraz, “Proposal to encode COMBINING DOT BELOW LEFT for Syriac,” (2020) [Unicode document], http://www.unicode.org/L2 /L2019/19338-syriac.pdf. Zumpe, M. Technische Aspekte der Göttingen Syrischen Konkordanz (Deutsche Arbeitsgemeinschaft Vorderer Orient, September 2001).

Dialogue Elements in Late Syriac Poetry: The Ways of Transformation Anton Pritula Sebastian Brock has a special interest and outstanding expertise in Syriac poetry, in particular, in all known forms of the dialogue genre. I owe special gratitude to Dr Brock, who has spent much time in correcting both the Syriac and English in my publications. Not having been privileged to study Syriac with him in person, I have been honored to benefit from the corrections and notes he was kind to send me, which were very helpful for my study of Syriac and also for developing the skills of translating Syriac poetry into English. Brock has developed a detailed typology of Syriac dialogue poetry that shows the basic stages of its evolution.1 Brock has identified over fifty such texts, many of which he has edited and translated.2 Most of these poems (sōghīthā, pl. sōghyāthā), being strophic and used for liturgical antiphonal singing, were composed in the fourth–seventh centuries. As is shown in numerous philological studies, the genre of the dialogue or dispute poem goes back to the Sumerian-Babylonian literary tradition.3 Later, the 1 See, for instance, S.P. Brock, “The Dispute Poem: From Sumer to Syriac,” Journal of the Canadian Society for the Syriac Studies 1 (2001): 3–11; S.P. Brock, “Syriac Dispute Poems: The Various Types,” in Dispute Poems and Dialogues in the Ancient and Medieval Near East. Forms and Types of Literary Debates in Semitic and Related Literatures, ed. G.J. Reinink and H.L.J. Vanstiphout (Leuven: Peeters, 1991), 109–119. ̈ 2 S.P. Brock, Sughyotho mgabyotho (‫ܡܓ ̈ܒܝܬܐ‬ ‫ܣܘܓܝܬܐ‬ ) (Monastery of St. Ephrem, ܲ� Netherlands, 1982); S.P. Brock, “Dramatic Dialogue Poems,” Orientalia Christiana Analecta 229, IV Symposium Syriacum. Literary Genres in Syriac Literature (1984): 134–147; S.P. Brock, “Syriac Dialogue Poems: Marginalia to a Recent Edition,” Le Muséon 97, no. 1–2 (1984): 28–58; S.P. Brock, “Dispute of the Months and Some Related Syriac Texts,” Journal of Semitic Studies 30, no. 2 (1985): 181–211; S.P. Brock, “The Sinful Woman and Satan: Two Syriac Dialogue Poems,” Oriens Christianus 72 (1988): 21–62; S.P. Brock, Studies in Syriac Christianity (Aldershot: Variorum, 1992); S.P. Brock, “Syriac Poetry on Biblical Themes. 2. A Dialogue Poem on the Sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22),” The Harp 7 (1994): 55–72; S.P. Brock, “Syriac Liturgical Poetry – a Resource for Today,” The Harp 8 (1995): 62–67; S.P. Brock, From Ephrem to Romanos (Aldershot: Variorum, 1999); S.P. Brock, “Two Syriac Dialogue Poems on Abel and Cain,” Le Muséon 113 (2000): 333–375; S.P. Brock, “A Prayer Song by St Jacob of Serugh Recovered,” The Harp 16 (2003): 349–354; S.P. Brock, “The Dialogue Between the Two Thieves (Luke 23:39–41),” The Harp 20 (2006): 151–170; S.P. Brock, “A Soghitha on the Daughter of Jephtha, by Isaac,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 14, no. 1 (2011): 3–25. 3 See R. Murray, “Aramaic and Syriac Dispute-Poems and Their Connections,” Journal of Semitic Studies, Suppl. 4 (1995): 157–187. The scholar treats also the Sumerian and Akkadian

© Anton Pritula, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004537897_016

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form was developed in Aramaic literature of the first millennium CE. Several dispute poems are known in middle-Persian, such as the famous “Babylonian (Assyrian) tree” (i.e. the date-tree).4 Brock believes that the traditional Syriac dispute poems also provided a connection between the ancient Mesopotamian tradition and the Arabic munāẓara,5 and he considers the fifth–sixth centuries to be the most fruitful period for the creation of sōghīthā in Syrian literature.6 Later on, after the Arabic conquest, the Syriac poetic tradition continued to produce different kinds of verse texts containing dialogue elements, representing the next stage of the evolution. Some of the pieces are strophic and were meant to be sung in church, while others formed small text-collections consisting of short poems and quatrains. These represented (or, rather, imitated) poetic correspondence between different Syriac authors or historical personalities. Most of these texts remain unstudied since they were not available until very recent times. The methodology and scholarly approach developed by Sebastian Brock open new opportunities for the research into this type of poetry. In recent years, several important publications on the history of dialogue poetry by Alessandro Mengozzi have traced its further development into modern times, several being translated into Neo-Aramaic. For the first time attention has been paid to aspects of the music and performance.7 In the centuries that followed the Arabic conquest of the Near East, the Syriac literary tradition had to accommodate to the new situation and meet new challenges. As a result, the traditional literary forms nurtured by the Syriac literary tradition absorbed the achievements of the neighboring Islamic  – Arabic and Persian  – traditions. Various kinds of dialogue poetry that were

4 5 6 7

dialogue poems, 158–160. Besides, dispute poems found in the Targums are mentioned, such as the disputation of the months, and sometimes acrostic is used (156). The dispute of the months is performed also at the Palestinian liturgy on Easter and is included into the Easter cycle (163–168). Several poems of this type are known in the Judeo-Persian tradition. See J.P. Asmussen, “A Judeo-Persian Precedence-Dispute Poem and Some Thoughts on the History of the Genre,” in Studies in Judeo-Persian Literature, Studia Post-Biblica 24 (Leiden: Brill, 1973), 32–59. C.J. Brunner and J. Christopher, “The Fable of the Babylonian Tree,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 39, no. 3–4 (1980): 191–202, 291–302. Brock, “The Dispute Poem: from Sumer to Syriac,” 8. Brock, “Dispute of the Months and Some Related Syriac Texts,” 188. A. Mengozzi, and L.B. Ricossa, “Folk Spontaneity and Pseudo-Teretismata in East-Syriac Soghiyāthā: Resurrection, Joseph and His Mistress, ‘Tell me Church!,’ Moses and Jesus, and Great Rome,” Christian Orient 6, no. 12 (2013): 162–180; A. Mengozzi, and L.B. Ricossa, “The Cherub and the Thief on YouTube: An Eastern Christian Liturgical Drama and the Vitality of the Mesopotamian Dispute,” Annali dell’Istituto Orientale di Napoli 73 (2013): 49–66.

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very common in Syriac Christian poetry in the centuries before Islam were transformed according to new literary tastes. A re-consideration of the existing genre forms was especially active in the Ilkhanid period (late thirteenth–early fourteenth centuries) when the Christian communities obtained access to the royal court. Among the most notable figures of that epoch is an East Syriac poet Khāmīs bar Qardāḥē (late thirteenth–early fourteenth centuries), who experimented in creating new forms and rhythms. He used quatrains (analogous to the Persian rubāʿī) and short pieces resembling Persian ghazals, although he applied to them a traditional Syriac genre named sōghīthā.8 Alessandro Mengozzi has studied the general structure and contents of the book, defining its main forms and reductions presented in the extant manuscripts.9 Not much attention has been paid by scholars to this period of Syriac pottery until quite recently. One of the reasons may be an interdisciplinary gap in which most of these texts occurred. For most Syriac scholars, whose interests were focused on theology, historiography, Church history, or the earlier period of the literary tradition, this type of poetry might have appeared strange, and therefore considered secondary and non-original in relation to the contemporary Islamic one.10 On the other hand, Arabists and Iranists, who have had better acquaintance with these poetic methods, simply did not see this tradition as a part of their area. In this short essay, I wish to list and classify main types of Syriac verse texts of this period that have any connection to the dialogue form. More detailed shorter 8

See, for instance, A. Mengozzi, “Persische Lyrik in syrischem Gewand: Vierzeiler aus dem Buch des Khamis bar Qardaḥe (Ende 13. Jh.),” in Geschichte, Theologie und Kultur des syrischen Christentums: Beiträge zum 7. Deutschen Syrologie-Symposium in Göttingen, Dezember 2011, ed. M. Tamcke and S. Grebenstein (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2014), 155–176; A. Mengozzi, “Quatrains on Love by Khamis bar Qardaḥe: Syriac Sufi Poetry,” in Christsein in der islamischen Welt: Festschrift für Martin Tamcke zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. S.H. Griffith and S. Grebenstein (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2015), 331–344; A. Pritula, “Bar ʿEbrōyō, Khāmīs bar Qardāḥē: iz Ninevii v Fars,” in Commentationes Iranicae: Sbornik statei r 90-letiyu V.A. Livshitsa, ed. S.R. Tohtasiev, P.B. Lurje (St Petersburg, 2013), 508–514; A. Pritula, “Zwei Gedichte des Ḫāmīs bar Qardāḥē: Ein Hochgesang zu Ehren von Bar ʿEbrōyō und ein Wein-Gedicht für die Khan-Residenz,” in Geschichte, Theologie und Kultur des syrischen Christentums: Beiträge zum 7. Deutschen Syrologie-Symposium in Göttingen, Dezember 2011, ed. M. Tamcke and S. Grebenstein (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2014), 315–328. 9 A. Mengozzi, “The Book of Khamis bar Qardaḥe: History of the Text, Genres, and Research Perspectives,” in Syriac Encounters: Papers from the Sixth North American Syriac Symposium, Duke University, 26–29 June 2011, ed. M. Doerfler, E. Maria and E. Fiano, Eastern Christian Studies 20 (Leuven: Peeters, 2015), 415–438. 10 See, for instance, A. Baumstark, Geschichte der syrischen Literatur, mit Ausschluss der christlich-palästinensischen Texte (Bonn: A. Marcus und E. Weber, 1922), 319.

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poems will be examined as a means of poetic communication, whether real or just as a literary method.

ʿŌnīthā as a Development of Earlier Dialogue Poetic Forms

ʿŌnīthā (pl. ʿōnyāthā) reached its highest popularity in the thirteenth century, being performed by two alternating choirs at in the liturgy.11 This literary form is generally believed to have originated from the Syriac dispute poems of sōghīthā type.12 Like sōghyāthā, ʿōnyāthā were performed at mautbā of the night service. It is significant that in some manuscripts of collections of ʿōnyāthā, there are also sōghyāthā in the same context.13 In the main corpus of the liturgical strophic ʿōnyāthā known as the Book of Wardā, especially among the hymns of the days of the Rogation of the Ninevites,14 some represent a kind of dialogue. The general feature of the group is a very detailed description of different calamities, such as famine, locusts, plague, foreign invasions etc.15 The terrible devastation and massacre and other calamities make the author doubt God’s justice. This is expressed in a number of questions, as in the hymn in the Devastation of Tiflis that happened in 1225 CE (№ 44 а,16 stanzas 50–55). At the end, the Just One (i.e. God) reproaches the author and explains to him God’s will, i.e. the testing of people before the transition to eternal life (№ 44 а, stanzas 56–61). Similar compositions can be found in other hymns attributed to Wardā, where the role of expositor and interpreter is assumed by God’s Justice. One of the hymns on natural disasters (№ 57),17 or the author’s Reason in the hymn on People’s inequality 11 See A. Pritula, The Wardā: An East Syriac Hymnological Collection. Study and Critical Edition, Göttinger Orientforschungen, I. Reihe: Syriaca 47 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2015). 12 See, Baumstark, Geschichte der syrischen Literatur, 102. Although there are some exceptions, as for instance, the famous sōghīthā on the Edessa cathedral, which does not have a dialogue form. See H. Goussen, “Über eine ‘Sugitha’ auf die Kathedrale von Edessa,” Le Muséon 38, no. 1–2 (1925): 117–136. 13 See Pritula, The Wardā: An East Syriac Hymnological Collection, 13–14. 14 A three-day fasting two weeks before the Lent. See also Pritula, The Wardā: An East Syriac Hymnological Collection, 88–92. 15 M. Tamcke, “Die islamische Zeit in Giwargis Wardas ‘Onita über die Katholikoi des Ostens,” in The Encounter of Eastern Christianity with Early Islam, ed. E. Grypeou (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 139–140. 16 The numbers of the hymns from the Wardā are given following the table in Pritula, The Wardā: An East Syriac Hymnological Collection, 19–81. 17 Cf. H. Hilgenfeld, ed., Ausgewählte Gesänge des Giwargis Warda von Arbel (Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1904), 16–20.

Dialogue Elements in Late Syriac Poetry

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(№ 64), demonstrate this motif.18 Thus, this type of hymn may be considered apologetic, although in all these hymns the description of the disasters occupies the majority of the hymn. In the manuscript Vat. Syr. 653, we may see the development of this kind of ʿōnyāthā describing the terrors of the foreign invasions. Beside the hymn under discussion (fol. 98v–103r), and the one on Karmlīš (fol. 213r–218v), Vat. Syr. 653 also contains a hymn on the conquest of Bēth Garmay in 1224 CE (fol. 95r–98v). It follows the same compositional plan: the description of the massacre, followed by the author’s doubts, and then the voice of God’s Justice. This text has been not published and needs scholarly attention. Among a number of sōghyāthā published by Brock, there is a poetical dialogue with the soul, written apparently by Jacob of Serugh.19 It consists of three parts, each of which is a long speech by one of the characters, and so the alternation of the personalities’ speech is not regular. In his typology of the dispute-poems, Brock relates such poems to the fourth and fifth type.20 Apparently, the composition of this ʿōnyāthā descends genetically from the fifth type of dispute poems, which includes an apologetic element and an irregular division of the characters’ speeches, along with the dramatic development of events, is characteristic of the latter type.21

Transformation of the sōghīthā Genre Form: A sōghīthā on the Ringdove (‫ )ܨܘܨܠܐ‬Ascribed to Khāmīs

In the sōghīthā section (short strophic poems) of the manuscripts of poetry by Khāmīs bar Qardāḥē (late thirteenth–early fourteenth centuries), there is a dialogue representing an appeal to the bird ‫ܨܘܨܠܐ‬ ܼ (ringdove) symbolizing a human soul, according to the manuscript rubrics. The central motif of the poem is the bird’s departure, i.e., the soul’s take-off, also noted in the headings. This sōghīthā is composed on behalf of the dying body, which is complaining of the death to come as it fears the uncertainty of its future destiny. This sōghīthā was first published, based on a late manuscript,22 then later studied,

18 19 20 21 22

See Pritula, The Wardā: An East Syriac Hymnological Collection, 457–464. Brock, “A Prayer Song by St Jacob of Serugh Recovered,” 349–354. Brock, “Dramatic Dialogue Poems,” 137, 138. Brock, “Dramatic Dialogue Poems,” 137, 138, 142. Ḥošabbā, q. Šlēmōn Īšōʿ, ed., Khāmīs bar Qardāḥē, Mēmrē w-Mušḥāṯā. Nūhadrā (Dohuk, 2002), 190–191.

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edited critically and translated into English.23 It is preserved in at least four manuscripts.24 The dialogue poem by Khāmīs is characterized by the following features: 1) It reflects the stage of development of the poetry of the so-called Syriac Renaissance, which uses Arabic and Persian poetic features. 2) At the same time, the piece is a modification of a traditional Aramaic dialogue poem, having a thousand-year history. 3) All the existing manuscripts of the poem go back to a single archetype (which could be an autograph) that had the same lacunas (stanzas 17–21). Using the figure of a bird as an allegory of the human soul may be found for the first time in Syriac poetry in a poem by Yūḥannōn bar Maʿdānī (d. 1263).25 The works by this poet were fundamental in forming the poetic style of the Syriac Renaissance. They were, however, neither translated nor carefully studied. The outstanding Syriac man of letters borrowed the plot from his elder Muslim authors, transforming its character from the tradition of Islamic mysticism to the Christian one. ܿ ‫ܐܗ‬ ܿ ‫ܐܗ‬ ܿ ‫ܐܗ‬ ܿ ‫ܐܗ‬ ܿ All stanzas consist of four 7-syllable lines and a final refrain ‫ܐܗ‬ ܲ � ‫ �ܲܐܘ ܿܗ ܵܐ‬, reminding the reader of both weeping and a bird’s twitter‫ܠܘ ܵܝܐ‬ ܼ ‫ܗܝ ܿܗ �ܲܗ ܸܠ‬ ing. Stanzas 1–8 and 11–22 present a monologue of the body addressed to the ringdove, i.e. to the soul. Stanzas 9–10 contain its reply. Thus, the poem under discussion represents a reworking of dialogue sōghīthā. Its distinctivr feature is that the division of the cues is not obvious, since there are no designations of the actors before each stanza, as is common for the classical Syriac dialogue poems. The only way to distinguish them is to note the difference in the grammatical gender of the addressees, as the body (‫ )ܦܓܪܐ‬is masculine, whereas bird (i.e., soul, ‫ )ܢܦܫܐ‬is feminine. Such an arrangement seems to be an adaptation to the new literary tastes of the Church elite of the Mongol era, influenced by the accomplishments of Arabic and Persian poetry. An educated Syriac reader was supposed to be able to recognize the traditional genre form using a sophisticated indicator. Among the dialogue poems identified by Sebastian Brock are three conversations between soul and body.26 In its main motif the text by Khāmīs is similar 23 See A. Pritula, “‘O Ringdove! Where Are You Heading For?’ A Syriac Dialogue Poem of the Late 13th Century,” in Syrische Studien: Beiträge zum 8. Deutschen Syrologie-Symposium in Salzburg 2014, ed. D.W. Winkler, Orientalia  – Patristica – Oecumenica 10 (Wien: LIT Verlag, 2016), 351–360. 24 Pritula, “‘O Ringdove! Where Are You Heading For?,’” 354. 25 The text is edited in F.Y. Dolabani, ed., Mušḥōtō d-Mōr Grīgōriyūs Yūḥannan Bar ʿEḇrōyō map̄ riyōnō qaddīšō d-Madnḥō (Glane/Losser, 1983), 5–16. 26 Brock, Sughyotho mgabyotho, 88–92, 93–102, 103–107.

Dialogue Elements in Late Syriac Poetry

317

to one of the poems published by Brock (no. 21), namely the departure from this life of the two characters and their concern about their future destiny in the life to come.27 Both poems finish with a supplication regarding the reunification of the soul and the body for eternal life, and about safe passage through the Last Judgment. All the other texts involving the same personages seem to have the character of dispute, where the qualities of the two are compared. Among contemporary Syriac dialogue poems of the Islamic period is a piece forming a part of the famous book The Eden Paradise by ʿAḇdīšōʿ bar Brīkhā (d. 1318), who apparently had an idea of reworking traditional Aramaic topics while exploiting poetic innovations of his time. This poem, representing a disputation between body and soul uses a regular rhyming system, as is usual for the period.28

Syro-Turkic Poem from the Mongol Time Ascribed to Khāmīs

In many manuscripts of the Divan (collection of poems) of Khāmīs bar Qardāḥē there is a bilingual poem.29 All the Syriac stanzas use quatrains in a 7–7–8–8 meter. Each of them has its own internal rhyme that follows a constant scheme, i.e., in every first, second and fourth verse (aaxa). In the Turkic stanzas the verses have an irregular meter that varies from eight to ten syllables. In the Turkic translation of the Syriac original, one finds many syriacisms, such as bar Maryam (the Son of Mary), a stable combination used in the texts. Such a broad use of borrowings, both in vocabulary and syntax, is common for translated religious texts, especially liturgical ones, in which the proximity to the original has a great importance. Some terms, nevertheless, used in the Turkish version testify to the opposite tendency, specifically to adapt the text to the cultural tradition of the target language. This approach also appeared in translations of the Holy Scriptures into Persian during the Mongol dynasty.30 This tendency to use concepts from the target language explains why the Turkish text renders 27 Brock, Sughyotho mgabyotho, 93–102. 28 Brock, Syriac Dispute Poems: The Various Types, 113. 29 An edition of this text in A. Pritula, “Syroturcica: A Bilingual Poem from the Mongol Time,” Christsein in der islamischen Welt: Festschrift für Martin Tamcke zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. S.H. Griffith, and S. Grebenstein (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2015), 345–357. A critical edition is published in A. Pritula and P. Zieme, “A Syro-Turkic Poem on Divine Economy Ascribed to Khāmīs: Critical Edition,” Intellectual History of the Islamicate World (2019): 299–324. 30 See A. Pritula, Khristianstvo i persidskaia knizhnost 13–17 vekov (St. Petersburg: Izdatelstvo Bulanina, 2004), 15, 28, 37.

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the name Jesus in the standard Islamic way, ʿĪsā, which functions as a refrain in the last verse of each stanza. Interestingly, this corresponds in the Syriac version not to the name Jesus, but rather to the title messiah (Syr. mšīḥā, Ar. masīḥ). The Arabic šayṭān found in Turkish stanza 3, a term typically used by ܲ ܿ Muslims, corresponds to the traditional Syriac epithet ‫ܠܩܪܨܐ‬ � ‫( ܐ ܼܟ‬slanderer). The word kalīsā, found in Turkish stanza 11, is a typical term for designating a church in Persian. Large discrepancies occur in rendering glosses in the Turkish stanzas in contrast to a relative unity of readings in the Syriac ones. In addition, the poem is one of the earliest texts of this group, dated to the period closest to the life of Khāmīs, although not necessarily composed by this poet, since it is absent from the earliest surviving copies. This poem, as well as similar bilingual ones, started a tradition of alternating stanzas in different languages, which is an innovation of the Syriac dialogue poems. Using the traditional strophic structure, the authors tried to reflect the new cultural and linguistic situation, when the Christian communities living in Islamic surroundings were increasingly using vernacular languages. Such an alternation of the Syriac and Turkic stanzas was apparently meant as a sort of a dialogue between different national communities that lived in the Ilkhan Empire.

Short Poems: A Means of Literary Communication and Correspondence

Two outstanding contemporaries, Khāmīs bar Qardāḥē and Bar ʿEḇrōyō, conducted a poetic correspondence, typical in their time for both the Islamic and Christian educated elite in the Near East. There are at least three groups of texts extant that give evidence of the correspondence.31 1) One of these verse text groups has the character of a theological disputation concerning the union of Christ’s two natures, a discourse usual for the East-West Syrian Churches’ dialogue. Although these texts were published, neither has yet been translated nor studied thoroughly.32 The discussion consists of Khāmīs’ poetic appeal to his West Syrian contemporary Abrāham ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, followed by a short responsive quatrain by the latter, and then concludes with an extended homily by Bar ʿEḇrōyō.

31

They are listed in A. Pritula, “One More Unknown Khāmīs’ Ode in Honor of Bar ʿEbrōyō,” Christian Orient 8, no. 14 (2017): 187–194 (188–189). 32 Dolabani, ed., Mušḥōtō d-Mōr Grīgōriyūs, 157.

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This combination of texts is usually contained in the manuscripts of this great West Syriac author’s poetical heritage.33 2) A rather lengthy poetic homily by Bar ʿEḇrōyō, On Perfection, with additions by Khāmīs. This text has an unparalleled long literary development that lasted up to the early twentieth century. The various stages of the poem’s extension were registered by Hidemi Takahashi in his reference book on Bar ʿEḇrōyō. After Khāmīs the following Syriac authors contributed to the poem: Ῑšōʿyahb bar Mqaddam (in 1451/2), Patriarch of Chaldean Church Joseph II (1697/8), Ṣawmō of Piyoz (ca. 1730), Eliyā Šēr of Shaqlawa (in 1882) and Philip bar Isḥāq Zayyā (in 1933).34 Thus, seven poets participated, who lived within a time framework of eight centuries and belonged to three different churches: Syrian Orthodox, Church of the East and the Chaldean Church. The text was published in a complete way, including all its stages, occupying over two hundred pages.35 It has also been recently edited as a facsimile from a nineteenth century West Syriac manuscript including the first two authors’ works. A critical edition, translation, and thorough study of this unique poem is nevertheless still needed. 3) An ode by Khāmīs on Bar ʿEḇrōyō’s death found in many manuscripts of the Khāmīs book.36 In the manuscripts this piece is identified as a mēmrā and therefore has a non-strophic structure. In the last verses “the two Grīgōrīūs” are mentioned, the deceased and the living one. The first one of them is, most likely, Grīgōrīūs bar ʿEḇrōyō and the second one – his brother Grīgōrīūs bar Ṣawmō bar ʿEḇrōyō, who succeeded him in the post of Maphrian.37 The form of quatrains, most popular in Persian literature, first appeared in the Syriac tradition during the period of the so-called Syriac Renaissance, namely in the Mongol period (thirteenth century), as were most of other literary 33 Dolabani, ed., Mušḥōtō d-Mōr Grīgōriyūs, 157. 34 H. Takahashi, Barhebraeus: A Bio-Bibliography (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2005), 339–341. 35

‫ف‬

‫ظ‬

�‫ܪܘܬܐ؛ ا � ن�ل����� ا �ل���م ن���د و ج �ي� ك‬ .‫�م�ا ل‬ ‫[ ܡܐܡ̈ܪܐ ܙܘܓܢܝܐ ܕܥܠ‬A ‘Double’ Homily on ܼ ‫ܓܡܝ‬ ܼ � ‫م‬ ̈

Perfection] (Baghdad: Publishing House of Mar Anthonius Monastery, 2005). 36 At least, in seven: Vat. Syr. 33, Vat. Syr. 185, Vat. Syr. 186, St Petersburg Б III 5, Berlin Or. quart. 801, Trichur 25. For the edition and translated into Russian and German of this text, see A. Pritula, “Khāmīs bar Qardāḥē, vostochnosiriiskii poet kontsa XIII v.,” Symbol 61 (2012): 303–317; Pritula, “Zwei Gedichte des Ḫāmīs bar Qardāḥē,” 315–328. 37 On his life, see H. Takahashi, “A Mimro on Maphrian Gregory Bar Şaumo Safī Bar ʿEbroyo by Dioscorus Gabriel of Barţelli, Bishop of Gozarto d-Qardu,” in The Syriac Renaissance, ed. H. Teule and C.F. Tauwinkl (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 151–195.

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borrowings from the Islamic tradition. This form, being one of the most popular in the medieval Persian poetry, was used for correspondence, real or imaginary. It is noteworthy that a four-line verse structure is the most common type of a stanza in the Syriac traditional poetry. That is why the term used for the quatrains in the manuscripts – tarʿā, means stanza. The collections of this type of poems are usually entitled tarʿē (pl. of tarʿā), which leaves some ambiguity, meaning both a set of quatrains and a complex structure that has a strophic character. That is why the form of quatrain might have been perceived in the Syriac tradition as a potential part of a larger text, unified at least in contents. Apart from these, there are shorter poems that are still unpublished and not studied, but were popular to some extent, since they were included in sixteenth century poetic anthologies. One of them is found in a manuscript in the Chaldean Cathedral of Mardin (CCM 00013, olim Diyarbakir 50, written in 1553 CE),38 which includes fifty-two quatrains by different authors, as well as anonymous, and one final ode (CCM 00113, fol. 212r). The earliest of these authors, Khāmīs bar Qardāḥē and Bar ʿEḇrōyō, were active in the second half of the thirteenth century. The final ode is ascribed to Khāmīs bar Qardāḥē and addressed to Bar ʿEḇrōyō, which was published by the author of this paper.39 The poetry collection under discussion, which is of great importance for Syriac literary history, needs to be published and carefully studied. Five quatrains ascribed to Bar ʿEḇrōyō (CCM 00013, fol. 119r–119v) are immediately followed by the six ones ascribed to Khāmīs bar Qardāḥē (CCM 00013, fol. 120r–210v). The former is called maphrian (due to his Church position in the Syriac Orthodox Church), which is how he is usually called in East Syriac manuscripts, and the name is omitted. One of those ascribed to Bar ʿEḇrōyō is a quatrain on spiritually perfect men (fol. 119r). There is no doubt that the poem was composed by this outstanding East Syriac literature, since it is found in the earliest manuscripts of his poems, ܿ and is generally attributed to him in the editions.40 The poem (its first line is ‫ܐܘ‬ ̈ ܲ ܲ ̈ ‫ܕܡܘ ܼܬ ܸܢܫ̈ܪܐ܆‬ ܼ ‫ܛܘܒܬܢܐ �ܕܐ ܸܩܠܘ ܸܓ ܹܦܐ �ܒ‬ ܼ ) praises spiritual persons, obviously in first turn, monks and hermits, who reached perfection like arrows. The piece contains a typical Christian discourse: a necessity to despise the world’s wisdom in order to reach spiritual perfection. 38 See Pritula, “One More Unknown Khāmīs’ Ode in Honor of Bar ʿEbrōyō.” 39 Pritula, “One More Unknown Khāmīs’ Ode in Honor of Bar ʿEbrōyō,” 193–194. 40 See H. Takahashi, “The Poems of Barhebraeus: A Preliminary Concordance,” Christian Orient 6, no. 12 (2013): 78–139 (124). According to this concordance this poem is found in the earliest manuscripts and in both editions: Or. 298, 1487 CE (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana), 12; Huntington 1, 1498 CE (Oxford, Bodleian Library), 139; Dolabani 2.10.2, Scebabi 154.

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On the next folio (fol. 119r), in the same collection of quatrains, a piece on ̈ the same subject occurs that is ascribed to Khāmīs (its first line is ‫ܛܘܒܬܢܐ ܓܝܪ‬ ܼ ̈ ܲ ܲ ‫ܕܡܘ ܼܬ ܸܢܫ̈ܪܐ܆‬ ܼ ‫ ) �ܕܐ ܸܩܠܘ ܓܦܐ �ܒ‬that has a notable textual similarity, or, to be precise, uses the same words and grammatical constructions. The first line of the quatrain is very similar to the initial line of the one by Bar ʿEḇrōyō. Moreover, the whole text by Khāmīs uses the same words and constructions as the poem by the former. The second text seems to be a response to the original poem by his West Syrian contemporary. It does not actually try to refute it, but rather develops and paraphrases. It looks like a literary dialogue of two contemporary authors who treated each other with much respect.

Conclusion

All the above mentioned issues require a new approach from scholars. Since a number of manuscript collections has been recently digitized, new opportunities are opening for involving more texts in scholarly publications. Since the texts discussed are transmitted irregularly, and are dispersed in quite different manuscripts in various collections, the historical and poetic context, as well as their communicative connection, are not always visible to scholars. First, a general data base should include all the extant hymns and poems, especially short poems, where every single short poem – be it a quatrain or even a one-line poem – must be registered, at least with the incipit to make them searchable. Then after all the texts in all the manuscripts are included in such a database, only then can one really get a general idea about the overall typology and the context of the development of this kind of poetry. Bibliography Asmussen, J.P. “A Judeo-Persian Precedence-Dispute Poem and Some Thoughts on the History of the Genre,” in Studies in Judeo-Persian Literature, Studia Post-Biblica 24 (Leiden: Brill, 1973), 32–59. Baumstark, A. Geschichte der syrischen Literatur, mit Ausschluss der christlichpalästinensischen Texte (Bonn: A. Marcus und E. Weber, 1922). ̈ Brock, S.P. ‫ܡܓ ̈ܒܝܬܐ‬ ‫ܣܘܓܝܬܐ‬ [Sughyotho mgabyotho] (Monastery of St. Ephrem, ܲ� Netherlands, 1982). Brock, S.P. “Dramatic Dialogue Poems,” Orientalia Christiana Analecta 229, IV Symposium Syriacum. Literary Genres in Syriac Literature (1984): 134–147.

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Brock, S.P. “Syriac Dialogue Poems: Marginalia to a Recent Edition,” Le Muséon 97, no. 1–2 (1984): 28–58. Brock, S.P. “Dispute of the Months and Some Related Syriac Texts,” Journal of Semitic Studies 30, no. 2 (1985): 181–211. Brock, S.P. “The Sinful Woman and Satan: Two Syriac Dialogue Poems,” Oriens Christianus 72 (1988): 21–62. Brock, S.P. “Syriac Dispute Poems: The Various Types,” in Dispute Poems and Dialogues in the Ancient and Medieval Near East. Forms and Types of Literary Debates in Semitic and Related Literatures, ed. G.J. Reinink and H.L.J. Vanstiphout (Leuven: Peeters, 1991), 109–119. Brock, S.P. Studies in Syriac Christianity (Aldershot: Variorum, 1992). Brock, S.P. “Syriac Poetry on Biblical Themes. 2. A Dialogue Poem on the Sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22),” The Harp 7 (1994): 55–72. Brock, S.P. “Syriac Liturgical Poetry – a Resource for Today,” The Harp 8 (1995): 62–67. Brock, S.P. From Ephrem to Romanos (Aldershot: Variorum, 1999). Brock, S.P. “Two Syriac Dialogue Poems on Abel and Cain,” Le Muséon 113 (2000): 333–375. Brock, S.P. “The Dispute Poem: From Sumer to Syriac,” Journal of the Canadian Society for the Syriac Studies 1 (2001): 3–11. Brock, S.P. “A Prayer Song by St Jacob of Serugh Recovered,” The Harp 16 (2003): 349–354. Brock, S.P. “The Dialogue Between the Two Thieves (Luke 23:39–41),” The Harp 20 (2006): 151–170. Brock, S.P. “A Soghitha on the Daughter of Jephtha, by Isaac,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 14, no. 1 (2011): 3–25. Brunner, C.J. and J. Christopher, “The Fable of the Babylonian Tree,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 39, no. 3–4 (1980): 191–202, 291–302. Dolabani, F.Y. ed. Mušḥōtō d-Mōr Grīgōriyūs Yūḥannan Bar ʿEḇrōyō map̄ riyōnō qaddīšō d-Madnḥō (Glane/Losser, 1983). Goussen, H. “Über eine ‘Sugitha’ auf die Kathedrale von Edessa,” Le Muséon 38, no. 1–2 (1925): 117–136. Hilgenfeld, H., ed. Ausgewählte Gesänge des Giwargis Warda von Arbel (Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1904). Ḥošabbā, q. Šlēmōn Īšōʿ, ed. Khāmīs bar Qardāḥē, Mēmrē w-Mušḥāṯā. Nūhadrā ([Dohuk], 2002). Mengozzi, A. “Persische Lyrik in syrischem Gewand: Vierzeiler aus dem Buch des Khamis bar Qardaḥe (Ende 13. Jh.),” in Geschichte, Theologie und Kultur des syrischen Christentums: Beiträge zum 7. Deutschen Syrologie-Symposium in Göttingen, Dezember 2011, ed. M. Tamcke and S. Grebenstein (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2014), 155–176.

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Mengozzi, A. “The Book of Khamis bar Qardaḥe: History of the Text, Genres, and Research Perspectives,” in Syriac Encounters: Papers from the Sixth North American Syriac Symposium, Duke University, 26–29 June 2011, ed. M. Doerfler, E. Maria and E. Fiano, Eastern Christian Studies 20 (Leuven: Peeters, 2015), 415–438. Mengozzi, A. “Quatrains on Love by Khamis bar Qardaḥe: Syriac Sufi Poetry,” in Christsein in der islamischen Welt: Festschrift für Martin Tamcke zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. S.H. Griffith and S. Grebenstein (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2015), 331–344. Mengozzi, A. and L.B. Ricossa. “The Cherub and the Thief on YouTube: An Eastern Christian Liturgical Drama and the Vitality of the Mesopotamian Dispute,” Annali dell’Istituto Orientale di Napoli 73 (2013): 49–66. Mengozzi, A. and L.B. Ricossa. “Folk Spontaneity and Pseudo-Teretismata in East-Syriac Soghiyāthā: Resurrection, Joseph and His Mistress, ‘Tell me Church!,’ Moses and Jesus, and Great Rome,” Christian Orient 6, no. 12 (2013): 162–180. ‫ف‬ ̈ �‫ܓܡܝ ܼܪܘܬܐܐ؛ ا ��لن� ظ���� ا �ل���م ن���د و ج �� ك‬ .‫�م�ا ل‬ ‫ܙܘܓܢܝܐ ܕܥܠ‬ ‫[ ܡܐܡ̈ܪܐ‬A “Double” Homily on ܼ

‫� ي‬

‫م‬

Perfection] (Baghdad: Publishing House of Mar Anthonius Monastery, 2005). Murray, R. “Aramaic and Syriac Dispute-Poems and Their Connections,” Journal of Semitic Studies, Suppl. 4 (1995): 157–187. Pritula, A. Khristianstvo i persidskaia knizhnost 13–17 vekov (St. Petersburg: Izdatelstvo Bulanina, 2004). Pritula, A. “Khāmīs bar Qardāḥē, vostochnosiriiskii poet kontsa XIII v.,” Symbol 61 (2012): 303–317. Pritula, A. “Bar ʿEbrōyō, Khāmīs bar Qardāḥē: iz Ninevii v Fars,” in Commentationes Iranicae: Sbornik statei r 90-letiyu V.A. Livshitsa, ed. S.R. Tohtasiev, P.B. Lurje (St Petersburg, 2013), 508–514. Pritula, A. “Zwei Gedichte des Ḫāmīs bar Qardāḥē: Ein Hochgesang zu Ehren von Bar ʿEbrōyō und ein Wein-Gedicht für die Khan-Residenz,” in Geschichte, Theologie und Kultur des syrischen Christentums: Beiträge zum 7. Deutschen Syrologie-Symposium in Göttingen, Dezember 2011, ed. M. Tamcke and S. Grebenstein (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2014), 315–328. Pritula, A. “Syroturcica: A Bilingual Poem from the Mongol Time,” Christsein in der islamischen Welt: Festschrift für Martin Tamcke zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. S.H. Griffith and S. Grebenstein (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2015), 345–357. Pritula, A., ed. The Wardā: An East Syriac Hymnological Collection. Study and Critical Edition, Göttinger Orientforschungen, I. Reihe: Syriaca 47 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2015). Pritula, A. “‘O Ringdove! Where Are You Heading For?’ A Syriac Dialogue Poem of the Late 13th Century,” in Syrische Studien: Beiträge zum 8. Deutschen Syrologie-Symposium in Salzburg 2014, ed. D.W. Winkler, Orientalia – Patristica – Oecumenica 10 (Wien: LIT Verlag, 2016), 351–360.

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Pritula, A. “One More Unknown Khāmīs’ Ode in Honor of Bar ʿEbrōyō,” Christian Orient 8, no. 14 (2017): 187–194. Pritula, A. and P. Zieme, ed. “A Syro-Turkic Poem on Divine Economy Ascribed to Khāmīs: Critical Edition,” Intellectual History of the Islamicate World (2019): 299–324. Takahashi, H. Barhebraeus: A Bio-Bibliography (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2005). Takahashi, H. “A Mimro on Maphrian Gregory Bar Şaumo Safī Bar ʿEbroyo by Dioscorus Gabriel of Barţelli, Bishop of Gozarto d-Qardu,” in The Syriac Renaissance, ed. H. Teule and C.F. Tauwinkl (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 151–195. Takahashi, H. “The Poems of Barhebraeus: A Preliminary Concordance,” Christian Orient 6, no. 12 (2013): 78–139. Tamcke, M. “Die islamische Zeit in Giwargis Wardas ‘Onita über die Katholikoi des Ostens,” in The Encounter of Eastern Christianity with Early Islam, ed. E. Grypeou (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 139–140.

Syriac Apocalypticism and the Rise of Islam Stephen J. Shoemaker In 1975, at an Oxford colloquium on first-century Islam, Sebastian Brock delivered a brief communication that gestured toward the importance of non-Islamic sources for understanding the beginnings of Islam with a paper entitled “Syriac Views of Emergent Islam.”1 Henceforth, the study of Islamic origins would be changed. In effect, Brock’s paper issued a challenge to this discipline to expand its data pool to include the witness of Christian sources contemporary with the events of earliest Islam. No longer could scholars of early Islam remain innocently ignorant of their invaluable testimony, content to reconstruct the rise of Islam on the basis of the Islamic sources alone. This challenge could, of course, simply be ignored, as it so often has been. Yet for those scholars who would embrace it and expand on it to include other non-Syriac and non-Christian sources, the resulting turn to integrate earliest Islam with its late antique milieu would prove transformative.2 Much of my own research owes an enormous debt to this path-breaking contribution by Malphono Brock, and it is with this in very much in mind that I turn to consider some of the evidence that Syriac apocalyptic writings from the early seventh have to offer for understanding the beginnings of Islam. The Impending End of the World From the early sixth century onward, the religious cultures of the late ancient Near East bear steady witness to mounting expectations that the world would soon end. Many Christians, Jews, and even Zoroastrians of this era believed that they were living at the dawn of the eschaton, which would soon come upon the world, bringing history to an end or at least to a decisive turning point. These eschatological hopes, moreover, were in each case intertwined with the idea of a divinely chosen empire whose destiny would be to conquer the world before finally handing over power to God. Not surprisingly, in these 1 Eventually published as S.P. Brock, “Syriac Views of Emergent Islam,” in Studies on the First Century of Islam, ed. G.H.A. Juynboll (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), 9–21, 199–203. 2 Most notably in P. Crone and M.A. Cook, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) and its legacy. © Stephen J. Shoemaker, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004537897_017 © Stephen J. Shoemaker, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004537897_017 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license.

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Jewish and Christian eschatological scripts, Jerusalem is center stage, and its conquest is pivotal in the final events before the eschaton. There, in many accounts, the chosen emperor will ultimately hand over worldly power to God. These potent expectations of an imminent eschatological empire that would subdue the world and hand over authority to God are essential for understanding the rise of Muhammad’s new religious movement, the Believers, which was simultaneously imperial in its ambitions and, so it would seem, fueled by a conviction that the world would soon end in the final judgment of the Hour. Not surprisingly, some of the best evidence for this apocalyptic backdrop to the rise of Islam emerges from certain Syriac writings, one of which even appears to have directly influenced the Qurʾān and, one assumes, the beliefs of Muhammad’s earliest followers.3 In the Christian world, the sixth century opened to widespread expectations that the world was nearing an end, since the year 500, according to contemporary calculations, marked the beginning of the seventh millennium since the creation of the world. The end of course did not arrive, but its delay did little to deflate eschatological anticipations, which remained strong, it would seem, throughout the sixth century. Numerous sources of various genres and from various places indicate that Christians of the sixth century were expecting to witness the End very soon. These eschatological expectations reached their peak in the early seventh century, just at the moment that Muhammad’s new religious movement was coming into its own. The tumult of the last Roman-Persian war stoked eschatological hopes across the Near East, and for the Christians, Heraclius’ crushing defeat of the Persians and his restoration of the True Cross to Jerusalem intensified convictions that the end of the world was at hand. Indeed, Heraclius’s victory and his actions thereafter convinced many that the end of time had truly come upon them. As Cyril Mango notes, his journey to Jerusalem to restore the True Cross to Golgotha should be understood as “a deliberately apocalyptic act.”4 The Jews and Zoroastrians of Late Antiquity, for their part, shared in the eschatological enthusiasm of the age. Messianic expectations rose sharply among the Jews of Palestine during the early seventh century, largely in reaction 3 For more detailed discussions of this topic, see S.J. Shoemaker, “The Reign of God Has Come: Eschatology and Empire in Late Antiquity and Early Islam,” Arabica: Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 61 (2014): 514–558, and S.J. Shoemaker, The Apocalypse of Empire: Imperial Eschatology in Late Antiquity and Early Islam, Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). 4 For more on the Christian apocalypticism and imminent eschatological expectations of this era, see Shoemaker, Apocalypse of Empire, chapter 3, where the broad secondary literature on this topic is also noted.

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to Persia’s “liberation” of Jerusalem and the Holy Land from the Romans and perhaps even a temporary revival of Jewish autonomy. As with the Christians of Byzantium, imminent eschatological expectations were both prominent and powerful within contemporary Judaism. The Jewish apocalypticism of this period, and of Late Antiquity in general, also envisions worldly empires as having a positive role to play in the events of the end times. In this respect, late ancient Judaism, at least in the Roman Empire, appears to have been influenced by the apocalyptic views of its Christian overlords. Nevertheless, at the same time this Jewish apocalypticism often subverts the Roman triumphalism of the Christian narratives, imagining instead that Rome’s power and prosperity, although divinely ordained, were only temporary. Rome enjoyed divine favor only so that it could yield its power to the Messiah at the end of time and allow the final restoration of the kingdom of Israel. Other apocalyptic narratives hope for Israel’s liberation through the providential triumph of another empire over the Romans, in some cases, the Iranian Empire, in others the Ishmaelites. Yet in nearly every instance, the eschaton is expected to arrive soon through the triumph of some empire or another.5 Eschatological expectations were also at a peak in the Sasanian Empire during the late sixth and early seventh centuries: according to the Zoroastrian calendar, the millennium of Zoroaster would come to an apocalyptic end at the middle of the seventh century. Moreover, Zoroastrian eschatology was also thoroughly imperial in nature. Iran’s rulers had been chosen to play a special role in the cosmic battle between good and evil, between Ohrmazd and Ahriman. All faithful Zoroastrians were expected to participate in this struggle by resisting evil and doing good. This obligation extended no less so to the ruling authorities, who were uniquely positioned to effect good in the world, and from Zoroastrianism’s mythic foundation, Iran’s kings were believed to play a significant part in overcoming evil. As a Zoroastrian polity, the Sasanian Empire was a powerful agent of Ohrmazd in the world and was thus one of the most potent vehicles for mobilizing humankind in the struggle against Ahriman and his minions. As in the Roman version of imperial eschatology, Sasanian Zoroastrianism believed that the Iranian Empire would ultimately emerge triumphant and hold universal sovereignty in the world just prior to the end of the millennium. At this point, much like the Christian Last Emperor legend, a mythic king would appear to lead the Iranian Empire in its final triumph over the forces of evil, at least for this millennium. The most 5 Regarding the Jewish apocalypticism and imminent eschatological expectations of this era, see Shoemaker, Apocalypse of Empire, chapter 4, where the secondary scholarship on this topic is also noted.

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important of these Zoroastrian messiahs is a figure known as Kay Bahrām, and undoubtedly it is no coincidence that at the end of the sixth century a usurper named Bahrām VI Čōbīn briefly came to power by harnessing the claim that he was in fact the long awaited apocalyptic ruler. The end of the millennium, after all, was known to be coming in the very near future. Thus, we find in Zoroastrianism an actual mobilization of imperial eschatology not long before Muhammad began to organize his new religious polity. Islam, then, it would seem, emerged into a world that was permeated by eschatological anticipation and furthermore expected the end of the age to arrive through the triumph of a divinely chosen empire.6

Syriac Sources of Apocalyptic

Some of the most significant evidence of imminent eschatological expectation on the eve of Islam, at the end of the sixth and the beginning of the seventh century, derives, as we have noted already, from Syriac sources. The lives of two Syriac martyrs, for instance, St. Mihr-Mah-Gushnasp and St Golinduch, bear witness to the strength of such convictions, although, one should note, the latter’s martyrdom is now lost in Syriac but is best preserved in Georgian. In both of these narratives, turmoil of the late sixth and early seventh centuries is adduced as evidence that the world is hastening toward its end. St Golinduch even offers a prophecy reflecting the imperial eschatology that was characteristic of Late Antiquity. Toward the end of her life, we are told, Golinduch met the Persian emperor Khosrau II, who like her had taken refuge in Roman territory. She warns the exiled king as follows: “‘The king of the Greeks will establish you in your land, but the kingdom of the Persians will remain yours.’ Then she also spoke about the Antichrist, for his arrival has drawn near, and he is standing at the very doors (cf. Matt. 24.33), and also about the kingdom of the Greeks, what will befall it, which she kept silent and did not tell anyone.”7 6 This topic also can be explored in more detail, along with references to the secondary scholarship, in Shoemaker, Apocalypse of Empire, where the broad secondary literature on this topic is also noted. 7 The Life of Mihr-Mah-Gushnasp/George, in P. Bedjan, ed., Histoire de Mar-Jabalaha : de trois autres Patriarches, d’un prêtre et de deux laïques, Nestoriens ((Paris: Otto Harrassowitz, 1895), 475–477); Passion of St. Golinduch 17 (K. Kekeliże, ეტიუდები ძველი ქართული ლიტერატურის ისტორიიდან (Etiudebi żveli k‘art‘uli literaturis istoriidan [Studies in the History of Old Georgian Literature]), 13 vols. (Tiblisi: Sak‘art‘velos SSR mec‘nierebat‘a akademiis gamomc‘emloba, 1945–), vol. 3: 226. Regarding the antiquity of the Georgian version in relation to the Greek, see G. Garitte, “La Passion géorgienne de sainte Golindouch,” Analecta Bollandiana (1956): 405–440 (407–25). I have prepared an English translation of the

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Nevertheless, another Syriac source from the beginning of the seventh century offers particularly compelling testimony to belief that the world would soon end through imperial triumph, namely, the Syriac Alexander Legend.8 This text is all the more important, one should note, on account of its direct literary link with the Qurʾān, as Kevin van Bladel and Tomasso Tesei have both convincingly demonstrated.9 According to Gerrit Reinink, the Syriac Alexander Legend was composed after 628, most likely around 630, but before the Islamic conquest of Mesopotamia in 636, which the text does not seem to know.10 For reasons that I have explained elsewhere, I am convinced that most of this Legend derives from an earlier source that was composed shortly after the year 515 CE and was redacted sometime shortly after 628. Nevertheless, I will not go into the arguments for this here, particularly since the circulation of ideas of imminent imperial eschatology among the Christians of the Near East during the formative years of Muhammad’s new religious movement holds paramount significance for the present purpose.11 And the Qurʾān’s direct dependence on this text, the only such specific text that we have yet been able to identify, offers invaluable evidence of direct contact between earliest Islam and the late ancient tradition of imperial apocalypticism.

 Georgian version, which will be published with translations of the hagiographical writings of Eustratius Presbyter by A. Cameron and Ph. Booth. The volume will appear in the Translated Texts for Historians published by the University of Liverpool Press. 8 Published with English translation in E.A.W. Budge, The History of Alexander the Great, Being the Syriac Version of the Pseudo-Callisthenes, 2 vols. (Cambridge: The University Press, 1889). 9 K. van Bladel, “The Alexander Legend in the Qurʾān 18.83–102,” in The Qurʾān in its Historical Context, ed. G.S. Reynolds (London: Routledge, 2007), 175–203; T. Tesei, “The Prophecy of Ḏū-l-Qarnayn (Q 18:83–102) and the Origins of the Qurʾānic Corpus,” Miscellanea Arabica (2013–14): 273–290. 10 See, e.g., G.J. Reinink, “Alexander the Great in Seventh-Century Syriac ‘Apocalyptic’ Texts,” Byzantinorossica 2 (2003): 150–178 (151–165); G.J. Reinink, “Die Entstehung der syrischen Alexanderlegende als politisch-religiöse Propagandaschrift für Heraklios’ Kirchenpolitik,” in After Chalcedon: Studies in Theology and Church History Offered to Professor Albert van Roey for his Seventieth Birthday, ed. C. Laga, J.A. Munitiz and L. van Rompay, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 18 (Leuven: Deptartement Oriëtalistik/Peeters, 1985), 263–281 (279–280). 11 Interested readers can find the relevant arguments in Shoemaker, Apocalypse of Empire, chapter 3. See also, however, the earlier arguments by W. Bousset, “Beiträge zur Geschichte der Eschatologie I,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 20 (1899): 103–131 (114–115), and K. Czeglédy, “The Syriac Legend concerning Alexander the Great,” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 7 (1957): 231–249.

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The Syriac Alexander Legend

In its vision of the quickly approaching end times, the Syriac Alexander Legend both echoes earlier traditions from the Tiburtine Sybil, a fourth-century apocalyptic text, and foreshadows the Apocalypse of Ps.-Methodius from later in the seventh.12 In the Legend, Alexander, who here as in other related texts prefigures the Roman emperor, promises that if the Messiah does not come in his days, he will “carry this throne, which is a seat of silver upon which I sit, and will place it in Jerusalem, that, when the Messiah comes from heaven, He may sit upon my kingly throne.” Likewise, Alexander decrees that when he dies, his “royal crown shall be taken and hung upon the seat which I have given to the Messiah,” as is to be done with the crowns of all the kings that will follow him.13 The links between imperial authority, royal headgear, Jerusalem, and the coming Kingdom of God found in the Tiburtine Sybil and Ps.-Methodius are all present here as well. In addition, the Legend shares with these texts an interest in the prophecy of Gog and Magog, whom it identifies with the Huns, predicting that they will break forth from the north through the Caspian Gates and ravage the land just before the appearance of a final king and the end of time.14 Then, the Legend maintains, “so shall the power of the kingdoms melt away before the might of the kingdom of the Greeks which is that of the Romans…; and what remains of them the kingdom of the Romans will destroy…; and there shall not be found any among the nations and tongues who dwell in the world that shall stand before the kingdom of the Romans.”15 The Legend concludes on this same note with a prophecy given by the court astrologers of Tubarlak, Alexander’s Persian opponent. The astrologers warn their king “that at the final consummation of the world, the kingdom of the Romans would go forth and subdue all the kings of the earth; and that whatever king was found in Persia would be slain, and that Babylonia and Assyria would be laid waste by the command of God.” Tubarlak writes the prophecy down and gives it to Alexander, with a prediction “that Persia should be laid 12

Regarding the relation of these texts, see, in addition to Shoemaker, Apocalypse of Empire, chapter 3; S.J. Shoemaker, “The Tiburtine Sibyl, the Last Emperor, and the Early Byzantine Apocalyptic Tradition,” in Forbidden Texts on the Western Frontier: The Christian Apocrypha in North American Perspectives, ed. T. Burke (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2015), 218–244; S.J. Shoemaker, “The Tiburtine Sibyl: A New Translation and Introduction,” in New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, ed. T. Burke and B. Landau, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), 506–521. 13 Budge, History of Alexander, 257–258 (Syr) and 146–147 (trans.). 14 Budge, History of Alexander, 268–269 (Syr) and 154 (trans.). 15 Budge, History of Alexander, 270 (Syr) and 155 (trans.).

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waste by the hand of the Romans, and that all the kingdoms be laid waste, but that that [kingdom of the Romans] should stand and rule to the end of time, and should deliver the kingdom of the earth to Christ who is to come.”16 The name “Tubarlak” appears to be unique to this text, and according to Reinink, this prophecy was composed specifically with reference to Heraclius and his recent victory over Persia, with Tubarlak standing in for Khosrau II. This certainly is a possibility, but I am not convinced that it is the only one, and other scholars, particularly those who would date the text to the sixth century, have not reached the same conclusion as Reinink. It certainly may be that this prophecy was specifically added to the Legend in the light of Heraclius’s recent victory. But it could just as well have been part of the sixth-century version, inasmuch as it comports with other elements of the text’s imperial eschatology and with the historical Alexander’s victory over the Persians. In this latter case, one imagines that the prophecy would have taken on new meaning in the context of Heraclius’s triumph, when the earlier text was revised. Indeed, perhaps this prophecy was not so much inspired by the last Roman-Persian war, but instead the war itself inspired newfound interest in this text following Rome’s triumph. In these ways, then, the Syriac Alexander Legend retrojects the eschatological role of the Roman Empire, its emperor, and its victories back into the life of Alexander, the original king of the Greeks (and Romans). Alexander’s kingdom, as a symbol of Rome, will bridge the present world with its eschatological future, delivering the kingdom of the world up to Christ.17 The Legend’s revision and circulation at the beginning of the seventh century provides evidence of the dramatic increase in eschatological urgency and imperial eschatology in the wake of Heraclius’s victory over the Persians and the restoration of the Cross. Numerous contemporary Greek sources also confirm this sharp rise in imperial eschatological expectations in conjunction with these events.18 Moreover, one finds similar ideas in another roughly contemporary apocalypse, the Latin Ps.-Ephrem On the End of the World. In this text the conflict between Rome and Persia is once again painted in eschatological colors, and the end of the world is identified with the completion of the Roman Empire, 16 Budge, History of Alexander, 275 (Syr) and 158 (Eng, slightly modified). See also Reinink, “Die Entstehung,” esp. 268–279; G.J. Reinink, “Heraclius, the New Alexander: Apocalyptic Prophecies during the Reign of Heraclius,” in The Reign of Heraclius (610–641): Crisis and Confrontation, ed. G.J. Reinink and B.H. Stolte (Leuven: Peeters, 2002), 81–94 (84–86); Reinink, “Alexander the Great,” 158–161. 17 See A.M. Sivertsev, Judaism and Imperial Ideology in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 35. 18 Again, see on this subject Shoemaker, Apocalypse of Empire, chapter 3.

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so that the consummation of the world will come “when the kingdom of the Romans begins to be fulfilled by the sword.”19 Even in the kingdom of Axum, it would seem, on the eve of Islam there is evidence of belief in imperial eschatology, in the so-called Vision of Baruch or 5 Baruch. This apocalyptic vision of the end times, which Pierluigi Piovanelli has convincingly dated to the early seventh century, concludes with the emergence of a righteous emperor, whose reign intersects with the rule of the Antichrist. Once God has removed the Antichrist, after he has ruled for seven years, this righteous emperor then “will say to the Cross: ‘Take away all this,’ and the Cross will take it and ascend to Heaven.”20 Then after a period of rule by the demonic powers, Michael will finally sound the horn, and the dead will be resurrected to meet their reward or punishment. Such texts, and most significantly the Syriac Alexander Legend, reveal that at the very moment when Muhammad’s religious movement was coming into its own, there was simultaneously a dramatic surge of belief that the Kingdom of God would soon be established on the earth and would be ushered in through imperial triumph, in this case the victory of the Roman Empire. On its own this development in the religious culture of Late Antiquity would surely be significant. Yet the fact that we can demonstrate the direct influence of the Syriac Alexander Legend on the traditions of the Qurʾān leaves little doubt that Muhammad’s new religious movement was aware of and in contact with the imperial eschatology of Christian Late Antiquity. The patterns of agreement between the Legend and Qurʾān 18:83–102 make any explanation other than direct influence highly improbable.21 Accordingly, the Legend provides, as it were, a very important “smoking gun,” indicating a direct connection between late ancient imperial eschatology and formative Islam. 19 Ps.-Ephrem, On the End of the World, in D. Verhelst, “Scarpsum de dictis sancti Efrem prope fine mundi,” in Pascua Mediaevalia: studies voor Prof. Dr. J.M. de Smet, ed. J.M. de Smet, et al., Mediaevalia Lovaniensia, sereries 1, studia 10 (Leuven: Universitaire pers Leuven, 1983), 518–528 (523). Concerning the date, see esp. P.J. Alexander, The Byzantine Apocalyptic Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 142–147; and B. McGinn, Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages, Records of Civilization, Sources and Studies 96 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 60. 20 J. Halévy, Tě’ězâza sanbat (Commandements du sabbat), accompagné de six autres écrits pseudo-épigraphiques admis par les Falachas ou Juifs d’Abyssinie, Bibliothèque de l’École des hautes études Sciences historiques et philologiques 137 (Paris: É. Bouillon, 1902), 95–96; trans., in W. Leslau, Falasha Anthology, Yale Judaica Series 6 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951), 75–76. Regarding the date, Piovanelli persuasively argued this in a paper entitled “The Visions of Baruch and Gorgorios: Two ‘Moral’ Apocalypses in Late Antique Ethiopia,” at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Society for Biblical Literature in Chicago (19 Nov 2012). The foundation of the argument is the text’s failure to make any mention of the Islamic conquests or any other event beyond the end of the sixth century. 21 Van Bladel, “Alexander Legend”; Tesei, “Prophecy.”

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Ps-Ephrem on the End Times

Immediately on the other side of the Islamic conquests, one finds evidence of sustained belief in an imminent imperial eschatology, in the Syriac Homily on the End Times falsely ascribed to Ephrem. This apocalypse, whose true author is unknown, seems to have been written not long after Muhammad’s followers swept in and swiftly seized control of much of the Roman and Sasanian Near East, probably sometime around 640 or not long thereafter. Indeed, for the better part of a century, there was a solid consensus that this document, at least, as we have it now, was composed sometime after the beginning of the Muslim conquests, but not very long thereafter. Nevertheless, Reinink has recently proposed a much later dating for this text proposing its composition after 640 but before 683, since the text does not seem to be aware of the Second Civil War ( fitna) among Muhammad’s followers, which began in that year.22 Even more recently, Robert Hoyland notes that while there has long been some consensus around 640 for dating this apocalypse, perhaps its references to the payment of tribute and building roads could invite a later dating, possibly during the reign of ʿAbd al-Malik, who is known to have introduced new fiscal practices and seen to the building of roads.23 Indeed, Edmund Beck, the text’s most recent editor had already suggested that the text should be placed in the second half of the seventh century, since it refers to the existence of the jizya, the Islamic poll tax on non-Muslim subjects.24 Harald Suermann likewise has more recently proposed a date for this section of the apocalypse that mirrors Reinink’s suggestion, pointing in this instance to the construction of roads as likely indication of a more recent composition sometime between 640 and 680.25 Despite these recent waverings, the most likely date of this apocalypse in fact remains sometime during the early stages of the invasions by Muhammad’s followers, and sometime around 640 still seems like a good approximation. As Michael Kmosko and other earlier scholars as well have noted, its chaotic 22 G.J. Reinink, “Pseudo-Ephraems ‘Rede über das Ende’ und die syrische eschatologische Literatur des siebten Jahrhunderts,” Aram 5 (1993): 437–463 (455–462). 23 R.G. Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam, Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 13 (Princeton, N.J.: Darwin Press, 1997), 263. 24 E. Beck, ed., Des Heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Sermones III, CSCO 320–321, Scr. Syri 138–139 (Louvain: Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, 1972), 2:ix. 25 D. Thomas and B. Roggema, eds., Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, Volume 1 (600–900), History of Christian-Muslim Relations 11 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 160–161. Michael Penn too, presumably for similar reasons, favors a dating to generally sometime before 680: M.Ph. Penn, When Christians First Met Muslims: A Sourcebook of the Earliest Syriac Writings on Islam (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 39.

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account of their incursions suggests a time not long after the collapse of the Roman army and before the consolidation of authority and establishment of governance by the Believers.26 In fact, only at the very end of this apocalyptic account are the invaders said to actually take control of the region’s cities: prior to this they are raging through the land, conquering and plundering. The supposed reference to building of roads is clearly a misinterpretation of the Syriac, in my judgment. Although the words in question could legitimately be interpreted as reference to road building, this is not their only possible or even most obvious meaning, and in fact, their immediate context strongly suggests otherwise. The verb that others have here rendered as “build,” from the root DRŠ, is more properly translated here as “tread, open up.” Moreover, the word that is interpreted as referring to actual roads, urḥātā is used not only for roads, but also with the meaning of “way” or “course,” while the word for “paths,” šbile, which also can mean simply “way,” does not seem to designate actual roads. Indeed, such language does not seem to me indicative of actual road construction but something more akin to “make their way” in English. Accordingly, the passage in question should be interpreted as stating that “they [the descendants of Hagar] will make their way through the mountains and blaze paths across the plains,” as translated also by Edmund Beck, for instance (“Sie werden Wege in den Bergen bahnen …”).27 Such an interpretation is further indicated by the opening of section four, which subsequently says that “the marauders will spread across the land, over plains and mountaintops.” Surely this is a parallel expression. Moreover, the fact that in this account the invaders have yet to seize control of the cities makes it rather unlikely that road construction is here in view. Instead, this line of the homily is presumably meant to indicate the haste and frenzy with which the marauders ran throughout the land. As for the imposition of tribute, while it is not entirely impossible that this could refer to the jizya poll tax, it is far more likely that the homily’s reference to tributes instead indicates payments on the part of cities and local authorities in acknowledgment of their submission to the invaders and in exchange for peace. Payment of such tribute by the defeated parties to the Believers was in fact quite common during the early stages of their conquest of the Near East 26 Published posthumously in K. Czeglédy, “Monographs on Syriac and Muhammadan Sources in the Literary Remains of M. Kmosko,” Acta Orientalia 4 (1954): 19–91 (34–35). See also, e.g., T. Nöldeke, Review of Thomas Joseph Lamy, Sancti Ephraem Syri hymni et sermones, vol. III, Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 4 (1890): 245–251 (246); and E. Sackur, Sibyllinische Texte und Forschungen: Pseudomethodius, Adso und die tiburtinische Sibylle (Halle: M. Niemeyer, 1898), 34. 27 Beck, ed., Sermones III, 2:84.

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and is well in evidence.28 And, for what it is worth, not only are the events of the Second Civil War absent, as Reinink notes, but so too are those of the First Civil War, which began in 656. Thus, a date of around 640 remains the most likely date of composition for this piece, despite these recent vacillations. This apocalypse opens by describing the general conditions that portend the coming end of the world. Nation will war against nation as wickedness proliferates throughout the world. Plague and famine will encompass the earth. Lawlessness will reign supreme, and the righteous will be beset by the wicked. The recent occurrence of such events offers clear signs that “the end times have arrived,” as the author explains at the beginning of section two. Our visionary then “predicts” a coming war between the Romans and the Persians. After Rome’s victory in this conflict, the descendants of Hagar, the Ishmaelites, will drive the Romans from the Holy Land. In this way, the apocalypse interprets the recent conquests by Rome and the Ishmaelites as a single, connected apocalyptic harbinger of an imperial eschaton. Following these linked events, however, the author genuinely begins to predict the future, warning that the peoples of Gog and Magog will be then unleashed, coming to a conclusion with the Roman Empire resurgent and “possessing the earth and its boundaries.” With “no one existing who opposes it,” that is, the Roman Empire, the Antichrist will appear, setting in motion the final events of the eschaton and the Antichrist’s arrival.29 Thus, the imperial eschatology of the pre-Islamic period is extended across these conquests and is sustained under the new hegemony of Muhammad’s followers. Accordingly, this apocalyptic homily attributed to Ephrem establishes an important continuity between the eschatological expectations surrounding the Roman reconquest of the Near East and the conquests by Muhammad’s followers, as well as the other Syriac apocalypses forecasting eschatological deliverance through Roman triumph, such as, for instance, the much more widely circulated and studied Apocalypse of Ps.-Methodius.

28 See, e.g., the specific examples of exactly such payment of tribute by the defeated parties to the Believers in R.G. Hoyland, In God’s Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 44, 47, 54–55, 74, 79, 83, 90, 96–97, etc. 29 Ps.-Ephrem, Homily on the End 8, ed., H. Suermann, Die geschichtstheologische Reaktion auf die einfallenden Muslime in der edessenischen Apokalyptik des 7. Jahrhunderts, Europäische Hochschulschriften Reihe XXIII, Theologie 256 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1985), 25.

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Bibliography Alexander, P.J. The Byzantine Apocalyptic Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Beck, E., ed. Des Heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Sermones III, CSCO 320–321, Scr. Syri 138 139 (Louvain: Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, 1972). Bedjan, P., ed. Histoire de Mar-Jabalaha: de trois autres Patriarches, d’un prêtre et de deux laïques, Nestoriens (Paris: Otto Harrassowitz, 1895). van Bladel, K. “The Alexander Legend in the Qurʾān 18.83–102,” in The Qurʾān in its Historical Context, ed. G.S. Reynolds (London: Routledge, 2007), 175–203. Bousset, W. “Beiträge zur Geschichte der Eschatologie I,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 20 (1899): 103–131. Brock, S.P. “Syriac Views of Emergent Islam,” in Studies on the First Century of Islam, ed. G.H.A. Juynboll (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982). Budge, E.A.W., ed. and trans. The History of Alexander the Great, Being the Syriac Version of the Pseudo-Callisthenes, 2 vols. (Cambridge: The University Press, 1889). Crone, P. and M.A. Cook. Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Czeglédy, K. “Monographs on Syriac and Muhammadan Sources in the Literary Remains of M. Kmosko,” Acta Orientalia 4 (1954): 19–91. Czeglédy, K. “The Syriac Legend concerning Alexander the Great,” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 7 (1957): 231–249. Garitte, G. “La Passion géorgienne de sainte Golindouch,” Analecta Bollandiana (1956): 405–440. Halévy, J., trans. Tě’ězâza sanbat (Commandements du sabbat), accompagné de six autres écrits pseudo-épigraphiques admis par les Falachas ou Juifs d’Abyssinie, Bibliothèque de l’École des hautes études Sciences historiques et philologiques 137 (Paris: É. Bouillon, 1902). Hoyland, R.G. Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam, Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 13 (Princeton, N.J.: Darwin Press, 1997). Hoyland, R.G. In God’s Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Kekeliże, K., ed. ეტიუდები ძველი ქართული ლიტერატურის ისტორიიდან [Etiudebi żveli k‘art‘uli literaturis istoriidan], 13 vols., Studies in the History of Old Georgian Literature (Tiblisi: Sak‘art‘velos SSR mec‘nierebat‘a akademiis gamomc‘emloba, 1945–). Leslau, W., trans. Falasha Anthology, Yale Judaica Series 6 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951).

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McGinn, B. Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages, Records of Civilization, Sources and Studies 96 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979). Nöldeke, T. Review of Thomas Joseph Lamy, Sancti Ephraem Syri hymni et sermones, vol. III, Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 4 (1890): 245–251. Penn, M.Ph. When Christians First Met Muslims: A Sourcebook of the Earliest Syriac Writings on Islam (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015). Reinink, G.J. “Die Entstehung der syrischen Alexanderlegende als politisch-religiöse Propagandaschrift für Heraklios’ Kirchenpolitik,” in After Chalcedon: Studies in Theology and Church History Offered to Professor Albert van Roey for his Seventieth Birthday, ed. C. Laga, J.A. Munitiz, and L. van Rompay, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 18 (Leuven: Deptartement Oriëtalistik/Peeters, 1985), 263–281. Reinink, G.J. “Pseudo-Ephraems ‘Rede über das Ende’ und die syrische eschatologische Literatur des siebten Jahrhunderts,” Aram 5 (1993): 437–463. Reinink, G.J. “Heraclius, the New Alexander: Apocalyptic Prophecies during the Reign of Heraclius,” in The Reign of Heraclius (610–641): Crisis and Confrontation, ed. G.J. Reinink and B.H. Stolte (Leuven: Peeters, 2002), 81–94. Reinink, G.J. “Alexander the Great in Seventh-Century Syriac ‘Apocalyptic’ Texts,” Byzantinorossica 2 (2003): 150–178. Sackur, E. Sibyllinische Texte und Forschungen: Pseudomethodius, Adso und die tiburtinische Sibylle (Halle: M. Niemeyer, 1898). Shoemaker, S.J. “The Reign of God Has Come: Eschatology and Empire in Late Antiquity and Early Islam,” Arabica: Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 61 (2014): 514–558. Shoemaker, S.J. “The Tiburtine Sibyl, the Last Emperor, and the Early Byzantine Apocalyptic Tradition,” in Forbidden Texts on the Western Frontier: The Christian Apocrypha in North American Perspectives, ed. T. Burke (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2015), 218–244. Shoemaker, S.J. “The Tiburtine Sibyl: A New Translation and Introduction,” in New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, ed. T. Burke and B. Landau, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), 506–521. Shoemaker, S.J. The Apocalypse of Empire: Imperial Eschatology in Late Antiquity and Early Islam, Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). Sivertsev, A.M. Judaism and Imperial Ideology in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Suermann, H., ed. Die geschichtstheologische Reaktion auf die einfallenden Muslime in der edessenischen Apokalyptik des 7. Jahrhunderts, Europäische Hochschulschriften Reihe XXIII, Theologie 256 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1985). Tesei, T. “The Prophecy of Ḏū-l-Qarnayn (Q 18:83–102) and the Origins of the Qurʾānic Corpus,” Miscellanea Arabica (2013–14): 273–290.

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Thomas, D. and B. Roggema, eds. Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, Volume 1 (600–900), History of Christian-Muslim Relations 11 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 160–161. Verhelst, D. “Scarpsum de dictis sancti Efrem prope fine mundi,” in Pascua Mediaevalia: studies voor Prof. Dr. J.M. de Smet, ed. J.M. de Smet, et al., Mediaevalia Lovaniensia, sereries 1, studia 10 (Leuven: Universitaire pers Leuven, 1983), 518–528.

Christianity in Iraq and the Issue of Chaldean Identity Herman G.B. Teule Between the 5th and 8th October 2017, the Chaldean Church held its annual Synod in Rome. Taking place a few days after the Kurdish referendum (27.09.2017) and the non-binding proclamation of the independence of Iraqi Kurdistan, it is understandable that the Fathers of the Synod were much concerned about the consequences of this decision. Especially, since the Autonomous Kurdish Region has functioned during the last fifteen years as a free haven for many Christians fleeing the climate of violence and the political instability of the south, mainly in Baghdad, but since the establishment of the “Islamic Caliphate” (2014), also from Mosul and the Plain of Nineveh. The Christians of Iraq were much divided on the issue of the referendum. The “Chaldean-Syriac-Assyrian Popular Council” (CSA-PC) and the “Bet Nahrayn Democratic Party”1 supported the Kurdish position, whereas a rival party, the Baghdad-based Assyrian Democratic Movement (ADM), often designated as Zowʿa, the Syriac term for Movement, was against. Interestingly, in the referendum debate, the Chaldean patriarchate seemed to distance itself from these Christian political parties, stating that “political and militia factions that are said to be Christian are actually far from the interests of the local Christian communities.”2 It is revealing of a certain tension between the Chaldean ecclesiastical leadership and local Christian politicians. In this article in honor of Sebastian Brock, who has always had a keen interest in the modern-day developments of the Syriac Churches, I will argue that it is too simplistic to oppose on the one hand politicians striving for the recognition of Christianity in Iraq as one, supra-denominational, ethnic minority and, on the other, ecclesiastical 1 For a survey of the Christian political parties in Iraq, see H. Teule, “Christians in Iraq. An Analysis of some recent political developments,” Der Islam 88 (2011): 179–198; H. Teule, “Christians in Iraq. An Analysis of some recent developments,” in Christsein in der islamischen Welt. Festschrift für Martin Tamcke zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. S. Griffith and S. Grebenstein (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2015), 587–594. Recent updating are to be found in H. Teule, “Chronique d’Irak,” Proche Orient Chrétien 68, no. 1–2 (2018): 183–191, and Proche Orient Chrétien 69, no. 1–2 (2019): 187–189. Cf. H. Teule, “Iraq,” in Christianity in North Africa and West Asia, ed. K.R. Ross, et al. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 164–176; M. Vogt, Christen im Nahen Osten. Zwischen Martyrium und Exodus (Darmstadt: Academic Grünwald Preselect.media GmbH, 2019), 173–226. See also infra, historical overview. 2 Agenzia Fides, 14.09.2017 (Rome).

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leaders for whom ethnic issues would be only of secondary importance. As a matter of fact, one of the main themes discussed during the Synod was that of identity. At first sight insignificant statement holds that for the building of new Chaldean churches a special façade style is recommended. The Synod means the so-called Ishtar gate, one of the entrance gates of the ancient city of Babylon erected in the sixth century before the CE by Nebuchadnezzar II, son of Nibupolassar, founder of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, successor to the once powerful Assyrian Empire.3 The Synod speaks of a historical style, apparently because it links the Chaldean community to Old Babylon, situated south of Baghdad (and importantly not in Kurdistan, see infra), the official name of the Chaldean leadership being patryarkuta d-Babel d-Kaldaye, patriarchate of Babylon of the Chaldeans. This distinctive so-called Chaldean church style is already being applied in several recent church or community buildings, such as the St Joseph’s Cathedral in Ankawa or the Mar Tuma Church in Sarcelles, near Paris.4 This statement on a Chaldean church style is to be interpreted against the background of a more fundamental discussion on identity. During the Synod, the Chaldean bishop emeritus of Cajon-San Diego, Sarhad Jammo, was given the occasion to give his views on an autonomous and distinct Chaldean nation in Iraq, quite a political statement. In order to understand what is at stake, it is necessary to briefly recall a few developments of the Christian community of Iraq, taking into account the results of the last parliamentary elections held on May, 12th 2018.

Historical Overview

Traditionally, Christianity in Iraq has been visible along ecclesiastical lines, with all the divisions (“uniate” vs orthodox, West and East Syriac, etc.) belonging to this situation. Since about forty years, Iraqi Christians have been trying to overcome this state of affairs by affirming themselves as a sole ethnic community. The ethnic element here is the commitment to a shared Syriac language, literature and culture. One of the challenges was to find a common ethnic label that would be acceptable for the members of all Churches. The Assyrian Democratic Movement suggested the label Assyrian, following a certain nationalist tradition which originated in Syria in the fifties of the

3 The Ishtar Gate is now in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. 4 Cf. H. Teule, Les Assyro-chaldéens Chrétiens d’Irak, d’Iran et de Turquie (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 128 and 233.

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twentieth century.5 Realizing the importance to speak with one Christian voice in post-Saddam Iraq, the leadership of ADM suggested that the new constitution speak of one united Christian minority, labelled Chaldo-Assyrian. This hybrid term was as a matter of course a concession to the Chaldean Church, the largest Christian community of the country, which ADM rightly thought would never accept to be called Assyrian. Unfortunately, after an initial acceptance of this term by all ecclesiastical leaders, the latter retracted their approval with the result that the new Constitution, adopted in 2005, speaks of two distinct Christian communities, the Chaldeans and the Assyrians.6 A new attempt at unification was made in Kurdistan, when one of the Christian ministers in the Kurdish government, Sarkis Aghajan, created a Mowtba, a Council, initially intended to become an umbrella organization where all Christian factions and parties would be represented and have their voice. Realistically, he called his Mowtba: Chaldo-Syrian-Assyrian Popular Council, thus implicitly recognizing the difficulty of finding one unifying label acceptable to all parties, and repairing the fact that the previous label Chaldo-Assyrian had failed to mention the Syrians, i.e. the Syrian Orthodox and Syrian Catholics. This happened in 2007, but soon the Mowtba developed from an umbrella organization into a political party itself with its own agenda, competing basically with the ADM. The main point of disagreement between the two parties was about cooperation with the Kurds: should one give support to the Kurdish project of autonomy and link the future of Iraqi Christianity to Kurdistan – the position of the Mowtba – or should one rather operate on the federal level, cooperating with the central government in Baghdad, the ADM position? During the last ten years, the Mowtba and ADM were the main Christian political parties, represented in both the Kurdish and the federal parliament, together taking the majority of the guaranteed seats given to the Christian community. This situation changed with the last elections, when two of the five allotted Christian seats went to the so-called Babylon Brigade, a new political party, one to another new formation, the Chaldean List (Iʾtilāf al-Kildān), leaving ADM and Mowtba with only one seat each.7

5 Cf. N. Atto, Hostages in the Homeland, Orphans in the Diaspora: Identity Discourses among the Syrian/Syriac Elites in the European Diaspora (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 263. Atto discusses the creation of the Assyrian Democratic Organisation (ADO) in North-Eastern Syria, whose “Assyrian” ideology was taken over by the Iraqi ADM. For a general survey of this ideology, see A.M. Butts, “Assyrian Christians,” in A Companion to Assyria, ed. E. Frahm (Hoboken, NJ, & Chichester, 2017), 599–612. 6 Teule, Assyro-chaldéens, 157–160. 7 Teule, “Chronique d’Irak.”

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There are several conclusions to be drawn from this simplified introduction. Firstly, it is a new phenomenon that Christianity in Iraq gets its visibility through politicians and not only through the ecclesiastical leaders, as has always been the case. Secondly, one has to recognize that the idea of emphasizing the common ethnic element – whatever label you give it – did not bring the desired unity. It rather created a set of new divisions, despite the fact that many politicians agree on the necessity of a common name. The discussion is more on what label is the most appropriate one. Thirdly, and it nuances the previous point, it is not only the ecclesiastical leadership which opposes the idea of a shared identity. For example, a small political party, the Chaldean National Council, accused the CSA-Mowtba, created by Aghajan, of diluting national identities and defended the idea that nationality and church go hand in hand instead of a common or shared supra-denominational “nationality.”8

The Position of the Chaldean Church

On several occasions, the Chaldean Church has expressed itself in the strongest terms about these new developments. The reason is not opposition against the idea of the creation of Christian political parties per se, as if the Chaldean bishops feared to be marginalized or would lose influence. There is a more fundamental reason, – apart from criticism of the new divisions it created –, namely the hesitation about whether defining itself as an ethnic component would serve the interests of the Christian community. Looking back at the recent history of the Chaldean Church after the Second World War, this position is quite understandable. In the last decades, we see that the Chaldeans have gradually settled in central and south Iraq, basically in Baghdad and Basra.9 This created a new sociological reality, which is characterized by the Arabization of the Chaldean population and by a certain alignment with the political system of the regime of Saddam Husein, which was strongly characterized by the Arab ideology of the Baʿth party. This resulted into some pastoral initiatives, leading to the abandonment or at least to the limitation of the use of Syriac and Sureth during Qorbana.10 Some Chaldean church-leaders expressed the fear that emphasizing too much the ethnic element, for example, by claiming the 8 9

Teule, “Christians in Iraq: An Analysis of some Recent Political Development,” 188. H. Teule, “Christianity in Iraq and its Contribution to Society,” in Syriac Christianity in the Middle East and India. Contributions and Challenges, ed. D.W. Winkler (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2013), 23–41 (39); K. Girling, The Chaldean Catholic Church. Modern History, Ecclesiology and Church-State Relations (London: Routledge, 2018), 182–193. 10 Teule, Assyro-chaldéens, 155.

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creation of an autonomous Christian region in the Plain of Nineveh – much ink has been spilled on this issue – would lead to marginalization and even ghettoïsation, the opposite of what the Chaldean Church has managed to reach in the period after WWII. It is in this vein that the Chaldean Patriarch suggested to use a more neutral term and to speak only of a qāʾima masīhiyya, a Christian component, without any allusion to an ethnic identity.

The Chaldean Synod and Ethnicity

The 2017 Synod seems however to develop a different position. Decree 8 of the Synod reads as follows: “The Synod Fathers studied the future of Chaldeans in Iraq, Syria, Iran and the new countries that they have migrated to. The Fathers stressed the Chaldean identity and language and rejected other labels and titles.”11 This is a clear rejection of both the label “Assyrian” adopted by ADM and the compromise label of the CSA Mowtba. This latter label is especially targeted. In a pastoral letter issued after the Synod, the Patriarch states: “we reject the composite name Chaldean, Syrian, Assyrian, as used in the Kurdish region, and which goes against the (Iraqi) constitution,” which speaks of two distinct Christian groups, the Chaldeans and the Assyrians. As mentioned above, the rejection in itself is not new. What is new is that the Synod now stresses a specific Chaldean ethnic identity, at odds with the suggestion just mentioned to abandon all ethnic names and to speak instead of only “Christians” and at odds also with the de facto reality of Arabization. Before trying to give an explanation, it is useful to have a closer look into what is meant by “Chaldean identity” by analyzing Bishop Jammo’s interpretation in this respect, who was given ample opportunity to express his views during the Synod. He starts with a definition of Chaldean identity: Since the establishment of the Chaldean Empire by Nebuchadnezzar in 612 BCE. until today (at least partly), Chaldean was the language of the local population of Mesopotamia, the centre of which was in Babylon. This Chaldean language is a form of Aramaic, distinct from Syriac, which Jammo considers as a literary language only, used in the Schools of Edessa and Nisibis. This spoken language is the core of the Chaldean nationality and links them to Babylonia or more generally to Mesopotamia. Next to language it is also the faith of Abraham, from Ur of the Chaldeans, as well as the ancient cultural heritage of Mesopotamia (science, art), which determines 11

The decrees of the Synod and the Pastoral Letter published after the closure of the Synod can be consulted through the official webpage of the Chaldean Church (www.Saint-Adday, accessed March, 2019).

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a distinct Kaldanayuta, which is not Syrian (of Syria), but something typical of Iraq. Interestingly, in his eyes, the Syriac Orthodox and the Syriac Catholics of Iraq are also ethnically Chaldeans, because their vernacular as spoken in Karakosh is Sureth or the Chaldean form of Aramaic. Striking is that the term Assyrian has nowhere a place in Jammo’ vision, as if this term had never been used on Iraqi soil. On the basis of this definition of Iraqi Christianity, Jammo formulates a number of recommendations of political and “theological” character. He speaks of a roadmap for a Chaldean nation. Surprisingly, he calls for a Chaldean province, stretching from the Chaldean village of Karamless12 through the plain of Nineveh, continuing in the Kurdish region as far as Fish Khabour, close to the Syrian border. As a matter of fact, this is more or less the map of the Christian homeland suggested by the CSA Mowtba, castigated by the Synod for its composite Christian label.13 It is however not clear what he means by “province” and what powers and competences should be given to this entity, but he has undoubtedly in mind a strong form of autonomy which would give the Christians of that region the right to determine their own policy in “cultural, financial, educational, political, and territorial” matters. Again, it is a position which is very close to that of CSA Mowtba, who a few years earlier worked for a strong form of autonomy, ḥukm dhātī, but abandoned its position for a more realistic approach (see infra). Jammo’s proposal, asking for such a strong form of autonomy, is of course as unrealistic as formerly that of the CSA Mowtba. A supplementary reason why it will never be accepted is that it would link the Plain of Nineveh, under federal authority, to the Kurdish Region, which is unacceptable to the majority of the Christians living in the Plain of Nineveh. Even more unrealistic is Jammo’s suggestion to also create a Christian province in “South Iraq, around Nasiriyya and Babylon,” the heartland of the ancient Chaldean Empire, near the ruins of ancient “Ur of the Chaldeans,” Nasiriyya and the Governorate of Babylon being totally devoid of a Christian population. Disturbing in Jammo’s vision is that he ignores a recent successful step taken in 2013 by Iraqi Christian politicians. Realizing that their claims for an autonomous Christian territory in the Plain of Nineveh, be it the soft “cultural” autonomy proposed by the ADM, or the strong “political” autonomy, including the link with Kurdistan, as advocated by CSA-Mowtba politicians, were doomed to fail, both parties managed to overcome their political differences and requested from both the central and the Kurdish governments the permission to establish a separate moḥāfaẓa (Governorate) for the Christians and the members of 12 Girling, Chaldean Catholic Church, 203–205. 13 Teule, “Christian in Iraq,” 190–191.

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other religious and ethnic minorities in the plain of Nineveh. At present, this area is part of the mohafaza of Nineveh, but on the 21st of January 2014 the federal Council of Ministers accepted this proposal and announced the creation of several new governorates, a possibility given by the constitution, and decided that the Plain of Nineveh which would be detached from the Mosul governorate to form its own province, with all the (limited) competences given to the other governorates. Apart from a negative reaction on the side of the Council of the Nineveh Governorate, it was basically the occupation of large parts of this region by the “Islamic Caliphate” a few months later which prevented the implementation of this ministerial decree. After the liberation of the region, this issue came immediately back on the agenda of the Christian politicians, but the difficulties related to the slow return of Christians to their native villages14 and the weakness of the central government do not allow to hope for a rapid solution. One can imagine that the emphasis by the Synod Fathers on a distinct Chaldean identity provoked some strong reactions in the camp of the other parties, accusing the patriarch or the Chaldean Church to even lend support to the creation of a new Political formation, the Chaldean Alliance list, Iʾtilāf al-Kildān, which as we have seen won one seat in the federal House of Representatives. 1.

2.

Conclusions It is clear that the last Chaldean Synod marks a break with the previous Synods which were more pastoral in character, and with the general attitude of the Chaldean leadership which has always been critical towards the Christian political parties, their incapacity to overcome dissensions and unrealistic strategies, but never took a position in the political debate, at least not openly. One can only speculate about the reason or reasons. Is it out of fear to lose influence, when the future of Christianity is left into the hands of lay politicians or at least co-determined by them, who are even looked upon with much suspicion by the hierarchy? Is it a concession to some developments in the diaspora emphasizing the ethnic element of the Chaldean Church? Or is it out of a certain disappointment that previous initiatives at reaching unity with the other churches in Iraq were always met with a flat refusal. One could think especially of the proposal

14 Teule, Chronique.

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launched by patriarch Louis Sako, in the period of the sedis vacatio of the Assyrian Church of the East (2015) after the death of Patriarch-Katholikos Mar Dinkha IV and the election of a successor. Sako suggested that the three branches of East-Syriac Christianity, the Assyrian Church of the East, the Ancient Church of the East, led by Mar Addai II, and the Chaldean Church, reunite and that the three joint synods elect a new patriarch who would become the head of a new Church of the East, a Church which would have no ethnic label, be it Chaldean or Assyrian. To make this possible, Patriarch Sako declared that he himself was prepared to step down and urged Mar Addai to do the same. The Church of the East reacted as could be expected. On the one hand, it praised Louis Sako for this courageous step. On the other, the Synod pointed out that is was unacceptable for them to put them themselves under the obedience of the Pope, a necessary condition according to Sako, since it would reduce them to a sort of uniate church, under the Catholic umbrella, and not a sister church, on its own merits and based on full equality.15 It may be no coincidence that hardly one month later, the patriarch took the initiative to launch a Chaldean League, to promote a Chaldean identity and to defend the interests of the Chaldean Church. It is against this background that we have to understand the new orientation of the Chaldean Church as seen at the 2017 Synod. Bibliography

Atto, N. Hostages in the Homeland, Orphans in the Diaspora: Identity Discourses among the Syrian/Syriac Elites in the European Diaspora (Leiden: Brill, 2011). Butts, A.M. “Assyrian Christians,” in A Companion to Assyria, ed. E. Frahm (Hoboken, NJ, & Chichester, 2017), 599–612. Girling, K. The Chaldean Catholic Church. Modern History, Ecclesiology and Church-State Relations (London: Routledge, 2018). 15 See the reaction by the Assyrian Bishop of Modesto (California) (now Patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East), and member of the Joint Theological Roman Catholic and Assyrian Dialogue Commission, Mar Awa Royel, “Authenticity in Unity. A personal Reflection on Present-Day Questions Concerning the Unity of the Church of the East,” published in the official periodical of the Assyrian Church of the East, The Voice of the East (2015): 1–6. For an analysis, see H. Teule, “The Assyrian Church of the East, the Chaldean Church and the Roman Catholic Church. An attempt at understanding their interrelation,” in The Declaration of Balamand, Twenty-five Years Later, ed. J. Skira, P. Demey and H. Teule (forthcoming).

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Teule, H. Les Assyro-chaldéens Chrétiens d’Irak, d’Iran et de Turquie (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008). Teule, H. “Christians in Iraq. An Analysis of some recent political developments,” Der Islam 88 (2011): 179–198. Teule, H. “Christianity in Iraq and its Contribution to Society,” in Syriac Christianity in the Middle East and India. Contributions and Challenges, ed. D.W. Winkler (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2013), 23–41. Teule, H. “Christians in Iraq. An Analysis of some recent developments,” in Christsein in der islamischen Welt. Festschrift für Martin Tamcke zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. S. Griffith and S. Grebenstein (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2015), 587–594. Teule, H. “Iraq,” in Christianity in North Africa and West Asia, ed. K.R. Ross, et al. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 164–176. Teule, H. “Chronique d’Irak,” Proche Orient Chrétien 68, no. 1–2 (2018): 183–191, and Proche Orient Chrétien 69, no. 1–2 (2019): 187–189. Teule, H. “The Assyrian Church of the East, the Chaldean Church and the Roman Catholic Church. An attempt at understanding their interrelation,” in The Declaration of Balamand, Twenty-five Years Later, ed. J. Skira, P. Demey and H. Teule (forthcoming). Royel, Mar Awa. “Authenticity in Unity. A personal Reflection on Present-Day Questions Concerning the Unity of the Church of the East,” The Voice of the East (2015): 1–6. Vogt, M. Christen im Nahen Osten. Zwischen Martyrium und Exodus (Darmstadt: Academic Grünwald Preselect.media GmbH, 2019), 173–226.

Who Says? A Social History of Syriac Use in the Medieval Islamic Period Thomas A. Carlson Although classified as a “dead” language, Syriac has been used continuously over the centuries. Under Muslim rulers it yielded ground to Arabic and later Persian as the high status language, yet Syriac maintained predominance or at least currency in certain social domains, such as medicine and history, longer than in others. This paper traces what can be said about who used Syriac, where, and for what purposes in the medieval Islamic period, from the translation movement of Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq in ninth-century Baghdad through the “Syriac Renaissance” to the chaos of the post-Mongol period. The universal history of Bar ʿEbroyo alone was continued by various authors down to the end of the fifteenth century, and only in the 1490s do we find the end of the continuous tradition of Western Syriac chronicles. Yet the geographical distribution of late medieval Syriac texts is very uneven, suggesting the possibilities and limitations of the “Syriac Renaissance.” The ongoing use of Syriac throughout the medieval period, including for certain “secular” topics, indicates an opportunity for Syriac Studies to inform Islamic Studies and Middle Eastern history more generally. The essay will conclude with a discussion of what is necessary for Syriac scholars to participate in the debates of Islamic history.

A Maphrian without Arabic

In the early 1140s, a monk named Loʿozar from the monastery of Sarjīsiyya, located outside Malaṭya in eastern Anatolia, was appointed to be the next Syriac Orthodox maphrian in Takrit, in Iraq. He was appointed over his own objections, and while reluctance to accept high office was a trope, and indeed often a qualification for such office, the historian Bar ʿEbroyo recorded a specific objection: the monk in question asserted that he could not speak a word of Arabic.1 This was evidently considered not a disqualification from the office, however; it was pointed out to him that the recently deceased maphrian likewise started without Arabic, though he “learned a little” during his tenure. The 1 D. Wilmshurst, trans., Bar Hebraeus, The Ecclesiastical Chronicle: An English Translation (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2016), 418–419.

© Thomas A. Carlson, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004537897_019

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monk Loʿozar was consecrated maphrian for Iraq despite his lack of Arabic knowledge. The process by which Arabic displaced Syriac and other languages as both the spoken and written languages in the Middle East south of Anatolia and west of Iran remains little explored.2 Arabic use spread among non-Arabs as a result of the seventh-century conquests, of course, but the process was not rapid. In the late twentieth century, neo-Aramaic dialects continued in places such as Maaloula, Ṭur ʿAbdin, and some parts of northern Iraq, but Arabic had become the national language of the new Arab nation-states of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and the entire Arabian peninsula. Classical Syriac3 continued in use almost exclusively as a liturgical language, until the modern revival of kthobonoyo achieved modest success at re-introducing other genres.4 Between the seventh and the twentieth centuries, and especially after the Graeco-Arabic translation movement of the eighth to tenth centuries, the progress and dynamics of Arabization remain substantially unclear. It is an honor and a pleasure to dedicate this exploratory foray into such questions to the scholar who has done so much to clarify the earlier relationship between Greek and Syriac.5

Literary Multilingualism

A few initial distinctions are in order. While the discipline of sociolinguistics has focused on correlating social distinctions to differences in speech today, the study of historical change suffers from the inability to do field work in 2 For an outline, see H.G.B. Teule, “The Syriac Renaissance,” in The Syriac Renaissance, ed. H.G.B. Teule, C.F. Tauwinkl, R.B. ter Haar Romeny, and J.J. van Ginkel (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 1–30. This article will broaden the temporal focus, while also pursuing greater nuance through the exploration of different cultural domains. 3 In this article, “Syriac” is used exclusively of the classical literary language which derived from the Aramaic dialect of Edessa. Other spoken dialects are termed “Aramaic” to avoid confusion. 4 G.A. Kiraz, “Kthobonoyo Syriac,” in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage: Electronic Edition, ed. S.P. Brock, et al. (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2011; online ed. Beth Mardutho, 2018), https://gedsh.bethmardutho.org/Kthobonoyo-Syriac. 5 S.P. Brock, “Greek into Syriac and Syriac into Greek,” Journal of the Syriac Academy 3 (1977): 1–17; S.P. Brock, “Greek and Syriac in Late Antique Syria,” in Literacy and Power in the Ancient World, ed. A.K. Bowman and G. Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 149–160. More recently on the pre-Islamic period, see D.G.K. Taylor, “Bilingualism and Diglossia in Late Antique Syria and Mesopotamia,” in Bilingualism in Ancient Society: Language Contact and the Written Text, ed. J.N. Adams, M. Janse, and S. Swain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 298–331.

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the past, as David Taylor pointed out.6 Arietta Papaconstantinou reminds us that the ways urban elites employed literary languages reveal little about rural spoken language use.7 Yet the polyglot literary tradition in the Middle East indicates that speech does not exhaust the “social history of language”: some languages were spoken but not written, while others were sometimes written but not spoken.8 The parallel presence of multiple literary languages raises the questions why specific languages were used in some contexts but not in others. In particular, the legacy of western nationalism has predisposed scholars to think of social groups separated by language, religion, and territory, which together were thought to determine social identity. Ethnic and linguistic labels certainly informed one another, yet the multilingual reality of the diverse Middle East was that literary languages operated at the same time in different domains. Such literary multilingualism has been observed in early modern Europe and in Palestine under the British Mandate,9 and the goal of a social history of language is to document where, when, and for what purposes a language such as Syriac would be employed. To this end, my focus will be less on particular authors and texts, and more on the particular social domains and functions of certain kinds of texts.

Syriac as Ecclesiastical Language

The general scholarly wisdom is that Syriac has primarily been an ecclesiastical language, used for liturgy and theology in the Syriac churches until today. This general statement is not incorrect, but for the medieval period this statement claims both too much and too little. On the one hand, Syriac was not always the only language of liturgy, as indicated by the famous anecdote about John of Daylam’s multilingual monastic liturgies.10 On the other hand, Syriac was used for other genres into the late medieval period, as we will see. But it is true that new liturgical compositions in classical Syriac continued to be composed at least into the fifteenth century: there were several new Syriac Orthodox 6 7

Taylor, “Diglossia,” 298–299. A. Papaconstantinou, “‘They Shall Speak the Arabic Language and Take Pride in it’: Reconsidering the Fate of Coptic after the Arab Conquest,” Le Muséon 120 (2007): 273–299 (283). 8 For the phrase, see P. Burke, Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2–4. 9 Burke, Languages, 7; L.R. Halperin, Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920–1948 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 18–19. 10 S.P. Brock, “A Syriac Life of John of Dailam,” Parole de l’Orient 10 (1981–1982): 123–189 (149).

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anaphoras,11 and the Eastern Syriac authors such as the priest Isḥaq Shbadnaya and Metropolitan Ishoʿyahb bar Mqaddam of Erbil composed poems for liturgical feasts and saints’ days.12 The fifteenth century also saw new compositions of theology, such as Isḥaq Shbadnaya’s “Poem on God’s Government from ‘In the Beginning’ until Eternity” and Masʿūd of Ṭur ʿAbdin’s “Spiritual Boat.”13 Indeed, by the end of the fifteenth century, while the scriptures might be available in other languages, such as a couple Persian gospel texts,14 Syriac seems to have become the exclusive language of liturgical and theological compositions in the Syriac Orthodox Church and the Church of the East.15

Syriac Grammar

There were also non-ecclesiastical domains that continued to use Syriac into the late medieval period. Grammars of Syriac continued to be composed, not only in the Syriac language, but even in Syriac verse, by the thirteenth-century Syriac Orthodox maphrian Bar ʿEbroyo and the fifteen-century Eastern Syriac

11

Barsoum lists eight anaphoras composed in the fifteenth century and one in the sixteenth, although some are not extant, as well as several fifteenth-century authors of “mediocre” ḥusoyos: Ignatius Aphram I Barsoum, The Scattered Pearls: A History of Syriac Literature and Sciences, trans. M. Moosa (2nd rev. ed.; Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2003), 67, 79. 12 For the former, see Th.A. Carlson, “A Light From ‘the Dark Centuries’: Isḥaq Shbadnaya’s Life and Works,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 14 (2011): 191–214. For the latter, see A. Baumstark, Geschichte der syrischen Literatur (Bonn: A. Marcus und E. Webers Verlag, 1922), 329–330. 13 For the latter, see B.L. van Helmond, Masʿoud du Ṭour ʿAbdin: un mystique syrien du XVe siècle, étude et texte (Louvain: Bureaux du Muséon, 1942). An edition of the former work is in progress. 14 A Persian gospel harmony: G. Messina, ed. Diatessaron persiano (Rome: Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 1951). Persian fourfold gospels: A. Pritula, Khristianstvo i persidskaia knizhnost’ XIII–XVII bb. [Christianity and Persian Literature 13th–18th C.], Pravoslavnyĭ Palestinskiĭ Sbornik 38 [101] (Saint Petersburg: Dmitriĭ Bulanin, 2004), 106–108, #7, 11–13, 21. 15 Barsoum lists Arabic theological works by authors up until Daniel b. al-Ḥaṭṭab (d. 1382), but then nothing else in Arabic until the eighteenth century: Barsoum, Scattered Pearls, 122. This study neglects Melkites, as they are not known to have composed works in Classical Syriac after the year 1000 CE: S.P. Brock, “Melkite Literature in Syriac,” in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage: Electronic Edition, ed. S.P. Brock, et al. (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2011; online ed. Beth Mardutho, 2018) https://gedsh.beth mardutho.org/Melkite-literature-in-Syriac. What little Maronite literature was authored in Syriac in the period between 1000 and 1500 CE also seems to be exclusively religious: Baumstark, Geschichte, 342–343.

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metropolitan of Erbil, Ishoʿyahb bar Mqaddam.16 The function of these grammars was in part, no doubt, to maintain the literary tradition, so that the literate classes might continue to compose in Syriac. Syriac grammars might also serve to standardize and classicize the Syriac of someone who spoke a different Aramaic dialect, and to resolve interpretive questions about the finer points of grammar or lexicon, but the fact that Syriac grammars were composed in Syriac rather than in another language suggests that their purpose was as an aid to composition rather than interpretation.17 This is also indicated by the fact that the authors of late medieval Syriac grammars also composed non-grammatical texts, clearly regarding the Syriac literary canon as open. In other words, the grammatical works imply a literary tradition that continued to be active into the late medieval period.

Syriac Medicine

Syriac famously contributed to the medical domain, especially to the translation movement in early Abbasid Baghdad, when translators such as Ḥunayn b. Isḥaq imported the whole of Greek medicine into Arabic, enabling later Muslim physicians such as al-Rāzī and Ibn Sīnā to author their original works.18 Syriac medicine in this period has typically been treated by scholars as a mere intermediary between the two larger traditions of Greek and Arabic, and extensive work has been done on the “Islamic medicine” to which Syriac Christians contributed.19 Anton Baumstark lists only physicians from the first millennium, with the exception of the famous thirteenth-century 16

For Bar ʿEbroyo, see H. Takahashi, Barhebraeus: A Bio-Bibliography (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2013), 355–84. Ishoʿyahb b. Mqaddam’s grammar remains unedited: Paris BNF Syr. 369. 17 For a different but not incompatible interpretation, Teule proposes that Syriac grammars were first developed by Eastern Syriac authors due to their greater Arabization: Teule, “The Syriac Renaissance,” 11. 18 The literature on the subject is vast, but may be entered through D. Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ʿAbbāsid Society (2nd–4th/8th–10th centuries) (London: Routledge, 1998); J.B.V. Tannous, The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018); P.E. Pormann, “Medicine,” in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage: Electronic Edition, ed. S.P. Brock, et al. (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2011; online ed. Beth Mardutho, 2018) https://gedsh.bethmardutho.org/Medicine. 19 M. Ullmann, Die Medizin im Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1970); M. Ullmann, Islamic Medicine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997); P.E. Pormann and E. Savage-Smith, Medieval Islamic Medicine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).

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physician who became a maphrian, Bar ʿEbroyo.20 When the Armenian physician Amirdovlatʾ of Amasya boasted of consulting sources in five languages for a medical work he composed in 1459, he listed Armenian, Greek, Dalmatian (!), Arabic, and Persian, but not Syriac, which suggests that the Syriac medical tradition had come to an end.21 But such an interpretation would be premature. The Syriac medical tradition continued into the second millennium. Bar ʿEbroyo himself began a translation of Ibn Sīnā’s medical Qānūn into Syriac, which he left unfinished at the time of his death, and he may have composed another medical work or two in Syriac, although none of his known medical works is explicitly identified as being composed in Syriac.22 The Syriac Book of Medicines edited by Budge was copied for that editor from a medieval manuscript which he estimated to belong to the twelfth century, although it is unclear how much faith should be placed in such an estimate.23 More explicitly, Bar ʿEbroyo noted in his historical work that a physician named Gabriel, living in Edessa in the 1220s, was composing medical as well as philosophical works in the Syriac language.24 Even in the early fifteenth-century, a biographical dictionary of physicians mentions a contemporary Syriac metropolitan who was also a physician in upper Mesopotamia, who composed works of an unspecified nature in both Arabic and Syriac.25 The absence of Syriac from Amirdovlat’s boast may indicate no more than that he did not read the language, or that Syriac medical texts were not circulating in central Anatolia and farther west. While known Arabic medical works are certainly more numerous and circulated more widely, there was a small medical tradition in Syriac throughout the period of the Mongol Ilkhanate and even afterward, into the

20 Baumstark, Geschichte, 227–231, 318. 21 L.S. Khach‘ikyan, Tasnhingerord dari hayeren dzeṛagreri hishatakaranner [Fifteenth-Century Armenian Manuscript Colophons] (Yerevan: Haykakan SSṚ Gitut‘yunneri Akademiayi Hratarakch‘ut‘yun, 1958), 2: 115. The identification of դահմատէրէն as “Dalmatian” is uncertain. 22 H. Takahashi and N. Yaguchi, “On the Medical Works of Barhebraeus: With a Description of the Abridgment of Ḥunain’s Medical Questions,” Aramaic Studies 15 (2017): 252–276 (257). 23 E.A.W. Budge, Syrian Anatomy, Pathology, and Therapeutics, or “The Book of Medicines” (London: Oxford University Press, 1913), 1: xl. 24 P. Bedjan, ed. Gregorii Barhebræi Chronicon Syriacum e codd. mss. emendatum ac punctis vocalibus adnotationibusque locupletatum (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1890), 457; E.A.W. Budge, trans., The Chronography of Gregory Abû’l Faraj, the Son of Aaron, the Hebrew Physician commonly known as Bar Hebraeus (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), 1: 392. 25 Dāʾūd b. Naṣr al-Mawṣilī, Rawḍat al-alibbāʾ fī tārīkh al-aṭibbāʾ, Berlin orient. quart. 1068, f. 111a.

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fifteenth century, perhaps especially for segments of the population that spoke Aramaic dialects rather than Arabic in their daily lives.

Mercantile Syriac

Classical Syriac may also have continued in use as a literary language among merchants at least into the thirteenth century. A caravanserai outside of Malaṭya in eastern Turkey was constructed in 1218 by a Syriac-using physician with an Arabic name, as its surviving trilingual dedication inscription attests.26 Abū Sālim b. Abū l-Ḥasan constructed the only known Seljuk-era Anatolian khan not built by a member of the Turkic elite,27 and he recorded his action in Armenian, Arabic, and Syriac. Although Malaṭya had a long history of Arabic presence, it had not been under Arab rule since the Byzantine reconquest of the city in the 930s, and by the 1140s, as we learned in the anecdote which began this paper, monks from this area could not read Arabic. We might therefore presume that this physician wanted locals and travelers to be able to read his name and bless him even if he could not assume a familiarity with Arabic. The ongoing use of Aramaic as a living oral language in some areas, such as nearby Ṭur ʿAbdin, and Syriac’s status as the only dialect of Aramaic written by Christians outside Palestine in this period, suggests that other business records and ephemera, such as receipts of sale, might have been composed in the language, but are not preserved. Business must have been conducted in the spoken languages, of course, even if it may be recorded in other languages for particular purposes.

Historical Chronicles in Syriac and Arabic

Finally, Syriac was also a language of historical composition, but its geographical distribution is suggestive. Muriel Debié has recently compiled a repertoire of all known Syriac historical works.28 Among the Syriac Orthodox, the many chronicles of Late Antiquity and the early Islamic period were followed, after 26 K. Erdmann, Das anatolische Karavansaray des 13. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Mann, 1961), 1: 65–66. 27 S. Redford, “Reading Inscriptions on Seljuk Caravanserais,” Euroasiatica 4 (2016): 221–233 (228). 28 M. Debié, L’écriture de l’histoire en Syriaque: Transmissions interculturelles et constructions identitaires entre hellénisme et islam, Late Antique History and Religion 12 (Leuven: Peeters, 2015), 515–628.

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a hiatus, by the massive chronicles of Michael Rabo, of an anonymous author to the year 1234, and of Bar ʿEbroyo,29 the last of which was continued by various hands down to the end of the fifteenth century. By contrast, Debié’s list of Eastern Syriac historical texts ends in the early eleventh century with Eliya bar Shinaya of Nisibis.30 This is not, however, the death of history within the Church of the East: already in the ninth century, Ḥunayn b. Isḥaq is credited with a history in Arabic from Creation to the reign of the caliph al-Mutawakkil, Eliya bar Shinaya’s history was bilingual in Syriac and Arabic, and the Arabic historical tradition within the Church of the East continued until the historical portion of Yuḥannā b. Ṣalībā al-Mawṣilī’s Kitāb Asfār al-Asrār.31 The Syriac Orthodox also composed history in Arabic, starting with Bar ʿEbroyo’s Mukhtaṣar Tārīkh al-Duwal and continuing with the brief chronology of a later maphrian who became patriarch, Nuḥ Puniqoyo.32 Thus a Syriac historiographical tradition continued later among the Syriac Orthodox than among the Church of the East, but an Arabic tradition picked up in both churches, though centuries apart. Attempting to understand the difference between these two Syriac traditions clarifies how medieval Middle Eastern language change could vary based on geography,33 and the opportunity that the study of Syriac offers not only to Syriacists and heritage communities, but also to Islamicists and Middle Eastern historians. Just as Arietta Papaconstantinou reinterpreted the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Samuel not as the last gasp of the Coptic language but instead as a difference between Coptic social groups, so we need to resist interpreting changes in Syriac use as a broad phenomenon across the whole Middle East, but instead look for local differences. I would suggest that the difference 29 D. Weltecke, “Les trois grandes chroniques syro-orthodoxes des XIIe et XIIIe siècles,” in L’historiographie syriaque, ed. M. Debié, Études syriaques 6 (Paris: Geuthner, 2009), 107–135; D. Weltecke, “A Renaissance in Historiography? Patriarch Michael, the Anonymous Chronicles ad a. 1234, and Bar ʿEbrōyō,” in The Syriac Renaissance, ed. H.G.B. Teule, C.F. Tauwinkl, R.B. ter Haar Romeny, and J.J. van Ginkel (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 95–111. 30 Debié, L’écriture, 623–628. 31 Debié, L’écriture, 631–643. Debié also cites a much later Arabic historical text from the eighteenth century, but this represents a revival rather than a continuation of the earlier tradition: Debié, L’écriture, 647. Her list excluded works appended to manuscripts, such as those translated by A. Scher, “Épisodes de l’histoire du Kurdistan,” Journal Asiatique Xe série 15 (1910): 119–139. While most of Scher’s documents concern a single year, the third and seventh documents which he translated span several years. 32 The latter, not found in Debié’s repertoire, was edited and translated by J. Assemani, Bibliotheca Orientalis Clementino-Vaticana (Rome: Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, 1721), 2: 469–472. 33 This was suggested also by Teule, “The Syriac Renaissance,” 7–10.

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in historical production between the two main Syriac denominations is not theological, but geographical, which also correlates with later medieval medical production and the trilingual inscription on the caravanserai.

Differential Regional Arabization

The seventh-century conquerors of most of the Middle East spoke Arabic, which considerably raised that language’s status,34 but not everywhere equally. Even more so than other premodern ruling elites, the Arab conquerors dispersing from the isolated oases of pre-Islamic Arabian society were demographically minuscule compared to the numerous newly conquered agricultural populations, so most non-Arabs simply did not interact with them and had little opportunity to adopt Arabic. We would expect the most rapid Arabization to occur among the local populations that moved to the newly founded cities such as Baṣra, Kufa, Mosul, and Baghdad in Iraq, or Fusṭaṭ and later Cairo in Egypt.35 Language change would be aided in the context of newly founded cities by a combination of social upheaval among the non-Arabs and proximity to the Arabic-speaking ruling elite. Centralized caliphal patronage in Baghdad likewise funded the elaboration of an Arabic literary culture among Christians as well as Muslims, especially in the domain of translations of Greek secular literature.36 But caliphal patronage was based primarily in Baghdad, and to a lesser degree in other Iraqi cities. By contrast, Syria’s new urban foundations (such as al-Ramla) were fewer and smaller, while upper Mesopotamia above Mosul was garrisoned as a frontier zone as far as Malaṭya. Yet the Byzantine reconquest of Malaṭya in the 930s may have halted its functional Arabization, and the continued presence into the eleventh century of Armenian royal families indicates that Arabic was not the exclusive language of patronage, even at an earlier period. Thus Iraq likely experienced Arabization more quickly than Syria or upper Mesopotamia. In this regard, it is noteworthy that the last Syriac history composed in the medieval Church of the East, that of Eliya bar Shinaya in the early eleventh century, was composed in that denomination’s western outpost of Nisibis, and even there the work was composed in Arabic as well as Syriac.37 34 35 36 37

A point made by Papaconstantinou, “They Shall Speak,” 292–293. Papaconstantinou, “They Shall Speak,” 293. Gutas, Greek Thought, 1–5. Debié, L’écriture, 623–628.

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It is also among Christian physicians from the area of upper Mesopotamia that one finds Syriac medical compositions after 1000 CE, and again it is outside Malaṭya that the trilingual inscription partly in Syriac welcomed merchants to the caravanserai. Bar ʿEbroyo’s chronicle repeatedly makes the point that the people of Takrit in Iraq knew Arabic, while the maphrians sent from upper Mesopotamia typically did not. Upper Mesopotamia generated more latemedieval Syriac than did Iraq, despite the much larger volume of literary production in the latter region. We must remember that Arabization was not one-directional, nor was it an inescapable outcome of the early Islamic conquests. If Iraq experienced more rapid Arabization due to greater new urbanization and caliphal patronage, the degree of difference should not be overstated. Amīn al-Dawla b. al-Tilmīdh was a Christian physician serving the caliphs, and was named as the head of the ʿAḍūdī hospital in twelfth-century Baghdad. He was described, in a biographical dictionary by the Muslim author Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa, as expert (khabīr) in Syriac and Persian, and having studied Arabic thoroughly (mutabaḥḥar).38 That Arabic might be insufficient for the duties of someone like Amīn al-Dawla b. al-Tilmīdh in the highest medical offices in Baghdad perhaps suggests that Iraqi Arabization was still incomplete three centuries after the translation movement of Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq. Bar ʿEbroyo, after noting a couple twelfth-century maphrians who spoke no Arabic, nonetheless included a general remark to the effect that maphrians spoke the language of their flock.39 It is unclear whether this means that more recent maphrians knew Arabic, or if instead the Christians of Takrit still understood Syriac or some other Aramaic dialect. A further Arabization of the region of upper Mesopotamia around 1200, then the headquarters of the Syriac Orthodox patriarchate and the source of most maphrians, seems unlikely under the ongoing Turkic domination of the area. The influx of the Turks had attenuated Arabic’s prestige, as is also seen by the revival of Persian literature particularly in Turkic courts, from the late tenth century onward.40 Scholars who think of the rapid Arabization of

38 Savage-Smith, E., S. Swain, G.J. van Gelder, ed. and trans., A Literary History of Medicine: The ʿUyūn al-anbāʾ fī ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbāʾ of Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 10.64. 39 D. Wilmshurst, trans., Bar Hebraeus, The Ecclesiastical Chronicle, 230–231. 40 C.E. Bosworth, “The Development of Persian Culture under the Early Ghaznavids,” Iran 6 (1968): 33–44; L. Richter-Bernburg, “Linguistic Shuʿūbīya and Early Neo-Persian Prose,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 94 (1974): 56–58. Syriac, of course, did not enjoy the royal patronage that Persian did.

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Christians under Islamic rule might point to Theodore Abu Qurra,41 but some of his successors in upper Mesopotamia were unfamiliar with the language. But if Arabization had not progressed in the maphrians’ home region, then Bar ʿEbroyo’s comment may suggest that Christians in Takrit continued to understand Aramaic of some form.

An Ebb Tide of Arabic after the Mongol Conquest

The conquests by the Mongols opened up possibilities for other non-Arabic prestige languages, and the medical and historical compositions of Bar ʿEbroyo, surprisingly authored even in the relatively highly Arabized regions of Iraq, may have sought a real renaissance of Syriac during a period when competition with Arabic and Persian appeared plausible.42 Ultimately, as we know, that attempt was unsuccessful, and Bar ʿEbroyo’s Syriac chronicles were continued only in Ṭur ʿAbdin, whose Aramaic-speaking population has continued into the modern period. Yet the Eastern Syriac tradition, as pointed out by Heleen Murre-van den Berg, largely forgot its earlier Arabic literature during the upheavals that preceded Ottoman rule; medieval Arabic texts from the Church of the East were transmitted largely by other Christian communities, and Syriac again came to dominate every genre in Eastern Syriac communities, especially outside of urban centers.43 A fifteenth-century priest from Mosul, a city largely founded by Muslim Arabs centuries earlier, might betray neo-Aramaic influence in his Syriac colophon when he prayed for his city.44 This suggests that Arabization, whether in the language for composing elite texts or the vernacular speech of everyday life, could be reversible in certain

41 A.M. Butts, “Theodoros Abū Qurra,” in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage: Electronic Edition, ed. S.P. Brock, et al. (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2011; online ed. Beth Mardutho, 2018) https://gedsh.bethmardutho.org/Theodoros-Abu-Qurra. 42 As suggested by Takahashi, Bio-bibliography, 102–104. 43 H. Murre-van den Berg, “Classical Syriac, Neo-Aramaic, and Arabic in the Church of the East and the Chaldean Church between 1500 and 1800,” in Aramaic in its Historical and Linguistic Setting, ed. H. Gzella and M.L. Folmer (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2008), 335–351 (340, n27). Teule similarly observed that the earliest Syriac Orthodox texts in Arabic were forgotten by the later tradition within that denomination: Teule, “The Syriac Renaissance,” 5–6. 44 Princeton Garrett Syr. 22, f. 97a. The jussive use of ‫ܡܥܡܪ‬ ܲ� shows influence of neo-Aramaic dialects: A.J. Maclean, Grammar of the Dialects of Vernacular Syriac, as Spoken by the Eastern Syrians of Kurdistan, North-West Persia and the Plain of Mosul, with Notices of the Vernacular of the Jews of Azerbaijan and of Zakhu near Mosul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1895), 142.

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locations, and that Mosul itself was linguistically mixed rather than exclusively Arabic at the end of the medieval period.

Implications and Opportunities for Syriac Studies

In summary, I have asked us to revisit the well-established but often overlooked point that Syriac, today of interest primarily to theologians and biblical scholars, was once much more broadly used. While the Syriac textual tradition has not been kind to non-ecclesiastical literature, some elements do remain, and they challenge us to rethink scholarly assumptions about a rapid Arabization of the Syriac-speaking churches from the eighth century onward. Rapid Arabization did occur in some places, such as the cities of southern and central Iraq, yet even there it was incomplete until the later medieval period. The Arabization of upper Mesopotamia and eastern Anatolia was much less thorough, and was partly reversed by the later conquests of the area by Byzantines and Turks, conquests which indirectly enabled the Syriac renaissance. Syriac was one of several trans-regional written languages, each with a different range of topical domains as well as social connections. The notion of a polyglot and multi-religious medieval Middle East, while not exactly news, nevertheless challenges the hegemony of Arabists and Islamicists in the study of this portion of the human past. Syriac has extensively informed the scholarly study of Late Antiquity, and is increasingly informing studies of the origins of Islam, but Syriac may yet inform studies of later so-called “Islamic” societies. This is especially true for regions such as upper Mesopotamia, for which the Arabic sources preferred by Islamicists are rarer and less informative. The late medieval continuation of Syriac literature provides an opportunity for Syriac scholars to speak to broader audiences than they typically have so far. Given the importance of Islam and Middle Eastern history in the world today, attempts to engage these scholarly discussions could raise the profile of the field of Syriac Studies as a whole. But due to the limitations of graduate training in the presently balkanized study of the medieval Middle East, most Islamicists remain insufficiently aware of the benefits offered by Syriac sources. In order to realize the potential for Syriac Studies to inform Islamic Studies more broadly, Syriacists first need to become conversant with the achievements and debates within the other field. Learning Arabic is a prerequisite, of course, but so is attending Islamicist conferences. Doing so would open doors for collaboration between Syriacists and Islamicists, and raise opportunities for both fields to benefit from the other. It would also more accurately reflect the extensively mixed diversity of the medieval Middle East itself. If Syriacists learn some Arabic, then they will be in a

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better position to suggest that Islamicists might heed the command reportedly given by Muḥammad himself to one of his Companions, Zayd b. Thābit, to learn Syriac.45 Bibliography46 Assemani, J. Bibliotheca Orientalis Clementino-Vaticana, vol. 2 (Rome: Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, 1721). ʿAwwād Maʿrūf, B., ed./Abū ʿĪsā Muḥammad b. ʿĪsā. al-Tirmidhī. Al-Jāmiʿ al-kabīr, vol. 4 (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 1996). Barsoum, Ignatius Aphram I. The Scattered Pearls: A History of Syriac Literature and Sciences, trans. Matti Moosa (2nd rev. ed.; Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2003). Baumstark, A. Geschichte der syrischen Literatur (Bonn: A. Marcus und E. Webers Verlag, 1922). Bedjan, P., ed. Gregorii Barhebræi Chronicon Syriacum e codd. mss. emendatum ac punctis vocalibus adnotationibusque locupletatum (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1890). Bosworth, C.E. “The Development of Persian Culture under the Early Ghaznavids,” Iran 6 (1968): 33–44. Brock, S.P. “Greek into Syriac and Syriac into Greek,” Journal of the Syriac Academy 3 (1977): 1–17. Brock, S.P. “A Syriac Life of John of Dailam,” Parole de l’Orient 10 (1981–1982): 123–189. Brock, S.P. “Greek and Syriac in Late Antique Syria,” in Literacy and Power in the Ancient World, ed. A.K. Bowman and G. Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 149–160. Brock, S.P. “Melkite Literature in Syriac,” in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage: Electronic Edition, ed. S.P. Brock, et al. (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2011; online ed. Beth Mardutho, 2018), https://gedsh.bethmardutho.org/Melkite -literature-in-Syriac. Budge, E.A.W., ed. Syrian Anatomy, Pathology, and Therapeutics, or “The Book of Medicines,” vol. 1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1913). Budge, E.A.W., trans. The Chronography of Gregory Abû’l Faraj, the Son of Aaron, the Hebrew Physician Commonly Known as Bar Hebraeus, vol. 1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1932). 45 Abū ʿĪsā Muḥammad b. ʿĪsā al-Tirmidhī, al-Jāmiʿ al-kabīr, ed. B. ʿAwwād Maʿrūf (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 1996), 4: 439, #2715; Abū ’l-ʿAbbās Aḥmad al-Qalqashandī, Kitāb Ṣubḥ al-a‌‌ʿshā (Cairo: Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣriyya, 1922), 1: 165. 46 Regrettably, when writing this paper I was unable to consult K. van Bladel, “Arabicization, Islamization, and the Colonies of the Conquerors,” in Late Antique Responses to the Arab Conquests, ed. J. van den Bent, F. van den Eijnde, and J. Weststeijn (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 89–119.

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Burke, P. Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Butts, A.M. “Theodoros Abū Qurra,” in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage: Electronic Edition, ed. S.P. Brock, et al. (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2011; online ed. Beth Mardutho, 2018) https://gedsh.bethmardutho.org/Theodoros -Abu-Qurra. Carlson, Th.A. “A Light From ‘the Dark Centuries’: Isḥaq Shbadnaya’s Life and Works,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 14 (2011): 191–214. Debié, M. L’écriture de l’histoire en Syriaque: Transmissions interculturelles et constructions identitaires entre hellénisme et islam, Late Antique History and Religion 12 (Leuven: Peeters, 2015). Erdmann, K. Das anatolische Karavansaray des 13. Jahrhunderts, vol. 1 (Berlin: Mann, 1961). Gutas, D. Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ʿAbbāsid Society (2nd–4th/8th–10th centuries) (London: Rout­ ledge, 1998). Halperin, L.R. Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920–1948 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). van Helmond, B.L. Masʿoud du Ṭour ʿAbdin: un mystique syrien du XVe siècle, étude et texte (Louvain: Bureaux du Muséon, 1942). Khach‘ikyan, L.S. Tasnhingerord dari hayeren dzeṛagreri hishatakaranner [FifteenthCentury Armenian Manuscript Colophons], vol. 2 (Yerevan: Haykakan SSṚ Gitut‘yunneri Akademiayi Hratarakch‘ut‘yun, 1958). Kiraz, G.A. “Kthobonoyo Syriac,” in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage: Electronic Edition, ed. S.P. Brock, et al. (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2011; online ed. Beth Mardutho, 2018), https://gedsh.bethmardutho.org/Kthobonoyo-Syriac. Maclean, A.J. Grammar of the Dialects of Vernacular Syriac, as Spoken by the Eastern Syrians of Kurdistan, North-West Persia and the Plain of Mosul, with Notices of the Vernacular of the Jews of Azerbaijan and of Zakhu near Mosul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1895). Messina, G. ed. Diatessaron persiano (Rome: Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 1951). Murre-van den Berg, H. “Classical Syriac, Neo-Aramaic, and Arabic in the Church of the East and the Chaldean Church between 1500 and 1800,” in Aramaic in its Historical and Linguistic Setting, ed. H. Gzella and M.L. Folmer (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2008), 335–351. Papaconstantinou, A. “‘They Shall Speak the Arabic Language and Take Pride in it’: Reconsidering the Fate of Coptic after the Arab Conquest,” Le Muséon 120 (2007): 273–299. Pormann, P.E. “Medicine,” in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage: Electronic Edition, ed. S.P. Brock, et al. (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2011; online ed. Beth Mardutho, 2018) https://gedsh.bethmardutho.org/Medicine.

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Pormann, P.E. and E. Savage-Smith, Medieval Islamic Medicine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). Pritula, A. Khristianstvo i persidskaia knizhnost’ XIII–XVII bb. [Christianity and Persian Literature 13th–18th C.], Pravoslavnyĭ Palestinskiĭ Sbornik 38 [101] (Saint Petersburg: Dmitriĭ Bulanin, 2004). al-Qalqashandī, Abū ’l-ʿAbbās Aḥmad. Kitāb Ṣubḥ al-a‌‌ʿshā, vol. 1 (Cairo: Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣriyya, 1922). Redford, S. “Reading Inscriptions on Seljuk Caravanserais,” Euroasiatica 4 (2016): 221–233. Richter-Bernburg, L. “Linguistic Shuʿūbīya and Early Neo-Persian Prose,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 94 (1974): 56–58. Savage-Smith, E., S. Swain, G.J. van Gelder, ed. and trans. A Literary History of Medicine: The ʿUyūn al-anbāʾ fī ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbāʾ of Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah, 5 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2020). Scher, A., trans. “Épisodes de l’histoire du Kurdistan,” Journal Asiatique Xe série 15 (1910): 119–139. Takahashi, H. Barhebraeus: A Bio-Bibliography (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2013). Takahashi, H. and N. Yaguchi. “On the Medical Works of Barhebraeus: With a Description of the Abridgment of Ḥunain’s Medical Questions,” Aramaic Studies 15 (2017): 252–276. al-Tirmidhī. See ʿAwwād Maʿrūf, B., ed. Tannous, J.B.V. The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018). Taylor, D.G.K. “Bilingualism and Diglossia in Late Antique Syria and Mesopotamia,” in Bilingualism in Ancient Society: Language Contact and the Written Text, ed. J.N. Adams, M. Janse, and S. Swain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 298–331. Teule, H.G.B. “The Syriac Renaissance,” in The Syriac Renaissance, ed. H.G.B. Teule, C.F. Tauwinkl, R.B. ter Haar Romeny, and J.J. van Ginkel (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 1–30. Ullmann, M. Die Medizin im Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1970). Ullmann, M. Islamic Medicine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997). Weltecke, D. “Les trois grandes chroniques syro-orthodoxes des XIIe et XIIIe siècles,” in L’historiographie syriaque, ed. M. Debié, Études syriaques 6 (Paris: Geuthner, 2009), 107–135. Weltecke, D. “A Renaissance in Historiography? Patriarch Michael, the Anonymous Chronicles ad a. 1234, and Bar ʿEbrōyō,” in The Syriac Renaissance, ed. H.G.B. Teule, C.F. Tauwinkl, R.B. ter Haar Romeny and J.J. van Ginkel (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 95–111. Wilmshurst, D., trans. Bar Hebraeus, The Ecclesiastical Chronicle: An English Translation (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2016).

Sergius Baḥīrā and a Syriac “Story of Muḥammad” Muriel Debié Christian-Muslim controversy took many forms in Syriac, such as treatises by well-known authors as well as anonymous texts that have started to attract the attention of scholars. While describing the manuscripts in the Raḥmani collection at the Syrian-Catholic Patriarchate in Charfet, Lebanon, I found an intriguing series of six very short Syriac texts.1 They are copied after the well-known story of Sergius Baḥīrā, the Christian monk who according to Islamic tradition is said to have acknowledged Muḥammad’s prophetic status, and according to Christian tradition is said to have been the one who transmitted to Muḥammad the Islamic law and beliefs as well as the Qurʾān.2 The manuscript has an explicit, or closing formula, that says: “End of the story of Muḥammad,” which implies that the scribe, or the model from which the manuscript was copied, considered the content as a thematic unit, a kind of polemic Syriac sīra of Muḥammad. I would like to offer this study of these short texts to Sebastian Brock who played a major role in emphasizing the importance of Syriac sources3 for the history of what is now increasingly entitled “the 1 They are copied in the Syriac manuscript Charfet Raḥmani 122 (B. Sony, Le catalogue des manuscrits du patriarcat au couvent de Charfet – Liban, Beyrouth, 1993 [Arabic], no. 841). I am extremely grateful to the Syrian-Catholic Patriarchate for giving permission to work on the Raḥmani collection and to Youssef Dergham for his endless and generous help. My thanks go to G. Dye and A. Amir-Moezzi who read and controlled a version of this paper at a time when they were already involved in an important book editing. It is also a pleasure to acknowledge Barbara Roggema’s generous review of this paper. All the remaining errors are mine. 2 On the influence of this legend in Armenia, see R.W. Thomson, “Armenian Variations on the Baḥīrā Legend,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies, vol. 3, no. 4, part 2, Eucharisterion: Essays presented to Omeljan Pritsak on his Sixtieth Birthday by his Colleagues and Students, Harvard Ukrainian Studies (1979–1980), 884–895; in Byzantium, see A.-Th. Khoury, Polémique byzantine contre l’Islam (VIIIe–XIIIe s.) (Leiden: Brill, 1972), 76–87; Andalusia, see Th.E. Burman, Religious Polemic and the Intellectual History of the Mozarabs, c. 1050–1200, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 52 (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 122, 271; in Europe, see N. Daniel, Islam and the West. The making of an Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, I966), and J. Tolan, Saracens, Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Ethiopia, see A. Gori, “Islam in Ethiopia,” Rassegna di Studi Etiopici 37 (1993): 45–87. 3 To cite only a few of his contributions: S.P. Brock, “Syriac Sources for Seventh-Century History,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 2 (1976): 17–36; S.P. Brock, “North Mesopotamia in the Late Seventh Century: Book XV of John Bar Penkāyē’s Rīš Mellē,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 9 (1987): 51–75; A. Palmer, S.P. Brock and R.G. Hoyland, The Seventh Century in the West-Syrian Chronicles. Translated Texts for Historians 15 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1993); S.P. Brock, “Syriac Views of Emergent Islam,” in Studies on the First Century of

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Islamicate world.”4 It is also a way of paying tribute to his constant mining of manuscripts that brought to light new sources, as well as a token of admiration and friendship. Barbara Roggema edited three of these texts as continuations of the EastSyriac recension of the famous Sergius Baḥīrā story.5 The three other texts have not been edited so far: an “Information about the caliphs,” a “Genealogy of Muḥammad, king of the Arabs” and a short chronicle of the “Kingdom of the Arabs.” It is of special interest that these texts belong to the East-Syriac tradition, since texts with a similar content have already been published yet only from Syrian-Orthodox manuscripts. We can now find out whether or not there are significant differences in the way the East-Syriac (hereafter ES) and West-Syriac (hereafter WS) traditions perceived Islam and talked about Muḥammad and the ensuing history of the caliphs. As is often the case in the East-Syriac tradition, the manuscript is recent and was copied in 1889. Therefore, it cannot contribute to our understanding of the original composition of these texts. We are left to search for content-related clues in order to understand their date of composition and how they became associated in the manuscript. It will be possible to compare the arguments given here to those in the polemical/apologetical Christian-Muslim dialogues produced in the eighth– ninth centuries. For this period, we have in Syriac6 the dispute between Islamic Society, ed. G.H.A. Juynboll, Papers on Islamic History 5 (Carbondale/Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), 9–21, 199–203; S.P. Brock, “Scribal Tradition and the Transmission of Syriac Literature in Late Antiquity and Early Islam,” in Scribal Practices and the Social Construction of Knowledge in Antiquity, Late Antiquity and Medieval Islam, ed. M. Wissa, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 266 (Leuven: Peeters, 2017), 61–68. 4 It designates the regions from al-Andalus, across the Mediterranean and Middle East, to the Punjab and beyond into China and Mongolia in which Muslims are culturally dominant, but not associated specifically with the religion of Islam. 5 Edition and translation, with critical study, by B. Roggema, The Legend of Sergius Baḥīrā: Eastern Christian Apologetics and Apocalyptic in Response to Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2009). For a concise overview, see B. Roggema, “The Legend of Sergius Baḥīrā,” in Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, Volume 1 (600–900), ed. D. Thomas and B. Roggema, History of Christian-Muslim Relations 11 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 600–603. See also K. Szilágyi, “Muḥammad and the Monk. The Making of the Christian Baḥīrā Legend,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 34 (2008): 169–214; R.G. Hoyland, “The Earliest Christian Writings on Muḥammad. An Appraisal,” in The Biography of Muḥammad. The Issue of the Sources, ed. H. Motzki (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 276–297. 6 S.H. Griffith, “Disputes with Muslims in Syriac Christian Texts: From Patriarch John (d. 648) to Bar Hebraeus (d. 1286),” in Religionsgespräche im Mittelalter, eds. B. Lewis. and F. Niewöhner, Wolfenbütteler Mittelalter-Studien 4 (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1992), 251–273. L.R. Sako, “Muslim-Christian Dialogue in Syriac Sources,” in Syriac Churches Encountering

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Patriarch John and the Emir,7 between the Monk of Bēt Halē and an Arab Notable,8 and The Dialogue of the Patriarch Timothy with the caliph al-Mahdī.9 It is worth noting that the last two are East-Syriac texts. In Arabic,10 we can refer to the Dialogue between Abraham of Tiberias and the Emir11 and the correspondence between al-Hāshimī and al-Kindī.12

The Story of Sergius Baḥīrā

A better understanding of the composition and transmission of this text can help us understand how and when the three pieces about Kaʿb the scribe that interests us here, were added. A first nucleus of the story of Baḥīrā is attested Islam: Past Experiences and Future Perspectives, ed. D.W. Winkler, Pro Oriente Studies in the Syriac Tradition 1 (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2010), 6–12. 7 Patriarch John III (631–648) and ʿUmayr ibn Saʿd al-Aqari (c.644): M.P. Penn, “John and the Emir: A New Introduction, Edition and Translation,” Le Muséon 121, no. 1–2 (2008): 65–91. B. Roggema, “The Debate between Patriarch John and an Emir of the Mhaggrāyē: A Reconsideration of the Earliest Muslim-Christian Debate,” in Christians and Muslims in Dialogue in the Islamic Orient of the Middle Ages, ed. M. Tamcke, Beiruter Texte und Studien 117 (Beirut: Orient-Institut/Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2007), 21–40, and B. Roggema, “The Disputation of John and the Emir,” in Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, Volume 1 (600–900), ed. D. Thomas and B. Roggema, History of Christian-Muslim Relations 11 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 782–785. 8 D.G.K. Taylor, ed. and trans. “The Disputation between a Muslim and a Monk of Bēt Ḥālē: Syriac Text and Annotated English Translation,” in Christsein in der islamischen Welt: Festschrift für Martin Tamcke zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. S.H. Griffith, and S. Grebenstein (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2015), 187–242. 9 Catholicos Timothy I (780–823) and caliph al-Mahdî (775–785): M. Heimgartner, “Die Disputatio des ostsyrischen Patriarchen Timotheos (780–823) mit dem Kalifen al-Mahdi,” in Christians and Muslims in Dialogue in the Islamic Orient of the Middle Ages, ed. M. Tamcke, Beiruter Texte und Studien 117 (Beirut: Orient-Institut/Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2007), 41–56. 10 S.H. Griffith, “The Monk in the Emir’s Majlis: Reflections on a Popular Genre of Christian Literary Apologetics in Arabic in the Early Islamic Period,” in The Majlis: Interreligious Encounters in Medieval Islam, ed. H. Lazarus-Yafeh, et al. (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1999), 13–65. 11 G.B. Marcuzzo, Le dialogue d’Abraham de Tibériade avec ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Hāšımı̄ à Jérusalem vers 820: étude, édition critique et traduction annotée d’un texte théologique chrétien de la littérature arabe (Rome: Pontificia Universitas Lateranensis, 1986). 12 Partial English transl. The Apology of Al-Kindi written at the Court of Al-Mâmûn (Circa A.H. 215; A.D. 830) in Defence of Christianity under Islam, ed. and commented by Sir William Muir, Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK), Second Edition (London, 1887), and complete FT: G. Tartar, Dialogue islamo-chrétien sous le calife Al-Ma‌ʾmun (813–834): les épîtres d’Al-Hashimî et d’Al-Kindî, Nouvelles éditions latines (Paris: Nouvelles éditions latines, 1985).

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in the eighth century in Islamic texts.13 It relates how a monk bore witness to the prophethood of Muḥammad: a number of Arabs came with Muḥammad to his cell, and the monk had a vision of the greatness of the youth above the latter’s head. The versions written over time differ in terms of Muḥammad’s physical signs of prophethood, his age, his companions, and the miraculous happenings during his travel or even the number of his travels to Syria, but this is the common nucleus of all these stories. This story from early Muslim biographical traditions on the life of the Prophet aims at marking the coming of Muhammad and the revelation of the Qurʾān as foretold by earlier prophecies, thus portraying the older traditions as confirming and validating the truth of Islam. The oldest attestation is given by Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq (d. 767),14 whose version was taken over by Ibn Hishām (d. 834)15 and al-Ṭabarī (d. 923) and regarded as a fact by most later Muslim biographers of Muḥammad.16 It seems that Christians adapted this story. The Christian version related how the monk instructed Muḥammad about God and Christ. A Syriac version of the story is known today as The Legend of Sergius Baḥīrā. The name Sergius was added to Baḥīrā in Syriac texts since the latter is only an epithet, sometimes attributed to ascetics, but not a name as such. Bḥir in Hebrew or Aramaic means “elect.” Vocalised Baḥīrā in Syriac is a monastic title meaning “proven,” “tried.”17 The Story of Sergius says that Rabban Sergius was called Baḥīrā by the sons of Hagar and uses the double name Sergius Baḥīrā. It implies that Sergius is the Syriac name of the monk to whom the Arabs gave the monastic surname. The Latin version also uses the compound name, whereas the Arabic has only Baḥīrā. Sergius promised to help Muḥammad who complained that he was illiterate and limited by the Arabs’ beliefs and practices. He also wrote for him a scripture, called Sūrah al-baqarah (WS, ES), Qurʾān (WS, ES) or Furqān (A) in the Syriac History of Baḥīrā. In return, Baḥīrā asks Muḥammad and his successors to show indulgence to the Christians, their monks and clerics. The story 13

For a survey of the appearances of Bahira in early Muslim texts connected with Muhammad, see U. Rubin, The Eye of the Beholder. The Life of Muhammad as Viewed by the Early Muslims. A Textual Analysis (Princeton, N.J.: Darwin Press, 1995), 49–52. 14 English transl. Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw it, 476–477. See A. Abel, “L’Apocalypse de Bahira et la notion islamique du Mahdi,” Annuaire de l’Institut de Philologie et d’Histoire Orientale 3 (1935), 1–12. 15 F.M. Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing (Princeton, N.J.: Darwin Press, 1998), 132. 16 A. Abel, “Baḥîrâ,” Encyclopædia of Islam (Leiden: Brill Online, 2007). 17 F. Nau, L’Expansion nestorienne en Asie, Conférences faites au Musée Guimet en 1913, Annales du Musée Guimet 40 (1914), 193–300 (215, n1); Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw it, 270–276 and 476–479 (270, n33).

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suggests that Islam is a misunderstood form of Christianity and functions as a response to the political, religious and social challenges of Islam. What characterizes the Syriac version is the prominence of the apocalyptic sections, a genre well represented in the eighth century Syriac tradition.18 In the Christian Arabic versions, the weight is more on the encounter between Baḥīrā and Muḥammad, as in the Islamic tradition. Until recently, scholars assumed that the earliest Christian text that mentions Sergius Baḥīrā by name is The Disputation between a Muslim and a Monk of Bēt Ḥālē19 because that text was traditionally dated to the 720s since it is supposed to take place at the time of the caliph Maslama.20 However, in the first edition and translation of this text, David Taylor convincingly argues that a late eighth- or early ninth-century date is more likely. At this time, Syriac and Arabic-writing Christians were producing numerous apologetic texts against Islam.21 There are two strong arguments in favour of this somewhat later date. One is the reference to the “Disputation’s erroneous claim that in the time of Maslama a number of major cities in Iran, which were also Church of the East episcopal sees, had non-Islamic rulers.”22 This statement points to a later period when the information was not contemporary anymore, and was more likely garbled. The next argument is the convincing identification of the four Roman rulers alluded to in the text with Leo IV (r. 775–780) who minted coins with his bust side by side with that of his son Constantine VI on the obverse, and busts of his father Constantine V and grandfather Leo III on the reverse, sometime after April 776.23 The Disputation moreover shows signs that it knew The Story of Sergius Baḥīrā, especially the reference in it to the Qurʾān as the Surat of the Cow, and not the other way round. Thus, the Disputation cannot be taken as a testimony of the circulation of Sergius’s story in Christian circles at the beginning of the eighth century, but more likely at the end of the eighth or beginning of the ninth.

18 S.H. Griffith, “Muhammad and the Monk Bahîrâ: Reflections on a Syriac and Arabic Text from Early Abbasid Times,” Oriens Christianus 79 (1995): 146–174 (149). 19 Griffith, “Muhammad,” 154; S.H. Griffith, “Disputing with Islam in Syriac: The Case of the Monk of Bêt Halê and a Muslim Emir,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 3, no. 1 (2000): 1–23. 20 Maslama ibn ʿAbd al-Malik (fl. 705–738). 21 Taylor, ed. and trans. “The Disputation,” 187–242. Sergius is mentioned in §34, 224. 22 Taylor, ed. and trans. “The Disputation,” 196–197 and 200. 23 Taylor, ed. and trans. “The Disputation,” 197–198.

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The Byzantine tradition presents Baḥīrā as a heretic, more precisely as an Arian,24 or a Nestorian, in an attempt to explain how the pseudo-prophet Muḥammad, his disciple, created his own heresy.25 In the Arab Christian polemical correspondence between the Christian ʿAbd al-Kindī and the Muslim al-Hāshimī, he is supposed to have given himself the name of Nesṭūryūs, Nestorius.26 The Story of Sergius Baḥīrā as we now have it in Syriac is clearly a composite text,27 made up of two blocks assembled at a later stage. Written in Syriac, it is also attested in Arabic and the first part in Latin. It takes the form, traditional in Christian literature, of a monk’s life and bears, as is usual in Syriac texts, the title of Story, tašʿītā: ‫ܬܫܥܝܬܐ‬. The anonymous author of the text places the story in the mouth of another monk, Ishoʿyahb in the WS and Yahb in the ES recension. Ishoʿyahb is a much more common form than Yahb, but the latter was transmitted into Latin and Arabic, with the honorific title “Mar” which became part of the name: Mar Yahb became Mariaon in Latin and Marhab in Arabic.28 Therefore Yahb, the difficilior reading, was probably the original name, which was subsequently turned into the more traditional Ishoʿyahb in parts of the manuscript tradition. The two stories concerning Baḥīrā are assembled fictionally as told by (Ishoʿ)yahb: he was the main witness in the first story, whereas in the second one, he heard the story of Baḥīrā from another monk, a disciple of Baḥīrā, called Ḥakim. Yahb is the common denominator for both fictionalised monastic stories of Baḥīrā. As is typical in monastic literature, Baḥīrā tells his own story to Yahb, a fellow monk. The story starts as a typical Sinaitic Apophtegmatum Patrum.29 24 25 26 27

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29

In John of Damascus (d. c.749). It is the earliest mention of Sergius but as an anonymous monk. Gori, “Islam,” 49–50 for a summary of the Greek tradition. Tartar, Dialogue, 107. Stephen Gero has attracted attention to the composite nature of the text: “The Legend of the Monk Bahira, the Cult of the Cross, and Iconoclasm,” in La Syrie de Byzance à l’Islam, VIIe–VIIIe siècles. Actes du Colloque international, Lyon – Maison de l’Orient Méditerranéen, Paris – Institut du Monde Arabe, 11–15 Septembre 1990, ed. P. Canivet, and J.-P. Rey-Coquais, Publications de l’Institut français de Damas 137 (Damascus: Institut Français de Damas, 1992), 47–58 (52). He does not have a name in the short Arabic recension and is called Marhab in the long one and Mariaon in the Latin version of the apocalypse (J. Bignami-Odier and G.L. della Vida, “Une Version latine de l’Apocalypse syro-arabe de Serge-Bahira,” Mélanges d’Archéologie et d’Histoire 62 (1950): 125–148). See B. Roggema, “Salvaging the Saintly Sergius: Hagiographical Aspects of the Syriac Legend of Sergius Baḥīrā,” in Entangled Hagiographies of the Religious Other, ed. N. Jaspert

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Baḥīrā narrates his journey and stay in Sinai. This story shows a familiarity with the Sinaitic monastic literature: not only does the text place the Apocalypse of Baḥīrā on Sinai, but it is also aware of the monastic regulations that forbade people to spend the night on the top of the holy mountain (that Baḥīrā hastens to transgress).30 After this passage comes an apocalypse, a revelation he allegedly received on top of the holy mountain. It was viewed as a place special for its direct connection to God, and known as a receptacle of divine energy since the time of Moses who received two revelations from God on the Sinai summit. It had thus become an iconic place for receiving a revelation in both Judaism and Christianity. This apocalypse is twofold: historical, since it deals with the Arabs, called the “Sons of Ishmael” in the form of twelve beasts,31 and eschatological, since it concerns what happens after death, where Baḥīrā is shown Paradise and Hell. The story ends with the message Baḥīrā conveys to Maurice, king of the Romans, and to Khosrau, king of the Persians, prophesying the victory of the Sons of Ishmael, before he dies. A short account of the influence on Islam of a Jewish scribe, Kalb in WS and Kaʿb in ES, a successor of Sergius, acts as a transition. The second part of the story is an account (Ishoʿ)yahb received from a disciple of Sergius called Ḥakim. Here again the monastic fiction serves to introduce another account of Sergius’s life, the most well-known one, found also in the Islamic tradition, i.e. his encounter with Muḥammad and his teaching of the prophet of Islam. It takes the form of questions and answers traditional in Christian literature of controversy. The most objectionable passages of the and A. Cuffel (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018), 55–83, on the hagiographical topoi in the text. 30 D.F. Caner with S. Brock, R.M. Price and K. van Bladel, History and Hagiography from the Late Antique Sinai, Translated texts for Historians 53 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010). 31 This section follows the pattern of the Book of Daniel and owes a lot to The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius wr. ca 690. See G.J. Reinink, ed. & trans., Die syrische Apokalypse des Pseudo-Methodius, CSCO 540–541, Scr. Syri. 220–221 (Louvain: Peeters, 1993). F.J. Martinez, “Eastern Christian Apocalyptic in the Early Muslim Period: Pseudo-Methodius and Pseudo-Athanasius,” Ph.D. dissertation, The Catholic University of America, 1985. G.J. Reinink, “Ps.-Methodius: A Concept of History in Response to the Rise of Islam,” in The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East. V. 1: Problems in the Literary Source Material, ed. A. Cameron, and L.I. Conrad, Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 1 (Princeton, N.J.: Darwin, 1992), 149–187. After the Muslim dynasties the “kingdom of the Romans” triumphs, then comes the Antichrist, followed by Elijah who heralds the arrival of the Messiah (Gero, “The Legend of the Monk Bahira,” 53). On the figure of the Mahdi, see A. Abel, “L’Apocalypse de Bahira et la notion islamique du Mahdi,” Annuaire de L’Institut de philologie et d’histoire orientales 3 (1935): 1–12.

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Qurʾān and Islamic practices for Christians are deemed to come from Sergius’s accommodation of his teaching to the weaknesses of the Arabs. This story ends with a prophecy by Sergius of the fate of the Sons of Ishmael until the end of times and the second coming of Christ, in a succession of symbolic colours. One date is mentioned, 1055 AG, i.e. CE 744, the date of al-Walīd II’s death, that marks the end of the Umayyad dynasty. The latest ex eventu events refer to the caliphs Abū Muhammad Mūsā ibn Mahdī al-Hādī (785–786 CE/169–170 AH) and Hārūn al-Rashīd (786–809 CE/170–193 AH). Therefore, the History of Sergius as we have it in Syriac was consciously woven together out of two tales about Sergius, which were loosely – from a literary point of view – joined together. They take the form of monastic Apophthegmata or hagiographies and add an apocalypse in the former part and a prophecy in the latter. An appendix about Kaʿb follows the first tale, after Baḥīrā’s death, and precedes the second one.32 We can try to reconstruct the history of the text as follows: Second tale by Ḥākim about Baḥira

First tale: Ishoʿ(yahb) meets Baḥira who tells him his story Revelation on Mount Sinai– beasts; Paradise and hell Prophecy of Baḥira to Maurice and Khosrau Death of Baḥira

His arrival in Yathrib, Encounter with Muḥammad Q & A Baḥira and Muḥammad Prophecy with the colours; Death of Baḥira Story of Sergius Baḥira 1st tale 2nd tale

Story of Sergius Baḥira 1st tale Kaʿb 2nd tale

es manuscripts Summary of Kaʿb’s story After conclusion: 3 additional texts about Kaʿb’s teaching

ws manuscripts Introduction: summary of both tales Baḥira and the crosses, pursued by the ws Sabrisho and king Nuʿmān

32 “First” and “second” tale refer to their position in the final text not necessarily to their respective time of composition which is difficult to assert.

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The East-Syrian Origin of Sergius Baḥīrā’s Legend

Although the text is transmitted in East-Syriac and West-Syriac manuscripts, I would like to argue for an East-Syriac origin of its composition. It is likely that the recension transmitted in the West-Syriac manuscripts, rather counterintuitively, was produced in the Church of the East. There are a number of arguments that supports this theory. Baḥīrā is never referred to as a “Nestorian,” a label we would expect in a West-Syriac text (and one we find in the Byzantine and the Arabic traditions). Although the general introduction does not exist in the ES recension as we now have it, but only in the WS, it presents an East-Syriac setting for the story. It mentions in its first lines both the Revelation to Sergius on Mount Sinai about the Sons of Ishmael, and the story of Sergius’s encounter with Muḥammad, weaving together the two blocks of the story. We can thus infer that it was added after the completion of the History out of the two tales. There are a number of striking East-Syriac features: Sergius Baḥīrā is called Rabban, a typically East-Syrian title for clerics. The narrator, Ishoʿyahb in this case, also bears a distinctly East-Syriac name. The West-Syrians pursued Baḥīrā, because they did not accept his teaching saying that Christians should worship only one cross and not many as in the churches of his time, and only a wooden cross, not a silver or metal one, because that would be similar to worshipping pagan idols. Therefore, they are held responsible for the flight of Sergius to the desert of Yathrib.33 Baḥīrā supposedly became familiar with the local Arabs thanks to the Catholicos of the Church of the East, Mar Sabrisho (596–604) who made miracles and converted the Arab king Nuʿmān of Ḥirta/al-Ḥīra (583–c.602). This passage clearly relies on an ES Life of Sabrisho34 and mentions another EastSyriac cleric, the monk Ishoʿzekhāyā who also appears in his Life.35 Sidney Griffith interpreted it as a West-Syriac insinuation that the East-Syrians were responsible for the creation of the Islamic teachings.36 However, as Roggema 33 The ancient name of Medina, constantly used in Syriac texts. 34 J.M. Fiey, Saints syriaques, Late Antiquity and Early Islam 6 (Princeton, N.J.: Darwin Press, 2004), no 392, 168–169. M. Tamcke, Der Katholikos-Patriarch Sabrišoʿ  I. (596–604) und das Mönchtum, Europäische Hochschulschriften 23, Theologie 302 (Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 1988), esp. 22, 83. 35 P. Bedjan, ed. Histoire de Mar-Jabalaha, de trois autres patriarches, d’un prêtre et de deux laïques nestoriens (Paris: Otto Harrassowitz, 1893), 288–331. The story of Nuʿmān can be found pp. 321–328 (Roggema, The Legend, 315, n7). It is also mentioned in the Chronicle of Seert (Patrologia Orientalis 1, no. 3, 478–481). 36 Griffith, “Muḥammad,” 157–159.

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rightly points out, there is no trace of polemic or negative interpretation in this passage.37 On the contrary, we can detect an anti-West-Syrian bias in the cause of the flight of Sergius. This passage legitimates Baḥīrā who acted with Muḥammad and the Arabs, as Sabrisho did with Nuʿmān and the pre-Islamic tribes. It situates him in a filiation of Christian-Arabic encounters, before Islam and in the process of the creation of Islam, thus emphasizing that the new religion is but a Christian variant. The introduction we have now in the West-Syriac manuscripts clearly aims at establishing the credentials of Sergius Baḥīrā and his sanctity in the context of the Church of the East since he was supported by the positive figure of Mar Sabrisho. This introduction is poorly integrated into the narrative that starts afterwards with the account of (Ishoʿ)yahb, also present in the East-Syriac recension, by a loose narrative device: “After these things …” The narrative of (Ishoʿ)yahb’s encounter with Sergius starts there. This introduction mentioning Sabrisho and Nuʿmān seems to have been added when the two blocks of the story were combined, but only in part of the manuscript tradition. Some manuscripts in the Church of the East either did not present this addition or removed it because of the loose connexion with (Ishoʿ)yahb’s account. Either this branch without the introduction was translated into Arabic and into Latin (which translated only the first tale about Sergius),38 or the translation took place before the introduction was added. Accordingly, we should refer not to a WS and an ES recension but rather to two ES recensions, one of which was transmitted later on only in WS manuscripts. It was slightly modified then: it asks for the prayers of Mary, mother of God – a typical WS appellation –, and Mor Barṣaumo – a Syrian-Orthodox saint – at the end of the text. It also adds a small paragraph about the construction of buildings in the prophecy of the second part.39 Several arguments thus point to an East-Syriac origin of the text. We could imagine, of course, that West-Syrians created an East-Syriac setting for the History in order to hold the dyophysites responsible for the perverted message transmitted to Muḥammad by Sergius. Yet there is no negative interpretation of Sergius’s message. The figure of Kaʿb is even introduced in order to exonerate Sergius of any distortion.

37 Roggema, The Legend, 317, n9. 38 I cannot deal here with the Latin version. See Roggema, The Legend, 215–218 for the position of the editors and her own arguments. 39 For the differences between ES and WS recensions, see Roggema, The Legend, 211–212.

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It seems that it is rather late in the process of the text’s composition that there came to be two distinct recensions of the story and an introduction was added to one of them, and a conclusion40 to the other. Because they share the same material in the same order, we can infer that the first and second tales of (Ishoʿ)yahb were already combined (with the mention of Kaʿb in between), when the ES and (the now) WS recensions began to diverge. The ES recension places at the end of the second tale, in a kind of final conclusion, information that the other recension displays at the beginning of the first part in the introduction. The information in these passages differ, however, since Sergius supposedly came from Bēt Garmai in the ES recension, and from an unknown place, Bēt Qudshaye, in the WS, a place that sounds like an East-Syrian place name but does not exist. The name of the village is Tishn in WS, a village actually attested in Bēt Garmai, whereas the ES version has Shushan, the well-known city of Suza, which is not in Bēt Garmai, but the capital of the province of Elam. The information is garbled and it is legitimate to ask whether they came from the same original and were later displaced. They may have come from the same source, if we hypothesise that a correction took place towards a lectio facilior in the ES recension, Shushan being a well-known place, contrary to Tishn. The rendering of Bēt Qudshaye instead of Bēt Garmai is more difficult to explain. It is thus unclear how these elements were included and at what stage in the history of the text. Another place in the text where both recensions differ concerns the figure of Kaʿb the Scribe who appears after the end of the first part, and the death of Sergius Baḥīrā.

The Figure of Kaʿb

The developments dealing with Kaʿb clearly aim at showing that he is the one liable for distorting the message of Baḥīrā, in an attempt to present the latter in a positive light. Abū Isḥāq Kaʿb ibn Matiʿ ibn Haysuʿ or Haynuʿ, according to his full name, known as Kaʿb al-Aḥbār,41 was according to Ibn 40 Roggema, The Legend, 298–299: “The account of Mar Sergius, called Baḥīrā, written by the monk Mar Yahb has come to an end. Now, I, Mar Yahb composed it.” 41 M. Schmitz, “Kaʿb al-Aḥbār,” Encyclopaedia of Islam (2nd ed.; Leiden: Brill, 1974), 316. Rubin, The Eye of the Beholder, 317; R. Gottheil and H. Hirschfeld, “KAʿB AL-AḤBAR,” Jewish Encyclopedia.com; H. Hirschberg, “Kaʿb al-Aḥbār,” Encyclopaedia Judaica (New York: Macmillan, 1971–1972). R. Tottoli, Biblical Prophets in the Qurʾan and Muslim Literature (Richmond: Curzon, 2002), 89–92, and about the evolution of the Muslim attitude to the

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Isḥaq (d. ca. 768), a Yemenite Jew who converted to Islam after the death of Muḥammad.42 According to the Jewish tradition, he was a companion of the Prophet Muhammad.43 His name Aḥbār is the plural of ḥibr/ḥabr, from the Hebrew ḥābir, a colleague, companion and, ultimately, a scholar. He is called a scribe, sāprā, in Syriac. Kaʿb is recognized as an authority in the transmission of Jewish materials (Isrāʾīliyyāt) into Islam, and books on the story of the Bible and the prophets circulated in his name.44 Kaʿb became in Christian and Jewish traditions the one who corrupted Muḥammad’s scripture from within and the one responsible for the alteration (al-taḥrīf ) of the text of the Scriptures. Al-Kindī’s letter also says that before Muḥammad could become a Nestorian, Sergius Baḥīrā died and “his teaching was distorted by two learned Jews, ʿAbd Allāh ibn Salām and Kaʿb al-aḥbār.”45 In later Muslim literature, too, it is suggested that he was a false convert and undermined Islam by introducing extraneous Jewish teachings.46 Kaʿb appears in the Story of Sergius Baḥīrā as the one who convinced the Muslims that Muḥammad was the Paraclete announced by Christ.47 According to the recension preserved in WS, he also prophesied that Muḥammad would rise from the dead after three days. In this recension, he is called Kalb, obviously a scribal mistake for Kaʿb that is correctly spelled in ES.48 He is not mentioned however in any other version of the text, either in Latin, or in the Arabic version that places on Baḥīrā the responsibility for the transmission of Christian teaching to Muḥammad: instead of the mention of

42

43 44 45 46 47 48

Jewish traditions, 171–183. S. Lowin, “Kaʿb al-Aḥbār,” Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World. Executive Editor N.A. Stillman. Consulted online on 15 September 2021. First published online: 2010. Kaʿb is charged today with being the first Zionist who undermined the Islamic tradition. The risāla of al-Hāšimī/al-Kindī by an anonymous author, in all likelihood a Nestorian, S.H. Griffith, “The Prophet Muḥammad, His Scripture and His Message according to the Christian Apologies in Arabic and Syriac from the First Abbasid Century,” in La vie du prophète Mahomet: Colloque de Strasbourg, octobre 1980, ed. T. Fahd (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983), 99–146 (105–107). J. Leveen, “Mohammed and his Jewish Companions,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 16, no. 4 (1926): 399–406. Tottoli, Biblical Prophets, 91. Tartar, Dialogue; A. Guillaume, trans. The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ishaq’s Sīrat Rasūl Allah (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955). Tottoli, Biblical Prophets, 91. Cf. John 14.16, 15.26, 16.7; Griffith, “Muḥammad,” 135–136; Schmitz, “Kaʿb al-Aḥbār.” It is easy to mistake the Syriac letter ‫ ܥ‬ʿe, for the lomadh, with a similar shape but taller ‫ܠ‬.

Sergius Baḥīrā and a Syriac “ Story of Muḥammad ”

375

Kaʿb, we read in Arabic a passage where Baḥīrā bitterly regrets what he has taught to Muḥammad and the Muslims. The passage about Kaʿb is shared by both Syriac recensions, meaning that it was already present when they diverged. Therefore, it is likely that it was added after the translations in Latin and Arabic. The ES has only a short version of the passage about Kaʿb between the two main tales: {9} Then, after Mar Sergius died, a man rose up from the Jews whose name was known as Kaʿb the Scribe, and he was a teacher, a scribe, and a prophet for them. {9.4} He corrupted the teaching of Mar Sergius, since he told them that the one about whom Christ said: ‘Behold, after me the Paraclete will come to you’ |that| is Muḥammad. And lo, until our day they adhere to and follow this tradition that Muḥammad is the Paraclete.49 The recension preserved in the WS manuscripts is longer: {9} After the death of Sergius another man stood up, who was called Kalb the Scribe. He was from the race of Abraham. He was a bastard of the Jews from there and was a scribe. This Kalb the Scribe became a teacher for them and a scribe after Sergius and a false prophet. He taught falsehood and proclaimed untruth and he changed what Sergius had written and taught. He said to them ‘the one about whom Christ son of Mary, has said, “behold, I will come and send you the Paraclete,” that is Muḥammad.’ And ‘there will be a sign to you: when Muḥammad has died he will go up to heaven like ʿĪsā son of Maryam, and he will rise after three days.’ And it happened that when Muḥammad died the people of his community came together and they embalmed him and put him in a house with great reverence. Then they closed the door to see what would become of him. And after three days, they opened the door and nobody could enter the house because of the foul smell of Muḥammad’s body. And no one needs to investigate what happened to it. When Kalb the Scribe died he was buried like a donkey, because his prophecy had not been fulfilled. He was also found to be a liar and an impostor. However, because of their irrationality, they abandoned the words of Rabban Sergius Baḥīrā, which were true, and accepted and adhered to this tradition, which Kalb the 49 Roggema, The Legend, 269.

376

Debié

Scribe had given them, and until this day they say that the Paraclete is Muḥammad.50 The WS account has a more pronounced anti-Jewish stance. It mentions a false prophecy that Muḥammad would resurrect after three days like Jesus, a statement that is not present in ES, at least not in that passage of the text. Kaʿb’s teaching about Muḥammad being the Paraclete announced by Christ is shared by both recensions, but in a shorter form in ES. It is likely that the ES abbreviated material in the common section in order to include it and expand it in the additional pieces following the History of Sergius. Two of the passages following the History of Sergius take the form, traditional in the East-Syriac literature, of “Causes,” a genre well represented in the scholastic tradition of the Church of the East. One bears the title of “The Cause of Muḥammad,” the other of “The Cause of the Qurʾān.”51 They are preceded by a “Profession of faith that Kaʿb the scribe transmitted to the Īšmaʿālāyē” that introduces the alleged teaching of Kaʿb. The commentary included in the title of this text: “His memory be cursed,” shows that they aim at presenting Kaʿb as the bad teacher and Sergius, conversely, as the good one. The ES “Cause of the death of Muḥammad” seems to be an abbreviation of the version preserved at the end of the first part of the History of Sergius in the WS manuscripts, since the latter offers information necessary to understand the story: the prophecy of Kaʿb about Muḥammad’s resurrection. It is because Kaʿb had announced his resurrection after three days that the people who buried him came back to see what happened, an element that is not in the ES version, which creates an ellipse that makes the story difficult to understand. The passage about Kaʿb’s teachings between the first and second tale was probably added in the form we have in the WS manuscripts, because it makes more sense. It is likely that the ES recension as we have it now summarized this passage in its initial place, at the end of the first part, and then

50 Roggema, The Legend, 334–335. M.A. Amir-Moezzi, “Muhammad the Paraclet and ʿAlî the Messiah: New Remarks on the Origins of Islam and of Shiʿite Imamology,” Der Islam 95, no. 1 (2018): 30–64. 51 Roggema translates ʿeltā as “affair” but the more specific sense of “cause” seems preferable. On this East-Syriac genre, see A.H. Becker, Fear of God and the Beginning of Wisdom: The School of Nisibis and the Development of Scholastic Culture in Late Antique Mesopotamia, Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), chap. 5.

Sergius Baḥīrā and a Syriac “ Story of Muḥammad ”

377

created the three additional passages after the end of the text, in the form of “Causes.”

Texts and Manuscripts

As mentioned above, manuscript witnesses in the Church of the East are often rather late and this is also the case with the manuscripts examined in the present study. Many have disappeared during the wars and tribulations in the region. Others are still in local libraries and are not available for scholars, although a surprisingly positive outcome of the recent wars in Iraq are digitization campaigns that make some of the collections available online.52 The manuscript from Charfet is the only one known so far that copies six texts after the History of Sergius Baḥīrā. Concerning the History of Sergius, Roggema, who made the most recent edition of the text, establishes two main groups of manuscripts: a primary division emerges between West Syriac (WS) and Latin (two thirteenth- and fourteenth-century manuscripts)53 on the one hand and East Syriac (ES), Arabic 1 and Arabic 2 on the other.54 For ES, three manuscripts preserve the History of Sergius Baḥīrā,55 but only two of them include the three additional texts and the manuscript from Charfet is the only one that copies all six. Some of the Syriac manuscripts include the The Disputation between a Muslim and a Monk of Bēt Ḥālē after the History of Sergius, but none of these three ES ones:56 52 See the work done by Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML) at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota and by the monks of the monastery of Our Lady of the Seeds in Iraq, with a joint cataloguing and digitizing project by BnF, local students and scholars in Paris. 53 Roggema, The Legend, 215–218. 54 Roggema, The Legend, 221. 55 Roggema, The Legend mentions eight additional East-Syriac manuscripts to which she did not have access, among which three from the monastery Mar Antonius in Baghdad and two from Notre-Dame des Semences in Alqosh (243–245). The Mardin Chaldean Bishopric 82 she mentions as containing the text (p. 245, according to Scher’s catalogue, 87) is not the same as the manuscript catalogued by HMML under this shelf mark. See A. Scher, “Notice sur les manuscrits syriaques et arabes conservés dans la bibliothèque de l’évêché chaldéen de Mardin,” Revue des bibliothèques 18 (1908): 64–95 (87), ms. 82, item 6. In Macomber’s unpublished checklist of the manuscripts in Mardin, it has the shelf mark Macomber 100.11. Taylor, “The Disputation,” 202, n56, suggests that it was separated from the Mardin collection at some date after Macomber’s visit. 56 Taylor, “The Disputation,” 201–203.

378

Debié

Berlin Staatsbibliothek Sachau 10 (Sachau 78) 22 ff. Siglum S

Birmingham Mingana Syr. 604 dated 8 May 1933 225 ff. Siglum Q

Charfet Raḥmani 122 (Sony 841) 1889, f. 115–140 Siglum R

Date

17th c. according to Sachaua 14th or 15th according to Gottheilb

Written for Mingana, through the deacon Matthew, son of Paul, in the village of Alqosh, by the deacon Joseph, son of Thomas of the family of Abuna, in the time of the Pope Pius XI and of the Chaldean Patriarch Emmanuel IIc (colophon f. 225v)

Copied in the year 1889 by Zayā bar Qashīshā Zayā bar Paulus bar Zayā bar Marugā (?), at the request of ʿAbd al-Aḥad (colophon f. 140)

Contentd

f. 1–20r: the beginning is incomplete and the text starts at 3.07. Explicit (f. 20r) ‫ܫܠܡܬ‬

f. 1–23: ‫ܕܣܪܓܝܣ‬ ‫ܬܫܥܝܬܐ‬ ܼ

f. 115r–133v: ‫ܬܫܥܝܬܐ‬ ‫ܕܣܪܓܝܣ ܕܡܬܟܢܐ‬ ܼ ̈ ‫ܨܠܝܒܐ‬ ܼ ‫ܣܢܐ‬. ‫ܕܥܒܝܕ‬ ܼ ‫ܠܡܪܝ ܝܗܒ ܡܬܟܪܟܢܐ‬

‫ܬܫܥܝܬܐ ܕܡܪܝ ܣܪܓܝܣ‬ ‫ܕܡܬܩܪܐ ܒܚܝܪܐ‬ ‫ܕܥܒܝܕܐ ܠܡܪܝ ܝܗܒ‬ ‫ܝܚܝܕܝܐ‬ End of the story of Mar Sargis called Baḥīrā that was made by Mar Yahb the solitary

‫ܕܥܒܝܕ‬ .‫ܕܨܠܝܒܐ‬ ‫ܣܢܐ‬ ܼ ܼ ‫ܠܡܪܝ ܝܗܒ ܐܠܗܐ‬ ‫ܡܬܟܪܟܢܐ‬

The story of Sergius “the hater of the cross” that was made by Mar Yahbalaha the wanderer Explicit: ‫ܫܠܡܬ ܬܫܥܝܬܐ‬

The Story of Sargis called “the hater of crosses” that was made by Mar Yahb the wanderer

‫ܕܣܪܓܝܣ ܒܚܝܪܐ‬

End of the story of Sergius Baḥīrā

a E. Sachau, Verzeichniss der syrischen Handschriften der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Berlin, vol. 1, Die Handschriften-Verzeichnisse der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Berlin 23 (Berlin: A. Asher & Co, 1899), 293–294. b R.J.H. Gottheil, “A Christian Bahira Legend,” Zeitschrift für Assyriologie 13 (1898): 189–242; 14 (1899): 203–268; 15 (1900): 56–102; 17 (1903): 125–166. c A. Mingana, Catalogue of the Mingana Collection of Manuscripts now in the Possession of the Trustees of the Woodbrooke Settlement, Selly Oak, Birmingham, vol. 1 (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1933), 1156–1161 (1161). d Although the manuscripts are East Syriac, I chose to use the estrangela script throughout this paper since it is more familiar to most readers.

Sergius Baḥīrā and a Syriac “ Story of Muḥammad ”

379

(cont.)

Berlin Staatsbibliothek Sachau 10 (Sachau 78) 22 ff. Siglum S

Birmingham Mingana Syr. 604 dated 8 May 1933 225 ff. Siglum Q

Charfet Raḥmani 122 (Sony 841) 1889, f. 115–140 Siglum R

f. 20r–21r: excursus on Sergius’ family and background also by Yahb

2 fols. are left blank then various East Syriac texts were copied from several manuscripts

excursus on Sergius’ family and background also by Yahb

f. 21r: ‫ܬܘܒ ܟܬܒܝܢܢ‬ ‫ܬܘܕܝܬܐ ܕܐܫܠܡ‬ ̈ ‫ܠܐܝܫܡܥܠܝܐ ܟܥܦ‬ ‫ܣܦܪܐ ܕܘܟܪܢܗ ܠܠܘܛܬܐ‬ ‫ܐܡܝܢ‬

f. 133v–134v: ‫ܬܘܒ‬ ‫ܟܬܒܝܢܢ ܬܘܕܝܬܐ‬ ̈ ‫ܠܝܫܡܥܠܝܐ‬ ‫ܕܐܫܠܡ‬ ‫ܟܥܒ ܣܦܪܐ ܕܘܟܪܢܗ‬ ‫ܠܠܘܛܬܐ ܐܡܝܢ‬

Now we write the Profession of faith that Kaʿp the scribe transmitted to the Īšmaʿālāyē. His memory be cursed. Amin

Now we write the Profession of faith that Kaʿb the scribe transmitted to the Īšmaʿālāyē. His memory be cursed. Amin

f. 21r–22r: ‫ܥܠܬܐ ܕܡܘܬܗ‬

f. 134v–135r: ‫ܬܘܒ ܥܠܬܐ‬

Now the Cause of the death of Maḥmad

Now the Cause of the death of Maḥmad

‫ܕܡܚܡܕ‬

‫ܚܡܕ‬ ܲ� ‫ܕܡ‬ ܲ� ‫ܕܡܘܬܗ‬

f. 22r–v: ‫ܥܠܬܐ ܕܩܘܪܐܢ‬

f. 135r–136v: ‫ܬܘܒ ܥܠܬܐ‬

Now the Cause of the Qurʿān that Sargis transmitted to them for them to study it ̇ ‫ܘܒܢܐ‬ Des. ‫ܒܗ ܡܕܝܢܬܐ‬

Now the Cause of the Qurʾān that Sargis transmitted to them for them to study it

‫ܕܐܫܠܡ ܠܗܘܢ ܣܪܓܝܣ‬ ‫ܕܢܬܗܓܘܢ ܒܗ‬

̇ ̇ ‫ܫܡܗ‬ ‫ܘܩܪܗ‬ ‫ܪܒܬܐ‬

The copy breaks abruptly off here

‫ܕܩܘܪܐܢ ܕܐܫܠܡ ܠܗܘܢ‬ ‫ܣܪܓܝܣ ܕܢܬܗܓܘܢ‬ ‫ܒܗ‬

380

Debié

(cont.)

Berlin Staatsbibliothek Sachau 10 (Sachau 78) 22 ff. Siglum S

Birmingham Mingana Syr. 604 dated 8 May 1933 225 ff. Siglum Q

Charfet Raḥmani 122 (Sony 841) 1889, f. 115–140 Siglum R

f. 137r–v: ‫ܬܘܒ‬

̈ ‫ܕܟܠܝܦܐ‬ ‫ܡܘܕܥܢܘܬܐ‬

Now information on the caliphs f. 137v: ‫ܬܘܒ ܫܪܒܬܐ‬

̈ ‫ܕܡܚܡܕ ܡܠܟܐ‬ ‫ܕܛܝܝܐ‬

Now the genealogy of Maḥmad, king of the Arabs Final colophon (f. 225v) identifies the book as a selection of texts from various manuscripts

‫ܟܬܒܐ ܕܡܟܢܫܐ ܗܢܐ‬ ̈ ‫ܟܬܒܐ‬ ‫ܕܐܬܟܢܫ ܡܢ‬

f. 137v–138v: ‫ܡܠܟܘܬܐ‬

̈ ‫ܕܛܝܝܐ‬

The kingdom of the Arabs General explicit: ‫ܫܠܡܬ‬

‫ܚܡܕ‬ ܼ ܲ� ‫ܕܡ‬ ܲ� ‫ܬܫܥܝܬܐ‬ End of the story of Maḥmad

The scribe of manuscript Birmingham, Mingana syr. 604, copied a previous colophon: This copy was made from an old copy which was found in the monastery of Mar Jacob the Recluse which is near Sıırt in the year 1884 of our Lord. It was written and brought by the monks of Rabban Hormizd to the Monastery of the Virgin in the year 1896 and during the depopulation and killing that took place among the Armenians that old manuscript was destroyed and this new one survived.57 57 A. Mingana, Catalogue of the Mingana Collection of Manuscripts now in the Possession of the Trustees of the Woodbrooke Settlement, Selly Oak, Birmingham. Woodbrooke Catalogues 1–3 (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1933, 1936, 1939), 1156.

Sergius Baḥīrā and a Syriac “ Story of Muḥammad ”

381

This colophon is interesting for the history of the Christian communities at the turn of the twentieth century. The monastery of Mar Jacob in the Sıırt district to which the colophon alludes, had, since the second half of the sixteenth century, been the seat of the Chaldean patriarch ʿAbdishoʿ IV Maron and his successor Shemʿon VIII Yahballaha, and a number of manuscripts were copied there. It was a metropolitan see in 1562. The last Chaldean metropolitan of Sıırt was the scholar Addaï Scher (1902–1915) who was killed during the genocide and who until the end tried to conceal the manuscripts in Mar Jacob. It is probably at that time that the original was destroyed. However, in 1896 monks from Rabban Hormizd brought the copy to the Monastery of the Virgin (Our Lady of the Seeds) in Iraq thus ensuring its survival. In 1826–1855, a monk from Rabban Hormizd was the metropolitan of Sıırt, which shows the link between the two monasteries at the time.58 The manuscript in Charfet (R) also has a colophon (f. 138v–139r), saying that it was copied by the deacon Zaya, son of the priest Zaya, son of Paulos, son of Zaya, son of Maruga, from the Ris Gibo family, from Aradan (in the district of Amedia, Northern Iraq), at the request of ʿAbd al-Aḥad, 8 Feb. 1889, “from old Mesopotamian books.” The colophon implies that at least two manuscripts were used as models for the copy. Therefore, the three additional texts might come from one or several manuscripts different from the one that contained the History of Sergius Baḥīrā. The form of Muḥammad’s name is consistently Maḥmad in these texts. The two forms of the name Kaʿb/p in the ES manuscripts show that they did not have the same model. The ES Texts about Kaʿb’s Teaching The texts about Kaʿb add more comments on Islam. The first one deals with the paganism of the Arabs; the second with Kaʿb’s teaching, namely that Muḥammad is the Paraclete announced by Jesus and the false prediction that Muḥammad would rise from the dead; the third one is about the Qurʾān, how Kaʿb tampered with it, and then how al-Ḥajjāj codified it (for more on al-Ḥajjāj, see below).

58 J.F. Coakley, The Church of the East and the Church of England: A History of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Assyrian Mission (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

382

Debié

The Profession of Faith of Kaʿb59

̈ ‫ܬܘܒ ܟܬܒܝܢܢ ܬܘܕܝܬܐ ܕܐܫܠܡ‬ ‫ܠܝܫܡܥܠܝܐ ܟܥܒ ܣܦܪܐ ܕܘܟܪܢܗ‬ ‫ܠܠܘܛܐ܀ܐܡܝܢ܀‬ ‫ ܐܝܬܝܗܘܢ‬.‫ܕܗܘ ܒܠܒܠ ܘܚܒܠ ܟܠ ܡܕܡ ܕܟܬܒ ܣܪܓܝܣ ܡܢ ܩܕܝܡ‬ ̈ ‫ܒܢܝ ܝܫܡܥܝܠ‬ ̈ ‫̄ܗܘܘ ܓܝܪ‬ ‫ܚܢܦܐ ܒ̈ܪܝܪܐ ܒܕܡܘܬ ̈ܪܟܫܐ ܕܠܐ ܦܓܘܕܬܐ‬ ̈ ̈ ̈ ‫ܕܫܗܕܐ‬ ‫ܫܡܗܝܘܢ‬ ‫ ܕܐܝܬܘܗܝ ܐܒܠܝܣ‬.‫ܠܨܠܡܐ ܕܐܠܟܒܪ‬ ‫ܣܓܕܝܢ ̄ܗܘܘ‬ ̈ ‫ ܐܠܗܬܐ ܕܐ̈ܪܡܝܐ ܘܥܘܕܝ‬61‫ ܘܐܝܗܕ‬.‫ ܐܠܗܐ ܕܦܪܣܝܐ‬60‫ ܒܗܕܡ‬:‫ܗܠܝܢ‬ ̇ ̈ ̈ :‫ܒܢܝܗ ܘܪܡܝܙܕ ܘܐܘܟܒܪ ܕܝܫܡܥܝܠ‬ ‫ ܘܗܠܝܢ‬62.‫ܕܚܬܝܐ‬ ‫ ܐܪܛܡܝܣ‬.‫ܕܒܒܠܝܐ‬ ̈ ̈ ̈ ‫ ܗܠܝܢ ܒܢܝ ܬܝܡܝܢ ܘܣܡܘ ܫܡܗܐ ܕܫܐܕܐ ܥܠ‬.‫ܐܠܗܬܐ ܕܦ̈ܪܣܝܐ‬ ̈ ‫ ܘܡܢ ܗܘܬ ܛܥܝܘܬܐ‬.‫ܟܘܟܒܐ ܘܣܓܕܝܢ ̄ܗܘܘ ܠܗܘܢ ܥܕܡܐ ܠܝܘܡܢܐ‬ ̈ ‫ܕܫܐܕܐ ܒܐܬܪ ܐܬܪ ܘܣܓܕܝܢ ܠܐܘܟܒܪ ܘܠܟܐܦܐ ܘܠܒܪܐ ܕܡܬܩܪܝܐ‬ ̈ ‫ ܘܒܝܘܡܬܗܘܢ ܗܘܬ‬.‫ܙܡܙܡ ܘܠܩܒ̈ܪܐ ܕܝܢܣ ܘܝܡܒܪܣ ܚ̈ܪܫܐ ܕܡܨܪܝܢ‬ ̈ ‫ܦܠܝܓܘܬܐ ܘܛܥܝܘܬܐ‬ ̈ ‫ܒܒܢܝܢܫܐ ܡܛܠ ܗܘܪܡܙܕ ܘܐܪܡܢ‬ ‫ܕܫܐܕܐ‬ ‫ ܘܗܘܪܡܙܕ‬.‫ܘܐܪܗܡܢ ܐܘܠܕ ܠܚܫܘܟܐ‬ ‫ܐܡܪܝܢ ܕܗܘܪܡܝܙܕ ܐܘܠܕ ܠܢܘܗܪܐ‬ ܷ ̈ ‫ ܒܗܪܐ ܘܥܘܕܝ ܘܐܢܗܝܕ‬.‫ܐܘܠܕ ܠܛܒܐ ܘܐܪܗܡܢ ܠܒܝܫܐ‬ ‫ܒܢܝ ܗܘܪܡܝܙܕ‬ ̈ ‫ ܒ ܸܝܠ ܘܐܘܟܒܪ ܘܐܪܛܝܡܝܣ‬.‫ܕܫܡܗܝܗܘܢ ܠܥܠ ܒܫܡܝܐ‬ ݁ .‫ܒܢܝ ܐܗܪܡܙܕ‬ ̈ ̈ ‫ܫܡܗܝܗܘܢ ܠܬܚܬ ܥܠ ܐܪܥܐ ܘܒܢܝ ܐܫܡܥܝܠ ܗܐ ܡܪܓܙܝܢ ܠܐܠܗܐ‬ ̈ ̈ .‫ܟܠܗܘܢ ܝܘܡܬܐ ܕܚܝܝܗܘܢ ܒܫܘܬܦܘܬܐ ܕܥܡ ܐܘܟܒܪ ܘܠܐ ܝܕܥܝܢ ܠܗ‬ ‫ ܘܗܐ ܥܒܕܝܢ‬.‫ܘܫܡܗ ܕܐܘܟܒܪ ܡܬܟܪܙ ܡܢܗܘܢ ܒܩܠܐ ܪܡܐ ܒܗܬܝܢ‬ ̈ .‫ܕܒܚܐ ܟܠ ܫܢܐ ܒܫܢܐ ܥܕܡܐ ܠܝܘܡܢܐ‬ ‫ܠܗ‬ Now, we write the profession of faith which Kaʿb the Scribe – cursed be his memory – transmitted to the Ishmaelites, Amen. He confounded and corrupted everything that Sergius had written previously. For the Sons of Ishmael were foolish pagans, like horses without a bridle. They worshipped the statues of al-Kabar,63 who is Iblīs. The names of the demons are these: Bahram, god of the Persians, Ayhid,64 goddess of the Arameans, and ʿwdy65 of the Hittites, these are 59 B. Roggema, “The Confession which Kaʿb al-Aḥbār Handed down to the Ishmaelites,” in Roggema, The Legend, 403–405. Roggema, The Legend, 298–301. Charfet, Raḥ. 122, f. 133v–134v. See also B. Roggema, “Muslims as Crypto-Idolaters – a Theme in the Christian Portrayal of Islam in the Near East,” in Christians at the Heart of Islamic Rule: Church Life and Scholarship in ʿAbbasid Iraq, ed. D. Thomas, The History of Christian-Muslim Relations 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 1–18 for a discussion of this passage. 60 ‫ ܒܗܕܡ‬Bahdam, read ‫ ܒܗܪܡ‬Bahram. 61 Read ‫ ܐܢܗܝܕ‬as below. ̈ 62 Read ‫ܚܝܬܝܐ‬ . 63 Maybe the same as Awkbar. 64 Probably Anahid as further in the text, with a misreading of n as y. 65 The name is not otherwise known.

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the children of Hormizd, and Awkbar of the Ishmaelites, [Baal]66 of the Babylonians, Artemis, goddess of the Persians, these are the Sons of the South. And they attribute the names of the demons to the stars and they have worshipped them until this day, when the error of the demons was established in every place: they worship Awkbar and the Stone, and the well that is called Zamzam, and the grave of Jannes and Jambres, the magicians of Egypt. And in their days, there was division and the error of the demons among the people. About Hormizd and Ahriman, they say that Hormizd gave birth to light and Ahriman to darkness, and Hormizd gave birth to good and Ahriman to evil. Bahram, ʿwdy and Anahid are the children of Hormizd, whose names are on high in heaven. Baal, Awkbar and Artemis are the children of Ahriman, whose names are below on earth. And the Sons of Ishmael, lo, they anger God every day of their lives because of the association with Awkbar, without knowing it. And the name of Awkbar is proclaimed by them shamelessly with a loud voice, and lo, they sacrifice to him year after year, until our day. The text explicitly accuses Kaʿb of distorting Sergius’s message. The Arabs are characterised as wild horses, a traditional designation, stemming from Gen. 16.12, where Ishmael’s descendants are deemed to become “a wild-ass.” It reaffirms that the Muslims are pagans, using the word, traditional in Syriac of ḥanpe, the same root as ḥanīf in Arabic, a word applied to Ibrāhīm (Abraham in the Bible).67 The text accuses the Arabs of adoring several gods before Islam and jumbles up the names of ancient gods belonging to different local traditions: Zoroastrian, Greek, Mesopotamian and Arabian. The mention of Artemis either refers to Artemis of the Babylonians, the goddess Nana, as in manuscript R, or to the well-known Artemis of the Ephesians, according to manuscript S. The temple of Artemis of Ephesus (near the modern town of Seljuk in present-day Turkey) was well known in Antiquity as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. It was also mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles and in other early Christian texts. It had become the pagan Greek cult par excellence. In the same vein, Baal, mentioned in the Old Testament, was the icon of ancient Mesopotamian religion.

66 A word was added and erased in the Charfet ms. In S, Baal is added: Baal of the Babylonians. 67 On this word, see F. de Blois, “Naṣrānī (Ναζωραȋος) and ḥanīf (ἐθνικός): Studies on the Religious Vocabulary of Christianity and of Islam,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 65, no. 1 (2002): 1–30. It is one “of those expressions the precise meaning of which was unknown and the interpretation of which was considered a legitimate subject of scholarly disagreement” (18).

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The text also displays some knowledge of Zoroastrianism. It is another hint regarding the place of composition in the Iranian realm. The passage mentions the god Wahram (Old Iranian Vṛθragna, Middle Persian Warahrān or Wahrām), the god of victory; that Hormizd is the principle of Good and Ahriman of Evil, showing that it is aware of the dualistic dimension of the Iranian religion, although it attributes it to the pre-Islamic Arabs. The other gods are classified as good and evil, depending on whether they are the offspring of either the Good or Evil principle. The expression “Sons of the South” used here for the demons is a common Danielic wording (Dan. 11) and bears an eschatological undertone. The Arabs are accused of star worshipping, astrology, a common reference to pre-Islamic astrological cults in Arabia. Among these gods Iblis is mentioned first, apparently as pre-Islamic, although not known before the Qurʾān where he is cited nine times for his rebellion against God’s command to prostrate himself before Adam. He was considered an angel, then turned into a devil (often called al-Shayṭān “the Devil”) or a jinn depending on the commentators. The stone is the Ka‌ʿba and Zamzam is the sacred spring of Mecca, a reference to Islamic rituals. The third cult mentioned, al-Kabar and Awkbar, is a Christian attempt to revert unto the Muslims the accusation of shirk, “association” (of a partner to Allah) that is found in the Qurʾān.68 The expression Allāhu akbar is understood as meaning that the Muslims in their proclamation of faith associate Awkbar to Allah, as another god, and call two gods, Allāh wa-Akbar, “Allah and Akbar,” thus committing the sin of shirk, each time the muezzin calls to prayer. Awkbar is presented as a traditional god of the Arabs that the Muslims keep worshipping. The accusation of sacrifice is a Christian topos against pagans.

The Cause of Muḥammad’s Death69

‫ܬܘܒ ܥܠܬܐ ܕܡܘܬܐ ܕܡܚܡܕ‬ ̄ ‫ܐܢ‬ ‫ ܡܛܠ‬.‫ܐܢܫܐ ܡܫܐܠ ܠܐܢܫܝܢ ܡܢܗܘܢ ܥܠ ܩܒܪܗ ܠܐ ܝܕܥܝܢ‬ ̄ ‫ܕܐܚܝܕܝܢ ܡܫܠܡܢܘܬܐ ܕܐܫܠܡ ܠܗܘܢ ܟܥܒ ܣܦܪܐ‬ ‫ܝܗܘܕܝܐ ܐܝܟ‬ .‫ ܕܡܚܡܕ ܦܪܩܠܛܐ ̄ܗܘ ܕܐܫܬܘܕܝ ܒܗ ܡܫܝܚܐ‬:‫ܕܐܡܪܝܢ ܕܐܡܪ ܠܗܘܢ‬ ̄ ‫ܘܒܬܪܗ ܬܘܒ ܠܐ ܩܡ ܢܒܝܐ‬ ̈ ‫ ܘܗܘܝܘ ܚܬܡܐ‬.‫ܐܚܪܢܐ‬ ‫ ܡܬܝܩܪ‬.‫ܕܢܒܝܐ‬ ‫ ܘܟܕ‬.‫ ܘܒܬܪܟܝܢ ܟܥܒ‬.‫ ܕܐܬܢܒܝ ܥܠܘܗܝ ܣܪܓܝܣ ܒܚܝܪܐ‬.‫ܡܚܡܕ ܛܒ‬ ̈ ̈ ‫ ܘܚܢܛܘܗܝ‬.‫ܒܢܝ ܥܡܗ‬ ‫ܒܥܝܢܝܗܘܢ ܟܠܗܘܢ‬ ‫ܡܝܬ ܡܚܡܕ܇ ܐܬܝܩܪ‬ 68 Roggema The Legend, 301. P. Crone, “The Religion of the Qurʾānic Pagans: God and the Lesser Deities,” Arabica 57, no. 2 (2010): 151–200. 69 “The Affair of the Death of Muḥammad,” in Roggema, The Legend, 401–402. Roggema, The Legend, 302–303. Ms. Charfet f. 134v–135r.

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‫ ܚܕ ܪܒܐ‬.‫ܒܡܘܪܐ ܘܥܠܘܝ ܘܣܡܘܗܝ ܒܥܪܣܐ ܘܐܥܠܘܗܝ ܠܒܝܬܐ‬ ̈ ݁ ‫ܘܚܬܡܘ ܬܪܥܐ ܕܒܝܬܐ‬ ‫ܗܘ ܟܕ ܐܡܪܝܢ ܕܠܬܠܬܐ‬ ‫ܝܘܡܝܢ ܣܠܩ ܠܫܡܝܐ‬ ̈ ‫ ܘܒܬܪ ܬܠܬܐ ܝܘܡܝܢ ܐܬܟܢܫܘ ܟܠܗܘܢ ܘܦܬܚܘ‬.‫ܠܘܬ ܡܫܝܚܐ ܕܫܕܪܗ‬ ‫ܬܪܥܐ ܕܒܝܬܐ ܕܢܚܙܘܢ ܡܢܐ ܓܕܫ ܠܗ ܠܢܒܝܐ ܕܐܠܗܐ ܘܠܐ ܐܫܟܚܘ‬ ‫ ܘܠܐ ܥܠܨܐ ܕܢܘܕܥ ܥܠ ܩܒܪܗ ܕܠܐ‬.‫ܠܡܥܠ ܡܢ ܪܚܝܐ ܕܫܠܕܗ ܕܢܒܝܐ‬ ̈ ‫ ܘܗܐ ܐܚܝܕܝܢ ܡܫܠܡܢܘܬܐ ܥܕܡܐ ܠܝܘܡܢܐ܇‬.‫ܫܡܘܥܐ‬ ‫ܢܣܬܟܠܘܢ‬ ݁ ‫ܕܡܚܡܕ‬ ‫ ܫܒܘܩܘ ܠܝ ܐܚܝ ܟܠ‬.‫ܗܢܘ ܦܪܩܠܝܛܐ ܕܐܬܐ [ܒܬܪ] ܡܫܝܚܐ‬ ݁ ‫ܒܘܠܒܠܐ ܘܛܥܝܘܬܐ ܘܫܪܒܐ ܕܡܠܝܢ ܡܢ ܡܟܬܒܢܘܬܐ‬ ‫ܗܝ ܕܟܥܒ‬ ‫ ܟܥܒ ܕܝܢ ܡܝܬ ܘܩܒܘܪܬܐ ܕܡܚܡܕ ܐܬܩܒܪ܇ ܘܠܐ ܫܩܠܬ‬.‫ܣܦܪܐ‬ .‫ܢܒܝܘܬܗ ܫܘܠܡܐ‬ Now, the Cause of Maḥmad’s death If one asks any of them about his grave,70 they do not know, because they have this tradition71 that, as they say, Kaʿb the Jewish scribe, handed down to them. He told them that Maḥmad is the Paraclete whom Christ has promised, that after him no prophet has risen and that he is the seal of the prophets. And because of that, Maḥmad about whom Sergius Baḥīrā, and afterwards Kaʿb, prophesied is greatly honoured. When Maḥmad died, he was honoured in the eyes of all his people. They embalmed him with myrrh and aloe and placed him in a bier. They brought him into a big room and sealed the door of this room, saying that after three days he would rise to heaven, to Christ, who sent him. And after three days, they all gathered and opened the door of the room to see what had happened to the prophet of God, but they could not enter due to the smell of the corpse of the prophet. It is not necessary to tell about the grave what the listeners may not understand. This is the tradition that they hold until today, that Maḥmad is the Paraclete that came [after] Christ. Forgive me, my brother, for all the confusion and error and account that fill this writing of Kaʿb the scribe. Kaʿb died and was buried in Maḥmad’s tomb and his prophecy was not accomplished.

70 During the reign of the Umayyad caliph al-Walīd I, al-Masjid an-Nabawi (the Mosque of the Prophet) in Medina was expanded to include the site of Muhammad’s tomb: he was buried where he died, in Aisha’s house (A.T. Welch, “Muḥammad,” Encyclopaedia of Islam 7, ed. P.J. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W.P. Heinrichs, et al. (2nd ed.; Brill Online, 2014), 360–376). 71 ‫ܡܫܠܡܢܘܬܐ‬, mashlmānūtā is the word used already by John bar Penkaye (wr. ca 687) when talking about what Muḥammad transmitted to the Arabs: “they kept to the tradition of Muḥammad.”

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The title of this passage concentrates on the death of Muḥammad but the scope is broader and questions the nature of Muḥammad: who he is or, more precisely, who he is not. In a negative way, the text denounces the interpretations that understand him as the Paraclete or as a prophet. The beginning of the passage deals with a theological argument saying that one of the changes introduced in the Qurʾān by Kaʿb is that Muḥammad is the Paraclete that Jesus promised to send after he went back to his father (John 16.7). The argument is based both on the Gospel and on a Qurʾānic passage saying that Jesus foretold the coming of a messenger (al-Aʿrāf, Q 7. 157).72 It had been an issue since the beginning of Islam to prove that Muḥammad’s prophethood was announced in the Torah and the Gospels. If the Qurʾān actually says so in the passage mentioned above, it does not reveal to us where these prophecies can be found. Ibn Ishāq, who lived during the caliphate of Abū Jaʿfar al-Manṣūr (r. 754–775) apparently presents the first attempt to connect Q 61. 6 and John 15. 26–16 (cf. his Kitāb al-Maghāzī). The identification of the Paraclete is also a theme attested in the disputation of the caliph al-Mahdī (r. 775–785) with the East Syrian Patriarch Timothy I (780–823). The second theme deals with Muḥammad’s death and burial but aims at contesting his prophethood. Here the proclamation that Muḥammad is the seal of the prophets (a reference to Q 33. 40 where Muḥammad is deemed “Messenger of God and the Seal of the Prophets, rasūl Allāh wa-khātam al-nabiyyīn”) is also attributed to Kaʿb and thus negatively connoted. The question of Muḥammad’s burial cannot but evoke the Lives of the Apostles and more particularly the Lives of the Prophets, which were translated from Greek into Syriac,73 especially the summaries that concentrate on their death. These Lives were extremely popular in the three Syriac churches as well as in other churches of Late Antiquity and we can read this story also as a counter-Life of a prophet who is not accepted as such. This passage extends thus the Christian genre of the death and burial of the prophets and apostles to Muḥammad, with the aim of contesting his prophetical status. All the Christian apologists 72 See S.W. Anthony, “Muḥammad, Menaḥem, and the Paraclete: new light on Ibn Ishāq’s (d. 150/767) Arabic version of John 15: 23–16: 1,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 79, no. 2 (2016): 255–278, for the Christian Palestinian source of Ibn Ishāq’s Gospel version and, more broadly, the importance of this Johannine passage in the Abbasid period, see M.A. Amir-Moezzi, “Muhammad the Paraclet and ʿAlî the Messiah: New Remarks on the Origins of Islam and of Shi’ite Imamology,” Der Islam 95, no. 1 (2018): 30–64. 73 S.P. Brock, “The Lives of the Prophets in Syriac: Some Soundings,” in Biblical Traditions in Transmission: Essays in Honour of Michael A. Knibb, ed. C. Hempel and J.M. Lieu, Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 111 (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 21–37 (26–30 V).

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of the Abbasid era contend that the lack of personal miracles by Muḥammad was an argument against his divine election because miraculous signs are made by God through his prophets.74 According to al-Kindī’s letter, miracles were attributed to Muḥammad later on. The polemical tone is obvious here, since the text dismisses the idea that Muḥammad could be a prophet, because he did not resurrect after three days like Jesus Christ. In addition, the reference to the foul smell of his body is another way of saying that he is not a saint since sanctity is associated conversely with a nice scent.75 This text is written thus as an anti-hagiography of a character who is presented as neither a prophet, nor a saint. As Roggema points out: [T]his polemical tale about the failed prophecy of Muḥammad’s resurrection must have been popular very early on among Christians, as it already reached Spain in the ninth century. When Pseudo-al-Kindī mentions the failed resurrection, he insinuates that it was the cause of the Ridda, “apostasy,” after the Prophet’s death. Ultimately, this polemical tale could go back to the reports about ʿUmar, who refused to believe that Muḥammad was dead, convinced that his spirit has temporarily been raised to heaven.76

The Cause of the Qurʾān77

‫ܬܘܒ ܥܠܬܐ ܕܩܘܪܐܢ‬ ‫ܕܐܫܠܡ ܠܗܘܢ ܣܪܓܝܣ ܕܢܬܗܓܘܢ ܒܗ܇ ܡܢ ܒܬܪ ܡܘܬܗ ܕܣܪܓܝܣ‬ ̇ ‫ ܘܐܫܠܡ‬.‫ܘܫܚܠܦܗ ܠܡܟܬܒܢܘܬܗ ܕܣܪܓܝܣ‬ ‫ܒܚܝܪܐ ܩܡ ܟܥܒ ܣܦܪܐ‬ ̄ ‫ܠܗܘܢ ܡܠܦܢܘܬܐ‬ ̇ ‫ܐܚܪܬܐ ܘܐܥܠ‬ ̈ ‫ܘܚܠܩܐ‬ ‫ܒܗ ܒܘܠܒܠܐ ܘܚܘܒܠܐ‬ ̈ ̈ ̈ ‫ܘܫܥܝܐ ܘܦܠ‬ .‫ ܘܥܝܢܐ ܚܠܦ ܥܝܢܐ‬.‫ܘܦܓܥܐ ܘܓܙܘܪܬܐ ܘܡܣܚܘܬܐ‬ ̈ ‫ ܘܐܢ ܡܫܬܪܝܐ‬.‫ ܘܫܪܝܐ ܕܢܫܐ‬.‫ ܘܩܛܠܐ ܚܠܦ ܩܛܠܐ‬135v ‫ܘܫܢܐ ܚܠܦ ܫܢܐ‬ ̄ ̇ ‫ܐܢܗܘ ܕܥܒܪܐ ܐܚܪܝܢܐ ܠܐ ܢܣܒ‬ ̇ ‫ܠܗ܇ ܠܐ ܗܦܟ ܡܥܠ‬ ‫ܐܢܬܐ‬ .‫ܠܗ‬ ̤ ̈ ‫ ܘܚܕ ܬܓܡܐ‬.‫ܘܐܫܠܡ ܠܗܘܢ ܠܫܡܐ ܗܢܐ‬ ‫ܕܫܐܕܐ ܕܥܡܪ ܠܬܚܬ ܥܠ‬ .‫ ܘܟܠܡܕܡ ܕܐܚܝܕܝܢ ܡܢ ܝܘܠܦܢܗ ܕܟܥܒ‬.‫ܐܪܥܐ ܘܩܪܝܢ ܠܗ ܠܗܓܝܢܝ‬ ‫ ܣܪܓܝܣ ܐܠܦ‬.‫ ܘܟܥܒ ܥܬܝܩܬܐ‬:‫ܣܪܓܝܣ ܐܫܠܡ ܠܗܘܢ ܚܕܬܐ‬ ‫ ܣܪܓܝܣ ܦܫܩ ܘܐܫܠܡ ܠܗܘܢ‬.‫ ܪܝܡ ܩܠܐ‬.‫ ̄ܗ‬.‫ܢܩܘܫܐ ܘܟܥܒ ܡܟܪܙܢܐ‬ 74 Griffith, “Muhammad,” 141–142. 75 S.A. Harvey, Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination, The Transformation of the Classical Heritage 42 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 76 Roggema The Legend, 303. 77 Roggema, The Legend, 302–309; “The Affair of the Qurʾān,” in Roggema, The Legend, 595–596.

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‫ܡܠܟܝܢ‪ .‬ܘܟܥܒ ܬܠܬܝܢ ܘܫܬܐ‪̇ .‬‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܒܗܝ ܕܐܡܪ ܕܚܙܬ‬ ‫ܥܣܪܝܢ ܘܐܪܒܥܐ‬ ‫̈‬ ‫̄‬ ‫ܡܠܟܘܬܐ ܡܢ ܝܡܐ ܪܒܐ ܕܡܚܡܕ ܡܕܒܪ ܗܘܐ ܠܗܝܢ ܟܕ ܠܒܝܫ‬ ‫ܬܠܬ‬ ‫ܺ‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܠܒܘܫܐ ܝܘܪܩܐ‪ .‬ܟܠܚܕܐ ܡܢܗܝܢ ܬܪܣܪ ܦܪܫܝܢ‪ .‬ܩܕܡܬ ܕܒܢܝ ܝܫܡܥܝܠ‪.‬‬ ‫̈‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܕܒܢܝ ܦܛܡܐ‪ .‬ܟܠܡܕܡ ܕܐܚܝܕܝܢ‪ .‬ܘܒܗ‬ ‫ܕܒܢܝ ܡܚܡܕ ܘܕܬܠܬ‬ ‫ܘܬ̈ܪܬܝܢ‬ ‫̄‬ ‫ܡܬܗܦܟܝܢ ܗܘܘ ܥܕܡܐ ܕܩܡ ܓܒܪܐ ܕܫܡܗ ܚܓܓ ܒܪ ܝܘܣܦ‬ ‫̇‬ ‫ܟܠܗ ܐܪܥܐ ܕܒܝܬ ܐܪܡܝܐ ‪ 136‬ܘܒܢܐ ̇‬ ‫ܕܐܝܬܘܗܝ ܐܡܝܪܐ ܥܠ‬ ‫ܒܗ‬ ‫̄‬ ‫̇‬ ‫̇‬ ‫̇‬ ‫ܕܒܡܨܥܬܗ ܕܗܝ ܐܪܥܐ‬ ‫ܫܡܗ ܘܣܛܡܛܠ‬ ‫ܘܩܪܗ‬ ‫ܡܕܝܢܬܐ ܪܒܬܐ‪.‬‬ ‫̇‬ ‫ܒܢܗ‪ .‬ܘܡܛܠ ܗܕܐ ܐܬܩܪܝܬ ܘܣܛ‪ .‬ܗܝܕܝܢ ܫܕܪ ܠܥܩܬܐ ܘܠܒܨܪܐ‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܒܐܘܚ ̇‬ ‫̈‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܟܬܒܐ‬ ‫ܕܢܝܗ ܘܟܢܫܘ ܘܐܝܬܝܘ ܠܗ ܟܠܗܘܢ܇‬ ‫ܡܕܝܢܬܐ‬ ‫ܘܠܟܠ‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܕܝܠܗܘܢ ܘܡܠܦܢܐ ܕܝܠܗܘܢ܇ ܘܟܕ ܐܬܒܩܝܘ ܟܠܗܘܢ ܒܩܘܪܐܢ ܘܐܫܟܚܘ‬ ‫ܟܠܗ ܕܡܠܐ ܛܥܝܘܬܐ ܘܠܝܬ ܒܗ ܡܕܡ ܕܚܫܚ‪ .‬ܐܠܐ ܟܠܗ ܚܘܒܠܐ‬ ‫ܘܒܘܠܒܠܐ ܘܨܕܩܐ ܘܓܘܚܟܐ‪ .‬ܘܐܦ ܠܐ ܩܠܝܠ ܕܚܠܬ ܐܠܗܐ ܫܟܝܚܐ‬ ‫̄ܗܘܬ ܒܗ‪ .‬ܡܛܠ ܕܟܠܡܕܡ ܕܐܫܠܡ ܠܗܘܢ‪ .‬ܣܪܓܝܣ ܫܚܠܦܗ ܟܥܒ‬ ‫̄‬ ‫ܝܗ ̈‬ ‫ܘܕܝܐ ܘܐܬܩܪܝ ܚܓܓ ܒܪ ܝܘܣܦ ܒܫܘܚܠܦܐ ܕܟܬܒܐ ܕܐܝܬܘܗܝ ܟܠܗ‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܠܟܬܒܝܗܘܢ ܘܐܘܩܕ ܐܢܘܢ ܒܢܘܪܐ ܠܥܝܢ ܟܠܗ‬ ‫ܚܘܒܠܐ‪ .‬ܘܟܢܫܘ ܐܢܘܢ‬ ‫̄‬ ‫̈‬ ‫̇‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܒܡܨܥܬܗ ܕܘܣܛ ܡܕܝܢܬܐ‪ .‬ܘܫܕܪ ܠܟܠܗܘܢ ܡܠܦܢܐ ܘܩܫܝܫܐ‬ ‫ܥܡܐ‬ ‫ܘܟܢܫܘ ܐܢܘܢ ܘܦܫܩܘ ܠܗܘܢ ܨܘܪܬܐ ܕܟܬܟܐ ܕܝܠܢ ܥܬܝܩܬܐ ‪136v‬‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܘܚܕܬܐ‪ .‬ܘܡܢ ܐܘܢܓܠܝܘܢ ܝܐܘܕܝܬܐ‬ ‫ܘܢܒܝܐ ܘܟܠ ܦܬܓܡܐ ܕܫܦܝܪ‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܒܥܝܢܘܗܘܝ ܘܪܚܝܡ ̄ܗܘܐ ܥܠ ܟܠܢܫ ܪܫܡܗ ܒܗ ܘܟܬܒ ܘܣܡ ܡܢ‬ ‫̄ܗܘܐ‬ ‫̈‬ ‫̈‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܟܬܒܐ ܘܩܪܝܗܝ ܩܘܪܐܢ܇ ܘܒܥܐ ܡܢܗ‬ ‫ܬܫܥܝܬܐ ܡܕܡ‪.‬‬ ‫ܦܣܘܩܐ ܐܝܟ‬ ‫̈‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܠܗܝܢ ܫܡܗܐ ܗܠܝܢ‪ :‬ܩܕܡܝܬ ܨܘܪܬ ܠܒܘܩܪܐ ܕܗܝ ܝܩܝܪܐ ܒܥܝܢܝܗܘܢ‬ ‫̇‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܘܒܬܪܗ ܨܘܪܬ ܥܡܪܢ ‪ .‬ܘܨܘܪܬ ܝܘܣܦ‪.‬‬ ‫ܬܫܥܝܬܗܘܢ‪.‬‬ ‫ܛܒ ܡܢ ܟܠܗܝܢ‬ ‫ܘܨܘܪܬ ܡܪܝܡ‪ .‬ܘܨܘܪܬ ܥܝܣܐ‪ .‬ܘܨܘܪܬ ܝܣܝܢ‪ .‬ܘܨܘܪܬ ܚܡܝܡ‪ .‬ܘܨܘܪܬ‬ ‫ܐܠܦ ܡܝܡ‪ .‬ܘܨܘܪܬ ܡܘܣܐ‪ .‬ܘܨܘܪܬ ܐܗܪܘܢ‪ .‬ܘܣܓܝܐܬܐ ܐܚܪܢܝܬܐ‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܐܝܠܝܢ ܕܠܐ ܐܠܝܨܐ ܠܢ ܕܢܘܕܥ ܫܡܗܝܗܘܢ‪ .‬ܘܗܠܝܢ‬ ‫ܣܦܩܢ ܠܦܪܘܫܐ‬ ‫ܠܡܫܒܚܘ ܠܚܟܡܬܗ ܕܐܠܗܐ ܘܠܡܕܒܪܢܘܬܗ ܬܡܝܗܬܐ ܐ̈ܪܙܐ ܠܐ‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܡܬܡܠܢܐ‪ .‬ܡܬܕܟ̈ܪܢܐ ܕܠܗ ܫܘܒܚܐ ܘܥܠ ܟܠܗ ܥܠܡܐ ܚܢܢܣܐ‬ ‫ܘܪܚܡܘܗܝ ܢܓܢܘܢ ܥܠܝܢ ܘܥܠܝܟܘܢ‪ :‬ܐܡܝܢ‪.‬‬ ‫‪The cause of the Qurʾān‬‬ ‫‪The Cause of the Qurʾān, which Sergius transmitted to them for them‬‬ ‫‪to study. After the death of Sergius Baḥīrā, Kaʿb the Scribe rose up and‬‬ ‫‪changed the writing of Sergius and transmitted another teaching to them.‬‬ ‫‪And he introduced in it confusion, corruption, lots, mockery, disputes,‬‬ ‫‪circumcision, ablution, “an eye for an eye” and “a tooth for a tooth” and‬‬ ‫‪“a killing for a killing” and the repudiation of women, and that if a woman‬‬ ‫]‪is repudiated,78 but another man does not take her, he [the husband‬‬ ‫‪The reference here is to Q 2.230. This type of divorce is called talaq. It becomes final only‬‬ ‫‪when a waiting period of three full menstrual cycles expires. The husband can revoke‬‬

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cannot return to her. He transmitted to them this name and one legion of demons that lives down on earth and that they call “Jinni,” and everything they hold to is from the teaching of Kaʿb. Sergius transmitted to them the New and Kaʿb the Old [Testament]. Sergius taught them the semantron79 and Kaʿb the preacher with a loud voice.80 Sergius expounded and transmitted to them twenty-four kings, and Kaʿb thirty-six, for he said “I saw three kingdoms from the great sea, which Maḥmad was leading, wearing a green garment, and each one of them was divided in twelve. The first is [the kingdom] of the Sons of Ishmael, the second of the Sons of Muḥammad, and the third of the Sons of Fāṭma.” And everything they held to and converted to existed until a man stood up whose name is Ḥajjāj bar Yawsef, who was the emir of the whole region of Bēt Aramāyē. He built a great city there and called it Wāsit because81 he built it in the middle of that region: this is why it is called “Wāsit.”82 Then he summoned ʿaqtā83 [ʿAqula?] and Baṣra and all the cities in its vicinity, and they collected and brought all their books and their learned men to him. And when all of them examined the Qurʾān, they found the whole of it to be full of error, and that there was nothing profitable in it, but that it was all corruption, confusion, mockery and

the repudiation any time during the waiting period. The passage refers to the situation of the husband repudiating his wife for the third time: in this case, the couple cannot remarry without an intervening consummated marriage to another man. See Roggema, The Legend, 302. Samawʾal al-Maghribī (c.1130–c.1180) who converted to Islam in 1163 has a similar story in his anti-Jewish tract, Ifḥām al-Yahūd (Confutation of the Jews): Jews used to credit ʿAbd Allāh b. Salām with teaching and instructing Muhammad in the Torah, and for interpolating into the Qurʾān “the marriage law that a wife, after her third divorce from her husband, shall not be permitted to re-wed him until she has been married and divorced from another man, the purpose being, in their contention, to make mamzerim [illegitimate children] of the children of the Muslims … For, in their law, if the husband takes back his wife after she has been married to another man, her children are considered illegitimate.” M. Perlmann, “Samauʾal al-Maghribī Ifḥām Al-Yahūd: Silencing the Jews,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 32 (1964): 57–104, 135–136. 79 Often made of wood, the semantra (plur. of semantron) are percussion instruments that were struck in order to summon the faithful to church (they are still used in Orthodox monasteries). 80 Or reciter of prayers in a mosque. 81 These two words are written without space in both manuscripts as if it were a proper name that the scribes did not know. 82 The name of the city means “The Middle,” wasaṭ in Arabic, because it was situated half way between al-Kūfah and al-Baṣra. 83 Probably a misreading for ʿAqula near Kūfah.

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ridicule. Moreover, not the slightest fear of God84 was to be found in it, because all that Sergius had transmitted to them had been changed by Kaʿb the Jew. Ḥajjāj bar Yawsef contended the falsification of the book, which was completely corrupted. And they collected their books and he burnt them in the presence of all the people in the centre of the city of Wāsiṭ. He sent for all the Christian teachers and priests, and they gathered and explained to them the text (ṣūrtā) of our book, the Old and New [Testament] and from the Gospel what is Jewish and the Prophets. And every verse (petgāmā) that was beautiful in his eyes and which everyone liked, he marked (ršam) it and wrote it down and set it up from the books and he called it Qurʾān. He sought from it sections (pāsūqē) like some sort of stories (tašʿyātā). Their name is: the first is Sūrat al-Baqara, which is honoured by them more than any other of their stories (tašʿyātā). And after that: Sūrat ʿImrān, Sūrat Yawseph, Sūrat Maryam, Sūrat ʿĪsā, Sūrat Ya-Sīn, Sūrat Ha-Mīm, Sūrat Alif-Mīm,85 Sūrat Mūsā, Sūrat Aaron, and many more of which we do not need to give the names. These suffice for the discerning and to glorify the wisdom of God and His marvellous Economy, ineffable and unfathomable mysteries. Glory to Him. May His mercy and love rest on the whole world, on us and on you. Amen. The text presents the teachings of Kaʿb and the differences with Sergius’s ones. As a Jew he is the one who supposedly transmitted to the Muslims the lex talionis, circumcision and the “Old Testament.” The way of designating the latter shows that a Christian wrote this passage, because neither a Jew nor a Muslim would refer to the Bible in this way, distinguishing the Old and New Testaments. Kaʿb is also accused of having transmitted to the Muslims practices that they adopted, such as the preacher in the mosque or the law of divorce called talaq that was the most offensive one for Christians. Based on the History of Sergius, the passage states that Kaʿb also gave a prophecy or changed Sergius’ one. Interestingly it gives the interpretation that the man wearing a green cloak is Muḥammad, which was not stated explicitly in the History of Sergius. It also indicates that Kaʿb gave a different number for the Islamic kingdoms. Here

84

85

This is a typical Syriac expression, often translated as “religion.” Cf. A.H. Becker, Fear of God and the Beginning of Wisdom: The School of Nisibis and the Development of Scholastic Culture in Late Antique Mesopotamia, Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). The last two names do not exist but four suras are named for their muqatta‌ʾat, “disjoined letter” or “mysterious letter,” forming the opening verse of their respective surah: Ṭāʾ-Hāʾ, Yāʾ-Sīn, Ṣād and Qāf.

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again, the numbers are symbolic for Christians, not for Muslims: twelve and three. It took up the names of the dynasties from the History of Sergius. The text then turns to the Qurʾān, which Kaʿb supposedly falsified after Sergius gave it to the Muslims. The argument of scriptural falsification (taḥrīf ) is well known in the Islamic tradition, especially in Shiʿi milieus.86 It is also directed against the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, which were supposedly falsified, and which the Qurʾān therefore corrects. Christian apologists also believed in the taḥrīf of the Qurʾān. Here it is attributed to a Jewish figure. It is interesting to see that the reversal of Kaʿb’s forgery of the text is attributed to al-Ḥajjāj b. Yūsuf whose action is not presented as entirely negative. Two main official collections of the Qurʾān are known in the Islamic tradition: one that the first caliph, Abū Bakr (r. 11–13/632–634) commissioned to Zayd b. Thābit, who had been one of the secretaries of Muḥammad in Medina, and another one, some twenty years later, during the caliphate of ʿUthmān who commissioned Zayd b. Thābit to collect the Qurʾān in the “pure” dialect of Quraysh’ in order to obtain uniformity in the qurʾānic texts. He associated with him three members of noble Meccan families. The copies of the ʿUthmānic codex (al-imām) were sent to the metropolitan centres of Islam: Mecca, Baṣra, Kūfa and Damascus. Other revisions of the Qurʾān are also mentioned, including the one attributed to al-Ḥajjāj.87 It seems that this latter tradition circulated 86 M.A. Amir-Moezzi, Le Coran silencieux et le Coran parlant. Sources scripturaires de l’islam entre histoire et ferveur (Paris: CNRS Édition, 2011), on the accusations of falsification by the Shiites; E. Kohlberg and M.A. Amir-Moezzi, Revelation and Falsification: The Kitāb al-Qirāʾāt of Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Sayyārī: Critical Edition with an Introduction and Notes, Texts and Studies on the Qurʾān 4 (Leiden: Brill, 2009). 87 The canonisation of the Qurʾān has been a highly debated topic in qurʾanic scholarship. J. Wansbrough, Quranic Studies, Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation, Foreword, Translations, and Expanded Notes by Andrew Rippin (New York, Prometheus Books, 2004); J. Burton, The Collection of the Qurʾān (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977); H. Motzki, “The Collection of the Qurʾān. A Reconsideration of Western Views in Light of Recent Methodological Developments,” Der Islam 78 (2001): 1–34; G. Schoeler, “The Codification of the Qurʾan: A Comment on the Hypotheses of Burton and Wansbrough,” in The Qurʾān in Context: Historical and Literary Investigations into the Qurʾānic Milieu, ed. A. Neuwirth, N. Sinai and M. Marx, Texts and Studies on the Qurʾān 6 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 779–794; V. Comerro, Les traditions sur la constitution du muṣḥaf de ʿUthmān, Beiruter Texte und Studien 134 (Beirut: Orient-Institut/Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2012); C. Gilliot, “Oralité et écriture dans la genèse, la transmission et la fixation du Coran,” in Oralité et écriture dans la Bible et le Coran, ed. Ph. Cassuto and P. Larcher (Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2014), 99–142. On the literary testimonies of its constitution, see C. Gilliot, “Creation of a Fixed Text,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Qurʾan, ed. J.D. McAuliffe, Cambridge Companions to Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 41–58 (44–46). Gilliot however does not mention al-Ḥajjāj; G. Dye, “Pourquoi et comment se fait un texte canonique? Quelques réflexions sur l’histoire du

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in Christian polemical texts in the eighth century as well as in some Islamic texts and later almost disappeared.88 These texts, especially the Christian ones, have been discarded by most Islamicists who follow the canonised Sunnite tradition on these issues, but might come from local Islamic sources, as our text seems to confirm, in spite of their obvious polemical tone. The text above refers correctly to the well-known figure of the Umayyad period, al-Ḥajjāj b. Yūsuf who was one of the most notable governors at the time of the caliphs ʿAbd al-Malik and al-Walīd.89 As the passage says, in 83/702 al-Ḥajjāj, then Umayyad governor of Iraq, founded the fortified town of Wāsiṭ as a military encampment on the west bank of the Tigris, midway between Kūfa and Baṣra. He made it his own residence and transferred there the majority of the Syrian troops. The texts focus on his role in seeking to produce a uniform tradition of the text of the Qurʾān. The Christian tradition presents the revision of the ʿUthmānian version as a new endeavour, contrary to the Islamic texts that credit ʿUthmān with sponsoring a philological work aiming at supplying the Qurʾān with diacritical marks and vowel signs, then had the text divided up into sections. The Muslim sources are rather unclear on the actual role of al-Ḥajjāj. The Shiʿi tradition adds that al-Hajjāj, who was a faithful supporter of the Umayyads, supressed in the Qurʾān material that dealt with ʿAlī and his family. Greek Christian texts seem also to hold that he destroyed texts about ʿAlī.90 His endeavour is dated to 703–704.91 The division of the Qurʾān into separate ajzāʾ (thirty sections allowing the whole Qurʾān to be read in a month) could well go back to him, and it may have been on his orders that Coran,” in Hérésies: une construction d’identités religieuses, ed. C. Brouwer, G. Dye and A. van Rompaey, Problèmes d’histoire des religions 22 (Bruxelles, Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2015), 55–104. For an approach based on manuscripts and palaeography, see F. Déroche, Qurʾans of the Ummayads. A First Overview (Leiden: Brill, 2014). 88 A.-L. de Prémare, “ʿAbd al-Malik b. Marwān et le processus de constitution du Coran,” in Die dunklen Anfänge. Neue Forschungen zur Entstehung und frühen Geschichte des Islam, ed. K.-H. Ohliget G.-R. Puin (Berlin: Hans Schiler Verlag, 2005), 179–211 (200–202 on al-Ḥajjāj); N. Sinai, “When did the Consonantal Skeleton of the Quran Reach Closure? Part I,” Bulletin of the Society of Oriental and African Studies, 77, no. 2 (2014): 273–292 (282–284 on al-Ḥajjāj); Dye “Pourquoi,” 87–90, who gathers Christian and Muslims testimonies about al-Ḥajjāj. 89 I thank François Déroche for helping me avoid errors in this passage. A. Dietrich, “al-Ḥad̲ jd̲ ̲ jā̲ d̲ j ̲ b. Yūsuf,” The Encyclopedia of Islam, New Edition, Volume II: C–G (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 39–42. 90 Roggema, The Legend, 309, n113 for the Christian references to al-Ḥajjāj. 91 Dye, “Pourquoi,” 68. O. Hamdan, “The Second Maṣāḥif Project: A Step Towards the Canonization of the Qurʾanic text,” in The Qurʾān in Context: Historical and Literary Investigations into the Qurʾānic Milieu, ed. A. Neuwirth, N. Sinai and M. Marx, Texts and Studies on the Qurʾān 6 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 795–835.

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new vowel points were introduced.92 The Syriac text here does not give much information, but it seems to credit him with: 1. The destruction of previous Qurʾānic manuscripts (the ʿUthmānian codices) but clearly also states that the organisation of the sections was written down, not just recited.93 2. The organisation of the surah,94 or maybe ajzāʾ, and with giving the Qurʾān its name. The name of the Qurʾān is here associated with its segmentation into suras, which has implications for the interpretation of its etymology sometimes linked to the Syriac qeryāna, reading, lection, recitation.95 It is also interesting to see that the suras are described as tales, stories. The order given here of the surah of the Cow and the surah of āl-ʿImrān is found also in Muslim texts.96 The association of al-Ḥajjāj and the surah of the Cow is also mentioned in a ḥadith.97 The text then cites the surah designated by Christian names; the surah starting with a “mysterious letter” and, finally, the surah bearing names of Old Testament prophets. From where does the Syriac text take this information? And how did it relate the History of Sergius to that of al-Ḥajjāj? The passage seems to be an attempt to explain that Kaʿb the Jew distorted Sergius’s message, but that al-Ḥajjāj restored it thanks to other Christian sages, turning again the Qurʾān into a Christian book retaining what pleased the caliph and the people assembled by him. We have here a Christian alternative narrative of the canonisation of the Qurʾān as a kind of Christian text reorganised by al-Ḥajjāj. In addition, the polemic content emerges at a deeper level by contending that the Qurʾān was revealed to Muḥammad. It presents it as the result of several human interventions in its edition, prominently that of Christians: Sergius at the beginning, then the wise man who corrected the falsification introduced by Kaʿb 92 Dietrich al-Ḥad̲ jd̲ ̲ jā̲ d̲ j,̲ from Nöldeke, Geschichte des Qorans2, iii, 260 and 262. O. Hamdan, Studien zur Kanonisierung des Korantextes. Al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrīs Beiträge zur Geschichte des Korans (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006), 146–174; O. Hamdan, “The Second Maṣāḥif.” 93 Recent scholarship claims however that it was only the recitation that was modified by al-Ḥajjāj (On these topics, C. Gilliot, “Les traditions sur la composition/coordination du Coran (ta‌ʾlīf al-Qurʾān),” in Das Prophetenḥadīṯ. Dimensionen einer islamischen Literaturgattung, ed. C. Gilliot and T. Nagel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005); Dye, “Pourquoi,” 90–91; Sinai “When did the consonantal,” 282–284). 94 Dye, “Pourquoi,” 86–87. 95 See, among others, A. Neuwirth, “Du texte de récitation au canon en passant par la liturgie. À propos de la genèse de la composition des sourates et de sa redissolution au cours du développement du culte islamique,” Arabica 47, no. 2 (2000): 194–229 (215–216). 96 Dye, “Pourquoi,” 90–92, on the ordering of the Qurʾān. 97 Dye, “Pourquoi,” 89–90.

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the Jew. The polemic is double and addressed to Jews and Muslims alike in the Islamicate world. The attribution of the organisation to the governor of Iraq points again to an Iraqi, if not to say a Shiʿi, origin of information and interestingly erases the ʿUthmānian and subsequent versions.

The Three Additional Pieces

Since the scribe of the manuscript simply said that he copied the texts “from old Mesopotamian books,” it is impossible to know when these texts were composed and from which model. The latest date cited in each gives a terminus post quem. The vocabulary used is also an indication of the period of composition. Exposition on the Caliphs This is a short succession of the atabegs (Seljuk provincial governors) in Mosul preserving local information on Mosul and Arbela.98

̈ ‫ܕܟܠܝܦܗ‬ ‫ܬܘܒ ܡܘܕܥܢܘܬܗ‬ ‫ ܒܫܢܬ ܚܡܫܡܐܐ ܘܥܣܪܝܢ ܠܫܠܛܢܐ‬:‫ܗܘܝܬ ܝܕܥ ܐܘ ܡܪܝ ܩܪܝܐ‬ ̈ ̇ ̈ ‫ܡܐܬܝܬܗ‬ ‫ܕܛܝܝܐ ܗܘܬ‬ ‫ ܘܒܫܢܬ ܚܡܫܡܐܐ‬.‫ܕܟܠܝܦܐ ܠܡܘܨܠ‬ ̈ ‫ ܘܒܫܢܬ ܚܡܫܡܐܐ ܘܫܬܝܢ‬.‫ܘܐ̈ܪܒܥܝܢ ܘܫܬ ܫܢܝܢ ܐܬܩܛܠ ܢܨܪܠܕܝܢ‬ ‫ ܘܒܫܢܬ ܐܠܦ‬.‫ܘܫܬ ܫܢ ̤ܝܢ ܗܘܬ ܡܐܬܝܬܗ ܕܢܘܪܕܝܢ ܡܢ ܚܠܒ ܠܡܨܘܠ‬ ̇ ̈ ̈ ‫ܕܐܝܬܗ ܒܕ‬ :‫ܕܝܘܢܝܐ‬ ‫ܘܐܪܒܥܡܐܐ ܘܬܫܥܝܢ ܘܐܪܒܥܐ‬ ‫ܫܡܥܠܝܐ ܫܢܬ‬ ̄ ̈ ‫ܚܡܫܡܐܐ ܘܫܒܥܝܢ ܘܬܡܢܐ‬ ‫ܫܢܝܝܢ ܒܬܫܪܝ ܐܚܪܝ ܬܫܥܐ ܒܗ ܝܘܡ‬ ‫ ܐܬܐ ܝܘܣܦ ܕܐܬܟܢܝ ܨܠܚܐܕܝܢ ܒܪ ܐܝܘܒ ܕܐܝܬܘܗܝ‬:‫ܬܠܬ ܒܫܒܐ‬ ̄ ̇ ‫ ܟܕ ܕܝܢ‬.‫ܘܟܒܫܗ ܠܡܘܨܠܡܕܝܢܬܐ‬ .‫ܗܘܐ ܡܠܟܐ ܕܡܨܪܝܢ ܘܕܕܪܡܣܘܩ‬ ̇ .‫ܡܠܟܗ ܐܝܬܘܗܝ ܗܘܐ ܡܣܥܘܕ ܕܐܬܟܢܝ ܥܙܕܝܢ ܒܪ ܡܡܘܕ ܒܪ ܙܢܓܝ‬ ̈ ‫ ܘܡܪܝ ܛܛܘܣ ܡܝܛܪܢ ܕܐܪܒܠ‬.‫ܒܝܘܡܝ ܚܣܝܐ ܡܪܝ ܐܠܝܐ ܩܬܘܠܝܩܐ‬ ̈ .‫ ܘܝܬܒ ܥܠ ܡܘܨܠ ܀ܟܘ܀ ܝܘܡܬܐ ܀ܗ܀ ܒܟܢܘܢ ܩܕܡ‬137v .‫ܘܕܡܘܨܠ‬ ̇ ̇ ̈ ‫ ܘܡܢ ܒܬܪ ܬܪܬܝܢ‬.‫ܐܚܕܗ‬ ‫ܫܢܝܢ‬ ‫ܡܢܗ ܟܕ ܠܐ‬ ‫ܘܒܝܘܡ ܚܕܒܫܒܫܐ ܫܢܝ‬ ̇ ̈ ‫ ܘܫܢܬ ܐܠܦ ܘܬܠܬܡܐܐ ܘܬܫܥܝܢ ܘܬܠܬ ܕܝܘܢܝܐ܇‬.‫ܫܩܠܗ ܠܗܪܫܠܡ‬ ̇ ̈ ‫ܕܐܝܬܗ ܒܕ ܛܝܝܐ ܐܪܒܥܡܐܐ ܘܫܒܥܝܢ ܗܟܢܐ ܗܘܐ ܫܘܪܝܐ ܕܒܢܝܢܐ‬ .‫ܕܫܘܪܐ ܕܐܪܒܠ‬

98 S. Runciman, A History of the Crusades, Volume II: The Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Frankish East, 1100–1187 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952).

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Now an exposition on the caliphs (f. 137r–137v) You must know, O Lord Reader that in the year 520 of the rule of the Arabs (ṭāyayē),99 the arrival of the caliphs took place in Mosul. And in the year 546, Naṣir el-Din was killed.100 And in the year 566 was the arrival of Nur el-Din from Aleppo to Mosul.101 In the year 1494 of the Greeks,102 which is the year 578 of the Išmaʿlayē103 in November, Tuesday 9, came Joseph named Salaḥdin b. Ayyub who was king of Egypt and Damascus.104 He laid siege to the city of Mosul105 while its king was Masʿud, named Azdin b. Mamud b. Zengi106 during the days of saint Mar Elias the catholicos107 and Mar Ṭuṭos, the metropolitan of Arbela and Mosul. He stayed against Mosul 26 days and Sunday 5 December he left without taking it. After two years, he captured Jerusalem. And in the year 1393 of the Greeks,108 which is 470 of the Arabs (ṭāyayē),109 it was the beginning of the (re)construction of the wall of Arbela. The text uses the term “caliph” to designate the Zengid emirs of Mosul. The dates are not accurate, but the passage concerns the beginning of the rule of the Seljuk atabegs (governors) of Mosul, with Imad al-Din Zengi, in 1127. The dates are given according to the Seleucid (anno Graecorum) or the Hijra era.

The Genealogy of Muḥammad, King of the Arabs

̈ ‫ܕܛܝܝܐ‬ ‫ܡܠܟܐ‬ ‫ܕܡܚܡܕ‬ ‫( ܬܘܒ ܫܪܒܬܐ‬f. 137v, l. 8) ܲ� ܲ� ܲ� ‫ ܩܘܨܝ ܐܘܠܕ‬.‫ܘܟܠܒ ܐܘܠܕ ܠܩܘܨܝ‬ .‫ ܘܟܥܒ ܐܘܠܕ �ܲܟܠܒ‬.‫ܠܘܝ ܐܘܠܕ ܟܥܒ‬ ݂ ܵ ‫ ܘܥܒܕܡ‬.‫ܥ ݁ܦ‬ ܵ ‫ܥܒܕܡ‬ ‫ܥ ݁ܦ ܐܘܠܕ‬ ‫ ܘܥ ܸܒ ݁ܕ‬.‫ܠܡ ܵܛܠܝ‬ ܸ ܸ ܲ� ‫ ܘܗܫܡ ܐܘܠܕ ܥ ܸܒ ݁ܕ‬.‫ܗܫܡ‬ ܲ� ܲ� ̈ ̄ ‫ܗܝ܀ܝܒ܀ܗܘܘ ܒܡܢܝܢܐ܇ ܘܥܒܕܐܠܗ‬ ‫ܘܐܚܘ‬ ‫ܠܡ ܵܛܠܝ ܐܘܠܕ ܥܒܕܐܠܗ‬ ܲ� ‫ܐܘܠܕ ܡܚܡܕ܀‬ 99 1125. 100 1152. Probably Imad al-Din Zengi (c.1085–14 September 1146), the founder of the dynasty who was assassinated by a Frankish slave. 101 1171. Nūr al-Dīn Abū al-Qāsim Maḥmūd ibn ʿImād ad-Dīn Zengī (February 1118–15 May 1174) was indeed atabeg of Aleppo. 102 1182/83. 103 1183. The date in both eras match (the date in the text is given according to the Hijra calendar). 104 Al-Nasir Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub (1137–4 March 1193), first sultan of Egypt and Syria. 105 Saladin besieged the city unsuccessfully in 1182 but finally gained control of it in 1186. 106 Izz al-Din Bin Qutb al-Din Mawdud Bin Imad ud-Din Zengi (d. 1193). 107 Eliya III (1176–1190). 108 1081/82. 109 1078. The dates in two comput do not match.

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Now the genealogy of Maḥmad king of the Arabs (ṭayāyē) Luʾay fathered Kaʿb and Kaʿb fathered Kalab,110 and Kalab fathered Qawṣi111 and Qawṣi fathered ʿAbedmaʿap112 and ʿAbedmaʿap fathered Hašam113 and Hašam fathered ʿAbd el-Maṭali114 and ʿAbd el-Maṭali fathered ʿAbdallah115 and his brothers, twelve in number, and ʿAbdallah fathered Maḥmad. As is usual in Syriac, Muḥammad bears the title of “king of the Arabs,” never of “prophet.” His genealogy does not start with Ismāʿīl (Ishmael) but with Luʾay. That may be because Luʾay fathered Kaʿb, the same name as Kaʿb the Scribe. Therefore, it may have interested the copyist of the texts about Kaʿb, who chose to start with a familiar name. The form and vocalisation of the proper names are erroneous, probably because they were not familiar to the Christian scribes.

The Kingdom of the Arabs

̈ ‫ܕܛܝܝܐ‬ ‫ܡܠܟܘܬܐ‬ ̈ ̈ ‫ܕܝܘܢܝܐ ܥܠ ܡܢܝܢܐ‬ ‫ܒܫܢܬ ܬܫܡܐܐ ܘܬܠܬܝܢ ܘܬܠܬ‬ ‫ܕܛܝܝܐ ܐܡܠܟ ܩܕܡܝܐ‬ ̈ (138) ‫ܡܚܡܕ܀ܫܢܝܐ܀ ܝ܀ܐܒܘܒܟܪ‬ ‫܀ܫܢܝܐ܀ܒ܀ ܘܝ̈ܪܚܐ܀ ܝ܀ ܥܘܡܪ ܒܪ ܟܛܒ܀‬ ‫ܫܢܝܐ܀ ܝ܀ ܘܝ̈ܪܚܐ܀ܘ܀ ܘܐܬܩܛܠ ܡܢ ܥܒܕܐ ܕܫܡܗ ܐܒܘܠܘܠܘܐ ܟܕ ܡܨܠܐ‬ ̈ ‫ܘܒܢܘܗܝ ܟܠܗܘܢ ܡܢ‬ ‫̄ܗܘܐ ܒܒܝܬ ܡܣܓܕܐ܇ ܘܐܦ ܗܘ ܥܒܕܐ ܐܬܩܛܠ ܗܘ‬ ̈ ‫ ܘܒܫܢܬ܀ܝܕ܀ܕܛܝܝܐ ܐܡܠܟ‬.‫ܥܒܕܐ ܕܫܡܗ ܪܚܡܢ܇ ܒܪܗ ܕܥܘܡܥܪ ܡܠܟܐ‬ ̄ ̈ ̈ .‫ܪܘܪܒܢܘܗܝ‬ ‫ܫܢܝܐ܀ ܝܒ܀ ܘܐܬܩܛܠ ܒܡܕܢܬܗ ܡܢ‬ ‫ܥܘܬܡܢ ܒܪ ܥܦܢ܀‬ ̈ ‫ܐܒܘܛܠܒ܀ܫܢܝܐ܀ܕ܀ܘܝ̈ܪܚܐ ܛ܀ܘܒܫܢܬ܀ܠܗ܀ܘܝ̈ܪܚܐ܀ܘ܀ܐܬܩܛܠ‬ ‫ܥܠܝ ܒܪ‬ .‫ ܠܥܒܕܐ ܩܛܠܘܗܝ‬.‫ܩܛܠܗ ܕܝܢ ܥܒܕܐ ܪܚܡܢ ܒܪ ܡܠܓܡ ܒܡܣܓܕܐ ܕܦܘܦܗ‬.‫ܥܠܝ‬ ̈ ‫܀ܫܢܝܐ‬ ‫ ܘܐܡܠܟ ܡܥܘܝܐ‬.‫ܘܐܡܠܟ ܚܣܢ ܒܪܗ ܒܬܪܗ ܝ̈ܪܚܐ܀ܗ܀ ܘܐܬܩܛܠ‬ ̈ ‫܀ܫܢܝܐ܀ܓ܀ܘܝ̈ܪܗܐ܀ܓ܀‬ ‫܀ܚܛ܀ ܘܝ̈ܪܗܐ ܀ܗ܀ ܘܝܙܝܕ ܒܪ ܡܥܘܝܐ ܐܡܠܟ‬ ̄ ‫ܐܡܠܟ ܡܪܘܢ ܒܪ ܚܟܡ܀ܐ܀ ܫܢܬܐ܀ ܘܝ̈ܪܚܐ܀ܗ܀ ܘܟܝܢ ܐܡܠܟ ܥܒܕ‬ ̈ ‫ܠܡܠܟ ܒܪ ܡܪܘܢ܀ܫܢ ̤ܝܐ܀ܟܐ܀ ܘܐܝܬܘܗܝ ̄ܗܘܐ ܪܫ‬ ‫ܛܝܝܐ ܕܒܡܥܪܒܐ܀‬ ̈ (138v)‫ܐܡܠܟ ܡܥܘܝܐ ܒܪ ܐܒܘܣܘܦܝܢ܀ ܘܩܪܐ ܠܢܦܫܗ ܡܠܟܐ ܘܪܫܐ ܕܛܝܝܐ‬ ̇ ‫ܕܒܡܕܢܚܐ܀ ܐܡܠܟ ܥܠܝ ܒܪ‬ ‫ܐܒܘܠܛܘܐܠܒ܀ ܘܐܬܟܬܫܘ ܥܡ ܚܕܕܐ ܗܘ‬ ̈ ̈ ‫ܘܡܥܘܝܐ܀ ܒܒܠ‬ ‫ܐܠܦܐ ܚܝܠܐ܀ ܘܥܠܝ܀ ܨ܀ ܐܠܦܝܢ܀ ܘܐܬܚܕܘ ܘܥܒܕܘ‬ ̈‫ܩܪܒܐ ܒܨܝܦܐ ܕܥܠ ܦܪܬ ܀ ܘܐܬܩܛܠܘ ܒܢܝܬܗܘܢ ܒܚܕ ܝܘܡܐ܀ܥ܀ ܐܠܦܝܢ‬ ̈ ‫ܘܐܬܚܪܒܘ ܡܢ ܬܪܝܗܘܢ‬ ̈ ‫ܓܒܐ ܣܘܓܐܐ܀ ܒܫܢܬ܀ ܠܐ܀‬ ‫ܕܛܝܝܐ ܘܥܠܝ ܢܚܬ‬ .‫ܠܟܘܦܗ‬ 110 111 112 113 114 115

Kilab ibn Murrah. Qusai ibn Kilab. ʿAbd Manaf ibn Qusai. Hashim ibn ʿAbd Manaf. ʿAbd al-Muttalib. ʿAbd Allah ibn ʿAbd al-Muttalib.

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The kingdom of the Arabs In the year 933 of the Greeks, according to the reckoning of the Tayyayē, the first who reigned was Maḥmad, for ten years. (138r) Abū Bakr,116 for two years and ten months.117 (?) ʿUmar b. Kaṭṭab,118 for ten years and six months and he was killed by a slave called Abū Lūlūā119 while he was praying in the mosque. This slave was killed too, he and all his sons by a slave of the son of ʿŪmar the king, called Raḥman. In the year fourteen of the Tayyayē, reigned ʿUthman b. ʿAfan,120 for twelve years. He was killed in his city121 by his chiefs. ʿAlī b. Abū Tālib122 for four years and nine months. In the year thirty-five and six months, ʿAlī was killed. ʿAbd el-Raḥman b. Muljam killed him in the mosque of Kūfah.123 They killed the slave. Ḥasan,124 his son, reigned after him for five months and he was killed. Maʿwiyā125 reigned for nineteen years and five months. And Yāzīd b. Maʿwiyā126 reigned for three years and three months.127 Marwan b. Ḥakam128 reigned for one year and five months.

116 Abū Bakr al-Siddīq (632–634). 117 The word “month” is misspelled consistently as ‫ ܝܪܟܐ‬with a kaph instead of a ḥa, which is surprising for such a common name if the scribe knew Syriac well. We can assume that he knew Arabic or Sureth and only marginally Syriac. The careless handwriting, with numerous errors and strikethrough, points to a little professional scribe. 118 ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭtāb (634–644). 119 That is the name under which he is known in Muslim sources (Tabari I, 2632), but the Syriac chronicles do not record his name, except Elijah of Nisibis, who cites a work now lost by al-Khwarizmi, but the source here is different. See L.J. Delaporte, trans., La chronographie d’Élie Bar-Šinaya, Métropolitain de Nisibe, traduite pour la première fois d’après le manuscrit Add. 7197 du Musée britannique, Bibliothéque de l’École des Hautes Études, Sciences historiques et philologiques 181 (Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion, 1910), 81. 120 ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān (644–656). 121 That is in Muḥammad’s city, Yathrib: medi(n)teh, Medina. 122 Vocalised Talab in the manuscript. ʿAlī ibn Abī T̩ālib (656–661). 123 Where he had taken refuge. The name is misspelled as Pūpah in the manuscript. Transcription of dialectical Arabic. 124 Al-Ḥasan ibn Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib (661). On the chronology of his life, and what the EastSyrian author Thomas of Marga has to say, see M. Tillier, “Le règne du calife Ḥasan bar ʿAlī d’après une source syriaque,” Les carnets de l’Ifpo, 29 novembre 2013 https://halshs .archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00920206. 125 Spelled ‫ ܡܠܘܝܬ‬with ta marbuta transcribed in Syriac. 126 Yazīd ibn Muʿāwiya (680–11 November 683). 127 Spelled correctly this time. 128 Marwan I (ca. 623–626 – April/May 685).

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And then reigned ʿAbdalmalik b. Marwan129 for twenty-one years. He was the head of the Tayyayē of the West. Maʿwiyā b. Abū Sufyān reigned and he called himself king and head of the Tayyayē of the East. And ʿAli b. Abū al-Tāleb reigned. They fought against each other, he and Maʿwiyā, in Babel one thousand soldiers and ʿAli 90,000. They made ready to fight and waged battle at Siffin on the Euphrates.130 And 70,000 among them were killed in one day and many were massacred on both sides in the year thirty-one of the Tayyayē.131 And ʾAlī132 came down to Kūfah. We have similar lists in WS manuscripts, but none where ʿAlī is considered a caliph, a king of the Arabs, and present in the succession. The Anonymous Chronicle until 1234 however displays a pro-Shiʿi account where the sons of ʿAlī reign until al-Ḥusayn dies in 680.133 Here al-Ḥusayn is not mentioned. However, the commentary that Muʿāwiya “called himself king and chief of the Tayyayē of the East” implies that he was not considered as such by people in the East and that his affirmation was not legitimate. The East-Syriac writer John bar Penkaye draws the same distinction between the Tayyayē of the West and the Tayyayē of the East, but has a more positive opinion of Muʿāwiya: “Justice flourished in his time and, and there was great peace in the regions under his control.”134 Contrary to Thomas of Marga who assigns twenty years to al-Ḥasan (parallel to the twenty years of the contemporary catholicos Georges I, r. 661 à 681), this text aligns itself with the main Islamic tradition saying that he reigned for a short period of time.135 We have in the list above an Iraqi conception of the succession of the caliphs, not to say a Shiʿi one, but with a different chronology than the account in Thomas of Marga, another East-Syriac source. This list is also the only Syriac one that mentions the name of ʿŪmar b. Kaṭṭāb’s murderer. Obviously, it is taken from a Muslim source. It is impossible to determine its date, yet the fact that the caliphs are not called caliphs, but kings or chiefs of the Tayyayē suggests an early date. 129 ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Marwān (685–705). 130 Ṣpʾ in the manuscript. A town in northern Syria near the Euphrates and the city of Callinicum. 131 It should be 41. 132 The name is misspelled with an initial ʾ. 133 Tillier, “Le règne.” 134 S.P. Brock, “North Mesopotamia in the Late Seventh Century: Book XV of John Bar Penkāyē’s Rīš Mellē,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 9 (1987): 51–75 (61). 135 Tillier, “Le règne.”

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This short text offers another example of the relevance of East-Syriac sources for the history of Early Islam, as repositories of ancient Islamic traditions that were not in the least unequivocal and emerge in their diversity in these sources.

Conclusion

This manuscript exemplifies how each handwritten copy is unique and can provide historical information about the milieu of production. The three pieces added to the Story of Sergius Baḥira that are found also in the other manuscripts helped us understand how the Story developed over time in Syriac in the Western and Eastern traditions, where it disseminated in two separate versions. That is, two versions of an original text that was itself the result of the accretion of two different stories elaborated on in an East-Syriac milieu. Textual genealogy and history thus clarify the developments of the two initial East-Syriac Lives of Baḥira, each integrating an apocalypse, into the Story we now have. The last line of the manuscript is a general explicit: ‫ܫܠܡܬ ܬܫܥܝܬܐ‬ ‫ܕܡܚܡܕ‬, “The story of Maḥmad is finished.” It encapsulates the entire content as a Christian counter-sirat Muḥammad that does not give him the title of prophet and construes an alternative history of the Prophet’s figure and the beginning of Islam. This manuscript draws on Iraqi/Shiʿi sources and shows how the East-Syriac tradition can preserve local material and perspectives that are absent in the West-Syriac tradition. It should warn us against a simplistic evaluation of Syriac sources as a block: it is worth paying attention to the differences between East and West, not just for the sake of confessional bias but in order to highlight the regional differences. At a time when a distinction between Western and Eastern Islamic realms is perceptible in the sources, even before the shift from the Umayyad to the Abbasid dynasties of Islam took place, Syriac texts belonging to the Eastern tradition have a distinctive position and transmit a local understanding of the religious and political changes of the seventh to ninth centuries. Bibliography Abel, A. “L’Apocalypse de Bahira et la notion islamique du Mahdi,” Annuaire de l’Institut de Philologie et d’Histoire Orientale 3 (1935): 1–12. Abel, A. “Baḥîrâ,” Encyclopædia of Islam (Leiden: Brill Online, 2007).

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Index of Places Alexandria(n) 1, 51, 173–178, 188–189 Ankawa 340 Antioch(ene) 67–69, 71, 73, 75–82, 175–176 Aradan 381 Arbela/Irbil 394–395 Athens 200n19, 203 Axum 332 Babylon(ia/ians) 148, 245, 250, 330, 340–341, 343–344, 383 Baghdad 105, 244, 339–342, 348, 352, 356–357, 377n55 Baṣra/Basra 342, 356, 389, 391–392 Bēt Aramāyē 389 Bēt Garmai/Garmay 315, 373 Bēt Qudshaye 373 Cēra, kingdom 238, 242–243 Changala river 242 Charfet 363, 377, 381 China 243, 245, 364n4 Commagene 196, 211 Coromandel Coast 240, 243, 248 Cranganore/Kodungallur/ Magodāyapattanam 242 Damascus 391, 395

Jacob the Recluse, monastery of 380 Jerusalem 115n19, 201, 208–209, 326–327, 330, 395 Karakosh 344 Karmlīš/Karamless 315, 344 Khān Bālīq (Beijing) 244 Kūfah/Kūfa/Kufa 356, 389n82–83, 391–392, 397–398 Kurdistan 339–341, 344 Mailapur 239, 243 Malabar (Coast) 237, 240–243, 245–247, 253, 255, 257, 260 Mar Quriaqos, church of 242, 244, 257 Mardin 320, 377n55  cathedral of 320 Mecca 384, 391, Mosul 339, 345, 356, 358–359, 394–395 Nasiriyya 344 Nineveh governorate 345 plain of 339, 343–345 Nisibis 356 School of 52, 343

Edessa 202, 269, 270–271, 353 cathedral 314n12 dialect of 195, 349n3 school of 343 Elam 373 Euphrates 227–228, 398

Palestine/Holy Land 69, 223, 326–327, 335, 350, 354. See also General Index: Promised Land

Fish Khabour 344

Samos 199–201 Samosata 196 San Diego (Cajon) 340 Sarcelles 340 Śenglī, Śenglē, Shengala, Shingly, Śinklī  242–245, 257–258 Shechem 29–37 Shushan 373  Siffin 398 Sıırt 380–381

Gazarta d-Beth Zabdai 248 Holy Land see Palestine. See also General Index: Promised Land Iraq 105, 339–345, 348–349, 356–359, 377, 381, 392, 394, 398–399 Ishtar gate 340

Rabban Hormizd, monastery of  380–381

408 Sinai/Mount of Sinai 128, 267–268, 272, 276, 369–371 monastery of/St. Catharine’s Monastery  267 Socotra 243, 245 Suza 373

Index of Places Vaipicotta Jesuit Seminary, Chennamangalam 247, 249–250 Vēṇāṭu 238 Virgin, monastery of the 380–381 Wāsit 389–390, 392

Index of Authors and Texts ʿAbd Allāh ibn Salām 374, 388n78 ʿAbd al-Kindī 365, 368, 374, 387 ʿAbd al-Malik 333, 392, 398 ʿAḇdīšōʿ bar Brīkhā 317 Abraham, metropolitan 249–250, 253 Abrāham ibn al-Khaṭṭāb 318 Abū Bakr 391, 397 Abū Muhammad Mūsā ibn Mahdī al-Hādī 370 Achilles 198–199 Addai II, patriarch 346 Agamemnon 198–199 Aghajan (Sarkis) 341–342 Alexander the Great 198, 331. See also Syriac Alexander Legend ʿAlī b. Abū Tālib 392, 397–398 Ambrogio Traversari 237, 252 Antony the Great 231 Aphrahat 58–59, 87, 115n22, 117, 135–152, 196  Apocalypse of Ps.-Methodius 330, 335, 369n31 Apollonius of Tyana 196–197 Apophthegmata Patrum 223, 231, 370 Archimedes 198–199 Arius of Alexandria 175, 178 Athanasios Balad 236 Ayyaṉ Aṭikal Ṭiruvaṭikaḷ 238 Awa III (Royel), patriarch 346n15 Bahram VI Čōbīn 328 Bar Bahlul 231 Bar ʿEbroyo/Barhebraeus 105, 268, 284, 318–321, 348, 351, 353, 355, 357–358 Bardaisan 17, 19, 20, 23n54, 193–196, 202, 210–211 Barṣaumo 372 Chandy Parampil 255 Chrysippus 202–203, 205, 212–216 Cicero 197, 206–207, 212, 214 Cleanthes 209–210 Collectio antiochena 176 Constantine V 367 Curetonian version 155–156, 158, 160–161, 165n26

Cyprian of Carthage 117n35, 173–176, 179–187, 189 Dadishoʿ Qatraya 88, 90, 103 Darius (I or III) 198 Diatessaron 11, 160n13 Dinkha IV, patriarch 346 Dio of Prusa 203 Diogenes Laertius 211–213, 215–216 Ephrem the Syrian 44–45, 47–48, 52, 54n67, 56–57, 110–112, 114–118, 120–121, 127–128, 145, 157n8, 169 Against Bardaisan’s Domnus = PrRef 2, 1–49 17, 19–20, 21n47, 22, 24 Commentary on Diatessaron 11 Commentary on Genesis 54n67 Discourse against Bardaisan = PrRef 2, 143–169 22–23 Fourth Discourse to Hypatius = PrRef 1, 91–124 18–19 Hymns on the Church/Eccl. 10–27, 38, 116n25, 118n36, 120–121 Hymns on Faith/HdF 18n34, 19, 21n46, 111, 112n10, 117–118, 120 Hymns on Nativity/Nat 11, 27n72, 33n90, 47n33, 48, 112 Hymns on Paradise 24, 116, 145 Hymns Preserved in Armenian 112, 114  Hymns on Resurrection 44, 46n27, 47   Hymns on Virginity 10n4, 11, 27–38, 56–57 Elias, disciple of John of Tella 80–82 Eliyā Šēr of Shaqlawa 319 ʿEnanisho 231n74 Evagrius Ponticus 86–90, 94–97, 99–100, 105, 117n32, 270–271 Evangelion da-Mepharreshe/Old Syriac Gospels 155–160, 162n16, 163–164, 166, 169–170, 230, 300 George of Christ, archdeacon 250 George Pakalomaṭṭam 248 Golinduch, Saint 328 de Gouvea, Antonio 245, 248

410 al-Hājjāj b. Yūsuf 381, 391–393 Ḥakim, disciple of Baḥīrā 368–369 Harklean version 156n8, 161n15, 169, 230–231 Hārūn al-Rashīd 370 al-Hāshimī, (ʿAbdallāh ibn Ismāʿīl) 365, 368 Heracleon 29n77 Heraclius 326, 331 Hierocles 206 Ibn Hishām 366 Isaac of Nineveh 86–89, 94–95, 98–99, 101–103, 105 Ishodad of Merv 231 (Ishoʿ)yahb 368–373, 378–379 Ishoʿyahb/Ῑšōʿyahb b. Mqaddam 319, 351–352 Ishoʿzekhāyā 371 Jacob, metropolitan 244, 257 Jacob of Jesus, vicar 243, 245 Jacob of Serugh/Sarug 43–44, 45n25, 46n27, 50–52, 55, 56n75, 57, 230–232, 315 Jesus. See General Index John of Apamea 86, 88–89, 91, 94–96, 102, 104–105, 117 John bar Penkaye 385n71, 398 John Chrysostom 67, 71, 75, 78n50 John Climacus 267–271 John of Ephesus 52, 69 John of Raithu 267, 269n17 John of Tella 80–82 Joseph II, patriarch 319 Joseph of Amid 237 Joseph Hazzaya 88–91, 93–94, 97–103  Joseph Sulaqa 240–241, 247, 253 Justin Martyr 193  Kaʿb (ibn Matiʿ ibn Haysuʿ/al-aḥbār) 365, 369–370, 372–376, 379, 381–383, 385–386, 389–391, 393, 396 Kadavil Chandy Kattanar (Alexander of the Port) 250–252, 254, 260 Khāmīs bar Qardāḥē 313, 315–321 Khosrau (II) 328, 331, 369–370  al-Kindī, ʿAbd 365, 368, 374, 387 Leo III 367 Leo IV 367

Index of Authors and Texts Louis Sako 346 Lucian 193 Maʾana, metropolitan 239 Malabar Sermonary 253 Mani 20 Māṇikkavācakar (Māṇikkavācer) 240 al-Manṣūr, Abū Jaʿfar 386 Maruvān Sapir Īśōʿ 238, 244–245 Maslama, ibn ʿAbd al-Malik 367n20 Mattai Vettikunnel 237n6 Maurice, king of the Romans 369–370 Maximus of Tyre 203 Melitius of Lycopolis 175, 178–179 Mihr-Mah-Gushnasp 328 Monk of Bet Halē 365, 367, 377 Muḥammad/Muhammad 326, 328–329, 332–333, 360, 363–364, 366–369, 371–372, 374–376, 379–381, 384–391, 395–396, 399 Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq 366, 386 Muʿawiyā, Yazīd ibn 396–398 Musonius 196–197, 203, 210–212 Narsai of Nisibis 50, 58–59, 135, 230, 250n52 Nebuchadnezzar II 340, 343 Nuʿmān of Ḥirta/al-Ḥīra 371 Origen 21, 29n77, 89, 91–94, 118n36, 206, 231 Palamedes 198–199 Paravur Dialogues 254–255 Paul of Tella 230 Pedro Gomez 252 Persius 206 Peshitta 139, 154–170, 230 Peter of Alexandria 176–179, 182–184, 188–189 Philip bar Isḥāq Zayyā 319 Plato 200–201, 206–207 Plutarch 197, 200, 203, 206–207, 214 Priam 198 Proclus 10, 215 Pseudo-Dionysius 88, 104, 252 Pseudo-Ephrem 331–333, 335 Pythagoras 193, 197–201, 203, 205, 216

411

Index of Authors and Texts Qurʾān 326, 329, 332, 363, 366–370, 379, 381, 384, 386–393 Rabban Ṣawma 244 Ris Gibo (family) 381 Roz, Francisco S.J. 243, 247, 249–255, 260 Sabrisho, catholicos 370–372 Sarhad Jammo 340 Ṣawmō of Piyoz 319 Scher (Addaï) 381 Seneca 201, 206, 209, 213 Severus of Antioch 67–83, 173–174, 178, 182–190 Shbadnaya, Isḥaq 351 Shimʿon IV, catholicos 248 Sinaitic version 155, 156n8, 158, 161–162, 165n26 Socrates 193, 197–201, 203, 205, 216 Sozomenus 178–179, 182 Stāṇu Ravi 238 Syriac Alexander Legend 329–332 Syro-Hexapla 230–231 al-Ṭabarī, Abū Jaʿfar 366 Talmud 113, 114n16, 116, 119–120, 122–127, 168. See also General Index: rabbinic Theodore bar Koni 231 Thomas of Harkel 230 Thomas of Marga 398

Tiburtine Sybil 330 Timothy I, catholicos 236, 365n9, 386 Timothy Aelurus 176, 178–179, 182, 185–186, 188–190 Tomus of Leo 188 Traditio apostolica 176 Tubarlak 330–331 ʿŪmar b. Kaṭṭāb 397–398 ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān 392, 397 caliphate of 391 ʿUthmānian version of the Qurʾān 391–394 Valignano, Alessandro 254 Vicente de Lagos 246–247 Vision of Baruch (5 Baruch) 332 al-Walīd I 385n70, 392 al-Walīd II 370 Wardā, Book of 314–315 Yahbalaha III, Catholicos 244, 257 Yūḥannōn bar Maʿdānī 316 Zacharias, deacon and scribe 245–247, 256, 258, 259nn Zaya … b. Maruga 378, 381 Zayd b. Thābit 360, 391 Zeno 197, 212–213, 215

Index of Bible Passages Genesis 1.26 3 16.12 19.27 28.17 31.27

240 229 54–55 383 119 113n12 126

Exodus 19.13 22.14 34.6

161n15 161n15 116

Leviticus 2.5–7 10.1–2 20.15,16 24.21 27.10

126 144 161n15 161n15 161n15

Numbers 33.1–2 33.1–49 33.5

91 91 92

Joshua 24.24 (or 24.25)

37n111

Ruth

167

1 Samuel 1.10–13 1.13 2.12–17 2.23–25a 2.30

111, 120 123, 127n75 144 148 142

1 Kings

203

1–2 Chronicles

203

Nehemiah 2.12 8.5

161n15 119

Job

32.16

119

Psalms 45.2 51.17 65.2 65.6 78.23 103.12 106.30

52, 70, 90, 94 123n67, 126 122n60 120 113 113n12 245, 258 119

Proverbs 18.4 18.19

145 139

Song of Songs 7.9

89 125

Isaiah 6.1–3 56.10

240 101 127n75

Lamentations 3.8

113

Ezekiel 1.4–2

91 91

Jonah 2.1

230–231

Matthew 1.17 6.34 6.6 11.28 11.29 12.33 12.40 12.43 13.7 13.22 13.24–30

32, 150, 204–205, 231 91 164n21 117 157n9 157n9 164n21 230–231 157n9 141n15 141n15, 143 150

413

Index of Bible Passages Matthew (cont.) 14.19 15.27 16.18–19 21.2,5,7 23.35–39 24.33 26.45 26.61 27.37 27.40 27.51

164n21 156n8 113n12 161n15 208–209 328 157n9 204 204 204 204

Mark 3.1 4.7 4.19 6.28 6.31 7.26 7.28 10.50,51 12.22 13.2 14.22 14.41 14.58 15.26 15.29 15.38

144 141n15 141n15, 143 164n21 157n9 164n21 156n8 164n21 164n21 204 146 157n9 204 204n28 204 204

Luke 1.26–56 1.38 2.13–14 5.4 5.37 7.12 7 8.24 10.6 10.25–37 10.26 10.27 10.30 10.34 11.1 11.24

32, 163–164 32 33n91 25 157n9 164n21 164n21 56 157n9 157n9 154 164n21 162n16 159 160, 161n15 157n9 157n9

12.6–7 12.19 13.1–5 13.15 13.34–35 14.28 16.19–31 16.21 16.25 23.38

168n37 157n9 208 161n15 208 149 154, 156–157 156 157 204n28

John

28, 31–32, 37–38, 204, 274 1.1, 5 164n21 2.19 204 3 32n88 4 12, 32–33 4.1–42 28n75 4.4–42 32 4.8 36n107 4.31–38 33, 36 4.35–36 36n109 5.36 164n21 6.22–71 36 8.32 164n21 9.3 208 11.38 164n21 12.15 161n15 12.32 204 14.16 374n47 15.26–16 386 15.26 374n47 16.7 374n47, 386 18.36 204 19.19–21 204n28 19.19–22 204 20.10 164n21

Acts 5.1–11

186 136

Romans 8.26

116n24

Hebrews 8.5 11.3

93 104

414

Index of Bible Passages

1 Corinthians 9.25

150

2 Corinthians 1.24 12.2–4

139–140 96

Ephesians 6.12

149

Philippians 1.30

149

Colossians 1.29 4.11

149 140

1 Timothy 4.10

149

2 Timothy 2. 11–13

168n37

1 Clement 9–12

115n22

1 Enoch 9.2

113n12

1 Enoch 48.1a

146n18

2 Maccabees 7

76n43

4 Maccabees 8–18

205 76n43

General Index animals 142, 160–161, 228–229. See also beast, also donkey, also fish Antichrist 328, 332, 335, 369n31 apocalypse/apocalypticism 325–335, 367, 369–370, 399 Arabic (language, texts, translation) 106, 160n13, 239, 246, 268, 283, 293, 295, 299, 312, 316, 318, 348–349, 351n15, 352–359, 365–368, 371–372, 374–375, 377, 383, 397n117, 397n123 Aramaic 167, 169, 194–195, 205, 254–255, 282–283, 312, 316–317, 352, 354, 357–358, 366 Chaldean 343–344 Christian Palestinian 269 Neo-Aramaic 301, 312, 349, 358 Armenian (language, literature) 112, 268, 300, 353–354 arts/artistic/artistry 9, 154–155, 158–159, 168–170 ascetic literature/ascetism 45, 52–54, 58–59, 67–68, 70–77, 80–83, 87–90, 94–96, 103–106, 150, 224, 232, 267, 270–272, 276, 366 Assyrian Democratic Movement (ADM)  339–341, 343–344 astral immortality 201 audience 20, 23, 33–34, 51, 58, 67–68, 69n4, 70–75, 77–79, 81, 96, 139–141, 143–144, 149–152, 155, 159–160, 163, 165, 228–231, 253–254, 359 Baʿth Party 342 beast 72, 74, 143, 161, 369–370 Bet Nahrayn Democratic Party 339 bilingual 168, 237, 317–318, 355 blindness 143–145, 147, 152, 167, 208, 214, 306 canon law/Christian canons 44, 173–190 Chaldean church 249, 255, 319, 339–346 clergy 235n1, 237, 240, 319, 378, 381 List (Iʾtilāf al-Kildān) 341, 345 National Council 342

Chaldean-Syriac-Assyrian Popular Council  339 Church of the East 244, 246, 248–250, 255–256, 284, 288, 319, 346, 351, 355–356, 358, 367, 371–373, 376–377. See also East Syriac compassion 56, 112, 113n15, 160, 166 conceptio per aurem 9–10, 12–13, 25, 27, 31–33, 37–38 corruption 78, 135–136, 138–146, 148–152, 388–389 Council of Chalcedon (451) 67, 70, 82, 175–176, 184, 189 Council of Constantinople (553) 88 Council of Ephesus (431) 175, 185 Council of Nicaea (325) 175, 179, 182–183, 185 Council of Trullo (692) 180 cross 103, 204, 239–240, 326, 331–332, 371, 378 death 13–15, 25–26, 34–36, 38, 60, 70, 72, 74–76, 80, 124n67, 141, 193, 197–205, 207, 229, 232, 271, 315, 355, 369, 376, 379, 384–388 dialogue 28–29, 38, 45, 48–50, 162, 201–202, 254–255, 311–318, 321, 346n15, 364–365 digital humanities 268, 272, 277, 279–308 discourse analysis 154, 159, 163 donkey 161–162, 375 door of heaven 112 dyophysite 271, 372 East Syriac 41n5, 44n21, 59–60, 87–90, 96, 105–106, 241n24, 247n42, 252n57, 284, 313, 320, 340, 346, 364–365, 371–372, 376–379, 398–399 Eleazar, biblical character 36 emotions and passions (πάθη) 205–206, 215–216 eschatology 325–329, 331–333, 335, 369, 384 Eve, biblical character 10, 12–15, 23–25, 27, 33, 35, 38, 54–55, 58–59 evil of banality 160

416 fish 114n19, 117, 143, 224, 227–232 Fitna First Civil War 335 Second Civil War 333, 335 Garshuni 290, 300 Malayalam 251n53, 254, 258nf gates of heaven 112–113 geo-ecclesiology 174 Gog and Magog 330, 335 Good Samaritan. See Samaritan Greek (language, tradition) 1, 10, 49n42, 58, 68n1, 69n7, 87–89, 92n29, 105–106, 110, 116n24, 135, 150, 154–166, 168, 170, 173–174, 179–181, 183, 193–196, 205, 224, 229–230, 232, 239, 250n51, 251n55, 267–276, 295, 300, 328n7, 331, 349, 352–353, 356, 368n25, 383, 386, 392 Hagar, biblical character 334–335, 366 hagiography 41, 46, 52–54, 76, 88, 223, 225, 229, 328n7, 368n29, 370, 387 Hannah, biblical character 59n86, 111, 117–118, 120, 122–123, 127 harmony of the self 94–97 Hebrew (language, tradition) 91, 121n59, 123n65, 168, 230, 239, 251, 254–255, 366, 374 Bible 113, 167–168 historiography 174, 313, 355 humor 229 hymnography 43, 55n72 imageless prayer 87–88, 94–97, 98, 105 immortality of the soul 199, 203 incarnation 12–13, 25–26, 111 inner prayer 89, 94–97, 103–106, 117 Ishmaelites/sons of Ishmael 327, 335, 369–371, 382–383, 389 Islam/Islamic tradition/world 105–106, 312– 313, 316, 318–320, 325–326, 328–329, 332–333, 339, 345, 348, 352, 357–350, 363–367, 369–372, 374, 381, 384, 386, 388n78, 391–392, 394, 398–399 Islamic Studies/Islamicists 348, 359, 355, 359–360, 392

General Index Jesus, biblical character 9, 27–38, 50–51, 70, 104, 117, 141n15, 146, 151, 162, 164–166, 169, 183–184, 193, 201–205, 208, 216–217, 243, 245, 318, 376, 381, 386–387 Jews/Judaism/Jewish traditions 76, 110, 112, 114–119, 121–123, 137n12, 167–168, 193, 199–205, 210, 216–217, 239, 242–243, 246, 254, 325–327, 369, 374–376, 385, 388n78, 390–391, 393–394. See also rabbinic Jizya. See Taxes/Poll tax (jizya) Jonah, biblical character 114n19, 227, 230–231 Joseph, biblical character 36, 53, 147 Joshua, biblical character 36–37, 112, 114n19 Judeo-Persian language. See Persian Kaldanayuta (Chaldean identity/language)  344 law of Zeus 209–210 lawyer 162–166 Lazarus, biblical character 154, 156–157 Levite 160 lex talionis 200, 390 limpidity 93, 99–103 liturgy 42–47, 49n42, 51, 54–57, 60, 101, 115, 154, 168–169, 204, 237–239, 248, 256, 311n3, 314, 350 Madrasha/e 42–45, 52 Manigramam 239 martyrs, martyrdom 41, 44, 52n59, 59–60, 67–83, 175, 179–180, 182, 184, 187, 189, 193, 197, 242, 251, 253, 257, 328 Martyrs of Sebaste 73–74, 76, 79 Mary/Maryam, biblical character 9, 10n4, 12–15, 23–25, 27, 31–33, 35, 37–38, 46–49, 55–57, 59–60, 317, 372, 375, 390 medicine 120, 207, 348, 352–354 Melkite literature/tradition 270–272, 276, 368–369 Memra/e 42, 50–51, 53, 59, 135, 319 miaphysite 271 Mongol period 319, 348 Moses, biblical character 28, 36, 89, 92, 100, 112, 116, 369

417

General Index mouth, function in prayer 31, 35, 45, 48, 55, 117, 118n36, 121–122, 123n67, 125–128, 145–146 multilingualism 349–350 new law 200–203, 210 oral performance 154–155, 163, 168, 170 Pahlavi 239–240 palimpsest 167, 269–270, 273 patronage 356–357 Persian /Iranian/Sasanian Empire 238, 326–327, 328, 331, 333, 335 language, literature 160n13, 238–240, 244, 246, 287, 312–313, 316–320, 348, 351, 353, 357–358 Early Modern Persian language 239 Judeo-Persian language 239, 311n3 Middle Persian language 238–239, 312, 384 piety 71, 79, 103, 160 praying mind 96, 98, 100–101 Promised Land 91–94. See also Index of Places: Palestine rabbinic 110–116, 118–128, 167–168 rebaptism 173, 179, 182, 184–185, 188–189 redemption 12, 23, 25–26, 35, 53–54, 120, 125 resurrection 44, 74, 92–94, 124–125, 199, 201, 203, 376, 387 Rich Man, biblical character 154, 156–157 ritual 46, 49–51, 55, 113–114, 116, 170, 175, 384 Rogation of the Ninevites 314 Roman Empire 199–200, 326–327, 330–333–335 Saint Thomas Christians, Suṟiyāni Nasrāṇikal 237 Śaiva bhakti 240 salvation 12n11, 27, 33, 35, 38, 56, 59, 71–72, 76, 78, 80, 82, 114 Samaritan 34–35 Good Samaritan, biblical character  154–157, 159–162, 165n26, 168 Samaritan woman, biblical character 12, 27–38, 59

Satan 13, 25–26, 38, 56, 114, 147 scent from Egypt 91–92 self-duplicity 142 self-understanding 136, 144, 151–152 Selihot 114–115 senses, sense perception 12–14, 17n31, 18–27, 31, 33n91, 38, 73, 118, 143, 144n16, 229 Shema 118–120 Sheol 34–35, 140 silence 21–23, 86, 88, 111, 116–121, 125, 127, 149, 163, 170 Sociolinguistics 349–350 sōghīthā/soghitha/sōghyāthā 48–50, 55–56, 311–317 spirituality 86–88, 99n56, 101–102, 105, 154, 168–169 stages of monastic life 93–95, 100–106 somatic stage (pagrānūtā) 93–94 stage of the soul (nafshānūtā) 93–94, 100 stage of the spirit (ruḥānūtā) 93–94 stillness 21–22, 88, 98, 119, 231 Synod of Diamper (1599) 249, 253 Syriac Renaissance 316, 319, 348–349, 358–359 Tarisāppaḷḷi (copper plates) 238–239, 244–245 Taxes/Poll tax (jizya) 333–334 text editing 272, 276 titulus crucis 204 virtuous (life, people) 74, 78, 92, 142, 197, 209, 215 voice 20–21, 23, 25, 33–35, 42–51, 53–57, 60, 86, 111, 116–118, 120–123, 125, 127, 135–136, 151, 170, 290, 315, 341 wine 125, 160 –161 women’s choirs 43–47, 50–53, 57 worship 42, 46, 49, 55–57, 103–105, 116, 120, 238, 246, 259, 371, 382–384 Zoroastrianism/Zoroastrians 239, 325–328, 383–384

Eastern Christian Studies

No one mentions Syriac – a dialect of the Aramaic language Jesus spoke – without referring to Sebastian P. Brock, the Oxford scholar and teacher who has written and taught about everything Syriac, even reorienting the field as The Third Lung of early Christianity (along with Greek and Latin). In 2018, Syriac scholars world-wide gathered in Sigtuna, Sweden, to celebrate with Sebastian his accomplishments and share new directions. Through essays showing what Syriac studies have attained, where they are going, as well as some arenas and connections previously not imagined, flavors of the fruits of laboring in the field are offered. Contributors to this volume are: Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Shraga Bick, Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony, Alberto Camplani, Thomas A. Carlson, Jeff W. Childers, Muriel Debié, Terry C. Falla, George A. Kiraz, Robert A. Kitchen, Kathleen E. McVey, Sergey Minov, Craig E. Morrison, Radu Mustață, István Perczel, Anton Pritula, Ilaria L.E. Ramelli, Christine Shepardson, Stephen J. Shoemaker, Herman G.B. Teule. Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony is Martin Buber Professor in the Department of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of The Ladder of Prayer and the Ship of Stirrings (Peeters, 2019) and the co-editor of Origeniana Duodecima (Peeters, 2019). Miriam L. Hjälm, D.Phil (2015), is a Senior lecturer in Eastern Christian Studies at Sankt Ignatios College, University College Stockholm. She is the author of Christian Arabic Versions of Daniel (Brill, 2016) and the editor of Senses of Scripture, Treasures of Tradition (Brill, 2017). Robert A. Kitchen, D.Phil (1998), retired United Church of Canada minister. He has published studies and translations of Syriac ascetical texts, including The Book of Steps (Cistercian, 2004) and The Discourses of Philoxenos of Mabbug (Cistercian, 2013).

ISBN 978 90 04 53788 0 ISSN 1783-7154 BRILL.COM/ECS

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