Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 9781463235468

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
FROM THE EDITOR
CHRISTIAN MARTYRS IN ARABIA
CONSTANTINE AND JUDAH THE MACCABEE: HISTORY AND MEMORY IN THE ACTS OF THE PERSIAN MARTYRS
MAKING SENSE OF PERSECUTION IN APHRAHAT’S DEMONSTRATIONS
SINGING HYMNS TO THE MARTYRS: THE ‘ANTIPHONS OF THE SĀHDĒ’ IN THE ASSYRIAN CHURCH OF THE EAST
CHRISTIANS IN THE CITY: ALEPPO IN THE OTTOMAN PER
REPORT ON THE EXCAVATIONS OF ḤĪRA IN 2010-2011
A NEW SYRIAC INSCRIPTION FROM TAKRIT (IRAQ)
BISHOP ISḤAQ SAKA (1931-2011)
THE CANADIAN SOCIETY FOR SYRIAC STUDIES

Citation preview

JOURNAL OF THE CANADIAN SOCIETY FOR SYRIAC STUDIES

Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies/ de la Société Canadienne des Etudes Syriaques The JCSSS is a refereed journal published annually, and it contains the transcripts of public lectures presented at the Society and possibly other articles and book reviews

Editorial Board General Editor

Amir Harrak, University of Toronto

Editors Sebastian Brock, Oxford University Sidney Griffith, Catholic University of America Adam Lehto, University of Toronto Craig E. Morrison, Pontifical Biblical Institute, Rome Lucas van Rompay, Duke University Kyle Smith, University of Toronto Copy Editing

Antoine Hirsch

Publisher Gorgias Press 180 Centennial Avenue, Suite 3 Piscataway, NJ 08854 USA

The Canadian Society for Syriac Studies La Société Canadienne des Etudes Syriaques Society Officers 2011-2012 President: Amir Harrak Vice-President and Secretary-Treasurer: Khalid Dinno Members of the Board of Directors: Samir Basmaji, Marica Cassis, Khalid Dinno, Geoffrey Greatrex, Amir Harrak, Robert Kitchen, Adam Lehto, Kyle Smith, Albert Tarzi The aim of the CSSS is to promote the study of the Syriac culture which is rooted in the same soil from which the ancient Mesopotamian and biblical literatures sprung. The CSSS is purely academic, and its activities include a series of public lectures, one yearly symposium, and the publication of its Journal. The Journal is distributed free of charge to the members of the CSSS who have paid their dues, but it can be ordered by other individuals and institutions through Gorgias Press (www.gorgiaspress.com). Cover Crosses from al-Hira (Iraq) — Courtesy Prof. Nasir al-Kaabi (University of Kufa—Iraq)

JOURNAL OF THE CANADIAN SOCIETY FOR SYRIAC STUDIES

Volume 12

Copyright © 2012 by The Canadian Society for Syriac Studies. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise without the prior written permission of Gorgias Press LLC. Published in the United States of America by Gorgias Press LLC, New Jersey ISBN 978-1-4632-0216-3 ISSN: 1499-6367

GORGIAS PRESS 954 River Rd., Piscataway, NJ 08854 USA www.gorgiaspress.com

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standards. Printed in the United States of America

The Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies

Table of Contents

From the Editor

1

Françoise Briquel Chatonnet, Christian Martyrs in Arabia

3

Kyle Smith,

16 Constantine and Judah Maccabee: History and Memory in the Acts of the Persian Martyrs

Adam Lehto,

34 Making Sense of Persecution in Aphrahat’s Demonstrations

Mar Awa David Royel, Singing Hymns to the Martyrs: The ‘Antiphons of the Sāhdē’ in the Assyrian Church of the East

43

Bernard Heyberger, Christians in the City: Aleppo in the Ottoman Period

50

Naṣīr al-Ka‛bī,

60 Report on the Excavations of Hīra in 2010-2011

Amir Harrak,

68 A new Inscription from Takrit (Iraq)

Khalid Dinno, Bishop Isḥaq Saka (1931-2011) Members of the CSSS for 2011-2012

72 74

____________________________________________________________________________

FROM THE EDITOR

I

n November 12, 2011, the CSSS held its 11th Symposium on the theme “Martyrs and Martyrdom in Syriac Literature,” and JCSSS 12 contains the transcripts of four papers presented there. In her paper “Christian Martyrs in Arabia,” Françoise Briquel Chatonnet of the CNRS brings together all the known sources, including two letters of Bishop Simeon of Bēt-Arsham, the Book of Ḥimyarites, and a number of inscriptions from Arabia, to shed light on an intriguing martyrdom that took place in the 6th century. While the inscriptions give credence to the historicity of the event, its narratives reflect many of the standard literary features that are found in earlier accounts of martyrdom and persecution. But the earliest letter of Simeon, based on eyewitness records, can be labelled an ‘historical passion’. The paper by Kyle Smith of the University of Toronto, “Constantine and Judah the Maccabee: History and Memory in the Acts of the Persian Martyrs,” focusses on Greek and Syriac sources that recount (or, in the case of Ephrem, do not recount) Shapur’s ‘Great Persecution’ in the mid-4th century. Smith questions the historical value of the link that some of these sources make between anti-Christian persecution and growing political tensions between Persia and Rome at the time of Constantine. The 4th century Martyrdom of Simeon Bar-Ṣabba‛e does not refer to bilateral pol-

itics but depicts its protagonist as a local warrior, priest and martyr fighting and dying for the salvation of his people—a present day Judah Maccabee. In his paper “Making Sense of Persecution in Aphrahat’s Demonstrations,” Adam Lehto of the University of Toronto examines a key witness to the early stages of the persecution of Shapur II. His focus is not on the reconstruction of political events, but rather on Aphrahat’s exegetical, polemical, theological, and pastoral responses to the suffering that his community is experiencing. While he recognizes the witness of biblical ‘heroes’ who have died or suffered for their faith, when he considers his own community the dominant theme is that they must respond appropriately to the chastisement of God. In our final paper on martyrdom, “Singing Hymns to the Martyrs: The ‘Antiphons of the Sāhdē’ in the Assyrian Church of the East,” Bishop David Royel considers how martyrdom and martyrs are portrayed in the liturgy of his own tradition. According to this liturgy, the ‘Antiphons of the Sāhdē’ have their origin with the 4th century Māruthā of Martyropolis, and Royel argues that they were part of the “early core” of the liturgy in the Church of the East. Some key themes in the liturgical portrayal of the martyrs are discussed: they are alive with God, and will receive a reward for their heroism, but also continue to function as spiritual physicians for the world.

___________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) — Page 1

From the Editor ____________________________________________________________________________________

The CSSS public lecture of 2012, “Christians in the City: Aleppo in the Ottoman Period,” was presented by Bernard Heyberger of IISMM and EHESS (Paris). The author describes the Christians of Aleppo as a particularly vivid community which enjoyed good relations with the larger Muslim population while it developed extensive contacts with the Far East and Europe. Through their openness to different cultures and traditions, they managed to enhance their eastern Christian identity against the dominant Muslim culture and European model of Christianity. Two papers deal with archaeology and epigraphy. In his “Report on the Excavations of Ḥīra in 2010-2011,” Naṣīr al-Kaabi, professor of history at Kufa University, Iraq, discusses the most recent archaeological excavations at the Christian site of Ḥirā near the holy city of Najaf. Elaborate buildings, stylistic crosses, and one Christian Arabic inscription

were unearthed; the artefacts reflect the culture of the Church in the whole of Iraq before and after the Islamic period. Amir Harrak discusses a new Syriac inscription dated to AD 777 in his article “A New Syriac Inscription from Takrit (Iraq).” Unlike most of the inscriptions from Takrit, this inscription has a lay, rather than ecclesiastical, origin, and uses the Hijra dating system alone, which is not typical in this period. Khalid Dinno of the University of Toronto commemorates the learned bishop Isḥaq Saka of Iraq, who passed away in 2011. One of the books of this prolific writer was recently translated into English and published, Commentary on the Liturgy of the Syrian Orthodox Church of Antioch. One can only hope that some of his other books, especially his Kanīsatī al-suryaniyya (My Syriac Church) will follow suit. A.H.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) — Page 2

______________________________________________________________________ CHRISTIAN MARTYRS IN ARABIA*

FRANÇOISE BRIQUEL CHATONNET CNRS PARIS UMR 8167 ORIENT ET MEDITERRANEE – MONDES SEMITIQUES

A

t the beginning of the 6th century, Christians of South Arabia were massacred by a Jewish king, and the scene of this dreadful event was the town of Najrān in the kingdom of Ḥimyar. The interpretation of this massacre is rather ambiguous. The context is clearly political: the Jewish king took power by force through a coup d’état. Christians did not recognize his legitimacy and were put to death. Even if the tradition developed that they were pressed to convert to Judaism or be put to death, it is not at all sure that this was really the requirement of the king. But it has been interpreted as a martyrdom and the Christians of Najrān entered the list of martyrs commemorated in the SyroOrthodox synaxary.1 This politico-religious event was reinterpreted as a purely religious oppression. At any rate, the echo of this slaughter was very strong at the time of the event and afterward and a whole set of documents is linked to it.2 This event is unique in history from several points of view. First the date: this slaughter took place after the peace of the church, when emperor Constantine at the beginning of the 4th century legalized Christianity, but before the period of the so-called “neo-martyrs” of the beginning of the Islam-

ic period or the martyrs under Islamic rule.3 So from the point of view of the Christians of the Byzantine Empire, where the news of the ‘martyrdom’ spread out first, it was a time of peace and prosperity for Christians, even though theological controversies harassed communities, especially in the Miaphysite milieu. It was even a moment when Christians were gaining more and more power and influence and were putting pressure on the “last pagans.”4 During this period, parallels to the massacre are to be found only in the Sassanid Empire.5 Second: the place and context of the massacre. This happened to Christians in Ḥimyar, that is, South Arabia. The kingdom of Ḥimyar corresponds mainly to present-day Yemen, even if the very place of Najrān is located in the South East part of today’s Saudi Arabia.6 And they were killed because they did not want to give up Christianity for Judaism. This is the only case of pressure to conversion in that way that we know of, although there are many cases of Jews being oppressed by Christians. The event has nothing to do with the charge laid sometimes against some Jews who, according to some sources, reported to the Roman authorities about Christians or applauded their persecution.7

________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 3

Christian Martyrs in Arabia _________________________________________________________________________________________

The third point which makes this episode particularly interesting is that we have at our disposal a whole set of documents that can be confronted.8 There are some inscriptions engraved in South-Arabian on behalf of nobles who were on the side of the persecutor, and other inscriptions in Ethiopic coming from the Ethiopian king who came to restore Christianity in Ḥimyar. Moreover, there are three texts preserved in Syriac: two letters attributed to Simeon bishop of Beth-Arsham, one of which seems to be quite close to the events, and the so-called “Book of the Ḥimyarites”. In Greek, the “Martyrdom of Arethas”9 (Arabic al-Harith) is dedicated to these events, which, along with the expedition of the Ethiopian king, are also mentioned in various chronicles. Thus, a persecution which might be considered marginal is exceptionally well documented, when compared to other similar or more intense persecutions. This martyrdom enjoyed fame throughout Oriental Christendom and several versions of it are preserved in Arabic, Ethiopic, Armenian and Georgian. In Syriac, manuscripts containing this story were copied until the end of the 19th century. My current analysis, which will be based mainly on Syriac sources, addresses the question of the elaboration of a narrative of martyrdom. Taking into account what is really a literary genre, I would like to consider how the narrative conforms to it as well as its peculiarities. Of course, this means that I will have to touch on the question of what is historical in these narratives and what is a hagiographical elaboration.

I. THE EVENTS AND THEIR TRANSMISSION First it is necessary to give a few details about the events of the persecution, and I will do this according to the first Syriac narrative. At the beginning of the 6th century, the philo-Ethiopian and Christian King

who ruled over the kingdom of Ḥimyar died and a Jew seized the throne by force. He is called Yusuf in the Sabean inscriptions, Mashruq in the Syriac Book of the Ḥimyarites, and just “the king of the Ḥimyarites” in the Syriac letters and the Greek Martyrdom. He destroyed a church in the capital town, Ẓafar, killed the Ethiopians who were protecting it and marched to Najrān. After besieging the town without success, he obtained its surrender by the promise that everyone would be spared and protected. But, as the narrative says, supposedly following the formal letter of the Jewish king, he had no intention to keep his promise and immediately began to force the Christians to convert to Judaism. He then asked for the bishop, and having been told by the community that their pastor had been dead for two years, he exhumed his remains from his grave and burned them in the fire that he had set in the church, along with the nobles and priests who did not want to deny Christ. After the men, it was the turn of the women. Their episode is marked by a competition between the wives of the noblemen on the one hand and the bnot-qyomo-nuns10 on the other, who all claimed for the right to die first. The king decided to save a noble lady whom he sent home, giving her time to change her mind. But three days later, when she was asked once more to convert to Judaism, she went out of her home, without veil on her head, and began to address the women of Najran in the central square of the town, encouraging them not to convert. Noise and rumours led the king to ask about the matter. She was brought to him and after a debate between them, she was put to death with her daughters. All this was supposed to have been written down in a letter from the Jewish king of Ḥimyar to Mundir, king of al-Ḥira in the North-East of Arabia, now in Iraq. The letter reached Mundir during an international peace conference that took place

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 4

Christian Martyrs in Arabia _________________________________________________________________________________________

between Byzantium and Persia. The representative of Justin, the Byzantine emperor, was there and with him Simeon of BethArsham, who is the supposed author of the narrative. The time was January of the year 835 according to Seleucid era, that is, 524 AD.11 Simeon wrote a letter addressed to another Simeon, the abbot of Gabbula in Northern Syria, in which he copied the letter of the Jewish king and added other details learned from a Christian messenger coming from Yemen. This second part of the letter of Simeon puts in light another figure, that of Ḥarith bin Ka‘b, an old nobleman, the chief of the community, who had also argued with the king and was put to death with some of his companions. Some other personal anecdotes come afterward, including the story of a three-yearold boy who wanted to be put to death with his mother but who was spared by the king, and a young daughter of the noble lady. The text ends with an appeal to every bishop and individual so that they may pressure the Ethiopian king to launch an expedition and come to the rescue of the Christians, and also to pressure the Jews in Palestine, so that they may cease to send missionaries to Ḥimyar. The Syriac “Book of the Ḥimyarites” and the Greek Martyrdom add afterwards the narrative of the military expedition of Ethiopia against Ḥimyar, the defeat of the Jewish king, and the reestablishment of Christianity in Yemen. I mentioned that this event is exceptionally well documented. In Syriac, the text that was first known and most often copied is a letter attributed to Simeon of BethArsham, a great miaphysite controversialist who went to fight against ‘Nestorians’ in the East and was at the conference in Ramla near al-Ḥira when the news of the massacre arrived. This letter is known in two versions, a long one preserved in several manuscripts and published by Ignazio Guidi,12 and a short one preserved in the chronicle of Pseudo Zachariah the Rhetor13

and in the chronicle of Zuqnin,14 and in a different form in the Chronicle of Patriarch Michael the Great.15 I have dealt elsewhere with the relationship between these two versions.16 What is important is that the chronicle of Pseudo-Zachariah seems to have been written around 570.17 That of Zuqnin is based on the chronicle of John of Ephesus,18 who was a contemporary of the events of Najrān and who had known Simeon of Beth-Arsham in person. Thus this first narrative was written at a time quite close of the events themselves.19 A second letter found and published by Irfan Shahid20 retells the same episodes and adds some new details. It was interpreted by Shahid as an authentic second letter written by the same Simeon of Beth-Arsham. In Syriac, there is also a later narrative, the “Book of the Ḥimyarites,” published from a single very poorly preserved manuscript,21 whose content includes the story of the expedition of the Ethiopian king. The tradition in Greek consists first of the Martyrion Arethae, which is centred on the personality of Ḥarith, spelled Arethas in Greek. The narrative in its first part clearly draws on the letter of Simeon, but the second part is close to the “Book of the Ḥimyarites.” The Chronicles of Theophanes, George Kedrenos, and Procopius also mention these events in passing. But what is more unusual is that we have some inscriptions from Arabia and Ethiopia which relate to them as well. Three south-Arabian inscriptions, made on behalf of Sharah’il Yaqbul, a general of king Yusuf As’ar Yath’ar, tell about the part played by this general in the elimination of Ethiopians in Ẓafar, the destruction of the church there, an expedition in the region facing Ethiopia, on the coast, and in the region of Najrān, mentioning only the blockade of the city, which had not yet been surrendered. In Ge’ez, an inscription from the Abyssinian king Kaleb Ella Asbeha gives him titles of domination over Ḥimyar and mentions the

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 5

Christian Martyrs in Arabia _________________________________________________________________________________________

building of a sanctuary therein; another inscription speaks about the execution of the Ḥimyarite king. This convergence of sources makes it clear that the narratives preserved in Syriac and in Greek have an historical background and can be inserted in a precise geopolitical context. This context is that of the political and religious history of South Arabia from the 4th to the 6th century AD. What is particularly striking is that Judaism, or a monotheistic religion inspired by Judaism, was well established in Yemen, at least in the ruling circles around the king, those who produced inscriptions from the 4th century onwards.22 The ancient South-Arabian religion is no more attested by inscriptions, gift to temples or new buildings, but that is only an indication about the elite of the kingdom which would have been able to offer to the gods. Christianity came later. The second letter of Simeon mentions a merchant named Jahsana who came from Ḥirta d-No‘man, that is al-Ḥira in the Persian Empire. But the narrative emphasizes the links of Arabia, or perhaps specifically Najrān,23 with the region of Northern Syria and the Miaphysite party: an example is the fact that the first bishop of Najrān had been sent by Mar Philoxenus of Mabbug (Aksenaya). The names of the persons whom the author asks to inform about the events, listed at the end of the first letter, give the same idea. Another text, The History of the Great Deeds of Bishop Paul of Qenṭos and Priest John of Edessa,24 tells about the conversion of the king of Ḥimyar at the hands of these two men and thus suggests the same ties. And the influence of Ethiopia is also clear from this story: the beginning of the narrative mentions the death of the Christian king put on the throne by the Ethiopians. South Arabia was the junction of two zones of influence, that of Persia, here represented by a Jewish party as well as most probably a Syro-oriental or ‘Nestorian’ one, and that of the Byzantine party,

which seems to have been of Miaphysite leanings and whose religious links were with the monasteries of Northern Syria but under the political influence of Ethiopia.

II. A NARRATIVE OF MARTYRDOM AMONG OTHERS Let us now consider the narrative of the persecution that fell upon the Ḥimyarite Christians. The question is to what extent the narrative is a faithful report of the historical facts, and to what degree it conforms to the characteristics of persecutions and martyrdoms, shaped and typified since the first centuries of the Christian era? In fact, the narrative is both typical and original in its various aspects. Typical in such narratives is the identity of the protagonists that are put in the spotlight. The beginning of the narrative mentions the slaughter of the noblemen that had believed in the promises of the king but that are, nevertheless, put to death first. Then the turn of the priests is naturally expected, although they are treated as a group and not as individuals. When it comes to individual martyrdoms, the persons mentioned are all women, or young children, people who in this society were considered weak. The only man who is highlighted is Ḥarith bin Ka‘b, but his old age (he is near the end of his life) is emphasized. So from the human point of view, none of the martyrs is strong, and the force with which they face martyrdom is a proof of what Christian faith can achieve. Women, in martyrdom, deserve the honour to be treated as men, in contradiction to social rules. They have the courage to face death as men do in a situation of war and martyrdom and are assimilated to them in fight. About Rahum, it is written in the Book of Ḥimyarites that she dies valiantly, like a man. This explains why the question of feminine modesty or decency is not important any more. She goes to the king without the veil

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 6

Christian Martyrs in Arabia _________________________________________________________________________________________

that had always covered her head: stress is placed on the fact that it is the first time since her wedding that one could see her face unveiled. She goes out to the central place of the town, a move she had never had before. In fact, she is allowed to behave like a man. In the second letter, a female servant of Ḥarith, Maḥya, goes outside too and begins to insult the king and the other Jews. Here also is a reversal of the normal social behaviour expected of a woman and a servant. And here too, respect for decency is thrown away: the king orders her clothes to be taken off, leaving her naked. The Persian martyr Shirin has to endure the same.25 Ḥarith also is unclothed on the order of the king. But contrary to the king’s expectation, neither of them is ashamed. The shame is on the side of the persecutors. All this conforms to the schemes found in different narratives of martyrdom from the first centuries of Christian history. On the other hand, these people are depicted as being quite ordinary, and not as saints with ascetic tendencies, as is often found in such narratives. The noblewoman, Doma or Roma, seems to have appreciated being rich and respected, having money and jewellery: she says that she has not loved them to the point to deny her Christian faith, but she never says she did not love them. The servant Maḥya is clearly depicted as wicked, someone speaking too much, unpleasant and not appreciated at all. Martyrdom does not imply asceticism: it is by their acceptance of death that they bring a testimony of faith, and not by a life of privations. The attitude of the Christians is generally moderate, as it is depicted in the letter. Neither Ḥarith nor Doma has a provocative attitude. They just refuse to deny Christ but do not seem to be looking for martyrdom. We know that this was a question that was disputed in the Church at the time of the great persecutions of the 3rd and early 4th

centuries. The quest for martyrdom and the question whether some attitudes towards it could be considered a form of suicide has been a subject of recent research, particularly with respect to the first three centuries of Christianity. Glen Bowersock for example has seen in this attitude the influence of a certain Roman mentality, which honours people choosing death instead of humiliation (Lucretia, Seneca).26 This position has been challenged by others, who stress that, from the end of the first century AD onwards, there is a change in Roman attitude, that the Church has generally condemned direct pursuit of death and provocation, and that the examples of such attitudes are generally found in a context of excitation and imitation.27 We have seen earlier a case of emulation involving married women wanting to be put to death just after their husbands and bnot-qyomo-nuns claiming the right to die first. But these are anonymous figures, except for Elishaba, the sister of bishop Paulos. The companions of Ḥarith, who ask to be beheaded after him, are also anonymous figures. A case of provocation is the young daughter of Doma, who spat in the face of the king because he was not respectful of the religion of her mother. But she is said to be very young. Harith and Doma are not provocative. What is more, Harith says that if members of his family deny Christ, they should have no inheritance from him and that his possessions should go to the church; but if one of them survives without denying Christ, he is to receive the entire inheritance. This means that there is no condemnation of the act of avoiding death. At the same time, there is no mention of apostasies. It is known that the question of lapsi, that is, people who fell away from the faith during persecution and who wanted to be reintegrated into the Church afterwards, was fierce in the first centuries. Cyprian (d. 258), for example, faced communities that were divided over this issue. Such cases are also mentioned in

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 7

Christian Martyrs in Arabia _________________________________________________________________________________________

the history of the Persian martyrs, for example the martyrs of Karka d-Beth-Slok. Here, no case of lapsi is mentioned and it seems as if no one apostatised, even if some people were quite cautious in going to collect the bodies of the martyrs. The story of the martyrs of Najrān in its different phases fits this type of narrative. Christians bear testimony through word and death, assuming both senses of the word ‘martyr’, sohdo. Public profession of faith is the essential part of sohduto or martyrdom, death being just a consequence. All individuals have time to dispute with the king, to profess their faith in front of the people and to exhort others to resist the pressure to convert. The noble Doma goes to the central square of the city to address her fellows. This is coherent with the general behaviour of Christians in Antiquity who, in such circumstances, as related in the various narratives of martyrdom, were looking for visibility and publicity. But all these discourses are simple. Harith as well as Doma announce to the king the end of his power and his future death, and the redactor knows it to have been fulfilled, but the context is not at that time apocalyptic; no celestial visions are reported. In the same way, the death of the Christians is not planned as a show, as had been the case in Roman times. Most of the time, the king asks his men to take the Christian victims away, to execute them in a remote place called lwadiya.28 Apart from those who are burnt in the church, the rest typically die from beheading, at least as far as the first letter is concerned. But it can be noted that in the elaboration of the tradition, this simple account of martyrdom tends to disappear: in the second letter, edited by Shahid, different forms of tortures with wood and ropes are depicted, boiling oil is used to pour on Elishaba, one is buried to chest height and riddled with arrows, and the intervention of beasts is mentioned, with some martyrs being attached to animals

(bull and ass) and sent into the desert. Here the local touch is the use of a camel for Elishaba when in the story of the martyrs of Karka d-Beth-Slok,29 sixteen elephants are brought in to trample the Christians.30 But even these variations are not conceived as a show. The context is no longer that of performances in amphitheatres,31 which had never been known in Arabia. The typical reference to martyrs as athletes of God32 is not used in the most ancient documents relating the events of Najrān. We find it only in the text of a hymn by John Psaltès,33 written in Greek but preserved only in Syriac. But this was written in a Byzantine context, where references to practices of the Roman world would have been more present. The biblical reference to the Maccabean martyrs, typical in Christian martyrdom literature, is implicitly present through the story of Doma coming with her daughters to be executed and seeing with fortitude these girls being executed in front of her. Marina Detoraki has stressed that in the Greek text there are certain parallels to the Maccabean martyrs,34 which was really considered by Christians as an anticipation of their own fate. I have just spoken of visibility. This publicity is also evident in the will to diffuse the information about martyrdom to other Christian communities, the very purpose of the letter of Simeon of BethArsham to Simeon of Gabbula: at the end, he implores him to inform every bishop of what has happened in Najrān. The aim is not only to engage the Byzantine Empire in direct action on behalf of Christians but to ask for prayers and simply to build a memory of the events. In the same manner, the bishop Yuhannan is said in the story of the Martyrs of Karka to have written to the patriarch of Antioch, asking both for prayers and for the diffusion of the knowledge of the event, as well as asking for help.35

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 8

Christian Martyrs in Arabia _________________________________________________________________________________________

III. THE BODIES OF THE MARTYRS A special mention must be made of the importance given to the body of the martyrs, during and after the events. Christians only look for eternal life and say explicitly that they do not care for their body in this life. This is particularly important in the episode linked to the noble lady Rahom, who arouses the pity of the king because of her beauty. In his supposed letter, the Jewish king says: “because of her noble condition, and kinship and beauty, we thought she would take pity on herself and could be convinced to deny Christ and we ordered not to put her to death.” But of course, she refuses and goes into the town saying that she wants to be put to death because of Christ: “I go to Christ with this beauty that is not corrupted by the denial of Jews.” The question of the bodies of martyrs is put into light by the fact that, in the second letter, immediately after each death, some Christians go and pick up the martyred bodies. As for Elishaba, she had been dragged away from the town. The following night, some other Christians come with linen clothes, spices, wine, water and bread and bury her according to the appropriate rites, marking the place for afterwards. In the same way, the Edessene martyrs Guria and Shmona, and afterwards Ḥabib, are taken care of after their death.36 The first aim is to give a decent burial and normal respect for the dead, since it is typical for the persecutors to throw them away without any burial, or even, in Persian contexts, to expose them as a normal way of treating the dead.37 Underlying the collection of the remains is the purpose of collecting relics38 and building martyria. Indirect proof of this is given by the first act of the Jewish king who asks for the bishop Paulos, and upon learning that he is dead, has both him and his successor exhumed from their graves,

and their bones burnt. This act is of course a way to deprive the community of its cohesion through the loss of a link, the cult at the tomb of its pastor. According to the second letter, Elishaba, the sister of this bishop, who was hidden and protected by Christians, runs out to the church because she wants to be burnt with the bones of her brother. On the other end, the appendix added supposedly by the scribe to the first letter, which mentions the victory of the Ethiopian king, says that one of his first acts was to build a church and a martyrion, presumably in memory of the recent martyrs. Special mention must be made of blood. It is known that the blood shed by martyrs is given a great importance in these narratives. Examples of it are numerous: in the history of Sharbil and Babaï, as also among the Edessene martyrs, when Sharbil is executed, his sister Babaï comes to collect his blood, for which she too is arrested and put to death. In Africa, before Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, was martyred, faithful Christians from his flock put out some material on the ground to collect his precious blood.39 The very same episode is also present in the narrative of the martyrs of Karka d-beth-Selok, in the Persian Empire: at the death of his mother, a younger son allows her blood to drip onto his eyes and body.40 Likewise, in the story of the Najrānite martyrs, when Harith is put to death, his companions run to take his blood and put it on their face and body as a blessing. In fact, blood shed is interpreted as a sacrament. In the histories of martyrdom of the first centuries, there is clearly an assimilation of martyrdom and baptism, a comparison between baptism in water and baptism in blood. Often martyrs try to get baptized just before being put to death, as was the case for Thecla in the arena. Here, the context is different because the people of Najrān are already Christians.

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 9

Christian Martyrs in Arabia _________________________________________________________________________________________

But the sacramental, eucharistic dimension is strongly assumed in the history of Rahom. I quote what is supposed to be written by the Jewish king: “And when I saw that there was no way that she would deny Christ, I ordered, to the terror of all Christians, that they throw her down and I ordered that her daughters should be slaughtered and their blood shed in her mouth and that only afterwards her head be cut off. And we have done so. And then I ordered that she should be stood up and I asked her what it was to taste the blood of her daughters, and in her madness, she swore by this deceiver, ‘As the Eucharist, pure and immaculate, such was its taste in my mouth and my soul.’” Here, clearly, we have a mystical and sacramental interpretation of blood. That is why, in the letter of Simeon, we find the mention of the blood shed by the martyrs which will be a protection for the city in the future in the speech of Rahom: “May the blood of brothers and sisters who were killed for Christ be a wall for this city if it remains faithful to Christ my Lord!” A third aspect that I would like to stress is that of smell. A sweet scent is associated with Paradise and is a sign of holiness as a prefiguration of eternal life.41 It is often a topos in narratives of martyrdoms that the dead body of the holy martyrs42 delivers a sweet and precious smell, different from that of normal dead bodies.43 We find an allusion to it in the second Syriac letter when some women who had not been put in the church to be burnt run to it, shouting one to another, “Come, my friends, so that we should be embalmed by the smell of priests”. Likewise, the little boy of three that the king tries to invite to his feast refuses to go with him, to eat the nuts and almonds by which he hopes to seduce him, saying to the king that he and his sweat smell dreadful, that he does not like the smell of Jews and wants instead the smell of his mother who has been put to death.

IN CONCLUSION I would like to come back to the question of the type of martyrdom narrative we encounter in this episode. It has long been thought that the first letter attributed to Simeon of Beth-Arsham was his very own text: it begins with the circumstances by which he was informed of the events. The letter then makes a citation of a letter of the Jewish king in the first person. It was thus natural, at the moment of the discovery of another letter by Irfan Shahid, to interpret it as a second one, also written by Simeon of Beth-Arsham. But the very style and content of the letter of the king, which is in fact an apology of the faithful and heroic attitude of Christians, make it difficult to believe that these are his own words. Different typologies of narratives of martyrdom have been developed by scholars like Delehaye,44 Quasten,45 and Saxer46 for the martyrdoms of the Roman Empire,47 and of course Devos48 for the Oriental martyrs.49 I cannot give a detailed list here but it is sufficient to say that the range of the categories elaborated by these authors goes from supposedly official minutes of trials to legendary and romantic narratives. I am not sure that real minutes have ever been preserved for such events as martyrdoms. But clearly here, in the case of the Najrānites, we have, at least with the letter of Simeon of Beth-Arsham, what is often called an “historical passion”, that is acta which are based on the record of eyewitnesses or well-informed contemporaries. It is not a direct testimony and we have seen some examples of elaboration that conform to what one might expect from a narrative of martyrdom. But the historical context is clear: there are no wonders or miracles, nor exceptional torture, nor apocalyptical themes. And we have seen that the first letter of Simeon must have been written quite close to the date of the events, before the middle of the 6th century.

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 10

Christian Martyrs in Arabia _________________________________________________________________________________________

I come back now to the question raised at the beginning of this paper: was it really and historically a martyrdom, in the sense of Christians put to death for their faith, or were these people victims of a political confrontation? It is difficult to answer this question. Some of the words of the king, saying that Persians and Romans have recognized that Christ is a man, could be a result of Miaphysite propaganda. But it could also be the sign that the victims were just those Christians linked with Ethiopia and Byzantium at a time when the new king tried to tie his links with Persia. The conquest of the same region by the Persians at the end of the 6th century is a clear sign of

its strong interest in South Arabia and of its probable intervention. We cannot say if Christians belonging to the Oriental Church were oppressed or not, nor can we determine if the motive of the massacre was purely religious or mainly political. But already in our first Syriac text, the episode is interpreted as a martyrdom and in the end the memory of these Najranite martyrs was preserved particularly in the Oriental Church.50 This historical dimension of the earliest narrative and its very original context are perhaps two reasons for its great fame throughout the whole Syriac world and beyond.

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 11

Christian Martyrs in Arabia _________________________________________________________________________________________

NOTES *

It is my pleasure to thank my friend Amir Harrak for inviting me to participate in the CSSS Symposium XII. The CSSS has been a model that inspired the foundation of the French Société d’études syriaques and Amir Harrak played a decisive part in stimulating Alain Desreumaux and me to follow his path. He was present for our first workshop and will be with us for the tenth next year. I really appreciate these exchanges between our societies. 1 F. NAU, Un Martyrologe et douze Ménologes syriaques (Paris, 1915), PO X.1, p. 31, 36, 49, 69, 94, 98, 109, 117. 2 This study is a part of a research project led by Christian Robin, specialist of Ancient South Arabia, Joelle Beaucamp, a Byzantinist, and myself, all three of us members of the CNRS, along with other occasional collaborators. Two volumes have already been published and I am preparing a new edition of the Syriac texts. 3 Sidney H. Griffith, “Christians, Muslims and Neo-Martyrs: Saints’ Lives and Holy Land History,” in A. Kofsky and G.G. Stroumsa (eds.), Sharing the Sacred. Religious Contacts and Conflicts in the Holy Land First-Fifteenth Centuries CE (Jerusalem, 1998), 163-207. 4 On the shift of the role of oppressors from Pagans to Christians, see Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eight Centuries (New Haven, 1996). On the question of the last Pagans in the Orient see, Pierre Chuvin, Chronique des derniers païens (Paris, 1991). 5 The Acts of these martyrs have been collected by Étienne Évode Assemani (éd.), Acta martyrum orientalium et occidentalium, I-II (Roma, 1748), and P. Bedjan, Acta Martyrum et Sanctorum syriace (AMS), 7 vols. (ParisLeipzig, 1890-1897), rep. Gorgias Press, Piscataway 2008. An introduction to these texts has been written by C. Jullien, “Les actes des martyrs perses. Transmettre l’histoire,” in A. Binggeli (ed.), L’hagiographie syriaque, Études syriaques 9 (Paris, 2012), 127-40. 6 On the site of Najrān and recent researches conducted there, see Jérémie Schiettecatte, “L’antique Najrān: confrontation des données archéologiques et des sources écrites,” in

J. Beaucamp, F. Briquel Chatonnet et C. Robin (eds), Juifs et chrétiens en Arabie aux Ve et VIe siècles : regards croisés sur les sources, Centre de recherche d’histoire et civilisation de Byzance, Monographies 32, Le massacre de Najrān II (Paris, 2010), 11-37. 7 On such cases see M.-F. Baslez, Les persécutions dans l’Antiquité. Victimes, héros, martyrs (Paris, 2007), 266-272. On the accusation by Christians about persecutions by Jews, see Judith M. Lieu, “Accusations of Jewish Persecution in early Christian sources, with particular reference to Justin Martyr and the Martyrdom of Polycarp,” in G.N. Stanton and G.G. Stroumsa, Tolerance and Intolerance in Early Judaism and Christianity, (Cambridge, 1998), 279-285. 8 For a review of the sources and the historical context, specially the question of chronology which is particularly important for the settling of Himyarite chronology, see J. Beaucamp, F. Briquel-Chatonnet et C. Robin, “La persécution des chrétiens de Nagrân et la chronologie ḥimyarite,” ARAM 11-12 (1999-2000 [2001]) 15-83. 9 M. Detoraki, Le martyre de saint Aréthas et de ses compagnons (BHG 166), trad. J. Beaucamp (Paris, 2007). 10 On this appellation, see the presentation of Marie-Joseph Pierre, “Les « membres de l’Ordre », d’Aphraate au Liber Graduum,” in F. Jullien (ed.), Le monachisme syriaque, Études syriaques 7 (Paris, 2010), 11-35, with bibliography. Add Sidney H. Griffith, “Monks, ‘Singles’ and the ‘Sons of Covenant’ – Reflections on Syriac Ascetic Terminology,” in E. Carr, S. Parenti, A.-A. Thiermeyer and E. Velkovska (eds), Eulogema: Studies in Honour of Robert Taft, S.J., Studia Anselmiana, 110, Analecta Liturgica, 17 (Roma, 1993) 141-160. Especially about women: S. Ashbrook-Harvey, “Women’s service in Ancient Syriac Christianity,” Mother, nun, deaconess. Images of Women according to Eastern Canon Law, Kanon XVI, Annuaire de la Société du droit des Églises orientales (2000), 226-41. The mention of these in the 6th century is intriguing as it is a way of life which is generally said to have preceded monasticism and to have flourished between the 2nd and the 4th century. It could mean that consecrated life had kept a very ancient form in South Arabia

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 12

Christian Martyrs in Arabia _________________________________________________________________________________________

and that more classical forms of monasticism had not yet been introduced. 11 For the date, see above note 7. 12 “La lettera di Simeone vescovo di BêthArsâm sopra i martiri omeriti,” éd. trad.. I. Guidi, Atti della Reale Accademia dei Lincei, 278 (1880-1881), 471-515; English translation by A. Jeffery, “Christianity in South Arabia,” The Moslem World 36 (1946) 204-216. I am preparing a new edition and translation. The text is preserved in eleven manuscripts, of which the oldest (Ms BL Add 14650) was written in 850 AD. About manuscript transmission, see F. Briquel Chatonnet, “Recherche sur la tradition textuelle et manuscrite de la lettre de Siméon de Beth-Arsham,” in J. Beaucamp, F. Briquel Chatonnet et C. Robin (eds), Juifs et chrétiens en Arabie aux ve et vie siècles: regards croisés sur les sources, Centre de recherche d’histoire et civilisation de Byzance, Monographies 32, Le massacre de Najrān II (Paris, 2010), 123-141. 13 Historia ecclesiastica Zachariae Rhetori vulgo adscripta, II, éd. E. W. Brooks, CSCO 84 SS 39 (Louvain, 1921); trans. E. W. Brooks, CSCO 88 SS 42 (Louvain, 1924); E. J. Hamilton et E. W. Brooks, The Syriac Chronicle known as that of Zachariah of Mitylene (London, 1899); new English translation by R. Phenix and C. Horn with an introduction and commentary by G. Greatrex in The Chronicle of Pseudo-Zachariah Rhetor. Church and War in Late Antiquity, Translated Texts for Historians (Liverpool, 2011). 14 Chronicle of Zuqnin, Text: Incerti auctoris Chronicon Pseudo-Dionysianum vulgo dictum, ed. J.-B. Chabot, CSCO 91 and 104, SS 43 and 53 (Paris 1927-1933), repr. Louvain 1952-1953; the letter of Simeon is in the 2d volume p. 57-67; CSCO 121, syr. 66 (Louvain, 1949), 57-69—Latin translation of the first volume; the second volume was translated into French by R. Hespels, CSCO 507, syr. 213 (Louvain, 1989), 42-50, and into English by W. Witakowski, Pseudo-Dionysius of TelMahre. Chronicle Part III (Liverpool, 1996), 53-63 and A. Harrak, The Chronicle of Zuqnīn. Parts III and IV, Mediaeval Sources in Translation 36 (Toronto: PIMS 1999), 78-84. 15 Michel le Syrien, Chronique, éd. trad. J.B. Chabot, t. II et IV (Paris 1902 et 1910).

16

F. Briquel Chatonnet, “Recherche sur la tradition textuelle et manuscrite,” (supra n.12) where I conclude that the longer version is the oldest. See also, with different conclusions, D. Taylor, “A Stylistic comparison of the Syriac Ḥimyarite martyr texts attributed to Simeon of Beth-Arsham,” ibid., 143-176. 17 G. Greatrex, “Pseudo-Zachariah of Mytilene: the context and nature of his work,” Journal of the CSSS 6 (2006) 39-52; id., “Le Pseudo-Zacharie de Mytilène et l’historiographie syriaque au sixième siècle,” in M. Debié (ed.), L’historiographie syriaque, Études syriaques 6 (Paris 2009, 33-55. See also id., The Chronicle of Pseudo-Zachariah Rhetor (supra n. 13), 32. The author considers the relations between this chronicle and the work of John of Ephesus. 18 John of Ephesus, Lives of Oriental Saints I, E. W. Brooks, ed., PO XVII.1 (Paris 1923). 19 In this respect, it is very similar to the Acts of the martyr Anastasius from Persia. On this text, see Bernard Flusin, Saint Anastase le Perse et l’histoire de la Palestine au début du viie siècle, I. Les textes; II. Commentaire (Paris, 1992) (Le monde byzantin). 20 Irfan Shahid, The Martyrs of Najran, New Documents (Bruxelles, 1971). 21 Axel Moberg, The Book of the Ḥimyarites, Fragments of a Hitherto Unknown Syriac Work (Lund, 1924). 22 Iwona Gajda, “Quel monothéisme en Arabie du Sud ancienne ?,” in J. Beaucamp, F. Briquel Chatonnet et C. Robin (eds), Juifs et chrétiens en Arabie aux ve et vie siècles: regards croisés sur les sources, Centre de recherche d’histoire et civilisation de Byzance, Monographies 32, Le massacre de Najrān II (Paris, 2010), 107-120. 23 A synthesis on this city by C. J. Robin, “Nagrān vers l’époque du massacre: notes sur l’histoire politique, économique et institutionnelle et sur l’introduction du christianisme (avec un réexamen du Martyre d’Azqīr),” ibid. 39-106. 24 Hans Arneson, Emanuel Fiano, Christine Marquis, and Kyle Smith, The History of the Great Deeds of Bishop Paul of Qenṭos and Priest John of Edessa (Piscataway, Gorgias Press, 2010). 25 Paul Devos, “Sainte Sirin, martyre sous Khosrau Ier Anosarvan,” AB 64 (1946) 87-131;

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 13

Christian Martyrs in Arabia _________________________________________________________________________________________

Id., “La jeune martyre perse sainte Širin († 559),” AB 112 (1994) 5-31. 26 G. Bowersock, “Martyrdom and Suicide,” in Id., Martyrdom and Rome, The Wiles Lectures (Cambridge, 1995), 59-74. 27 A discussion of this question is given by M.-F. Baslez, Les persécutions dans l’Antiquité. Victimes, héros, martyrs (Paris, 2007), 210-216. 28 This is clearly a misinterpretation of the Arabic term wādī “valley,” with the article. 29 BHO 705. AMS 2, p. 507-535. German translation by Georg Hoffmann, Auszüge aus syrischen Akten persischer Märtyrer, Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 7/3 (Leipzig, 1880, 18862), 43-60. Edition and German translation by G. Moesinger, Monumenta syriaca ex Romanis codicibus collecta, t. 2 (Innsbruck, 1878), 63-7. A new edition and translation is being prepared by Muriel Debié and will be published in the collection “Sources chrétiennes”. 30 G. Hoffmann, p. 53. 31 On this topic, Glen Bowersock, “The civic role of martyrs,” in Id. Martyrdom and Rome, The Wiles Lectures (Cambridge, 1995), 41-57. 32 Development in M.-F. Baslez, op. cit., 217-220. 33 R. Schröter, “Jacob’s von Sarug an die himjaritischen Christen,” ZDMG 31 (1877) 360405. Presentation and French translation in F. Briquel Chatonnet, “Recherche sur la tradition” (supra n. 16), 132-133. 34 M. Detoraki, Le martyre de saint Aréthas et de ses compagnons (BHG 166), trad. J. Beaucamp (Paris 2007). 35 Hoffmann, Auszüge, 51. 36 Actes de Šmōnā et de Guryā, Francis Crawford Burkitt, ed. & trans., Euphemia and the Goth. A Legendary Tale from Edessa, with the Acts of Martyrdom of the Confessors of Edessa, Text and Translation Society 2 (London, 1913; repr. Amsterdam, 1981), p. ‫;ܟܗ–ܓ‬ 90–110. See L. Greisiger, “Les saints populaires d’Édesse,” in A. Binggeli éd., L’hagiographie syriaque, Études syriaques 9 (Paris, 2012), 171-99. 37 Sur cette question, Muriel Debié, “Devenir chrétien dans l’Iran sassanide: La conversion à la lumière des récits hagiographiques,” in H. Inglebert, S. Destephen et B. Dumézil (eds.), Le pro-

blème de la christianisation du monde antique (Paris, 2010), 329-358. 38 On this question, see John Wortley, “The origins of Christian veneration of body-parts,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 223 (2006) 528. 39 Acts of Cyprian 5,4. 40 Hoffmann, Auszüge, 57. 41 For an analysis of this theme, see Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Scenting Salvation. Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination, The transformation of the classical heritage 42 (Berkeley-Los Angeles-London, 2006); see also Béatrice Caseau, “Syméon Stylite l’ancien entre puanteur et parfum,” Revue des études byzantines 63 (2005) 71-96 who stresses, on the contrary, stink as form of asceticism, in the very renunciation of being an image of holiness and the consequent rejection by fellow monks. 42 Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Scenting Salvation, 11-21. Already A. Lallemand, “Le parfum des martyrs dans les Actes des martyrs de Lyon et le Martyre de Polycarpe,” in E.A. Livingstone (ed.), Studia Patristica XVI, Texte und Untersuchungen sur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur 129 (Berlin, 1985), 186-192 who shows that this image stems from the Bible and is used in order to give an ideal description of the behaviour of the martyrs. 43 A topos that runs through F. Dostoievski, The Brothers Karamazov, first published in 1879-1880: at the beginning of the 3rd part, the smell of decomposition coming from the body of the holy man, the staretz Zossima, is considered a sign that casts doubt on his holiness. 44 H. Delehaye, Les passions des martyrs et les genres littéraires, Studia Hagiographica 13B (Bruxelles, 1921) and Id., Les légendes hagiographiques, Studia Hagiographica 18 (Bruxelles, 19554). 45 J. Quasten, Initiation aux Pères de l’Église I (Paris, 1955), 199. 46 V. Saxer, “Martyre III. Actes Passions. Légendes,” in Dictionnaire historique du christianisme ancien II (Paris, 1990), 1575-1580. 47 On the use of written minutes in the elaboration of the narratives of martyrdoms of the first three centuries and on these as models for later ones, see Glen Bowersock, “The written record,” in id., Martyrdom and Rome, The Wiles Lectures (Cambridge, 1995), 23-39.

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 14

Christian Martyrs in Arabia _________________________________________________________________________________________ 48

Paul Devos, “Les martyrs persans à travers leurs actes syriaques,” Atti del convegno sul tema : La Persia e il mondo greco-romano, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei 363. Quaderno 76 (Rome, 1966), 213-225. 49 A discussion of the major trends of these classifications is given by Boudewijn Dehandschutter, “Hagiographie et histoire: A propos des Actes et Passions des martyrs,” in M. Lamberigts and P. Van Deun (eds.), Martyrium in multidisciplinary perspective. Memorial Louis Reekmans (Leuven, 1995), 295-301; concerning the Persian martyrs see, C. Jullien, “Martyrs en

Perse dans l’hagiographie syro-orientale: le tournant du vie siècle,” in J. Beaucamp, F. Briquel Chatonnet, C. Robin (eds), Juifs et chrétiens en Arabie aux ve et vie siècles : regards croisés sur les sources, Centre de recherche d’histoire et civilisation de Byzance, Monographies 32, Le massacre de Najrān II (Paris, 2010), 279-290, and “Les actes des martyrs perses. Transmettre l’histoire,” in A. Binggeli (ed.), L’hagiographie syriaque, Études syriaques 9 (Paris, 2012), 127-40. 50 Briquel Chatonnet, “Recherche sur la tradition,” (supra n. 16).

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 15

______________________________________________________________________ CONSTANTINE AND JUDAH THE MACCABEE: HISTORY AND MEMORY IN THE ACTS OF THE PERSIAN MARTYRS*

KYLE SMITH UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

O

n Good Friday, sometime between 339 and 344 CE, the executioners of Shapur II beheaded Mar Simeon bar Ṣabbāʿē.1 Shapur was the long-reigning king of the Sasanian Persian Empire who occupied the throne for most of the fourth century (from his birth in 309 until his death in 379), and Simeon, whose surname means “the Son of Cloth Dyers,” was the Christian bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the twin-cities of the Persian winter capital that straddled the Tigris some thirty-five kilometers downriver from modern-day Baghdad. As the bishop of the capital city, and the purported leader of the Christians of Persia, Simeon was Shapur’s most prominent victim. Even though others were killed before him, Simeon’s acts indicate that the bishop was the protomartyr whose death inaugurated Shapur’s forty wearisome years of persecution in earnest.2

REMEMBERING (AND RE-REMEMBERING) SHAPUR’S PERSECUTION Within a century of his death, if not sooner, Simeon’s acts were known among Greekspeaking Christians in the Roman Empire.3 The Greek Church historian Sozomen re-

cords an abbreviated account of Simeon’s martyrdom in his Ecclesiastical History, published in Constantinople in the early 440s. Although Sozomen is evidently drawing upon some version of Simeon’s acts (and not another, independent source), he, too, acknowledges Simeon for ushering one hundred clerics to their deaths before fearlessly inclining his own neck to the sword.4 Sozomen’s account does not end with Simeon. He also narrates the trials of other Christians throughout Persia who were martyred under Shapur.5 At the end of his report, Sozomen explains that the emperor Constantine (the patron of all Christians in every land) was so troubled to hear about the persecution in Persia that he wrote a letter to Shapur pleading for an end to the violence.6 Sozomen is the first of many to confuse not only the chronology of events, but also the context of Constantine’s letter and the particulars of the emperor’s actions with regard to the Christians of Persia.7 Constantine died in the spring of 337, at least two years before Shapur’s persecution is supposed to have begun, and the emperor’s letter, according to the text preserved in Eusebius of Caesarea’s Life of Constantine, fraternally explains how God rewards those

________________________________________________________________________________ ke (Hamburg: Verlag, 2002), 185 for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 16

Constantine and Judah the Maccabee _________________________________________________________________________________________

who treat Christians kindly.8 The letter does not refer to a persecution in Persia, nor does it request an end to any ongoing violence. Despite Sozomen’s inaccuracies, his presentation of Constantine’s response to Shapur’s persecution is important as an historical source. It is a key indication of how the history of Christianity in fourthcentury Persia was reinterpreted, and rewritten, in later times. The most important sources for the study of Persian Christianity in the age of Shapur are not Greek church histories but Syriac hagiographies.9 Among the extensive collection of texts known as the Acts of the Persian Martyrs, two very different versions of Simeon’s death have survived.10 Intriguingly, the manifold differences between the two accounts of Simeon’s martyrdom demonstrate a process of historical revision not dissimilar from Sozomen’s reshuffling of historical events. The two versions of Simeon’s death were written with different agendas in mind and under what must have been very different social, political, and religious circumstances. While accurately dating the Acts of the Persian Martyrs can be difficult, the shorter and earlier account of Simeon’s death, the Martyrdom of Blessed Simeon bar Ṣabbāʿē, seems to have been composed in the fourth century. By contrast, the much longer History of Blessed Simeon bar Ṣabbāʿē is unlikely to have been composed until after the councils that formally established the Church of the East in the fifth century.11 Notably, these Persian church councils were convened by the bishops of Seleucia-Ctesiphon under the guidance of Roman envoys dispatched by the emperor Theodosius II. Although the version of Simeon’s History that is known to us may not have been composed until a century or more after Simeon’s death, its account is almost invariably privileged over Simeon’s Martyrdom and read as an accurate account of events

in the mid-fourth century.12 But, as studies of other texts among the Acts of the Persian Martyrs have shown, martyr acts frequently underwent long processes of revision.13 Daniel Boyarin’s distinction between history and hagiography is an admonition that bears repeating: “Being killed is an event. Martyrdom is a literary form, a genre.”14 As a genre, the Acts of the Persian Martyrs were often literarily tethered to Shapur’s persecution even when otherwise long since unmoored from the events of the fourth century. This is not because the texts were thoroughly revised in later periods, but often because they were not first composed until centuries after Shapur’s persecution. The History of the Holy Mar Maʿin, for example, takes place in the days of Shapur, but, as Sebastian Brock demonstrates, this West Syrian text was composed in the Roman Empire in the sixth century.15 The late date and Roman provenance of the text are reflected in how it depicts Constantine. Whereas the East Syrian tradition generally holds that Constantine was dead before Shapur’s persecution began, Mar Maʿin takes a page from Sozomen and presents the emperor as a zealous advocate for the Christians of Persia. According to the text, when Constantine heard about Shapur’s persecution of Christians, particularly the horrible scourging of the Christian convert Maʿin, he wept and refused to eat. Steeled by a night of prayer and fasting, the emperor’s sorrow was forged into righteous anger. The following morning, Constantine arrested and tortured the sons of the Persian nobles who were living in the Roman Empire. Then he wrote a letter to Shapur in which he threatened to invade Persia and personally dismember the Persian king “limb by limb” if he did not immediately free all Christians from imprisonment.16 Another text among the Acts, the History of Mar Qardagh, also recounts events

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 17

Constantine and Judah the Maccabee _________________________________________________________________________________________

that are said to have occurred during the time of Shapur. Yet, as Joel Walker points out, Mar Qardagh “preserves few, if any, reliable details about the fourth century.” It does, however, open “an extraordinary window into the cultural world of seventhcentury Iraq.”17 Qardagh, like Maʿin, had been a military leader and a member of the Sasanian elite before his conversion to Christianity. After becoming a Christian, Qardagh abandoned his former life and shunned “battles, ceased from conflicts, and loved a life of peace.” While the Romans and Persians prepared for war, Qardagh retreated to the prayerful tranquility of the mountains. His family, however, remained exposed: a Roman “pillaging raid” captured them and destroyed the lands under Qardagh’s authority “up to the frontier city of Nisibis.”18 When Qardagh heard what had happened, he wrote to the Romans, identified himself as a fellow Christian, and asked only for the safe return of his family. In response, the Romans sent him his brother’s head.19 Enraged, Qardagh once more girded himself for war and marched over two hundred of his men into a church to pray for divine assistance. Quoting the Psalms, Qardagh “extended his hands and prayed, saying, ‘Judge, Lord, my case and fight against those who fight against me. ... Unsheathe the sword and make it flash against my pursuers.’”20 Maʿin had prayed that David’s crown would be preserved upon the head of the “believing emperor Constantine,” but here, in the prayer of another Persian Christian, David’s psalm and an unsheathed sword are upraised against Caesar.21 Odd as the histories and slippery allegiances in Mar Maʿin and Mar Qardagh may be, perhaps the strangest example of how Shapur’s persecution was transformed in the memory of Persian Christians is found in the History of Mar Behnam. Long thought to be a late antique composition, Mar Behnam is now believed to date from

no earlier than the twelfth century.22 This medieval Syriac text details the story of still another Persian martyr who was killed for abandoning his ancestral religion and converting to Christianity. But Behnam was not just any martyr. He was the son of the king. Puzzlingly, even though the text is set in the fourth century, in the “time of Julian” and thus during what would have been Shapur’s persecution, Behnam is not said to be the son of Shapur II but the ancient Assyrian king Sennacherib II. Although such a radical chronological transposition of ancient Assyrian and biblical genealogies to much later contexts does not occur frequently in the Acts, it is not an uncommon device in Syriac literature more broadly.23 What all these diverse texts have in common are their various means of remembering and recycling the social and political history of fourth-century Persia for later historiographical or hagiographical purposes. Simeon’s acts are thus particularly helpful for re-reading fourth-century history in that both an early and a later version are extant. They provide a captivating glimpse into the changing ways that the Christians of Persia conceptualized their religious identity, negotiated an apparently precarious position between the Roman and Persian Empires, and interpreted their own history against the larger backdrop of major religious and political transformations. For this was a period that Christians of the Roman Empire remembered as one of liberation, but that Christians of the Persian Empire recalled as one of violence, destruction, and punitive taxes.

CONSTANTINE AND THE CHRISTIANS OF PERSIA, RECONSIDERED If the two versions of Simeon’s martyr acts and the various histories and hagiographies that speak about the confrontation between

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 18

Constantine and Judah the Maccabee _________________________________________________________________________________________

Shapur and his Christian subjects are to be believed, then Simeon was arrested for refusing to collect taxes from his flock. He was subsequently killed for further rebelling against Shapur’s authority by declining to bow before the king and worship the sun. According to most scholarly assessments of the motives underlying Shapur’s persecution, what led to the taxation and violent suppression of the Christians of Persia was the suspicion on the part of the Persian authorities that all Christians everywhere were, by dint of their religion, somehow surreptitiously allied with the Christian Caesars of Rome. This perspective assumes that in the aftermath of Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, and the emperor’s ensuing patronage of the Christian cult within the Roman Empire, that Christianitas quickly became synonymous with Romanitas. As a result of this concatenation of religion and empire, Shapur looked upon the Christians of Persia as an internal political threat—a fifth column loyal to Caesar, not the Shah.24 The notion that there was a persecution in mid-fourth-century Persia, especially one that was spurred by religious and political changes in the Roman Empire, is admittedly elegant in its simplicity and compelling as an historical narrative. It is compelling as a chronicle of the plight of a Christian minority population in a non-Christian land. It is compelling as a tale of how Christianity was used as a vehicle of the imperial designs of Rome’s first Christian emperor. And it is compelling as an indication of the sheer speed by which Christianity became a proxy of the fears of the Sasanian authorities over internal sedition and the tenuous fetters that bound their immense, continental empire together. But when assumptions about the immediateness of religious and political change in the fourth century are held at bay, then a much less elegant and much more complex narrative emerges, one that suggests there is little

reason to justify characterizing the violence reported in Simeon’s acts as historical evidence of a religious persecution that stemmed from the Christianization of the Roman Empire. The preponderance of late ancient textual evidence indicates, instead, that the traditional account of a persecution in fourth-century Persia is an ex post facto theological story—a harmonized event history woven from a tapestry of vague and conflicting sources—that reflects the presumed triumph of Christianity in the Roman Empire under Constantine. THE FOURTH-CENTURY EVIDENCE: APHRAHAT AND EPHREM The first problem with the presumption that Shapur persecuted Christians as a fifth column of Rome is that no Syriac source prior to Simeon’s History compels such a conclusion without the addition of an asterisk or a bracketed question mark. Outside of the martyrological tradition, the lone fourth-century witness to allude to Shapur’s persecution is the piecemeal account found in the work of Aphrahat, the Persian Sage. Not much is known about Aphrahat’s identity other than that he seems to have been an important church figure and biblical scholar somewhere in Persia. Aphrahat’s only known work, a series of twentythree pastoral homilies called the Demonstrations, is believed to have been written over a multi-year period near the end of Constantine’s life and the beginning of Shapur’s persecution, just as a protracted territorial dispute over Rome’s Mesopotamian provinces was engulfing the two empires.25 His fifth homily, “On Wars,” and his twenty-first, “On Persecution,” are thus often read as historical testimonies verifying both that Shapur persecuted Christians and that the Christians of Persia were unified with Caesar in their opposition to Shapur’s Magian regime.26 Yet there are reasons to doubt such a reading since

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 19

Constantine and Judah the Maccabee _________________________________________________________________________________________

Aphrahat’s homilies are tediously long winded on biblical interpretation and the elucidation of prophecy, but aggravatingly terse and elliptical on history. More often than not, Aphrahat ignores or only obliquely refers to contemporary events. And rarely does he expound upon the immediate purpose driving each of his Demonstrations, leaving that task to the conjecture of scholars. “On Persecution,” for example, is thought to have been inspired by Shapur’s violence against Simeon and those martyred alongside him, but Aphrahat never mentions either Shapur or Simeon, nor does he name or discuss the trials of any other Christian martyr in the Sasanian Empire. From its outset the text is an intellectual exercise in biblical exegesis that reads less as a response to persecution and more as Aphrahat’s rebuttal in a theological debate. Aphrahat explains that he has heard how Jews scoff at Christians and categorize their (un-described) trials as proof that God has rejected them.27 His primary agenda in this treatise is to combat such accusations. To do so Aphrahat employs the written testimony of the prophets and the lived example of the persecuted righteous ones so to concoct a series of ripostes against the Jews using their own biblical narratives. He calls as witnesses men such as Jephthah, Elijah, Hezekiah, and others who were persecuted just “as Jesus was persecuted.”28 If Aphrahat intended a litany of persecuted Jews as homiletic balm for oppressed Christians, then such a purpose becomes evident only in the most general terms in one of the last lines of the homily. Aphrahat refers to a persecution “in our days” that occurred “because of our sins.”29 Nothing more is said. The consensus opinion that the persecution “in our days” must have been Shapur’s comes not from this homily purportedly about Shapur’s persecution, but from the end of Aphrahat’s twenty-third and last homily (“On the

Grape Cluster”). The closing line of the Demonstrations dates the text by referring to its composition in “the thirty-sixth year of Shapur, king of Persia, who has stirred up persecution, and in the fifth year after the churches had been uprooted, and in the year in which there was a great ravaging of martyrs in the land of the east.”30 The amount of historical detail imparted in this final line eclipses what can otherwise be gleaned from two handfuls of Aphrahat’s treatises. Assuming that this dating mechanism was not appended by a later copyist, but was written by Aphrahat himself, then it clearly indicates that the Christians of Persia did not perceive Shapur’s reign as a pleasant one. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that this is the only information that Aphrahat conveys about Shapur’s persecution. He fails to comment on the most basic question of why Shapur is so angry at Christians. The Roman emperor is not cited as a cause, and neither the execution of the bishop of SeleuciaCtesiphon nor the decimation of the priesthood in Persia is mentioned—just this “great ravaging of martyrs.” On the basis of such little evidence, how can we claim to know what was happening, or, more importantly, why it was happening? Historical details are similarly lacking in the homily “On Wars.” In this text, Aphrahat spends his time carefully interpreting biblical prophecy, not dwelling upon the machinations of kings and empires. At first glance, he seems to read the Book of Daniel in a way that invites a Roman invasion of Persia because of the presumed liberation of Christians that would follow.31 Upon closer inspection, however, it is evident that Aphrahat did not hold such a shortsighted view of salvation history. His perspective is apocalyptic in its concern to show how the simmering tensions between Rome and Persia are a sign that portends the end of days. Any forthcoming Roman victory over Persia (even one led by the

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 20

Constantine and Judah the Maccabee _________________________________________________________________________________________

sword of a Christian king) is thus not interpreted as an end in itself, but as a biblically-prophesied stepping stone toward a grander providential hope—the reign of the kingdom of God. For Aphrahat, the Roman Empire will not be welcomed as a liberator, but, as Daniel would have it, feared as a beast that will be appreciated only insofar as it serves as a temporal tool in the hand of the true Liberator. Aphrahat’s Demonstrations are unquestionably tantalizing in their references to a turbulent time in Persia, and they must not be dismissed out of hand. But the Persian Sage’s historical portrait is vague and tendentious. Aphrahat’s asides and allusions have to be buttressed by other contemporary witnesses. One obvious source in which one would expect to find further evidence of Shapur’s persecution is the work of the most important Syriac writer of the fourth century, Ephrem the Syrian. Curiously, however, Ephrem is altogether silent about a persecution of Christians in Persia. His failure to say anything is all the more bewildering since Ephrem’s home, the northern Mesopotamian city of Nisibis on Roman eastern frontier, was a city that Shapur had besieged three times during Ephrem’s life.32 In 363, Shapur finally took Nisibis without a fight as part of the spoils of a lopsided peace treaty with the Roman Empire.33 Ephrem claims to have personally witnessed the handover of Nisibis to Shapur and the westward evacuation of the city’s inhabitants to the Roman side of the newly-redrawn limes. Fleeing Nisibis himself, Ephrem lived out the last decade of his life as a refugee in Edessa, which had become one of the easternmost Roman bulwarks against Persia. While in Edessa, Ephrem lamented the loss of his home, and he wrote about Shapur at length throughout the course of several hymns that were composed roughly twenty-five years after Simeon’s death and the beginning of Shapur’s persecution.

Remarkably, however, Ephrem presents Shapur in a positive light in these hymns, conceding that although the Persian king was a worshipper of fire and a barbarian whose armies were a pestilence to Nisibis, that Shapur was also providentially useful because he occasioned the downfall of the most pressing and proximate threat to Christians—the Roman emperor Julian.34 Ephrem’s hatred of Julian and the emperor’s abuse of Christians is hardly concealed in his hymns, but about Shapur’s own persecution of Christians Ephrem says nothing. Although odd on its face, perhaps it is not surprising that the focus of Ephrem’s vitriol would be directed against Julian rather than Shapur. Ephrem was deeply invested in what Sidney Griffith has called “an almost Eusebian doctrine of the Church of empire.”35 Concurring with Griffith, Christine Shepardson has argued that Ephrem strongly believed that Nicene orthodoxy should be “synonymous with the Roman Empire.”36 If Griffith, Shepardson, and others have correctly gauged Ephrem’s ideas about the proper relationship between Church and Empire, then his staunchly proRoman political theology gives rise to a perplexing question: how could Ephrem celebrate Shapur for killing Julian while simultaneously ignoring Shapur’s own persecution of those who had dutifully worshipped the god of Caesar? Reasonable explanations of such an apparent contradiction are few. Ephrem’s silence about Shapur’s persecution, and his conception of the Persian king as an unwitting ally against a pagan oppressor in the Roman Empire, makes sense only if Shapur’s reputation as a persecutor remained unknown to Ephrem and the other Christians of northern Mesopotamia as late as the mid-360s. Yet this strains credulity. If a widespread persecution occurred under Shapur, especially one that began with the killing of the most prominent bishop in Mesopotamia and the slaughter of one hundred other

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 21

Constantine and Judah the Maccabee _________________________________________________________________________________________

bishops, priests, deacons, and bnay qyāmā, then how could news of it not have reached other Syriac-speaking Christians on the threshold of Sasanian Persia?

THE MARTYRDOM VERSUS THE HISTORY OF BLESSED SIMEON BAR ṢABBĀʿĒ Beyond the dearth of fourth-century Syriac evidence attesting to a persecution driven by the Christianization of the Roman Empire, there is another, perhaps more compelling, reason to doubt that Shapur looked upon the Christians of Persia as a fifth column of Caesar: Simeon’s martyr acts themselves. The stark differences between the two versions of Simeon’s acts clearly demonstrate a process of historical revision. While the characters and narrative arcs of Simeon’s Martyrdom and History are similar in broad terms—Shapur taxes the Christians of Persia; Simeon refuses to collect the tax; Simeon is arrested, tried, and killed along with more than a hundred others—the details of each text are markedly different and these differences have not been discussed in historical accounts of Christianity in fourth-century Persia. The most obvious difference between the two texts is in how each accounts for the cause of Shapur’s oppression. The introductory sections of Simeon’s History invoke “blessed Constantine” several times, claiming that from as soon as “blessed Constantine began to rule and up until his death, a span of thirty-three years that he reigned over the Romans, there were no martyrs to be found in the land of the West. But immediately upon the death of the victorious Constantine, Shapur, the king of the Persians, began to harrow the Christian people, to harass and persecute the priests and the qyāmā, and even to destroy all the churches in his realm.”37 The History also refers to Shapur’s suspicion of a traitorous allegiance between the Christians of Persia

and the Christians of Rome, saying, “after the death of blessed Constantine, king of Rome, Shapur took the opportunity to contend against Constantine’s sons who were still young. He continually raided the land of the Romans and for that reason he became increasingly incensed with hatred for the servants of God who dwelled in the regions he possessed. He wanted, and schemed for, an occasion to persecute the faithful.”38 This connection between Christians across imperial boundaries, as well as an understanding of Shapur’s frustration over his failed sieges of purportedly Christian Roman cities such as Nisibis, is not lost on the narrator of the History. According to the History, the persecution of Christians in Persia follows naturally from the persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire, binding the Christians of the East to their formerly-persecuted brethren in the West.39 From the perspective of the History, Simeon was an unjustly persecuted cleric who was unwittingly thrust into a broader religio-political dispute when he refused to collect an oppressive “double poll tax and tribute” from the Christians of Persia. According to Shapur, the double tax was assessed because the Christians of Persia, “‘dwell in our land, yet they are of one mind with Caesar, our enemy. And while we fight, they rest.’”40 Before the king became aware of this supposed connection between Christians in his empire and those who were fighting against him in the Roman Empire, Shapur and Simeon were friends—at least according to the narrator of the History. The friendship between king and bishop could have been saved had Simeon yielded to Shapur’s wishes.41 Shapur pleads with Simeon to stay the executioner’s hand, imploring him again and again to collect the double tax, perform a token genuflection to the sun, and thereby prove to all that the leader of the Christians remains a friend of the king.

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 22

Constantine and Judah the Maccabee _________________________________________________________________________________________

A very different narrative emerges right from the start in Simeon’s Martyrdom. Rather than focusing on Constantine and the Christians of the West, Simeon’s Martyrdom presents the bishop as the leader of a people apart, a holy people set against any accommodation with king and empire, a people whom the Cross liberated from having to pay any taxes to any lord.42 Unlike the History, the Martyrdom never discusses a “double tax” that results from Shapur’s suspicions about the loyalty of Christians in his empire. In fact, cause and effect are reversed: Shapur becomes suspicious about the loyalty of Christians only after Simeon declares that Christians have been freed by the blood of Jesus and thus bear no obligation to earthly kings.43 This may seem to be a subtle, even pedantic, difference, but it is crucial for understanding how the author of each text presents and conceptualizes his hero within a broader historical trajectory. For, unlike the History, the opening sections of the Martyrdom peer back in time well beyond the immediate past in order to grasp for the biblical past, using scriptural narratives to interpret present trials and offer muted hope for atonement through the blood of Simeon, the leader of the Christian people. Ignoring the Christians of the Roman Empire, the Martyrdom embraces the Jews of Seleucid Empire, charting an historical, theological, and biographical equivalence between Simeon, a Christian bishop, and Judah the Maccabee, the son of a priest and the leader of the revolt against King Antiochus IV Epiphanes in the second century BCE. THE MACCABEES IN CHRISTIAN LITERATURE AND SIMEON’S MARTYRDOM Although Sasanian Christians and Seleucid Jews may seem to have little in common, Simeon’s Martyrdom depicts the two groups in close parallel, with each enduring reli-

gious oppression at the hands of powerful imperial overlords.44 Simeon was arrested and killed as a rebel leader because he had refused to collect taxes, bow before Shapur, or worship the sun. Simeon witnessed the destruction of his church and knew that its liturgical rites had been despoiled.45 Judah the Maccabee rebelled for similar reasons: Antiochus imposed heavy taxes on Judah’s people; he demanded sacrifice to pagan idols; he outlawed circumcision and the observance of the Sabbath; and his army brazenly desecrated the Temple.46 Despite these apparent similarities, there is a dissonance in the analogy between a Christian bishop martyred in prison and a Jewish warrior slain on the battlefield. As Arnaldo Momigliano once commented, it was specifically because of the “extreme importance attributed to the Temple and to its purification by Judas Maccabeus” that much of the Maccabean literature remained “exclusively Jewish” even when the texts were appropriated by Christian readers.47 Momigliano’s conclusion is sound. A number of early Christian exegetes were forced to perform nimble feats of rhetorical gymnastics in order to win over audiences who were skeptical of the utility of the Maccabean literature for Christians. As Gerard Rouwhorst notes, although the fourth-century Cappadocian bishop Gregory of Nazianzus did not completely dilute the Jewishness of the Books of the Maccabees—he does “nothing to minimize the fact that the Maccabeans were fighting for their Jewish religion”— Gregory does water the texts down enough to make them more theologically palatable to a Christian audience. Gregory subtly eliminates or spiritualizes what Rouwhorst refers to as the “most problematic … elements of the Jewish cult.”48 The common thread linking Gregory with other early Christian exegetes (such as Augustine and John Chrysostom) was his desire to make the Maccabean martyrs ac-

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 23

Constantine and Judah the Maccabee _________________________________________________________________________________________

ceptable “to Christians in spite of their Jewishness and, even more than that, to appropriate them as Christian role models.”49 Other church fathers, from Origen of Alexandria in the third century to Severus of Antioch in the sixth century, also sought to Christianize the Maccabean martyrs.50 But Judah seems to have been impossibility. By fighting to purify the desecrated Temple, and to thereby reestablish the Law, the Temple cult, the priesthood, and a non-Hellenized way of being Jewish in Jerusalem, Judah embodied an agenda that outstretched the rhetorical capabilities of even the most golden-tongued Christian orator. Outside of a few references here and there, Judah the Maccabee is mostly ignored in Greek and Latin Christian literature. This is not what happens in the Martyrdom of Simeon bar Ṣabbāʿē. The text is hardly concerned to minimize or explain away what Momigliano classified as the “exclusively Jewish” elements of the Maccabean literature. Engaging the Maccabees straightaway, the text reads the persecution of Christians in Persia as a direct and obvious recapitulation of the biblical past. Shapur II becomes Antiochus IV; the Christians of Persia become the thousand who were killed in a single day for not breaking the Sabbath; they become the women who were killed for circumcising their sons; and they become the others who were slain for keeping the holy vow and refusing to defile themselves with impure food.51 Judah is celebrated as a “priest and valiant warrior … bound with the breastplate of power to slay as a mighty one … girded in the garments of war as a hero.” His sword becomes “drunk with the blood of the slaughtered,” his death eulogized as one that was “for the struggle of his people.”52 The Christians of Persia, “our people,” as the narrator of the Martyrdom describes them, were similarly oppressed, but were also graced with a champion like Judah. Simeon “gave himself over to be

killed, just as Judah the Maccabee did in the time of the oppression of his people.”53 Judah and Simeon are described in concert as bearing arms, rushing toward the sword, and keeping the law of their God—Judah when he kills a soul for a soul and Simeon when he turns the other cheek. Both are purified and exalted as high priests in baptisms of their own blood.54 Unquestionably, Judah is being used here to further Christian interpretive ends. He does become the mirror of a Christian priest and martyr. But it is Simeon who undergoes the much more radical transformation. Judah and Simeon are put in parallel as “two priests,” one who “exalted his people while killing” and the other who “liberated his people while being killed.”55 Together, they serve the altar as “high priests clad with the ephod of the sanctuary.”56 The ephod, which is mentioned extensively in the Hebrew Bible, is a priestly garment. David girds himself with an ephod when in the presence of the Ark of the Covenant.57 Yet here, in a Christian martyr act, a Christian priest dons the ephod, thus visibly becoming mantled as a Jewish high priest right down to his ritual actions and vestments.

JUDAH THE MARTYR Is Judah ever described in such close parallel to a Christian martyr in other texts? Judah the Maccabee does not go unmentioned in early Christian literature—to cite but one relevant Syriac example, Aphrahat refers to Judah’s struggles on behalf of his people.58 In the same way, Vardan, the Armenian hero of the mid-fifth century, recites Judah’s speech to his troops before battle as a way of framing his people’s own uprising against the Sasanians as a reflection of the struggle of the Maccabees.59 It was thus not unheard of for Christians to laud the bravery of Jewish kings and warriors—just consider the references to David

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 24

Constantine and Judah the Maccabee _________________________________________________________________________________________

in the Acts of the Persian Martyrs—but the extended parallel between Judah the Maccabee and a Christian martyr is quite anomalous. Insofar as I can find, no other early Christian martyr act (in any language) memorializes Judah as one who can be compared to, much less romanticized as equivalent to, a Christian martyr. That said, other Maccabean “martyrs” are mentioned in Christian martyr acts and their cult was regularly promoted by Christian exegetes from late antiquity.60 Judah, however, is never regarded as one of these martyrs. From both a Jewish and a Christian perspective, the Maccabean martyrs were not the warriors who were killed while revolting against Seleucid rule, but rather the non-combatants who were killed for refusing to consume pork: the elderly Eleazar, who is described as “one of the leading teachers of the law”; an unnamed woman, who is known as Shmuni in the Syriac tradition; and this woman’s seven sons.61 These “Maccabean martyrs” do become Christian exempla, but not without the neutering of their Jewishness. John Chrysostom, for example, enshrouds the Maccabean martyrs in Christian cloth, pointedly correcting those around Antioch who say that the martyrs died for the Law. To the contrary, Chrysostom insists, instead of dying for the Law the Maccabean mother and her sons died for the Lawgiver—Christ.62 Useful as Chrysostom’s imprimatur may have been for the burgeoning Christian cult of the Maccabean martyrs in Antioch, he certainly did not initiate the Christian veneration of these martyrs. The literary, if not physical, veneration of the Maccabean martyrs was a well-established practice. References to the Maccabean mother abound in Greek and Latin martyrological literature composed well before the time of Chrysostom and Gregory. The mother of the martyr Marian is said to have “rejoiced like the mother of the Maccabees” upon her son’s

martyrdom.63 Blandina, in the well-known account of the Martyrs of Lyons, is described as being “like a noble mother encouraging her children.”64 No further explanation is necessary. The referent of a “noble mother encouraging her children” would have been self-evident to a Christian audience steeped in the story of the Maccabees. Without question, the Christians of Persia were just as saturated with the Syriac versions of these stories and, in translation, the Greek literature about the Maccabees—including Gregory’s well-known homily.65 As Joel Walker has shown, the relationship between mothers and their sons in the Acts of the Persian Martyrs is deeply marked by the story of Shmuni and her seven sons.66 Yet if the Maccabean martyrs were so important, and so widely celebrated, then why is Judah not counted among them in any text other than the Martyrdom of Blessed Simeon bar Ṣabbāʿē? As Robin Darling Young has noted, the martyrs and the warriors of the Books of the Maccabees are separate: the trial, steadfast courage, and gruesome deaths of Eleazar, Shmuni, and her sons “constitutes a distinct literary unit which both emphasizes the evil of the Seleucid rulers and explains the success of Judas Maccabeus.”67 In other words, it is the martyrs’ deaths that make the warriors’ victories possible. In 4 Maccabees, the philosophical text that is derived from the story of the martyrs in 2 Maccabees, the central narrative is the trial, suffering, and death of the martyrs.68 The martyrs are, in fact, the sole focus of the text. Neither Judah nor the broader military struggle is so much as mentioned. This is a clear indication that the martyrs had supplanted the warriors in at least one re-reading of 2 Maccabees. In his analysis of 4 Maccabees, David deSilva notes that the author of the text would have undermined his “own interpretation” of the Hellenization crisis were he to have discussed “the military

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 25

Constantine and Judah the Maccabee _________________________________________________________________________________________

exploits of Judas and his brothers.” Echoing Young, deSilva declares that it was “the martyrs, not the warriors, who defeated the tyrant and compelled him to leave the land.”69

JUDAH AND SIMEON AS REBEL LEADERS If it was the sacrifice of the martyrs that spiritually empowered the warriors to drive the Seleucids from Judea, and if both Jews and Christians were so uniformly keen to advance the story of the martyrs while minimizing or ignoring the warriors, then why does Simeon’s Martyrdom turn to Judah? Why pick a warrior? Why not turn to Eleazar, the distinguished teacher? The answer to these questions seems to be suggested several times in the text: Judah is much more than a teacher or an individual martyr, and so is Simeon. Judah struggles on behalf of his people, he serves the Temple for his people, and, through his death, he atones for the sins of his people. Simeon does the same. He is a rebel leader and priest of a people apart, the spiritual and political captain of a Christian ship adrift in a pagan sea. These are rare claims for a Christian martyr act to make. According to Judith Lieu, the martyrs of the pre-Christian Roman Empire had “no patrioi nomoi for which to die.” They had “no equivalent,” Lieu writes, to the claim that “their native land was purified through them.”70 The earliest Christian martyrs died for Christ, not Christianity; they died for God, not a people.

But Simeon’s Martyrdom, written in fourth-century Persia, takes a very different tack. The spiritual power of the martyr and the military might of the warrior are subsumed into one person: Judah. He becomes warrior, priest, and martyr all at once—and Simeon mirrors him. Unlike Judah, Simeon does not raise a sword, but he does suffer the sword raised against him. One priest, the text says, “exalted his people while killing,” and the other priest “liberated his people while being killed.”71 Some number of decades later, when Simeon’s Martyrdom is re-written and expanded into Simeon’s History, Judah disappears. The author of the later version of Simeon’s acts literally beheads the text, lopping off all the preliminary sections about Judah, Antiochus, and the Maccabees. When Jews are mentioned in Simeon’s History, it is not as heroes, but as rabid dogs.72 Simeon is no longer compared to Judah, but to Jesus. According to the History, just as the Jews were “rabid against Christ” so, too, did they bark at Simeon, vilifying him as a traitor and spy of Caesar. By the mid-fifth century, the Persian Christian view of their own history has changed. Instead of the Maccabees, the Christians of Persia turn to “blessed Constantine” and their “brothers in the West.” Yet, at some point in the fourth century, in some place in Persia, and for at least one Christian author, priests could be warriors, Christians could be Jews, and Judah the Maccabee did not have to be qualified, Christianized, or cleansed of his historical context.

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 26

Constantine and Judah the Maccabee _________________________________________________________________________________________

NOTES *Elements of this paper were presented at the Sixth North American Syriac Symposium at Duke University in 2011 and at the 2012 annual meeting of the North American Patristics Society. The helpful comments and criticism I received at those gatherings is much appreciated. 1 Timothy Barnes argues for a date of 340; Paul Peeters proposes 341; and (partly because of a reference to the persecution in the work of Aphrahat) Michael Kmosko, Martin Higgins, Richard Burgess, and Sacha Stern all argue for the later date of 344. See T.D. Barnes, “Constantine and the Christians of Persia,” JRS 75 (1985) 126-36; P. Peeters, “La date du martyre de S. Syméon archevêque de SéleucieCtésiphon,” AB 56 (1938) 118-43; M. Kmosko, S. Simeon Bar Ṣabbāʿē: Martyrium et Narratio, PS 2 (Paris, 1907), 690-713; M.J. Higgins, “Aphraates’ Dates for the Persian Persecution,” BZ 44 (1951) 265-71, “Chronology of the Fourth-Century Metropolitans of SeleuciaCtesiphon,” Traditio 9 (1953) 54-61, and “Date of Martyrdom of Simeon Bar Ṣabbāʿē,” Traditio 11 (1955) 1-35; R.W. Burgess, “The Dates of the Martyrdom of Simeon Bar Ṣabbāʿē and the ‘Great Massacre,’” AB 117 (1999) 9-66; and S. Stern, “Near Eastern Lunar Calendars in the Syriac Martyr Acts,” Mus 117 (2004) 447-72. 2 The opening line of the History of Blessed Simeon bar Ṣabbāʿē, the longer and later of the two versions of Simeon’s acts, refers to Simeon as “the first one to excel in the land of the East as a blessed martyr of God.” Other acts related to Simeon’s defer to him as the protomartyr. By far the most extensive study of the cycle of acts (the “B-Zyklus”) related to the History of Simeon is found in G. Wiessner, Untersuchungen zur syrischen Literaturegeschichte I: Zur Märtyrerüberlieferung aus der Christenverfolgung Schapurs II (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1967), 94-147. 3 We know that Simeon was remembered as a martyr by at least the early fifth century on the basis of a dated Syriac manuscript (British Library, MS Add. 12150) that was written in Edessa in November of the year 411 CE. The manuscript contains a list of the names of over one hundred Persian martyrs, including Simeon. See F. Nau, “Un martyrologie et douze

Ménologes syriaques,” PO 10.1 (1912) 7-26, and S. Brock, The History of the Holy Mar Maʿin with a Guide to the Persian Martyr Acts (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2009), 123-25, which lists all the names from the Edessa manuscript and incorporates additional names recently discovered in a fragment (no. 27) from that manuscript at the Egyptian monastery of Deir al-Surian. 4 Soz. HE II.9-10; on Sozomen’s use of Simeon’s acts, see Wiessner, Untersuchungen, 148-56, and P. Devos, “Sozomène et les actes syriaques de S. Syméon bar Ṣabbāʿē,” AB 84 (1966) 443-56. 5 Soz. HE II.9-14; see the further discussion of those whom Sozomen names in P. Devos, “Notes d’hagiographie perse,” AB 84 (1966) 229-48. 6 Soz. HE II.15 7 Perhaps the most wildly inaccurate account comes from the seventh-century Chronicle of the Egyptian bishop John of Nikiu. He claims that Constantine conquered Persia, built a church in every Persian village, and replaced Persian magistrates with Christian officials. See R.H. Charles, The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu (London, 1916), LXXVII.61-62. John’s assessment, as Garth Fowden points out, is probably an expansion of the sixth-century Chronicle of John Malalas, whose more muted remembrances of Constantine recall only that Constantine initiated, and was victorious in, a campaign against Persia that resulted in a peace treaty with Shapur. Fowden reads the chronicles of Malalas and John of Nikiu as later evidence of a cover-up and the literary “devices by which many Christian writers, especially in the fifth century, avoided having to engage with the view ... that ultimate responsibility for the disastrous course of Romano-Iranian relations in the fourth century lay, not with Julian, but with Constantine.” See G. Fowden, “The Last Days of Constantine: Oppositional Versions and Their Influence,” JRS 84 (1994) 146-70, at 153. 8 Eus. VC IV.9-13. Eusebius suggests that the letter, which was composed by Constantine himself, was sent back to the Persian king in the hands of an embassy who had brought gifts to Constantine soon after he became sole emperor of the Roman Empire. As Constantine’s rise to sole emperor occurred in 324, and as

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 27

Constantine and Judah the Maccabee _________________________________________________________________________________________

Eusebius had amassed most of the documents he used in the Life of Constantine no later than 326, the letter is very unlikely to date to the end of Constantine’s life when relations with Persia were quite fraught. For an overview of the possible dates of the letter’s composition, see H.A. Drake, “What Eusebius Knew: The Genesis of the Vita Constantini,” CP 83 (1988) 20-38, at 27; Barnes, “Constantine and the Christians of Persia,” 131-32, with further explanation in Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 258 ff.; D. Frendo, “Constantine’s Letter to Shapur II: Its Authenticity, Occasion, and Attendant Circumstances,” BAI 15 (2001) 57-69; and M.R. Vivian, “A Letter to Shapur: The Effect of Constantine’s Conversion on Roman-Persian Relations” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Santa Barbara, 1987), 87-129, where the dates and circumstances of the letter’s composition are considered in direct conjunction with the supposed dates of Shapur’s persecution. 9 Half of the extant martyr acts of Christians in Persia are set during the reign of Shapur. For an overview of these texts see Brock, History of the Holy Mar Maʿin, 77-95. 10 See Kmosko, S. Simeon Bar Ṣabbāʿē. An English translation (with notes and commentary) of Kmosko’s edition is forthcoming; K. Smith, The Martyrdom and the History of Blessed Simeon bar Ṣabbāʿē. Persian Martyr Acts in Syriac: Text and Translation. (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2013). 11 On the date of each text and the relationship between the two versions see the extensive discussions in Kmosko, 661-90, and Wiessner, Untersuchungen, 40-94. It should be noted, however, that Wiessner focuses heavily on developing an intricate theory about the sources of each text and says little about dates of composition. 12 Richard Burgess claims that the History is worthless for historians and can be of interest only to students of hagiography. He refers to the History as “obviously a later hagiographical pastiche, reworked, supplemented, and barnacled with many later accretions.” Yet, even as Burgess maligns the History as but a confused mishmash of sources and influences, he nevertheless uses that text and other acts related to it to give a synopsis of fourth-century events in

Persia. He suggests that Shapur turned with increasing anger against Christians after his failed siege of the Roman city of Nisibis in 337 and that he ultimately massacred hundreds of Christians after increasing their taxes, destroying their churches, and then executing Simeon and the one hundred with him. Although the chronology might be confused, Burgess claims, “the general outline of these events is not in dispute.” See Burgess, “Dates of the Martyrdom,” 9 and 29. There is, however, little reason to believe that either Simeon’s Martyrdom or his History presents a reliable chronicle of historical events. As Muriel Debié has shown, East Syrian historians rarely distinguish between historiography and hagiography, referring to both as “stories.” See M. Debié, “Writing History as ‘Histoires’: The Biographical Dimension of East Syriac Historiography,” in Writing ‘True Stories’: Historians and Hagiographers in the Late Antique and Medieval Near East, ed. A. Papaconstantinou (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 43-75, at 44. 13 The Martyrdom of Pusai, for example— which details the trials of Pusai the qarugbed (the “head of the craftsman”) who is mentioned near the conclusion of both of Simeon’s acts— is a text that probably did not reach the form in which we have it until around the turn of the sixth century even though it is set in the midfourth century and may have been circulating in some form by the fifth century. See G. Wiessner, “Zum Problem der zeitlichen und örtlichen Festlegung der erhaltenen syro-persischen Märtyrerakten: Das Pusai-Martyrium,” in Paul de Lagarde und die syrische Kirchengeschichte (Göttingen: Lagarde Haus, 1968), 231-51. 14 D. Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999), 116. 15 Brock, Mar Maʿin, 5. 16 Brock, Mar Maʿin, 36-37. 17 J.T. Walker, The Legend of Mar Qardagh: Narrative and Christian Heroism in Late Antique Iraq (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 1. 18 Walker, Mar Qardagh, 48. 19 Walker, Mar Qardagh, 50. 20 Walker, Mar Qardagh, 50. As Walker notes, this is “an exact quotation of Ps 35:1-3.”

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 28

Constantine and Judah the Maccabee _________________________________________________________________________________________ 21

See Brock, Mar Maʿin, 42. For the text, see P. Bedjan, Acta Martyrum et Sanctorum, vol. II (Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1891), 397-441. Wiessner argued that Mar Behnam was a late antique composition, but more recent studies have challenged that conclusion. See G. Wiessner, “Die Behnam-Legende,” in Synkretismusforschung: Theorie und Praxis, ed. G. Wiessner (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1978), 119-33; H. Younansardaroud, “Die Legende von Mar Behnam,” in Syriaca: zur Geschichte, Theologie, Liturgie und Gegenwartslage der syrischen Kirchen, 2. Deutsches Syrologen-Symposium, Juli 2000, Wittenberg, ed. M. Tamcke (Hamburg: Verlag, 2002), 18596; and H. Younansardaroud and M. Novák, “Mar Behnam, Sohn des Sanherib von Nimrud: Tradition und Rezeption einer assyrischen Gestalt im iraqischen Christentum und die Frage nach den Fortleben der Assyrer,” AF 29 (2002) 166-94. On the artistic representations of Mar Behnam in the thirteenth century, see Bas Snelders, Identity and Christian-Muslim Interaction: Medieval Art of the Syrian Orthodox from the Mosul Area (Leuven: Peeters, 2010). 23 On this theme of ancient Assyrian genealogies in late antique (and medieval) texts, see: A. Becker, “The Ancient Near East in the Late Antique Near East: Syriac Christian Appropriation of the Biblical East,” in Antiquity in Antiquity: Jewish and Christian Pasts in the GrecoRoman World, ed. G. Gardner and K. Osterloh (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 394-415; M. Debié, “Syriac Historiography and Identity Formation,” CHRC 89 (2009) 93-114; and, on the appropriation of ancient history in the late ancient History of Karka d-Beit Slok and its Martyrs, see “Hagiography and the Political Landscape of a Late Sasanian City,” in R.E. Payne, “Christianity and Iranian Society in Late Antiquity, ca. 500-700 CE,” (Ph.D. diss, Princeton University, 2010), 92-144. 24 The notion that Persian Christians were a “fifth-column” is repeated often. Timothy Barnes, for example, is sympathetic to Shapur for believing that the Christians in his realm were potential threat, saying that it was “Constantine who injected a religious dimension into the normal frontier dispute, by seeking to appeal to Shapur’s Christian subjects.” See Barnes, “Constantine and the Christians of Per22

sia,” 136. The noted scholar of pre-Islamic Persia, Josef Wiesehöfer, draws a similar conclusion, pointing to the changed condition of Roman foreign policy after Constantine’s conversion and referring to the Christians of Persia as a fifth column. See J. Wiesehöfer, “‘Geteilte Loyalitäten:’ Religiöse Minderheiten des 3. und 4. Jahrhunderts n. Chr. im Spannungsfeld zwischen Rom und dem sasanidischen Iran,” Klio 75 (1993) 362-82. 25 For a brief overview of Aphrahat’s identity, see A. Lehto, The Demonstrations of Aphrahat, the Persian Sage (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2010), 4-10. Lehto also provides a full translation of Aphrahat’s homilies. On the dates of composition, see Higgins, “Aphraates’ Dates.” Recent accounts of the Roman-Persian war in the fourth century that provide insight into Shapur’s intentions include: M.R. Shayegan, “On the Rationale behind the Roman Wars of Šābuhr II the Great,” BAI 18 (2004) 111-33; and the extensive work on this topic by Karin Mosig-Walburg. See K. Mosig-Walburg, “Zur Westpolitik Shāpūrs II.,” in Iran. Questions et Connaissances. Actes du IVe congrès européen des études iraniennes, organisé par la Societas Iranologica Europaea, Paris, 6-10 septembre 1999, vol. 1. La période ancienne, ed. P. Huyse (Leuven: Peeters, 2002), 329-47; “Christenverfolgung und Römerkrieg: Zu Ursachen, Ausmaß und Zielrichtung der Christenverfolgung unter Šapur II.,” Iranistik 7 (2005) 5-84; “Die Christenverfolgung Shapurs II. vor dem Hintergrund des persisch-römischen Krieges,” in Inkulturation des Christentums im Sasanidenreich, ed. A. Mustafa and J. Tubach (Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2007), 171-86; and Römer und Perser: Vom 3. Jahrhundert bis zum Jahr 363 n. Chr. (Gutenberg: Computus Druck Satz & Verlag, 2009). 26 See Barnes, “Constantine and the Christians of Persia,” and C.E. Morrison, “The Reception of the Book of Daniel in Aphrahat’s Fifth Demonstration, ‘On Wars,’” Hugoye 7 (2007) 55-82. 27 “On Persecution” begins: “I heard a reproach that greatly distressed me. The unclean say, ‘This people that has been gathered from the peoples has no God.’ And the wicked say, ‘If they have a God, why does he not seek vengeance for his people?’ The gloom thickens

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 29

Constantine and Judah the Maccabee _________________________________________________________________________________________

around me even more whenever the Jews reproach us and magnify themselves over our people.” See Aph. Dem. XXI.1; Lehto, 438. As a result of passages such as this, Aphrahat’s work has often been read as an attempt to refute Jewish criticism of Christianity, or, as Naomi Koltun-Fromm sees it, to forestall Persian Christians from “returning to their native Judaism in the face of martyrdom.” See N. KoltunFromm, Hermeneutics of Holiness: Ancient Jewish and Christian Notions of Sexuality and Religious Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 23. 28 On Aphrahat and Judaism, see J. Neusner, Aphrahat and Judaism: The Christian-Jewish Argument in Fourth-Century Iran (Leiden: Brill, 1971), and, more recently, N. Koltun-Fromm, “A Jewish-Christian Conversation in Fourth Century Mesopotamia,” JJS 47 (1996) 45-63. 29 Aph. Dem. XXI.23; Lehto, 458. 30 Aph. Dem. XXIII.69; Lehto, 530-31. 31 As Barnes puts it, Constantine was “preparing to invade Persia as the self-appointed liberator of the Christians of Persia … and the hopes which he excited [among them] caused the Persian king to regard his Christian subjects as potential traitors—and hence to embark on a policy of persecution.” See Barnes, “Constantine and the Christians of Persia,” 126. In his reading of the text, Jacob Neusner claims that Aphrahat assures his readers in the “Church of Iran” that Rome would soon triumph over Shapur. This leads Neusner to conclude that the Christians of Persia “regarded Shapur’s wars as those of Satan, and the victory of Byzantium as the triumph of Christ.” See J. Neusner, “Babylonian Jewry and Shapur II’s Persecution of Christianity from 339 to 379 A.D.,” HUCA 43 (1975) 77-102, at 79. See also Morrison, “Reception of the Book of Daniel” and F. Decret, “Les conséquences sur le christianisme en Perse de l’affrontement des empires romain et sassanide. De Shapur Ier à Yazdgard Ier,” RecAug 14 (1979) 91-152, at 134. 32 The date of the first siege is variously set as either 337 or 338 CE. Ancient authors (e.g., Jerome, Chron. ann. 338) generally suggest that the siege occurred in 338, whereas Barnes and Burgess argue for a date of 337—in part on the presumption that Constantine was on his way to confront Shapur when he died at Nicomedia in

the spring of 337, but mainly because they reckon the death date of Jacob of Nisibis to have been 337. Jacob was the Christian bishop of Nisibis who died during the siege and whose prayers were credited with saving the city from the Persian army. He is said to have been buried in the city walls. See R.W. Burgess, “The Dates of the First Siege of Nisibis and the Death of James of Nisibis,” Byz 69 (1999) 717; Barnes, “Constantine and the Christians of Persia,” 133, with further reference to P. Peeters, “La légende de Saint Jacques de Nisibe,” AB 38 (1920) 285-373. For more on the sieges, particularly the third and final siege, see C.S. Lightfoot, “Facts and Fiction: The Third Siege of Nisibis (A.D. 350),” Historia 37 (1988) 105-25, and M. Marôth, “Le siège de Nisibe en 350 après J.-Ch. d’après des sources syriennes,” AAntHung 27 (1979) 239-45. More broadly on Ephrem and his hometown, see P.S. Russell, “Nisibis as the Background to the Life of Ephrem the Syrian,” Hugoye 8 (2005) 179-235. 33 See R. Turcan, “L’abandon de Nisibe et l’opinion publique (363 ap. J.-C.),” in Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire offerts à André Piganiol, ed. R. Chevallier (Paris, SEVPEN, 1966), 875-90; and J. Teixidor, “Conséquences politiques et culturelles de la victoire sassanide à Nisibe,” in Les relations internationales: Actes du Colloque de Strasbourg, ed. E. Frézouls and A. Jacquemin (Paris: De Boccard, 1995), 499-510. 34 According to Ephrem’s Hymns against Julian, Shapur was aware that the Christian God had protected Nisibis during each of his three failed sieges. When Shapur finally entered Nisibis as its conquerer, Ephrem claims that the Persian king acknowledged the power of the Christian God: “The Magus who entered our place regarded it as holy, to our disgrace. / He neglected his fire temple but honored the sanctuary. / He cast down the [pagan] altars built by our laxity; / he destroyed the enclosures to our shame. / For he knew that from one temple alone emerged / the mercy that had saved us from him three times.” Eph. CJ, II.22, trans. K. McVey, Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns (New York: Paulist, 1989), 240. See also S.H. Griffith, “Ephraem the Syrian’s Hymns ‘Against Julian’: Meditations on History and Imperial Power,” VChr 41 (1987) 238-66.

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 30

Constantine and Judah the Maccabee _________________________________________________________________________________________ 35

S.H. Griffith, “Ephraem, the Deacon of Edessa, and the Church of the Empire,” in Diakonia: Studies in Honor of Robert T. Meyer, ed. T. Halton and J.P. Williman (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1986), 22-52, at 48. 36 C. Shepardson, Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem’s Hymns in FourthCentury Syria (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 4. 37 Kmosko, 782. All English translations of Simeon’s Martyrdom and History are my own. 38 Kmosko, 790. 39 “God, the venerated one who orchestrates all in his wisdom, allowed there to be a persecution in the land of the Romans for three hundred years. The faithful were tested by the persecution, and the mettle of those who were persecuted was revealed, which muzzled Satan’s mouth. Then God gave them calm and sent them an angel of peace, Caesar Constantine, who allowed them to live in comfort. This confounded the Devil since Jesus, not out of any inability to prevent it, had previously allowed his worshippers to be persecuted.” See Kmosko, 786. The “angel of peace” for the Christians of Persia has sometimes been interpreted as the early fifthcentury king Yazdgard I. See S. McDonough, “A Second Constantine? The Sasanian King Yazdgard in Christian History and Historiography,” JLA 1 (2008) 127-41. 40 Kmosko, 792. Shapur’s claim seems to be contradicted at the end of Simeon’s History when the narrator refers to “some among the faithful … who happened to be in the army of the king, asked for relics from the bodies of the holy ones” (Kmosko, 958). The request for relics is yet another indication of the late date of the History. Relics are never mentioned in Simeon’s Martyrdom, and cults of martyrs could not have gained a foothold in Persia until at least the early fifth century with the formal establishment of the Church of the East. See R. Payne, “The Emergence of Martyrs’ Shrines in Late Antique Iran: Conflict, Consensus, and Communal Institutions,” in An Age of Saints? Power, Conflict and Dissent in Early Medieval Christianity, ed. P. Sarris, M. Dal Santo, and P. Booth (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 89-113.

41

Simeon and Shapur’s friendship is frequently discussed in the text. See especially Kmosko, 800-803. 42 Kmosko, 731-34: “Now the glorious bishop Simeon was strengthened in his Lord and took courage in his God and sent word to the king and thereby informed him: ‘Christ liberated his church through his death and set free his people by his blood. Through his passion, he relieved those who carry heavy burdens; by his cross he lightened the yoke of subjugated people [Mt 11:28-29]. He made a promise to us that in the age to come his lordship would abide for eternity. Jesus is king of kings and we will not put the yoke of your oppression upon our shoulders. Far be it from us now liberated people to work once more in the service of a man! Our Lord is lord over your lordship; therefore, we will not take upon our head the lordship of our fellow man. Our God is the creator of your gods, and we do not worship his creatures, such as you. He commanded us: do not acquire gold or silver for your purses [Mt. 10:9]. Thus, we have no gold to give you, nor money to bring to you for taxes. His Apostle warned us, you were ransomed with a heavy price, so do not become servants of men’” [1 Cor 7:23]. 43 It is important to note that “Caesar” (although not “Constantine”) is mentioned in the Martyrdom when “the Jews” accuse Simeon of disloyalty, telling Shapur, “‘If you, King, were to send splendid royal letters and glorious offerings and delicious, majestic gifts, they would not be well received or much revered in the eyes of Caesar. But if Simeon were to send to him a curt and trivial letter, he would rise and bow and receive it with both his hands and diligently attend to his requests.’” (See Kmosko, 739.) Oddly, this accusation is never developed. Although Shapur confides to his advisors that Simeon “has rejected my kingdom and chosen that of Caesar” (Kmosko, 738) there is no further discussion of political loyalties and these brief references to Caesar are not only unique in the text but noticeably discordant with the general tenor of the rest of the text which seems to studiously avoid any reference to Christians outside of Persia and never attempts to expound upon the more mundane Roman-Persian political vagaries that may have brought about the deaths

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 31

Constantine and Judah the Maccabee _________________________________________________________________________________________

of Christians. In fact, the narrator of the Martyrdom says nothing about a war between Rome and Persia. Furthermore, he puts no positive spin on Shapur’s persecution, unlike the author of the History who gently proposed that persecution was a necessary element of salvation history binding the Christians of the East by blood to the Christians of the West. 44 The use of the term “Jew,” particularly with respect to a fourth-century Syriac text addressing the Maccabean literature, is admittedly imprecise and carries with it very ambiguous ethnic, nationalistic, and religious meanings. It is notable that Judah and the Maccabees are never referred to as “Jews” in Simeon’s Martyrdom, and, when “Jews” (Ihudaye) are discussed, it is in a brief unflattering aside that refers to the Jews as the accusers of Jesus and the present-day accusers of Christians in Persia (see Kmosko, 738-42). As Daniel Boyarin has noted, “it seems highly significant that there is no word in pre-modern Jewish parlance that means ‘Judaism.’ When the term Ioudaismos appears in non-Christian Jewish writing—to my knowledge only in 2 Maccabees—it doesn’t mean Judaism the religion but the entire complex of loyalties and practices that mark off the people of Israel.” See D. Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 8. With specific reference to Jews and Christians in Persia and Simeon’s martyr acts, see A.H. Becker, “Beyond the Spatial and Temporal Limes: Questioning the ‘Parting of the Ways’ Outside the Roman Empire,” in The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. A.H. Becker and A.Y. Reed (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 373-92. For more on “Christians” and “Jews” and the use of the Maccabees, see 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, P.W. van der Horst, H.W. Havelaar, and L. Teugels (Leuven: Peeters, 1998), 287-303. 45 Kmosko, 762. 46 Kmosko, 715-22. 47 A. Momigliano, “The Second Book of Maccabees,” CP 70 (1975) 81-88, at 87.

48

G. Rouwhorst, “The Emergence of the Cult of the Maccabean Martyrs in Late Antique Christianity,” in More than a Memory: The Discourse of Martyrdom and the Construction of Christian Identity in the History of Christianity, ed. J. Leemans (Leuven: Peeters, 2005), 81-96, at 94. See also M. Vinson, “Gregory Nazianzen’s Homily 15 and the Genesis of the Christian Cult of the Maccabean Martyrs,” Byz 64 (1994) 166-92, where it is argued that Gregory’s sermon “is an unusually valuable source for understanding relations between pagans, Christians, and Jews during the reign of Julian the Apostate” (166). 49 Rouwhorst, “Emergence of the Cult,” 93. And, more extensively, see, 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). 50 For a general overview of the Christian use of the Maccabees from late antiquity to the sixteenth century see D. Joslyn-Siemiatkoski, Christian Memories of the Maccabean Martyrs (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 51 Kmosko, 715-19, with extensive references to 1 Maccabees. 52 Kmosko, 723-26. 53 Kmosko, 727. 54 Kmosko, 727-31. 55 Kmosko, 727. 56 Kmosko, 730. 57 See, for example, 2 Sam 6:14 and A.G. Scherer, “Das Ephod im alten Israel,” UF 35 (2003) 589-604. 58 Aph. Dem. V.20; Lehto, 162. 59 See R.W. Thomson, “The Maccabees in Early Armenian Historiography,” JTS 26 (1975) 329-41. Thomson’s article is cited by Sebastian Brock in his own important contribution to the question of religion and political allegiance among Christians in the Sasanian Empire. Brock claims, “As far as oriental Christianity is concerned, it is only with the Armenian church that we can witness, possibly already in the pre-Islamic period, the beginnings of the convergence of these two modes of self-identity, in their case of the religious community with the ethnic and linguistic group, both of which cut across the two empires. A hint of this development can perhaps be seen in the extensive use made of the Books of the

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 32

Constantine and Judah the Maccabee _________________________________________________________________________________________

Maccabees by early Armenian historical writers.” In his note to this passage, Brock refers to Simeon’s Martyrdom, and says that “only passing use of Maccabees is found in Syriac writers.” While it is true that Simeon’s Martyrdom is the only text among the Acts of the Persian Martyrs that overtly draws from the Books of the Maccabees, the use of Judah and the Maccabean literature goes well beyond “passing” mention, spanning nine full columns of Syriac in Kmosko’s edition. See S. Brock, “Christians in the Sasanian Empire: A Case of Divided Loyalties,” in Religion and National Identity, ed. S. Mews (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), 1-19, at 16 and n. 66. 60 See, for example, G. Rouwhorst, “The Cult of the Seven Maccabean Brothers and Their Mother in Christian Tradition,” in Saints and Role Models in Judaism and Christianity, ed. M. Poorthuis and J. Schwartz (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 183-204. 61 See 2 Macc 6:7-7:42; the reference to Eleazar can be found at 2 Macc 6:18. On Shmuni and the Syriac use of the Maccabees, see W. Witakowski, “Mart(y) Shmuni, the Mother of the Maccabean Martyrs, in Syriac Tradition,” in VI Symposium Syriacum 1992, OCA 247, ed. R. Lavenant (Rome: PIO, 1994), 153-68. See also the important dissertation of S. Peterson, “Martha Shamoni: A Jewish Syriac rhymed liturgical poem about the Maccabean martyrdoms (Sixth Maccabees),” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2006). 62 John Chrysostom, “On Eleazar and the Seven Boys,” PG 63.523-530. For English translations of this homily and two others on the Maccabees, see W. Meyer, The Cult of the Saints: St. John Chrysostom (Crestwood: St.Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2006) 119-53. 63 The Martyrdom of Saints Marian and James, 13, in H. Musurillo, Acts of the Christian

Martyrs, vol. II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 213. 64 The Martyrs of Lyons, 55, in Musurillo, Acts, 79. 65 Concerning the Syriac version of Gregory’s homily, see A. de Halleux, “La version syriaque des Discours de Grégoire de Nazianze,” in Actes du II. Symposium Nazianzenum, ed. J. Mossay (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1983), 75-111; and A. Van Roey and H. Moors, “Les discours de saint Grégoire de Nazianze dans la littérature syriaque,” OLP 4 (1973): 121-33; OLP 5 (1974): 79-125. 66 Walker, Mar Qardagh, 244–45: “The Acts of the earliest Sasanian martyrs typically emphasize the solidarity of Christian families, especially (though not exclusively) the affective bonds between mothers and their sons. The enduring appeal of this model of supportive family relations is reflected in the popularity of the cult of the Maccabees in northern Iraq.” 67 R.D. Young, “The ‘Woman with the Soul of Abraham’: Traditions about the Mother of the Maccabean Martyrs,” in “Women Like This”: New Perspectives on Jewish Women in the Greco-Roman World, ed. A.-J. Levine (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991), 67-81, at 69. 68 The Syriac translation of 4 Maccabees seems to have circulated widely. See R.L. Bensly, The Fourth Book of Maccabees and Kindred Documents in Syriac (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1895). 69 D.A. deSilva, 4 Maccabees (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 24. 70 J.M. Lieu, “‘I am a Christian’: Martyrdom and the Beginning of ‘Christian’ Identity,” in Neither Jew Nor Greek? Constructing Early Christianity (New York: T&T Clark, 2002), 211-31, at 224-25 with reference to 4 Macc 1:2. 71 Kmosko, 730. 72 Kmosko, 823-26.

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 33

______________________________________________________________________ MAKING SENSE OF PERSECUTION IN APHRAHAT’S DEMONSTRATIONS

ADAM LEHTO UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

T

he 4th century Demonstrations of Aphrahat provide a window through which we can observe a very early stage in the development of the martyrological tradition of the Syriac East. It will be seen that most of the characteristic features of that tradition are lacking in Aphrahat, and that an analysis of his response to the persecution that his Church is experiencing reveals an author whose perspective is not easily combined with the more typical martyrological accounts that would soon begin to be produced by Christians in the Persian empire. The persecution to which Aphrahat responds is briefly mentioned in the dating formulae found at the very end of the 23rd and final Demonstration:

‫ܐܓ ܬܐ ܗܕܐ ܒ ܒ ܒ ܚ‬ ‫ܒ‬ ‫ܘ‬ ‫ܐܐ ܘ‬ ‫ܐܒ ܕ‬ ‫ܪܘܣ ܒ‬ ‫ܬܗ ܕ‬ ‫ܕ‬ ‫ ܘܒ ܬ‬:‫ܘ ܐ‬ ‫ܣ‬ ‫ܐ ܕܗܘ ܒ‬ ‫ܐ‬ ‫ܘ ܕ ܒ ܪ‬ ̈ :‫ܕܐܬ ܝ ܬܐ‬ ‫ ܒ‬:‫ܪܕܘ ܐ‬ ‫ܒ ̱ ܐ ܕܗܘܬ ܒܐ ܪܒ ܐ ܕ ̈ܕܐ ܒܐܪ ܐ‬ ...‫ܕ ܐ‬ I have written this letter to you, my friend, in the month of Ab in the six hundred and fifty-sixth year of

the kingdom of Alexander, son of Philip the Macedonian, and in the thirty-sixth year of Shapur, king of Persia, who has stirred up persecution, and in the fifth year after the churches had been uprooted, and in the year in which there was a great ravaging of martyrs in the land of the east… (Dem. 23.69)

The information provided in this passage allows us to date this “ravaging of martyrs” to some point during the year preceding the summer of 345 CE, when the 23rd Demonstration was completed. Aphrahat indicates that the ‘uprooting’ of the churches began several years earlier than this. The focus of this paper, however, is not on the historical reconstruction of the timing and extent of this Persian persecution, for which Aphrahat provides scant, albeit important, information. Rather, I wish to direct attention to what I consider to be a more interesting topic: how did the author make sense of the suffering and persecution of his community? The obvious place to start looking for answers to this question is Demonstration 21, which is specifically focussed on the topic of persecution. Aphrahat dates this composition to the year before the writing

________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 34

Making Sense of Persecution in Aphrahat’s Demonstrations _________________________________________________________________________________________

of Demonstration 23, in other words, at about the same time as the “ravaging of martyrs”. Since the dating is imprecise, we cannot be sure if his treatment of this theme was produced before or after this more severe persecution began. Demonstration 21 is part of a series in which the author responds to various Jewish critiques of the Christian community in Persia. He sets the stage for his discussion of persecution as follows:

: ‫ܐܘ‬ ‫ܐ ܗܐ‬ ‫ܐ‬ ‫̈ ܐܐ ܕ‬ ‫ܐ‬ ̈ ‫ ܘܗ ܐ ܐ‬. ‫ܕ‬ ̱ ‫ܐ‬ ‫ܐ‬ ‫ܘܢ‬ ‫ ܕܐܢ ܓ ܐ‬: ̈ ‫ܬ‬ ‫ ܘ‬:‫ܬܒ ܬܒ ܐ ܕ ܐ‬ ̈ ‫ܘܕ ܐ‬ ̱ ‫ܘܐܦ‬ ̈ . ‫ܒ‬ ‫ܘ ܪܘܪܒ‬ ̈ ‫ܓܒ ܐ‬ ‫ܒ‬ ‫ܘܓ ܫ ܘܬܒ‬ ̈ ‫ܐܕ‬ ‫ ܕ ܥ‬: ‫ܘܕ ܐ ܘܐ‬ ‫ܐ‬ ‫ܕ‬ ̱ ‫ ܕܐܢ‬:‫ܢ‬ ‫ܢ ܒ‬ ‫ܐ‬ ‫ܕ‬ ‫ܕܬܐ ܐ‬ ‫ܬܗܘܐ ܒ ܢ ܗ ܬܐ ܐ‬ :‫ ܕ ܐ‬:‫ܪܐ ܗ ܐ‬ ‫ ܬܐ ܘܢ‬: ‫ܕ ܕ‬ ‫ ܘܐܦ ܕ‬.‫ܢ‬ ‫ܘ‬ .‫ܢ‬ ‫ܕ‬ ‫ ܘܐ‬:‫ܒ ܐ‬ ‫ܘ‬ ‫ܢ‬ ‫ܒ‬ ‫ܘܗ ܐ‬ ‫ܐ ܨ ܬܗ ܘܒ ܐ‬ ‫ܐܕ‬ ‫ܒ ܐ‬ ‫ܢ‬ ‫ܢ‬ ‫ܐܐ ܕ‬ ‫ܕܗ ܐ‬ :‫ܢ‬ ‫̈ܪܕܘ‬ ‫ܡܕ‬ ‫ ܕ‬:‫ܢ ܒ ܓ ܐ‬ .‫ܒ‬ ‫ܢ‬ ‫ܬ‬ I heard a reproach that greatly distressed me. The unclean say, ‘This people that has been gathered from the peoples has no God.’ And the wicked say, ‘If they have a God, why does he not seek vengeance for his people?’ The gloom thickens around me even more whenever the Jews reproach us and magnify themselves over our people. It happened one day that a man who is called a ‘sage of the Jews’ challenged me: 'Jesus, whom you call your teacher, wrote to you, ‘If there is faith like a single mustard seed among you, you will say to

this mountain, ‘Move!’, and it will move out of your way,’ and ‘Be lifted up!’, and it will fall into the sea and obey you” [Matt. 17:20; 21:21]. Even so, among your whole people there is not one sage whose prayer is heard and who petitions God so that your persecutions might end. For it is written to you in your word: “There is nothing that you will be unable to do’” [Matt. 17:20]. (Dem. 21.1)

Thus, after briefly mentioning what the “unclean” and the “wicked” are saying about Christians (which is most likely a reference to pagan ridicule), Aphrahat reports a conversation he claims to have had with a Jew. The exchange between the two sages, which I see no reason to doubt was rooted in actual experience,1 reflects an interesting strategy on the part of its participants. The Jew quotes from the gospel of Matthew, including what must have been a particularly troublesome passage for the Christian community facing persecution: Jesus’ promise that with faith, “There is nothing that you will be unable to do.” But rather than picking up the gauntlet, Aphrahat responds with an exegetical challenge of his own, knowing, he says, that his opponent “would not accept the explanation of the word that he was quoting” from the gospel. He then presents his Jewish interlocutor with passages from the Law and the Prophets. We have not seen the last of this challenge from the gospel of Matthew, however. It will show up again in a very crucial context, discussed below. This exegetical framing of the topic in the opening lines of the Demonstration highlights the first and most basic feature of Aphrahat’s treatment of our theme. Any understanding of persecution and suffering is going to come out of a detailed interpretation of the scriptures, both Old and New Testaments. No reader of the Demonstrations will be surprised by this heavily exe-

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 35

Making Sense of Persecution in Aphrahat’s Demonstrations _________________________________________________________________________________________

getical approach since it is followed throughout the entire text. The title of the work reflects its contents, which, invariably, ‘demonstrate’ the truth of the author’s position using the evidence of scripture. In the present case, Aphrahat uses his interpretive skills to argue that, unlike the Christian case, Jewish confidence in God’s deliverance is misguided. Even Sodom was more righteous than Jerusalem, he says, and it has not been rebuilt. The restoration of the Jewish community in its own land is also ruled out by the prophets themselves (at least when properly interpreted), and by the ongoing apostasy of the Jewish community as a whole. This latter point is of course central to the standard caricature of Judaism produced by authors across the ancient Christian world. A single theme from this counter-critique, namely that God may deliver his people over to persecution to be chastised, is crucial for understanding Aphrahat’s perspective on the persecution of Christians:

‫̱ܒ‬ ‫ܐܕ‬ ‫ܘ ܝ‬ ‫ܐ‬ ‫ ܳ ̱ܗܐ‬:‫̈ܒ ܬܐ‬ ‫ܘܡ ܘ‬ ‫ܐ ܒܐ‬ ‫ܐܬܗ‬ ‫̱ܗܘܐ‬ ‫ܒ ܪܐ ܘܒ ܒ ܐ ܗ‬ ‫̱ܗܘܐ‬ ‫ ܐ‬:‫ܐ‬ ‫ܕ ܐ ܐ̱ ܐ ܕ‬ ...‫̈ ܬܐ ܕ ܪܕܘܢ‬ ‫ܐ‬ ‫ܘܢ ܒ‬ Understand and see, listener, that if God had given hope to Sodom and her companions, he would not have ruined them with fire and brimstone, the sign of the last day of the world. Rather, he would have delivered them into the hands of one of the kingdoms to be chastised… (Dem. 21.6)

We will return to this important theme of chastisement from God in a moment. First, however, we need to consider the main contours of the rest of Aphrahat’s discussion of persecution in Demonstration 21, which takes an abrupt turn after he completes his midrash on Sodom and Jerusalem. Signalling to the reader that he is

now done responding to the Jewish hope of restoration, he sets himself the task of showing that the persecuted righteous always receive a good reward while persecutors remain in contempt and disgrace. And he does this with one of his favourite techniques: the list of examples (in fact, two lists). There is no need to repeat here all the names in these lists. It will suffice to point out three key features of Aphrahat’s argument. First of all, while he spends page after page on Old Testament figures, only a few lines, given at the end almost in passing, deal with the Christian era. This consistent and striking reliance on Old Testament figures is echoed in other parts of the Demonstrations, for other purposes. Secondly, while Aphrahat says that his aim is to prove the vindication of the righteous and the demise of their persecutors, his argument also operates on a typological level. The Old Testament righteous anticipate the figure of Jesus, whose witness, says Aphrahat “surpassed all who went before and who came after”, and whose own words instructed his disciples to expect suffering (21.23). And thirdly, the gospel promise of the inspiration of the Spirit during persecution is retroactively applied to figures from the Old Testament era. What Jesus promised his own followers was a continuation of what had already been given to the persecuted righteous in ages past. Thus Aphrahat sees the suffering of his own community as a extension of the biblical story, from Abel to the Maccabees and into the Christian era. The figure of Jesus stands at the centre of this long history of righteous witnesses. All the key components of his earthly ministry: his incarnation; his teaching; his fulfilment of the promises; his crucifixion; his victory over Satan; his resurrection; his giving of the Spirit; his founding of the Church; all of these are, for Aphrahat, typologically present in the accounts of the persecuted

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 36

Making Sense of Persecution in Aphrahat’s Demonstrations _________________________________________________________________________________________

righteous from the Old Testament. There is also a strong eschatological dimension to these types, which represent not only Christ’s earthly life but also, at times, his victorious return and rule over the world and his enemies. And despite Aphrahat’s reputation as a moderate voice among antiJewish polemicists, there is a particularly strong emphasis on the punishment awaiting the Jewish people for their opposition to the Saviour. We see, then, that Aphrahat was not really finished responding to the Jewish challenge after his midrash on Sodom and Jerusalem. His argument to demonstrate the ultimate deliverance and victory of the righteous is rooted not only in the historical episodes of the biblical righteous, but even more crucially in the eschatological hope grounded in the saving actions of Jesus. His victory over death and Satan will be confirmed when he returns in glory, and the community that rejected him (i.e. the Jews) will be put to shame. As they await his final victory, his followers find comfort in his example, in his reassurance that suffering is an inevitable part of discipleship, and in his promise that the Spirit will be with them. They see themselves as part of a long history of persecuted righteous from the beginning of the biblical narrative, presided over by a God who is committed to their salvation, and who has decisively confirmed this commitment by sending Christ into the world. This, then, is Aphrahat’s general framework for understanding the situation in which his community finds itself. If the material that I have presented so far from Demonstration 21 was all that we had to go on, we might conclude that Aphrahat’s reflections on persecution were limited to his anti-Jewish polemic. We might also conclude that Aphrahat simply took for granted the righteousness of the followers of Jesus who are persecuted. After all, the overall thrust of the argument

throughout the demonstration is to set up a contrast between the Jewish and Christian communities, with the latter inheriting what the former had lost by its disobedience. It is only the Christian community that has the correct understanding of scripture, that has received the Spirit, and that possesses true hope for the future. At the very end of Demonstration 21, however, in just a few short lines, Aphrahat complicates the picture considerably. And here we return to the theme of chastisement identified earlier:

̈ ‫ܐ ̈ ܕܒ ܒܐ ܒ‬ ‫ܣ ܗܘܐ ܐܘ ܐ ܪܒܐ ܘܪܕܘ ܐ‬ ‫ܬܐ ܕ ܐ ܕܒ‬ ̈ :‫ ܘܐ ܬ̈ܪܝ ܘܐܬ ܝ ܬܐ‬.‫ܘܢ‬ ‫ ܘܬܒ‬:‫̈ܕ ܐ ܘ ̈ ܕܐ ܓ ̈ܐܐ‬ ‫ ܘܐܦ‬. ‫ܘܢ ܒ ̈ ܐ ܒ ܪ ܕܐܬܪܕ‬ ‫ܐܦ‬ ‫ܢܓܫܗ‬ ̈ ̈ ‫ܐ ܕܐ‬ ‫̈ ܐ ܐܦ ܕ ܒ‬ .‫ܘܐ‬ ‫̈ܢ ܐ ܗ‬ ‫ܕ‬:

‫ܘܐܦ‬ ‫ܕܘ‬ ‫ܐܘ‬ ‫ܘܐܘܕ‬ ̈ ‫ܒ‬ ‫ܘ‬

Furthermore, concerning our brothers in the west in the days of Diocletian, a great affliction and persecution came against the whole Church of God, in all of its districts. Churches were pulled down and uprooted, confessors confessed and there were many martyrs. He came to them in mercy after they had been chastised. These things have also happened in our days because of our sins, and so that the things that have been written might be fulfilled. As our Saviour said, “These things are going to happen.” [Matt. 24:6] (Dem. 21.23)

It is, perhaps, not surprising that Aphrahat’s admission that his own community is being punished for its sins appears only here at the end of his discussion, since it would have only weakened his earlier response to Jewish critique. But it clearly signals to any reader who is paying attention that there is more to be said on this topic of persecution.

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 37

Making Sense of Persecution in Aphrahat’s Demonstrations _________________________________________________________________________________________

To appreciate what this ‘more’ might be, we need to return once again to Demonstration 23, the latter part of which, as it turns out, reveals the raw emotional response of the author to his community’s suffering more than anywhere else in the collection. There is now no mention of any Jewish interlocutor. But the central question of the 23rd Demonstration, ‘Why are the prayers of the righteous not granted?’, is in effect another attempt to make sense of a situation in which those who claim to be God’s people seem to have been abandoned by him. As we shall see, Aphrahat constructs a theological framework to deal with this question, and then uses it to address the issues of unanswered prayer and sin that he avoided in Demonstration 21. This theological framework has to do with the role of the righteous in the world, and is constructed from three basic convictions. The first conviction is that it is the presence of the righteous in the world that allows for the latter’s continued existence. In a fascinating but sometimes obscure passage in section 3, Aphrahat describes the Tree of Life as an olive tree. Adam lost access to this tree through disobedience, but the righteous who eat its fruit become the mediators of repentance and life to the rest of the world. In section 10 their role is described through a series of metaphors: they are the salt that preserves the world; they are like the soul in the body, without which it would cease to function; they are the medicine of life for the world; they are the spring that keeps the garden fertile; they are the pilot that brings the ship to harbour. The entire middle part of Demonstration 23, sections 14 to 47, illustrates this conviction about the ongoing presence of the righteous by means of what might be called the ‘mother of all lists’ for Aphrahat, documenting the unbroken chain of blessing that winds throughout biblical history. The list ends with the claim that this blessing has now passed, through Jesus, to the

Church. It is now the righteous followers of Christ who mediate life and salvation to the world, and protect it from the wrath of God. So far we are on familiar ground, since much of this simply restates, in another way, what Aphrahat said about the righteous in Demonstration 21. But once again, the picture is complicated when our author introduces a new element. This is the second basic conviction of his theological framework in Demonstration 23. At the end of his discussion of the olive tree in section 3, Aphrahat qualifies his initial claim that the righteous preserve the world:

‫ܒ̈ ܐ‬ ‫ܘܒ ܒ ܕ ܬܪܥ ܓܐ ܕ‬ ‫ܐ‬ : ‫̈ܒܐ ܕ ܐܡ ܒ‬ ‫ܘ‬ :‫ܐ ܪܘܓ ܗ ܕ ܐ‬ ‫̈ ܐܘ‬ ‫ܒ ̈ܐ‬ ‫ܪܘܓ ܐ ܕ‬ ‫ܘܒ‬ ̈ ‫ ܘ‬.‫ܓܒ ܐ ܒ ܐ‬ ‫ܐ ܒܐ‬ ‫ܒ‬ ‫ܐ‬ ̈ ‫̈ ܐ‬ ‫ܕ ܐ ܪܗܒ ̈ܙܕ ܐ‬ ‫ܘܙܕ ܐ‬ ...‫ܒ ܘܪ ܗ ܕ ܓܐ‬

When a breach is made in the fence that surrounds the evil ones and there is no one among the good who can stand in it, a portion of the evil ones pours through and excites the wrath of the Most High. Because of the wrath which is against the evil ones, the chosen are entwined in the fumes. And when the sword is given the command to destroy, it slays sinners and the righteous, because the righteous have not hurried to stand in the breach in the fence… (Dem. 23.3)

Thus there are times when, in Aphrahat’s view, the righteous themselves seem to be responsible for the suffering in the world in some way. The image used here is taken from Ezekiel 22:30, where God tells the prophet, “I searched for a man who would repair the fence and stand in the breach on behalf of the land, so that I might not destroy it, but I did not find [him].” It is not that there are no righteous

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 38

Making Sense of Persecution in Aphrahat’s Demonstrations _________________________________________________________________________________________

ones to stand in the breach, since their continual presence has already been established. Rather, it is that they are failing in their duty, which paradoxically calls into question their righteous status, though Aphrahat does not pursue that line of thought explicitly. Even so, I would suggest that this image from Ezekiel is the beginning of an elaboration of the terse statement that we encountered at the end of Demonstration 21: that God is chastising the Persian Church because of its sins, just as he had done with Israel, who responded negatively, and with the Christians in the West, who responded positively. This brings us to the third basic conviction in Aphrahat’s theological framework in Demonstration 23, expressed in the opening lines of section 5: “At the moment when the measure of sinners overflows, the prayer of the righteous is no longer heard.” We might call this God’s ‘point of no return’. The proof of this, according to Aphrahat, lies in the experiences of both Jeremiah and Ezekiel, both of whom were told by God that even if the greatest of the righteous figures from the past were to appear and intercede for the wicked, he would not listen to them. It is not clear how this point is related to the previous one, but the idea seems to be that the righteous do indeed have a responsibility to ‘stand in the gap’, but if that gap is neglected, at a certain point God’s wrath simply has to be expressed. While this is a tentative reconstruction of Aphrahat’s thought processes, it seems a coherent way of holding these two convictions together (i.e. the responsibility of the righteous, and unanswered prayer), as the author obviously meant them to be. It is also here, in the context of a discussion of unanswered prayer, that our author returns, for the first but not the last time in Demonstration 23, to the theme of God’s chastisement:

‫ܡ‬

:‫ܙܕ ̈ ܐ‬ ‫ܪܕܘܢ‬

‫̄ܐܘ ܐ̱̈ܪܙܐ ܬ ̈ ܐ ܕ‬ ‫ܕܒ‬

‫ ܒ ܕܐ‬.‫ܕ ܐ ܕ ܪ ܢ ܒ ܐ ܕ ܪ ܐ‬ ‫ܘ ܐ‬: ‫ܕ‬ ‫ܐ‬ ‫ܐܬܪܕܝ‬ .‫ܐ‬ ‫ܪ ܐܕ‬ ‫ ܘ‬:‫ܨ ܬܗ‬ O amazing mystery! The righteous were not heard, since by not being heard they were being chastised before the judgement, so that they would not be blamed on the day of retribution. Thus Moses was chastised because he rebelled. His prayer was not heard, and he did not enter the promised land. (Dem. 23.7)

Even Moses, who seems to be second only to Jesus in righteousness according to Aphrahat, was not heard by God at one point because he needed to be cleansed of his sins. All the more so for the lesser righteous. Of course, Aphrahat would never apply the same reasoning to the case of Christ’s unanswered prayer in the garden of Gethsemane. Christ’s perfect righteousness is expressed in his willingness to obey his Father and ‘stand in the gap’ for the world. His prayer had to remain unheard in order for God to complete the plan of salvation. He thus represents a unique case. I have been arguing that Aphrahat constructs a theological framework to deal with issues that he avoided engaging in any depth in Demonstration 21. He has, in effect, both responded to the gospel challenge of his Jewish opponent, explaining why the prayer of faith might not be answered, and expanded on his brief but provocative statement at the end of Demonstration 21 that his community is suffering because of its sins. His efforts to construct a theological framework to deal with these issues stretch all the way through sections 1-47 of the 23rd Demonstration. In the last third of the Demonstration, however, Aphrahat shifts out of his usual didactic mode and gives voice to heartfelt prayers on behalf of his community. Sections 48 to 52 contain a long christological meditation, during the course of which Christ is addressed directly. Here we see an

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 39

Making Sense of Persecution in Aphrahat’s Demonstrations _________________________________________________________________________________________

amplification of the christological themes merely outlined in Demonstration 21, and laid out in slightly more detail earlier in Demonstration 23. Aphrahat then addresses the Father of Christ directly in sections 5359. Nothing that we have encountered so far, and arguably nothing else that can be encountered in the Demonstrations as a whole, can match the intensity of these sections. Aphrahat puts his own theory into practice: the author and teacher now becomes a righteous intercessor, standing in the gap for his people. And I would argue that it is not coincidental that in the very opening lines of this key section of the Demonstration, the troublesome idea from the Gospel of Matthew, so cunningly thrown at the author by his Jewish opponent back in Demonstration 21, is now invoked in full confidence:

‫ ܚ ܬܪ ܐ‬:‫ܐ‬ ‫ܐܘܢ ܒܐ ܘܒ‬ ‫ܒ ܬܢ‬ ‫̈ ܐ ܢ ܘܨܘܬ ܨ ܬܢ ܘ‬ ‫ܕ ܥ‬ ‫ ܒ‬... ‫ܒ ܒ‬ ‫ܐ ܕ‬ ‫ܡ‬ ‫ ܕ‬: ‫ܬܟ ܘܐ‬ ‫ܒ‬ ‫ܐܒ ܬ ܢܕ ܠ‬ ‫ܕܬ ܐ ܢ‬ ̈ ‫ܒ‬ ‫ ܘܐܦ ܗ ܐ ̱ܗܘܐ‬.‫ܢ‬ ‫ܙܕ ܬܢ ܬ‬ ‫̈ ܐ ܐܘ‬ ‫ܬܟ‬ ‫ܐ‬: ‫ܘ‬ ‫ܓ ܐ‬ .‫ܐ‬ ‫ܘܒ‬ ‫ܕ ܒܐ ܐ‬ ‫ ܘܐ ̱ ܐ ܒܐ‬: ‫̈ܒܐ‬ ‫ ܝ‬...‫ܨ ܬܢ‬ ‫ܐ‬ ‫ܘܒ‬ ‫ܒܒܐ‬ ‫ ܘ ܣ‬:‫ܒ ܢ‬ ‫ܘ ܐ‬: ‫ ܘ ܗܒ‬: ‫ܕܐܘ‬ ‫ ܬܪܕ ܒ ܘܓ ܟ ܘ ܬ‬:‫ܓ ̱ܒ ܘܬܟ‬ .‫ܒ ܟ‬ O Good and Kind One, open the gate to our requests! Give ear to our prayer and hear our supplication, even as your Beloved One taught us… [H]e wrote to us so that we might know your kindness, and he said, “There is nothing for which you will ask God in your prayer that he will not give to you” [Matt. 21:22]. And now, it is not because of our good works or righteousness that we are confident

and pray before you, but because of your compassion, for you are good and kind. For we pray before you as guilty ones, but you, as one who is kind and good, have heard our prayer… See our slavery, and have pity on your people in the time of their affliction! Hasten your mercy, and show your might! May you not chastise us in your anger, nor rebuke us in your wrath. (Dem. 23.53)

Nor is it coincidental, I would argue, that Aphrahat, in the opening lines of his grand prayer of intercession, returns here and only here to the theme of God’s chastisement of his people. What was quite out of place in his anti-Jewish polemic finds a natural home in his act of prayer, which is informed by a theological framework that attempts to find meaning in the face of God’s silence. This silence is placed in a wider context in which God has decisively acted through Christ, the righteous one par excellence, and in which the Church must recognize its own imperative need to demonstrate a righteous response to God’s initiative. We have been trying to understand Aphrahat’s attempt to make sense of the suffering and persecution of his community. The most obvious feature of his view, perhaps, is that there is a genealogy of persecuted righteous that stretches right back to the first human family. The suffering Christian community is instructed to take comfort in the stories of these exemplars from biblical and ecclesiastical history, whose experiences, and ultimate deliverance, all point to Christ’s definitive victory over persecution and death. Likewise, Christ’s own teaching affirms that his followers will suffer “because of [his] name” and because they are “not of this world”. Aphrahat places particular emphasis on the power of the Spirit in times of persecution, seeing it not just as an experience of the

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 40

Making Sense of Persecution in Aphrahat’s Demonstrations _________________________________________________________________________________________

Church’s martyrs, but of all the persecuted righteous in the biblical narrative. There is no hint whatsoever (how could there be?) 2 ̈ that these ‘witnesses’ (‫)ܣܗܕܐ‬ are suffering because of their sins. Standing in some tension to this view, however, is the notion that the suffering of the community, including state persecution of the sort that happened under Diocletian and had just begun under Shapur, is linked to the failure of the righteous to ‘stand in the gap’. If the great prophet Moses, the greatest exemplar of righteousness next to Christ himself, can be subjected to chastisement, and if the same has been shown to be the case for western Christians, then the Church in Persia can hardly claim to be exempt. This is not an idea that is found very often in early Christian and patristic discussions of persecution.3 In fact, here as in certain other areas of his thought, Aphrahat seems closer to Jewish sources than to what we might be familiar with from Greek or Latin Christian texts. There is an obvious analogue in the varied Jewish responses to the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. Aphrahat seems to operate within what Robert Goldenberg describes as the dominant Jewish paradigm for understanding the suffering of the community, rooted in the perspective of the Deuteronomic writings.4 Of course, this paradigm is modified for Christian use, but its essential outline remains intact, despite being placed next to a vigorous, if distinctive, Christology. Moreover, compared to the martyr acts that had long been produced in the Greek and Latin spheres, and in contrast to the martyr acts that would soon be produced in Syriac,5 Aphrahat displays very few of the standard elements that would go into the writing of such literature. In her recent book, The Other Christs,6 Candida Moss presents a comprehensive analysis of Greek and Latin martyr acts and literature in the pre-Constantinian period. She organ-

izes her presentation around five major themes in this literature. It is striking that most of the material in Aphrahat can be assigned to the first and most basic of these themes, that of ‘suffering like Christ’, but even here there is no attempt to depict Christian suffering on the model of the Passion of Christ. We fail to find any elaborate valorization of martyrs in the Demonstrations. No attention is paid to their glorious afterlife. Although the author refers to Moses and the other great righteous figures from the past as ‘heroes’ (‘men of power’), he has no interest in playing up their ‘heroic’ characteristics in the ways we typically find in many martyr acts. His concern, rather, seems to be more about creating heroes in the present by challenging his own community to elevate its own righteousness. The sins that are dragging it down (see Demonstration 14 in particular) need to be acknowledged and confessed, so that the righteous (and one presumes that Aphrahat has his own ascetic community particularly in mind) can truly play their role as mediators of God’s salvation to the world. Aphrahat’s own witness allows us to peer with some clarity into the theological challenges generated by the persecution under Shapur II. He authored no martyr acts in the conventional sense, unless we count his beloved lists, but this hardly seems appropriate. No contemporary is singled out as an exemplar. His impulse, on the contrary, was to console and to rebuke his community as a whole. We get the sense that he is waiting to see how his community will respond to God’s chastisement. On a deeper level, we may wonder if Aphrahat struggled to reconcile his own basic concept of martyrdom (solidarity with the suffering righteous of the past) with his understanding of the divinelyordained reasons for suffering, both of which were products of his meditations on the biblical text.7

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 41

Making Sense of Persecution in Aphrahat’s Demonstrations _________________________________________________________________________________________

NOTES 1

In his Dying for God (Stanford University Press, 1999), a brilliant comparative study of early Jewish and Christian accounts of martyrdom, Daniel Boyarin “propose[s] a model of shared and crisscrossing lines of history and religious development” (8) to understand the interplay between emerging Jewish and Christian cultures. Aphrahat’s treatment of the topic of persecution, explicitly in response to a Jewish conversation partner, would have been an interesting addition to Boyarin’s range of material. That being said, one wonders how much of a conversation on martyrdom there would have been in Persia before Shapur II. 2 Apart from a reference to Joseph in 1.14, and the reference to “martyrs” at the end of Demonstration 23, all the occurrences of the term ‫ ܣܗܕܐ‬in the technical sense of ‘martyr’ occur in the last two sections of Demonstration 21. 3 One of the few exceptions is found in the Stromateis of Clement of Alexandria. Most of Book IV is devoted to the topic of martyrdom. Chapters 11 and 12 contain Clement’s own attempt to ‘make sense’ of persecution, and in the latter he responds to Basilides’ doctrine of reincarnation, which includes the notion that martyrdom can be a result of sin: “But if martyrdom be retribution by way of punishment, then also faith and doctrine, on account of which martyrdom comes, are co-operators in punishment—than which, what other absurdity could be greater?... Where any more is faith in the retribution of sins committed before martyrdom takes place? And where is love to God, which is persecuted and endures for the truth?

And where is the praise of him who has confessed, or the censure of him who has denied? And for what use is right conduct, the mortification of the lusts, and the hating of no creature?” Clement’s view that “[w]e must not therefore think that He actively produces afflictions” stands in some tension with Aphrahat’s portrayal of a God who ‘hands over’ his people for chastisement. 4 Robert Goldenberg, “The destruction of the Jerusalem temple: its meaning and its consequences”, in The Late Roman-Rabbinic Period, ed. Steven T. Katz, Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 4 (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 196ff. Goldenberg notes that the rabbis “continued to employ the rhetoric of sin and punishment without ever quite identifying the specific sin that deserved such punishment, but simultaneously they labored to distract their followers altogether from the question of history and its meaning” (199). In contrast, Aphrahat quite explicitly identifies the sins of his community, and his critique is couched in a strongly eschatological context. 5 It would be interesting to explore whether or not Aphrahat’s ‘Deuteronomic’ approach to communal suffering has any echoes in the later Persian martyr acts. 6 Candida Moss, The Other Christs: Imitating Jesus in Ancient Christian Ideologies of Martyrdom (Oxford University Press, 2010). 7 It may be that what appears contradictory to the modern reader did not so appear to Aphrahat. Perhaps he thought that it was possible to be a true witness precisely by acknowledging sin in the midst of persecution. As with so many other puzzles in the text, Aphrahat does not explain his thinking on this matter.

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 42

______________________________________________________________________ SINGING HYMNS TO THE MARTYRS: THE ‘ANTIPHONS OF THE SĀHDĒ’ IN THE ASSYRIAN CHURCH OF THE EAST

MAR AWA DAVID ROYEL MODESTO, CALIFORNIA

I

n the Christian Church, hymns and antiphons are usually sung to God, for hymning is an act of thanksgiving to the Father for the economy of salvation fulfilled in Christ. On account of persecutions during the early centuries of the Church, the singing of hymns was also directed toward those men and women who died for the name of Christ. This paper will examine the development of the theme of ‘hymning to the martyrs,’ or the singing of antiphons in honour of those who gave their life for Christ, in the liturgical tradition of the Assyrian Church of the East. These antiphons, though seemingly glorifying the martyrs, are in fact hymns that glorify God.

THE COMMEMORATION OF THE MARTYRS AND ITS ‘ELTHĀ ‘CAUSE’ The commemoration of the ‘Persian Martyrs’ who suffered with Mār Šem‘ōn bar Ṣabbā‘ē during the Great Persecution under Shapur II seems to be part of the early core of the liturgical calendar of the Assyrian Church of the East. Because the ecclesiastical fathers and martyrs suffered on Friday of the Passion (i.e. Good Friday), their

commemoration was moved to the proceeding Friday, that is, the first Friday after Easter. However, this commemoration was most certainly observed by the School of Nisibis, where the doctor Īšai the Presbyter ̈ (mid-6th century) composed ‫ܕܣܗܕܐ‬ ‫ܥܠܬܐ‬ 1 “The Cause of the Martyrs,” a literary genre developed by the doctors and masters of this School. Here, the martyrdoms were not only included in ‘lecture notes’ of the professors, they also gave a theological raison d’être for the various feasts and commemorations which were observed at the School. With regard to the nomenclature ‘martyr’ or ‘confessor,’ Mar Īšai states: For on account of this, they are also called by us ‘martyrs’ and ‘confessors,’ that by this name of ‘martyrs’ they demonstrate concerning the truth of our faith. For this name of martyrdom is used in two senses: in the first sense that wherever there is doubt, witness is needed in order to confirm the matter, for ‘On the mouth of two or three witnesses every matter stands’(…). And again martyrdom is said to be in a different manner, in order to caution the hearers that they might

________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 43

Singing Hymns to the Martyrs _________________________________________________________________________________________

not be doubtful of anything concerning which they are commanded (…). Therefore, they call those who suffered for Christ ‘martyrs,’ for by their suffering they witnessed to the Resurrection of Christ—concerning which the errant pagans were doubtful—and they demonstrated their faith truthfully by the shedding of their blood for the sake of Christ, which was offered as a libation offering offered by them to God. And by their death they proclaimed the truth of the eternal life which is given in Christ; and in the likeness of a sweet-smelling odor, they offered themselves joyfully to God in the place of the offering (…). And for this reason also this same name of ‘confessor’ is said concerning them because they confessed the truth of the faith of Christ before all men. For ‘whosoever confesses me before men, I too shall confess him before my Father in heaven (…). Therefore the name of confessor from that of martyr…2

The major commemoration of the martyrs in the Church of the East is observed on the Friday after Easter, known as ‫ܥܪܘܒܬܐ‬ ̣ ̈ ‫ܕܡܘܕܝܢܐ‬ “Friday of the Confessors.” It is essentially a commemoration of the Persian Martyrs, though on that day all the martyrs and confessors may be commemorated. Another commemoration in the liturgical year is assigned specifically to Mār Šem‘ōn bar Ṣabbā‘ē on the Sixth Friday of the summer. The rubrics in the Ḥudrā for this commemoration indicate: The commemoration of Mār Šem‘ōn bar Ṣabbā‘ē, CatholicosPatriarch, the disciple of Mar Pāpā, and of the fathers who were crowned with him: They had been crowned on the Friday of the Passion, in the year 655 of the Greeks [= AD 344] in the country of Ledan at the land of the Huzites

[modern-day Ahwaz], in the days of Shapur. Their commemoration was moved to the Friday of the Confessors, which is for the general [commemoration] of all the saints. However, this Friday [i.e. Sixth of the Summer] is observed, for in it the altar of Mār Šem‘ōn bar Ṣabbā‘ē was consecrated in the country of Ledan. Mar Šem‘ōn was buried in Elam, which is called in Arabic ‘Sūs’…3

It seems that the theological understanding of observing the commemoration of the martyrs and confessors on a Friday also helped shape the repertoire of the commemorations which take place on all Fridays between Nativity and Epiphany.

THE ANTIPHONS OF THE MARTYRS, ‘ŌNYĀTHĀ D-SĀHDĒ In honour of the martyrs and in order to provide the faithful with sources of true and living Christian witness, the Church saw fit to extol and remember their sufferings for the sake of Christ and his Gospel. The martyrs, therefore, became ‘spiritual heroes’ who were put before the eyes of the believers to emulate and to follow their heroic examples. This concept became embodied in the liturgy of the hours of the Church of the East by the institution of a series of anthems (Greek, sticheria) known as the ‘Antiphons of the Martyrs,’ or ‘ōnyāthā d-sāhdē.4 Concerning the question “Why do they daily recite at vespers and at matins the antiphons of the martyrs, [but] on Sundays and feasts and in Lent they do not recite [them]?” The 9th-century anonymous author most commonly referred to as Pseudo-Gewargis of Arbela,5 in his Commentary on the Liturgical Rites (Memrā II, Chapter XIX), states the following: But the holy fathers sought that we might be confirmed in our faith,

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 44

Singing Hymns to the Martyrs _________________________________________________________________________________________

they desired that at all times the triumphs of the forbearers—the prophets, apostles and martyrs— might be proclaimed in our hearing. And all of these, or the majority, died by being killed. And also [concerning] that at one time two tyrants arose—I mean Shapur and Julian the Apostate—and they killed many for the sake of the true faith. The fathers decided that they might be commemorated at the times of the liturgy, that the believers might hear and be encouraged, and their memorial might be kept for their honor, and the believers, the spiritual sons, might be aided by their prayers. And even though one might suffer evils at the hands of the persecutors, let him learn from the martyrs through their antiphons and their remembrances, and let him endure his sufferings with joy. And when they [i.e. the fathers] saw that it was not fitting that they [the martyrs] be remembered in the middle of the liturgy, for this ‘path of the beginning’ signifies the end, they desired that their remembrances be made after the liturgy. But on the days of the holy feasts when the dispensation of their Lord is fulfilled, the remembrance of the servants is not to take place on the day of the honoring of their Lord. And during the days of the Fast [i.e. Lent], which is the battle of our Lord with Satan, let us also in like manner remain with Him in the battle; let us not engage in a remembrance other than the battles of our Lord, but we may add an appendix in our service that would be close to the remembrance of the Passion. But on Sundays when we signify by a type the Resurrection, we are not able to commemorate in those days sufferings and afflictions.6

In the same work, Pseudo-Gewargis of Arbela makes the point that the ancient practice was to commemorate the martyrs on Fridays, for it was on that day that both the ‘Old Adam’ and the ‘New Adam’ (i.e. Christ) died—the former on account of his transgression and sin, the latter on account of the undoing of Adam’s sin. In the context of discussing why the commemoration of St. John the Baptist is observed on a Friday, he states as follows: (The commemoration of martyrs) is observed on Friday on account of the sin [of Adam] taking place on Friday—we said and it is said that the death of Adam took place on a Friday too. It is just that we may typify [mrazzīnan] the death of every saint on the same [day], Friday, that we might remember the uprooting of the sin of Adam. Also, when Shapur the accursed reigned and captured the Catholicos Mār Šem‘ōn and many bishops, metropolitans, presbyters, deacons and faithful—they numbered 153— who blossomed through martyrdom in the East, [Shapur] was told that the Passion in which Christ was killed was on Friday—the last [Friday] of the Fast. The accursed one [Shapur] commanded that those holy ones be killed on the very day in which their Lord was killed, and (indeed) they were killed on the Friday of the Passion. Fittingly, the blessed [Mār Īšō‘yahb] decided that their commemoration should be observed on the Friday following the Passion. Firstly, so that we might remember and inquire that they were killed on this day and be encouraged by their proclamation. Also just as the accursed one [Shapur] mingled their death with the death of their Lord, we ought not to distance ourselves from our obligation: in the same way he extolled their death with

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 45

Singing Hymns to the Martyrs _________________________________________________________________________________________

that of Christ, we might magnify their commemoration with the Passion of our Lord. It is not comely that we should include the death of another man with his [i.e. Christ’s] death, (and thus) it [their commemoration] was left for the following Friday…7

It is almost certainly the case that, liturgically speaking, the commemoration of the martyrs and confessors preceded the composition of the antiphons of the martyrs. However, according to the Ḥūdrā tradition, the antiphons are attributed to Mār Mārūthā the bishop of Martyropolis. We are told that he travelled all throughout the confines of the Persian Empire and upon seeing the vestiges of the Great Persecution carried out by Shapur II (which decimated the Christian population of the empire) he collected many relics and remains of these martyrs of Persia, burying them in churches of his city Mayafarqin, which was renamed Martyropolis (city of martyrs). He is also said to have composed antiphons which extolled these martyrs for Christ (predominantly known as the ‘Persian Martyrs’) and the events of their heroic sufferings and deaths. Mārūthā, of course, is a key figure for the Persian Church at the important event of the Synod of Mār Isḥaq (Isaac) I the Catholicos, in 410.8 Acting as an emissary from the Roman territories (and a physician by profession), the famed bishop of Martyropolis made contacts with the Persian Church during the period of peace following the Great Persecution and the death of Shapur in 379. This period saw a marked tolerance of the Christians in the Persian territory during the reign of Yazdgird I (399-420/421).

THE ANTIPHONS IN THE LITURGY OF THE ASSYRIAN CHURCH OF THE EAST The martyrs’ antiphons are observed during both vespers and matins, being append-

ed to these two services—they are not recited on Sunday and feast days. At the end of the vespertine and matutinal office, the fixed antiphons are alternated by the choirs. Formerly, it seems to have been the case that when the offices (vespers and matins) ended—being signaled by the three-fold recitation of the Trisagion with doxology, and the Our Father—the two choirs proceeded to the martyrium (bēthsāhdē) of the church, almost always located to the north of the diaconicon. The relics of the saints were found in the martyrium, especially those of the patron saint in whose honour the church was dedicated. The relics were placed in often costly reliquaries made of precious metal or of marble (glusqmā); these were then placed in the walls of the martyrium with an engraved marble cover-piece. The most commemorated saints in the series of martyrs’ antiphons are St. George of Lydda and St. Mary. In fact, in the whole collection of these antiphons, these two precede the antiphon which is marked by the Gloria Patri and A Saeculo. It is a true statement, therefore, that the most popular saints in the collection of antiphons are these. Other saints include the Maccabees and their mother Mārt(y) Šmūnī, St. Cyriacus and his mother Julitta, Ss. Sergius and Bacchus, Rabban Hurmizd the Persian, and Rabban Pethyōn the martyr. In the service of matins for Friday, the desert and monastic fathers commemorated in the antiphons include St. Anthony of Egypt and St. Eugene of Clysma. In the same service, many of the monastic saints and martyrs of the Church of the East are mentioned; among them are Yōḥannan the son of the Visionaries, Māran‘ammeh, Rabban Hurmizd and Rabban Pranse. It is a common feature in the collection of these antiphons to commemorate Diodore of Tarsus, Theodore of Mopsuestia and Nestorius, as well as St. Ephrem, Mar Narsai of Nisibis, and Barṣawmā, the metro-

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 46

Singing Hymns to the Martyrs _________________________________________________________________________________________

politan of Nisibis. Among this last list, many of the doctors of the School of Nisibis are commemorated, including Job, Yōḥannān d-bēth-Rabban and Michael (the Interpreter).

SOME THEOLOGICAL THEMES COMMON TO THE ANTIPHONS OF THE MARTYRS The first important theme concerning the martyrs as contained in the antiphons is the fact that they are not dead but alive—in Christ. In Luke 20:34-38 we read: Jesus answered and said to them, ‘The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage. But those who are counted worthy to attain that age, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry nor are given in marriage; nor can they die anymore, for they are equal to the angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection. But even Moses showed in the burning bush passage that the dead are raised, when he called the Lord ‘the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob,’ for He is not the God of the dead but of the living, for all live to Him.’

Thus, according to the liturgy, the martyrs, are as alive as we are, but—in God! The second theme found in the martyrs’ antiphons is that their bodies and relics remaining upon the earth are a source of blessings and divine grace to the faithful who worship God in their presence. From the precious relics of the martyrs and saints, and originally from the earth upon which their blood was poured out, was taken the holy earth known as ḥnānā, lit. “mercy compassion.” This holy earth is used in the rite for the blessing of marriages, and as a remedy for the sick when the earth is mixed with holy oil. It is considered a source of grace for believers.

The martyrs are physicians who cure spiritual ills of humanity. The antiphons for the vespertine office of Fridays say: The martyrs became true physicians in the universe, curing and rendering whole the souls which were stained by sin. Thanks be to the Lord who chose you and made his power to abide in your bones, that you may be to the race of mortals, the ‘Harbour of Peace’ inside the world.

The martyrs heal those who are spiritually ill by means of their prayers and the grace of the Holy Spirit which is imparted to the faithful by means of their relics. Another important theological theme is the final reward which the martyrs will receive when Christ comes again in glory. In some antiphons, it is stressed that while their bodies are here on earth, their souls are mingled with the angels. At the final triumph of Christ over the world and also in a certain sense over the pagans who had the martyrs put to death, the final recompense of the martyrs on account to their self-sacrifice for Christ will be seen.

CONCLUSION The martyrs hold a place of high regard in the liturgy of the Assyrian Church of the East. In both the office of vespers and matins they are commemorated by means of a series of antiphons, the ‘ōnyāthā d-sāhdē, which are observed on ferial days. For feast days and Sundays, since the divine dispensation completed in Christ is observed liturgically, the antiphons of the martyrs are suspended in them. As living witnesses to the sufferings of Christ, through their own sufferings and persecutions, they become eminent examples of heroic virtue. For by suffering for Christ, they actually suffer with Christ; as one antiphon puts it: “Come in peace, O new bridegrooms, sons of the mys-

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 47

Singing Hymns to the Martyrs _________________________________________________________________________________________

tery of baptism, which grace has nurtured in the name of the Trinity.” Their commemoration in the liturgical year is meant to inspire a great faith and love for the things of God in the hearts and minds of the faithful.

Their bodies and relics remaining upon the earth are sources of healing and spiritual comfort to the baptized faithful, for they are no longer mere human beings but temples of the Holy Spirit par excellence.

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 48

Singing Hymns to the Martyrs _________________________________________________________________________________________

NOTES 1

Edited by Addai Scher, “Traités d’Isaï le docteur et de Hnana d’Abiabène sur les martyrs, le vendredi d'or et les rogations, et de foi à réciter par les évêques nestoriens avant l'ordination,” PO 7 (1911) 15-52. The present writer has consulted the Syriac manuscript of the Causes of the Feasts found in the Teutonic College of Campo Santo (Vatican City). The manuscript is given the number 44, and was written at Alqōš, dated 1897. 2 Manuscript Collegio Teutonico 44 (Vatican City), FF. 161v-161r. 3 Ktābā da-qdām wad-bātar wad-ḥōdrā wad-kaškūl wad-gazzā w-qālā d-ūdrānē ‛am ktābā d-mazmōrē [The Book of Before-andAfter, Ḥodrā, Kāškūl, Gazzā, Hymns in Aid, Along with the Psalter], ed. Toma Darmo, vol. III (Thrichur, 1962), 370-371. 4 For the English translation of these antiphons, see: Arthur J. Maclean, East Syrian Daily Offices. Translated from the Syriac with Introduction, Notes, and Indices and an Appendix Containing the Lectionary and Glossary (London, 1894), 12-16; 25-29; 32-35; 37-41; 43-47; 51-54; 109-134. 5 On him see S. P. Brock, “Gewargis of Arbela, Pseudo-,” in S. P. Brock et als., (eds.),

Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage (Gorgias Press, 2011), 176. 6 See R.H. Connolly (editor & Latin translation, Anonymi Auctoris Expositio Officiorum Ecclesiae Georgio Arbelensi vulgo adscripta, I & II. R.H. Connolly (editor & Latin translation), Accedit Abrahae Bar Lipheh Interpretatio Officiorum, CSCO 64, 72-71, 76 = SS 25, 2928, 32 (Paris-Rome, 1913, 1915; repr. Louvain 1960-1961). The Syriac text of the quotation is found in volume I, 192-193. 7 Ibid., 130-131. 8 “The synod [of Mar Isaac, 410 AD] was brokered by the Roman bishop Marutha of Martyropolis, Byzantium’s ambassador to Persia, who had endeared himself to the Persian Christians by ensuring that the thousands of victims of Shapur’s terrible persecution were remembered and honoured in the West. He had listed and published the names of some of the Persian martyrs, and had also collected the bones of many of the dead and buried them in Christian territory, at a site named Martyropolis (‘city of martyrs’) in the Roman border province of Sophanene;” D. Wilmshurst, The Martyred Church (London, 2011), 18. See also W. S. McCullough, A Short History of Syriac Christianity to the Rise of Islam (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1982), 63, 121-22.

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 49

______________________________________________________________________ CHRISTIANS IN THE CITY: ALEPPO IN THE OTTOMAN PERIOD

BERNARD HEYBERGER INSTITUT D’ETUDES DE L'ISLAM ET DES SOCIETES DU MONDE MUSULMAN (IISMM) ECOLE DES HAUTES ETUDES EN SCIENCES SOCIALES (EHESS)

A

leppo was one of the most important towns in the Ottoman Empire, having the third largest population in the 17th century, after Istanbul and Cairo. It was also a very important Christian city, with a quarter of its population being Christian until 1960. Today, there are still several thousand Christians, but in a city of some four million inhabitants. Aleppo was an important Christian city from the 17th to the 19th century, not only because of the number of its Christian inhabitants, but also because a very important cultural shift occurred at that time, which laid the groundwork for the socalled Nahḍa, that is, the Arabic Renaissance. This was possible because Aleppo and the Christians of the city had long been on the crossroads of different cultures: The Oriental Christian tradition, Arabic Islamic classical culture, Persian and Ottoman court culture, as well as Christian European culture, which had two components, the Western (mainly Roman Catholic) and the Eastern (Greek and Slavic). This role of Aleppo is almost forgotten in the memory of the local Christians today. The Maronites for instance identify themselves with

Lebanon, and generally ignore the role the Syrian city has played in their economic, cultural and religious development. On the other hand, the case of Aleppo offers the opportunity to consider what it meant to be a Christian in an Islamic environment during this period. Indeed, the Christians of Aleppo are better documented than the Christians of other large cities, such as Damascus. The Ottoman archives, especially the registers of the Cadi court, give evidence about the social life of Christians.1 But we also have, from the 17th century on, plenty of internal documents of the local denominations: manuscript books, chronicles, Church rules, correspondence, and icons. The Western consuls, travelers and merchants, as well as the Catholic missionaries, wrote and published a lot on the Syrian city, which was an important stage on the road from the Mediterranean to Persia, to India, and beyond. The local clergy became regular correspondents with the Roman authorities, mainly the offices of the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith,2 but they also left testimony in the Russian and Romanian archives.

________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 50

Christians in the City: Aleppo in the Ottoman Period _________________________________________________________________________________________

1. CHRISTIANS IN THE CITY “From everywhere you come to Aleppo,” wrote Volney, “the crowd of its minarets and of its whitish domes flatters the eyes, bored by the brown and monotonous appearance of the plain.”3 On a general view of the city, a present day photograph or an 18th century engraving, minarets and domes make a crown around the medieval citadel. The urban territory is completely squared by mosques, schools (madrasa), hospitals, khans, and fountains, which give witness to the piety and charity of the Muslims there as well as to the political and religious investment of the successive authorities in the prestigious town planning operations. But this picture does not account for the actual place the Aleppo Christians had in the city and in their respective Churches at the level of the entire Middle East. The ‘Greeks’ or ‘Melkites’, that is the Byzantines, were the most numerous. Their ‘Patriarch of Antioch’ had his seat in Damascus but was often elected by the Aleppines, and often stayed in the city. With ten or fifteen thousand faithful, under the rule of twelve priests and an archbishop (1668), they must have comprised half of the Christians in Aleppo. The most numerous after them were the Armenians. They had twenty-two priests and a resident bishop. The West Syrians (so-called Jacobites) had their own bishop, who had been residing in the city without interruption since 1597. Their patriarch had his seat in the monastery of Dayr Za‛farān, near Mardīn, but he often visited Aleppo and even temporarily made his residence there. The Maronites were the smallest of these groups, with about three thousand members. Their archbishop lived in a monastery on Mount Lebanon. Only from 1725 on, with the election of Germanos Farhāt, a native, did the bishop become a permanent resident in his seat. The East Syrians (so-called Nestorians)

were only represented by a small number of families who attended the churches of the other denominations.4 The presence of Christians in Aleppo is attested for the 15th century in the northern suburb of Al-Salība al-Jdayda, which became the heart of Aleppine Christianity. An enclave formed around a small courtyard where unpretentious churches were squeezed. The most ancient church belonged to the Armenians, followed by the Maronites, and then the Greeks. That of the West Syrians, the largest and most impressive, was built later, in 1510. At the beginning of the 17th century, a rich family of Armenian notables who were in charge of the customs in Aleppo, built the church of the Forty Martyrs in the same courtyard, which can still be seen today. The prosperity of the city and the benevolence of the authorities toward minorities favoured the improvement of the Christian population. The Greeks flocked from the Syrian countryside, especially from the valley of the Orontes, the Armenians from Cilicia and Anatolia, and the Syrians from the Jazīrah and north of Mesopotamia (Mardīn and Mosul). A manuscript note in a liturgical book, written by Germanos Farhāt, asserts that the first Maronites came down from their mountains to settle in Aleppo in 1489. Ottoman statistics, drawn up in order to levy the poll tax (jizya) on Ahl al-Kitāb, clearly show the increase in the number of Christians: In 1537 they were only 5.4 per cent of the households of the whole city, whereas by the end of the 17th century they had become 20%.5 Christians had to be discrete. As dhimmī, they were subjected by Islamic law to a number of discriminatory rules, which were first summarized in a text called “the Convention of ‘Umar”. According to this document, they were forbidden to build new churches, while restoration of ancient ones required authorization, at considerable cost. Religious observance had to be discrete; it

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 51

Christians in the City: Aleppo in the Ottoman Period _________________________________________________________________________________________

was generally not possible to hold Christian ceremonies in public or in the neighbourhood of a mosque. Even in the Saliba suburb which was mainly inhabited by Christians, the Charaf Mosque owned a number of waqf estates. The Christian cemetery, for instance, belonged to these waqfs. Muslim notables (’a‛yān) played an important role in the life of the city quarter, often as legal witnesses in trials before the Islamic court, where they testified on behalf of Christians.6 Christians had to pay a poll tax, jizya, which was stipulated in the Koran. They were also required to wear special clothing. When the Maronite Hannā Dyāb, a native of Aleppo, visited Lebanon for the first time at the beginning of the 18th century, he encountered local leaders on horseback, armed, and wearing white turbans, whom he took for Muslims. He was astonished when he heard that they were Maronites like him!7 In the chronicle of the Greek Catholic merchant Yūsuf Ibn Dimitrī ‘Abbud, at the end of the 18th century, criticism of these restrictions is often expressed. It is possible that while the Ottoman Empire was losing battles against Christian armies, the Sultan, in response to such defeats, stressed the enforcement of Islamic order. ‘Abbud says that as the Russians came up to Edirne, the war triggered serious upheavals in Aleppo. The new wālī issued commands to restore order in the city and required Christians to wear blue clothes and to put Qalābiq on their heads. In the end, the Christians negotiated a jurm, a fine, for 5000 piasters, in order to get exempted from the requirement of special clothing.8 Urban planning operations managed by the governors of the city came with the expansion of the Saliba quarter. Bahram Bacha built a ḥammām there in 1583. Above all, Ipshir Pacha changed the plan of the quarter in 1653, by building a khan, three qayṣariyya, a coffee shop, a fountain,

shops (all of which were Islamic waqfs), and a mosque.9 The churches, in spite of the restrictions of Islamic law, were restored several times and expanded. The Saliba quarter was not a Christian ghetto. The historian Antoine Abdelnour has studied the purchase and sale of real estate between Muslims and Christians and Christians and Jews.10 One third of these transactions were between Muslims and non-Muslims or between Christians and Jews. And one quarter of the homes sold by Muslims had Christian or Jewish neighbours. There were Muslim families living in the midst of Christian families and Christians sharing collective buildings with Muslims. Further evidence of the physical proximity between Christians and Muslims can be seen in the complaints which were sometimes levied against neighbours before the court.11 Indeed, this mix was not always tolerated. There was a trend toward sectarian gathering, and a tendency to make a street or a courtyard exclusively Christian or Muslim. Christians preferred segregation in their dwellings.12 Recent studies of Islamic court records by historians show that Christians made use of the court, and they knew how to use Islamic jurisprudence in their own interest. It was possible for them to win a trial against a Muslim. They even appealed to the court for legal deeds in matters of trade or inheritance. Generally, personal law is considered as belonging exclusively to the domain of millet ecclesiastical courts, but we find for instance that twenty-nine marriage contracts were recorded before the Islamic court between 1771 and 1773. In fact, when the spouses did not belong to the same denomination, a contract before the Muslim judge was a solution.13 Even quarrels between the faithful of a same denomination about theological or disciplinary questions could be taken before the cadi, who had to settle, for instance, whether or not Catholics could

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 52

Christians in the City: Aleppo in the Ottoman Period _________________________________________________________________________________________

attend mass in the Orthodox Church, or if the memory of Dioscorus had to be condemned.14

2. A SHARED CULTURE BETWEEN CHRISTIANS AND MUSLIMS Christians were relatively integrated within the Ottoman political system. However, they occasionally had to give proof of their loyalty. They were under the suspicion of betrayal and collusion with the enemies of the Sultan, and one suspects that it was under duress that they decorated and lit up their homes to celebrate a victory of the imperial armies or the birth of a male child in the imperial household. But were the Armenians actually compelled to organize “a beautiful procession for thanks-giving, after the capture of Kamenets”, as we read in a missionary’s account?15 The sincerity of the attachment of Yūsuf Ibn Dimitrī ‘Abbud (the Greek Catholic merchant mentioned earlier) to the Ottoman political order cannot be questioned when we read the records of the great military and political events of the Empire in his chronicle. Recording the death of Sultan Mustafā in 1774, and the accession of Abdulhamit, he adds this wish: Ja‛ala Allāh ayyāmahu zāhira aġṣān al-’amāni wa-al-faraḥ May God make his days like branches coming into blossom of hope and joy

And in 1789, at the accession of Salim son of Mustafa: Ayyadahu Allāh bi-al-naṣr waja’ala ayyāmahu tazhur al-salām May God support him in the victory, and make his days flourish with peace16

The culture of the Christians was not absolutely different from that of the Muslims. It was influenced by the values and

the principles inspired by Islam which were dominant in the Ottoman society. The wonderful wooden decoration of the Qā’a of bayt wakīl in Saliba is conserved today in the Museum of Berlin.17 It was made in 1600-1603, for a Christian called Al-ḥājj ‘Isā Ibn Butruṣ. Notice that this title “alḥājj” has a Muslim origin, but it was used at that time by Christians returning from their pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The inscriptions which are written on the decoration of this room are generally without any religious significance, being mostly proverbs. But one inscription, which one sees upon entering the room, has a rather ambiguous religious signification. Bismillāh, al-khāliq, al-nāṭiq, alḥayy In the name of God, the Creator, the Speaker, and the Living One

This expression is like the Muslim bismillāh, and would have given no offence to any Muslim who might have visited the home of ‘Īsā. But for a Christian it echoed the mystery of the Trinity. Did al-ḥājj ‘Īsā deliberately use this ambiguous expression? This is not likely to be the case as exactly the same expression appears in the Christian manuscripts intended exclusively for the use of the Melkite monks from Aleppo who lived in monasteries on Mount Lebanon in the 18th century. This expression goes back to the time of the Abbasid caliphs, when the Christian Arabic-speaking theologians, responding to the Islamic kalām, worked on the same issues with Muslims, with very similar arguments.18 The same Qā‛a of the house wakīl is lavishly decorated with Ottoman-Persian styled paintings. The obvious model of the artists was the paintings of the courts of Istanbul and Isfahan. The subjects belong generally to this court culture, without any religious content: the master with a book, the physician bleeding a patient, a wrestler, a musician, or hunting scenes. A scene

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 53

Christians in the City: Aleppo in the Ottoman Period _________________________________________________________________________________________

from the classical Arabic and Persian literature like the Laylā and Majnūn legend blends together with a Christian legend, that of Saint George, who, as it is well known, was venerated as al-Khidr by the Muslims. To this day there is a tomb of alKhidr in the citadel of Aleppo, but it now has exclusively Islamic features. The Last Supper is pictured on the decoration. On the table of this Last Supper, one can see the lamb of the sacrifice, cups of wine, and the millstone, which belong to the ancient Christian symbols of the Eucharist. This expresses a conception of the mystery of the Eucharist rather different from that of the missionaries who appeared from the 17th century on. The representation of Abraham’s sacrifice appears in the Persian miniatures of the 16th century, as an illustration of the Qiṣaṣ al-Anbiyā’, the stories of the Prophets. On the wooden decoration of bayt wakīl, this sacrifice of Abraham follows the Muslim tradition of the narrative: the angel carries the ram which has to be sacrificed in place of Isaac, whereas in the Christian tradition, following the book of Genesis, the ram is caught in a bush. Other examples of this cultural proximity between Muslims and Christians could be given, for example in their common moral code. In a Melkite list of sins, from the second half of the 17th century, one reads that drinking and selling ‘araq and wine are “ḥarām”, as well as eating suffocated meat and pork. In other texts, bishops issue strict moral rules especially for women.19

3. OPENING TO THE WORLD AND BEGINNING OF WESTERNIZATION The Churches had their local organizations. Generally, the millets are considered as autonomous organizations on the level of the Ottoman Empire, with the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople at the head of the

Greeks of the whole Empire, and the Armenian Patriarch in the capital at the head of the non-Chalcedonians. This is the sectarian and the clericalist view in the 19th century. Authority in the Churches was influenced by local networks. Legitimacy and authority was first locally won by support from the Christians and the Muslim notables of the city. It was, for instance, very difficult for the Syrian patriarch in Mardīn, who may have spoken better Kurdish than Arabic, to get legitimacy and obedience from his Aleppine flock. The order of the Maronite monks, founded by Aleppine young people, split swiftly into an Aleppine branch and a Lebanese branch, as did the Melkite Shuwayrī order.20 For the Rūm, the role of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople within the territory of Antioch was almost non-existent. It began to be more active in reaction to the split between Catholics and Orthodox after 1724. The Melkite patriarchs of Antioch, like Makāryūs al-Za‛īm or Athanasios Dabbās, felt themselves autonomous, being attached to their seat of Antioch, and at the same level of dignity and authority as Rome or Constantinople. With the unification of the Empire, the horizon of the Christians began to widen. As early as the 17th century, the Christians of Aleppo played a major role in the life of the Arabic- speaking Christians, from Cairo to Istanbul, and from Sidon to Mosul, being well ahead of other Eastern Christians in education and trade. They began to emigrate, and to head large networks in the other urban centers around the Mediterranean where they had relatives, or even in Persia and India.21 Maronite clergymen, even patriarchs like the famous Istifān Duwayhī in the 17th century, had been educated in Rome before they returned to their homeland. At one point Duwayhī was a missionary of the Roman Church in Aleppo. The Melkite patriarch Makāryūs al-Za‛īm made two

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 54

Christians in the City: Aleppo in the Ottoman Period _________________________________________________________________________________________

journeys that took him as far as Moscow, where he played an important role in ecclesiastical politics, as well as in Walachia and Moldavia.22 He also visited Georgia, where he was also active.23 His successor Athanasios Dabbās printed books in Arabic during his stay in Romania, at the beginning of the 18th century. On his return to Aleppo, he translated an incredible book from Greek into Arabic: Ṣalāḥ al-ḥakīm wa fasād al-‘ālam al-ḏamīm (The Salvation of the Wise Man, and the Ruin of the World of Sin). The author of this 1698 book is the Romanian prince Dimitri Cantemir, who lived at the court of the Sultan in Istanbul, and used sources in Romanian, Latin, Greek, and Persian. He quotes long passages from the Gulistan of the Persian poet Sa‛adi. But the most astonishing feature of this book is the word for word translation of a then recent book by a Unitarian Pole, Andreas Wissowatius. One wonders what he found so important in this book.24 Anyway, this is a testimony that ideas and culture can take strange paths, and that often Western principles and methods were transferred to Syria through Bucharest, Moscow, Crete, or Istanbul. Direct links between the Christians of Aleppo and the West improved continually. Small European (Franj) colonies that settled in Aleppo employed local Christians and Jews as servants and brokers. Some of the local Christians had their own trade, with ships crossing the sea from Istanbul to Egypt. They aspired to gain the title of drogman, which refers to an official translator of a European consul exempted from paying the poll tax, and in some cases from the jurisdiction of the local Islamic court. They were ‘protected’ by a European nation, but in some cases, the protector feared his protégé, because the latter could belong to powerful political and economic networks inside the Ottoman Empire.25 At that time, too, Catholic missionaries settled in the city. The Italian Franciscan

Friars were the first. Then, at the beginning of the 17th century, came the Carmelites and the French Jesuits and Capuchins. They opened schools and taught catechism in the courtyards of the Christian households. Auricular confession was one of the main tools to control consciences and to provide a strong Catholic education. A number of children from Aleppo were sent to Rome to study in the Maronite College or in the Urban College. In the latter, fifty of the seventy-eight students coming from Syria were natives of Aleppo.26 Several of them, returned to their homeland, translated books from Latin or Italian into Arabic, reproducing such bestsellers of Catholic literature as the Imitation of Jesus Christ by Thomas à Kempis, the Castle of the Soul by Theresa of Avila, The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, or the Introduction to the Devout Life by Francis of Sales, which were available in Arabic as early as the end of the 17th century.27 One of the most successful undertakings of the missionaries was the creation of brotherhoods for young people or for adults. The rules of these brotherhoods strongly encouraged their members to practice reading. Salvation needed instruction. Books were useful to encourage daily conscience examination and to practice selfcontrol in all the circumstances of daily life. These brotherhoods and their books also taught hygiene, punctuality, and courtesy. All the behaviour of the Catholic Christian was intended to distinguish him from the “heretic”, the “schismatic”, and the “infidel,” but with these new rules of behaviour, the shared life with Muslims and Orthodox became more problematic. Nevertheless, a milieu with a specific intellectual and spiritual culture flourished in Aleppo. This opening up to Western post-humanist culture happened alongside work on local traditions. Patriarch Makāriyūs al Za’īm compiled the traditions of his Church, and translated many works from

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 55

Christians in the City: Aleppo in the Ottoman Period _________________________________________________________________________________________

Greek into Arabic. After his return from Walachia to Aleppo, Athanasios Dabbās published ten books which were printed in Aleppo. These were the first books to be printed in Arabic in the Arab world. In the book collections of the Greek Catholic Shuwayrite monastery of Khinshāra or that of Dayr al-Shīr (Lebanon), one notices that the Aleppine monk Nicolas al-Ṣā’igh, who wrote panegyrics in the classical Arabic form of qaṣīda, in honour of the very modern and very Latin devotion of the Holy Heart of Jesus, used for the inspiration of his Dīwān al-khūrī the Diwân of Ibn AlFārid, which he had purchased in 1703, and the diwān of Abū-al-‘alā’ al-Ma’arrī, of which he had a copy made in 1715 with his own money. Another Shuwayrite whose dīwān later became famous, Hanāniyya AlMunayyir, copied the dīwān of Ibn al-Fārid in 1797, writing many comments in the margins of this exemplar. These monks not only used collections of poems, they also read classical Arabic and Latin philosophy that had been recently translated into Arabic. On the other hand, curiously, they principally used great modern Western collections for history, like the Ecclesiastical History of Baronius, in part translated into Arabic in the 17th century, while ignoring the Arabic chronicles.28 All the Oriental denominations, even the “Orthodox”, knew forms of synthesis between the modern Western Catholicism and local ecclesiastical traditions. In the same book, one can encounter two Christian traditions: the Western and the Oriental. Engravings from the Arabic Gospel printed in the Greek Catholic monastery of Saint John of Shuwayr around 1740 depict the Apostle Matthew in a rather Italian way, with table, seat, and opening into the landscape behind a curtain. He writes with a quill pen, not with a sharpened reed, as did the Orientals. But in the same book one also finds a typically Byzantine Virgin, next to a typically Italian grotesco decora-

tion. In fact, stamped pictures from France and Italy, as well as Byzantine-fashioned engravings from Poland or the Balkans were massively introduced and appreciated by the Christian people.29 The so-called Aleppo school of painting is the best testimony of this synthesis which took place in Syria during the 17th and 18th centuries. A dynasty of painters, founded by Yūsuf al-Muṣawwir in the second half of the 17th century, furnished icons for all the Churches of Syria. These pictures were inspired by Cretan or Greek paintings. The painters of Aleppo rediscovered the Byzantine tradition, and remained greatly attached to it in their choice of iconography as well as in composition and style. But their choice of plasticity and size at the expense of the characteristic rigidity and geometry of the forms found in the art of icons reflects a Western influence. We know besides that people were eager for copies of Roman pictures. Moreover, painters responded to local demand, introducing local elements of landscape and people’s appearance. Saints and their legends became more familiar. Saint Anthony of Egypt became more popular and better known among the Oriental Christians through Western publications and the renewal of monastic life in Mount Lebanon. At the same time, Saint Anthony of Padova was introduced, and has been represented following the same rules and the same techniques of icon painting as the other subjects.30

CONCLUSION From the 17th century on, the Christians of Aleppo profited from the unification of a very large territory under the ‘Ottoman peace’, and entered into contact with Egypt and Constantinople. But beyond the borders of the Empire they also had links to Persia and India, on the one hand, and to Christian Europe, on the other. The con-

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 56

Christians in the City: Aleppo in the Ottoman Period _________________________________________________________________________________________

tacts with Rome as well as with Moscow and with the Greek Orthodox world improved dramatically. This contact with the outside offered to the Christians of Aleppo the opportunity to promote their own culture and their own history, and to enhance their identity over and against the dominant Muslim culture as well as the new Christian model introduced by the Roman Catholic missionaries or natives educated in Rome. Today, the question of authenticity (aṣāla) and heritage (turāṯ) is an obsession both among Arabic Christians and among Muslims of the region. These issues are ge-

nerally shaped by the charges of injustice levelled against the West. People did not feel the same way during the 17th and 18th centuries. At that time, when they introduced innovation, they generally pretended to be returning to tradition. Contact with the West produced mimesis, contestation and reaction, and in the process helped local Christians to become more aware of their own traditions and their own history, and thus their own identity. It is time today to revisit the relations between Western culture and the Arabic East, considering the Arabs not only as victims, but as actors in their own history.31

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 57

Christians in the City: Aleppo in the Ottoman Period _________________________________________________________________________________________

NOTES 1

Abraham Marcus, The Middle East on the Eve of Modernity. Aleppo in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). Bruce Masters, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World. The Roots of Sectarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Abdul-Karim Rafeq, “Craft Organisation, Work Ethics and the Strains of Change in Ottoman Syria”, JAOS 111(1991) 495-511. Abdul-Karim Rafeq, “Craft Organizations and Religious Communities in Otto-man Syria (XVIe–XIXe centuries),” in La Shi‘a nell’im-pero ottoman (Rome: Accademia Nazionale Dei Lincei, 1993), 25-55. André Raymond, “Une communauté en expansion: les chrétiens d’Alep à l’époque ottomane (XVIeXVIIe siècles),” in André Raymond, La ville arabe, Alep à l’époque ottomane (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles) (Damascus: IFD, 1998), 353-372. Stefan Knost, “La société dans le faubourg Nord d’Alep (XVIIIe siècle): les chrétiens entre convivialité et ségrégation confessionnelle,” in Louis Boisset, Floréal Sanagustin, Souad Slim (ed.), Les relations entre musulmans et chrétiens dans le bilad al-cham à l’époque ottomane aux XVIIe – XIXe siècles (Beirut, University of Balamand , Institut français du ProcheOrient, Université Saint-Joseph, 2005), 125143. Hidemitsu Kuroki, “Zimmis in midnineteenth Century Aleppo: an analysis of Ciyze-Defteris,” in Essays in Ottoman Civilization, Proceedings of the XIIth Congress of the Comité International d’Etudes Pré-Ottomanes et Ottomanes (Prague: Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, 1998), 205-248. 2 See Bernard Heyberger, Les chrétiens du Proche-Orient au temps de la Réforme catholique (Rome : Ecole Française de Rome, 1994). New edition forthcoming (Rome : Ecole Française de Rome, 2013) 3 C. F. Ch. de Volney, Voyage en Syrie et en Egypte pendant les années 1783, 1784, 1785; new edition (Paris, 1959), 273. 4 Heyberger, Les chrétiens du ProcheOrient, 19-21. 5 Ibid. 6 Stefan Knost, “La société dans le faubourg Nord d’Alep;” Stefan Knost, Die Organisation des religiösen Raums in Aleppo. Die Rolle der

islamischen religiösen Stiftungen (auqaf) in der Gesellschaft einer Provinzhauptstadt des Osmanischen Reiches an der Wende zum 19. Jahrhundert (Beirut, Orient-Institut, 2009), passim. 7 Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana (Rome), Fondo Sbath manuscript n° 254, p. 31 8 Yūsuf Ibn Dimitrī ‘Abbud Bin Jirjis alKhūrī ‘Abbud al-Halabī, Hawādith Halab alyawmiyya 1771 – 1805. Murtād fī tārīkh Halab wa Baghdād, edited by Fawwāz Mahmūd AlFawwāz (Aleppo, Sha‘ar li-l-nashār wal-l‘ulūm, 2006), 87-89. 9 Jean-Claude David, Le waqf d’Ipsir Pasa à Alep (1063 – 1653): Etude d’urbanisme historique (Damascus: Institut Français d’Etudes Arabes, 1982), 102. 10 Antoine Abdelnour, Introduction à l'histoire urbaine de la Syrie ottomane (XVIeXVIIIe siècle) (Beirut: Librairie Orientale, 1982), 422. 11 Knost, “La société dans le faubourg Nord d’Alep.” 12 Raymond, “Une communauté en expansion : les chrétiens d’Alep à l’époque ottomane,” 354-358. 13 Raymond, “Une communauté en expansion: les chrétiens d’Alep à l’époque ottomane,” 366. Masters, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World, 34, 63. 14 Heyberger, Les chrétiens du ProcheOrient, 354-355. 15 Michel Febvre, Théâtre de la Turquie (Paris: E. Couterot, 1682), 295. 16 Yūsuf Ibn Dimitrī ‘Abbud, Hawādith Halab al-yawmiyya, 83, 197. 17 Julia Gonnella & Jens Kröger (eds), Angels, Peonies, and Fabulous Creatures. The Aleppo Room in Berlin (Berlin: Museum für Islamische Kunst. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, and Münster:Rhema, 2008), passim. 18 Bernard Heyberger, “Inschriften und Malereien des Aleppo-Zimmers: Zeugnisse von Kulturangehörigkeit und konfessionnelle Abgrenzung in Aleppo,” in Gonnella & Kröger (eds), Angels, Peonies, and Fabulous Creatures, 87-90. Sidney H. Griffith, The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam (Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008), 45, 75.

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 58

Christians in the City: Aleppo in the Ottoman Period _________________________________________________________________________________________ 19

Bernard Heyberger, Morale et confession chez les melkites d’Alep d’après une liste de péchés (fin XVIIe siècle), in Geneviève Gobillot & Marie-Thérèse Urvoy (eds), L’Orient chrétien dans l’empire musulman, Hommage au professeur Gérard Troupeau (Paris: Editions de Paris, 2005), 283-306. 20 Bernard Heyberger, Hindiyya, mystique et criminelle (Paris: Aubier, 2001), passim— forthcoming English translation (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2012). 21 Bernard Heyberger, “Sécurité et insécurité: les chrétiens de Syrie dans l’espace méditerranéen (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles),” in Meropi Anastassiadou & Bernard Heyberger (eds.), Figures anonymes, figures d’élite : pour une anatomie de l’Homo ottomanicus (Istanbul: Isis, 1999), 147-163. Idem, “Chrétiens orientaux dans l’Europe catholique (XVIIe–XVIIIe s.),” in Bernard Heyberger & Chantal Verdeil (eds), Hommes de l’entre-deux. Parcours individuels et portraits de groupe sur la frontière méditerranéenne (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2009), 61-94. 22 Hilary Kilpatrick, “Journeying towards Modernity: The “Safrat al Batrak Makāriyūs” of Būlus ibn al Za’īm al Halabī,” Die Welt des Islams (New Series), 37-2 (1997) 156-177. Eadem, “Makāriyūs Ibn al-Za’īm and Būlus ibn al Za’īm,” in Joseph E. Lowry and Devin J. Stewart (eds), Essays in Arabic Biography 1350–1850 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009), 262-273. 23 Carsten-Michaël Walbiner, Die Mitteilungen des griechisch-orthodoxen Patriarchen Makarius Ibn al-Za’im von Antiochia (1647–1672) über Georgien nach dem arabischen Autograph von St. Petersburg, PhD

Dissertation (Leipzig, 1994). Idem, “Accounts on Georgia in the Works of Makaryus Ibn alZa’im,” Parole de l’Orient 21 (1996) 245-256. 24 Dimitrie Cantemir, The Salvation of the Wise Man and the Ruin of the Sinful World. Ṣalāḥ al-ḥakīm wa fasād al-‘ālam al-ḏamīm, edited and translated by Ioana Feodorov (Bucarest: Editura Academiei Române, 2006). 25 Maurits H. Van den Boogert, “Intermediaries par excellence? Ottoman Dragomans in the Eighteenth Century,” in Heyberger and Verdeil (eds.), Hommes de l’entre-deux, 95115. 26 Heyberger, Les chrétiens du ProcheOrient, 405-431. 27 Bernard Heyberger, “Livres et pratique de la lecture chez les chrétiens (Syrie, Liban), XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles,” ivres et lecture dans le monde ottoman, Revue des Mondes Musulmans et de la Méditerranée, 87-88 (1999) 209-223. Idem, Hindiyya, mystique et criminelle, 55-58. 28 Carsten Michael Walbiner, “Monastic Reading and Learning in Eighteenth-Century Bilad al-Sham: Some Evidence from the Monastery of al-Shuwayr (Mount Lebanon),” Arabica 51-4 (2004) 462-477. 29 Bernard Heyberger, “De l’image religieuse à l’image profane ? L’essor de l’image chez les chrétiens de Syrie et du Liban,” in Bernard Heyberger & Silvia Naef (eds.), La multiplication des images en pays d’Islam (XVIIe – XXIe s.) (Istanbul : Orient Institut der DMG, 2003), 31-56. 30 Ibidem and Icônes melkites, exposition du Musée Nicolas Sursock, Beyrouth, 16 mai – 15 juin 1969 (Beyrouth, Musée Nicolas Sursock, 1969). 31 Samir Kassir, Considérations sur le malheur arabe (Arles : Actes Sud, 2004), 102.

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 59

______________________________________________________________________ REPORT ON THE EXCAVATIONS OF ḤĪRA IN 2010-2011*

NAṢĪR AL-KA‛BĪ UNIVERSITY OF KUFA (IRAQ)

M

ost of the studies on the city of Ḥīra are based on Islamic Arabic and Syriac literary sources. Prominent among studies in Arabic is the research by Yousif Rizq-Allāh Ghanīma,1 which makes use of the 10thcentury Kitāb al-Aghānī, among other sources, as well as the chapter on the same city by Dr. Jawad Ali in his Encyclopedia on the Arabs before Islam.2 Studies in foreign languages include the fundamental research by the German scholar Gustav Rothstein, which approached the literary sources critically while reconstructing the succession of princely rulers of Ḥīra.3 M. J. Kister’s research4 increased our knowledge about the city after he exploited the manuscript al-manāqib al-mazyadiyya of Abū al-Baqā’ (11th-12th century), which offers relevant details not found elsewhere. Nöldeke’s translation and study of the history of al-Ṭabarī, in which he also consulted the Syriac sources, was a step forward in expanding the research on Ḥīra.5 The same can be said of the work of Nina V. Pigulevskaia,6 on the connection between Arabs, Sassanians, and Byzantines. There is also a survey article on Ḥīra by Irfan Shahid.7 The present paper adds another dimension to the sources mentioned above by

making use of recent archaeological discoveries in Ḥīra unearthed during the latest season (2010-2011), in which important Christian remains were found.

RESULTS OF RESCUE EXCAVATIONS Before the latest excavations that took place between 2007 and 2011, several Iraqi and foreign missions had worked in and near Ḥīra. The first mission, led by Oxford University in the fall of 1931, worked in the hills of Kunaydra in the middle of the desert; it unearthed religious buildings, including two churches dating back to the 7th and 8th centuries.8 The Iraqi Department of Antiquities and Heritage conducted several missions in Ḥīra after 1945.9 In 1956 the excavations concentrated on Tell Um‘Arīf,10 while the 1980s witnessed intensive digging, including a mission that excavated the cemetery in 1981.11 Finally, a Japanese mission concluded its archaeological efforts in 1986.12 Subsequent excavations at Ḥīra began when the airport of al-Najaf project, which included the expansion of its runways, was launched in 2005. Since the project covered archaeological tells and large com-

________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 60

Report on the Excavations of Ḥīra in 2010-2011 _________________________________________________________________________________________

plexes dating to the time of Ḥīra, the Office of the Archaeology of Najaf began rescue excavations on May 16, 2007. It first selected two tells, Tell (A) and Tell (B), but the second proved less interesting in that it consisted of ruined buildings dating to the founding of the city of al-Kūfa. Thus the digging concentrated on Tell (A), an expansive complex rising some 4.5 m above the ground, having 46 rooms and three main sections, all built with bricks, mud, and plaster. The six stages of excavation revealed not a large house or a royal palace, but probably one of the monasteries of Ḥīra, since the structure reflects aspects of monasteries described in literary, historical, and geographical sources.13 The excavated finds from these two locations are as follows: 





    

jar of glazed pottery, painted light blue: long neck, wide mouth, two handles; one broken handle; missing part of the body Byzantine gold dinar: portrait of a king with a crown surmounted by a cross; the queen next to him with the same characteristics; the back of the dinar shows a tower surmounted by a cross and the name ‘Victoria’ in Latin glazed pottery jar, blue in colour: long nozzle, broken parts of the neck and the knobs glazed pottery jar green in colour: circular base, with handles, missing neck glazed pottery jar, light blue: lacks parts of handles jar of pottery: normal handle, flat circular base, broken neck regular pottery jar: no handles, flat circular base, broken neck large pottery jar: pointed base, bears a Syriac inscription; similar funerary jars found in Christian graves



glazed pottery lamp, dark blue: circular, broad dish shape



kohl marble stone: uncoloured, rectangular, concave



plaster cross: low relief cast; cross rests on three steps; two streams rise to the top, one on each side



plaster cross: high relief cast; lateral sides decorated with strips made of triple floral designs



plaster cross: low relief cast, partial flat board, restored in antiquity



complete plaster mold for casting Islamic coins: two parts, the base of which is drilled with the following Arabic Kufic inscription: “There is no god but Allāh, Muḥammad is the Messenger of Allāh”

Another season of rescue excavations began August 11, 2009, and lasted for 110 days, during which two sites, A and B, were selected. Site A is a large tell with a height of 4.5 m, and on it broken pottery and pieces of stucco are scattered in great numbers. Soundings were done on site A, whose buildings were destroyed to their foundations at the time when al-Kūfa was built, while the American army swept away some parts of it when they used the site for a base in 2003. A room was unearthed, measuring 6 by 3.5 m and built with mud bricks coated with plaster, and some sherds and broken handles were found inside it. Attention was then directed to site B, which consisted of 12 rooms of different sizes, a fact which suggests that it was a building with religious functions. The finds uncovered in both sites are as follows:  stopper for pottery jars: pyramidal in shape yellowish in colour; it has some cracks  glass bottle, brown in colour and of medium size; its neck is broken

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 61

Report on the Excavations of Ḥīra in 2010-2011 _________________________________________________________________________________________

 copper coin inscribed in Kufic, corroded  glass seal decorated with a sheep; bears the word “God”  bronze coins corroded by rust  bronze coins bearing a Kufic inscription and covered with rust The final rescue excavations that took place in 2010-2011 brought to light the most abundant and important finds. The locations chosen by the archaeological expedition were near the regions of the early excavations. Not only did it complete its diggings there but it was also able to extend them on two sites, which revealed remains which were more significant than all the buildings unearthed previously. The architectural features found there strongly suggest that the site was a Christian establishment. The site contained as many as 12 metal and plaster crosses and objects such as lamps clearly bearing the sign of the cross. The list of finds is as follows:  transparent marble slab whose upper left side is broken; divided into seven sections, five of which are perpendicular lines; inside two of these lines an old Arab inscription is traced  cross made by casting plaster; semicircular geometric motifs surround the cross; in good condition  plaster cross, rectangular in shape; frame made of geometric motifs; in good condition  cross, small in size with a hole for hanging around the neck; protrusions in its surface suggest that it was encrusted with semi-precious stones; in good condition  cross made by casting plaster; cross surrounded by rectangular arches; half of it is damaged

 cross made by casting plaster; cross surrounded by an arc; only one half survived  cross made by casting plaster but also engraved inside with a linear cross; damaged at bottom right side  cross made by casting plaster; its frame is a circular arc and is surrounded by geometric designs  burned clay cross, small in size with bulbs it its ends; it must have been worn; good condition  clay lamp of pear-shape; decorated with Christian symbols such as the cross on its surface and its base; good condition  cross made by casting plaster; longitudinal and in low relief; its material is not clean; good condition  clay lamp; decorated with crosses and geometrical designs in its surface and its base; traces of burning; good condition  bronze head of a horse: small in size, with enlarged mouth and nose as in running position; possibly used as a handle; good condition  funerary marble slab bearing six lines of a Kufic inscription, which includes the Islamic basmala; damaged at the bottom, affecting the last line  plaster arc two meters high, decorated with designs typical of Ḥīra, from the top to the bottom; good condition What is striking about the finds discovered in the last three seasons is that most of them are Christian, especially those from the third season (2010-2011). The number of crosses of various types and forms is quite remarkable, and these probably reflect the existence of complex religious establishments, while the Kufic found in most of the inscriptions belongs to the seventh century onwards.

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 62

Report on the Excavations of Ḥīra in 2010-2011 _________________________________________________________________________________________

Because of its importance, we now turn to the marble slab with its Christian Arabic inscription. After describing the stone, we shall edit and date the inscription, and try to identify the person commemorated in it.

the wall may have created a perfectly rectangular shape. The flat back of the slab (fig. 2) is smooth and not inscribed, but zooming its digital image reveals remnants of paint, light red in colour, inside some holes and scratches (Fig. 2).

THE INSCRIBED SLAB The rectangular and transparent marble slab, now housed at the Iraqi Museum (Baghdad) under number IM 224 134, is 1.5 cm thick, 11 cm high, and 5 cm wide (fig. 1). Its overall condition is good except (Fig. 1)

(Fig. 2)

(Fig. 1)

that its upper left corner is missing. It narrows gradually at the top, probably to help fix it on a wall with a wider base. The plaster frame of the slab while it was fixed on

The same paint also stains several spots (Fig. 3), which suggests that the slab was originally entirely painted. Since the marble is thin and transparent, the colour of the back must have contrasted with the inscription of the front side. This particular colour characterises most of the grave inscriptions in Ḥīra as well as the crosses and other Christian depictions attested there and in al-Quṣayr.14 The inscribed side of the slab is divided into seven panels marked with straight lines. Four of the panels are decorated with diamond-shaped meshes incised in the stone, while the central panel shows a stylized cross in its midst surrounded by Xmarks on each of its two sides. The second panels from the top and from the bottom contain Kufic inscriptions, as follows (fig. 3A-B):

‫ ﷲ‬+ ‫بركة من‬ “Blessing from God”

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 63

Report on the Excavations of Ḥīra in 2010-2011 _________________________________________________________________________________________

(Fig. 3A)

(Fig. 3B)

‫غفر! ﷲ لعبد المسيح‬ “May God forgive ‘Abd-al-Masīḥ” The top expression suggests that the slab is not funerary but commemorative, perhaps celebrating the building of an edifice, not necessarily religious in nature. As for the bottom expression, it wishes God’s forgiveness upon the man who may have built or financed the construction of the edifice. Forgiveness can be in this life or in the hereafter, but the top inscription seems to indicate that ‘Abd-al-Masīḥ was still alive when the inscribed slab was installed in the wall. The bottom inscription corresponds to the Syriac prayer (māran) ḥūs ‘al “(Our Lord) forgive” + personal name, found in many commemorative inscriptions. The name ‘Abd-al-Masīḥ, lit. “the servant of Christ,” is common among Christian Ar-

abs, both past and present, and it corresponds to the common Syriac name ‘Abd’Īšō‛ (“servant of Jesus”). It is interesting to note that the stylized cross that divides the first inscription rests inside the curved nūn letter of the preposition min “from,” in such a way that it seems to be inserted inside a circle, just like the cross in the middle panel of the slab. The cross has often been inscribed inside a circle in manuscripts and on religious buildings throughout the centuries. The cross on the slab is of a typical oriental shape: two branches (˂) emanate from part of the vertical arm and from the extremities of the horizontal arm, while the cross rests on a reversed bracket (˄). Unfortunately, the inscription does not contain any date, but its epigraphy suggests that it cannot be dated before the 6th century, nor after the 8th or 9th century. The shapes of the letters have no known parallel, for example in Nabatean inscriptions such as that of al-Namarah dated to AD 328, or the Kufic script, which ceased to be used by the 9th century. The 7th century seems to be a reasonable guess for the date of the slab, given the fact that Ḥīra was very active in the history of Christianity in Mesopotamia.

THE IDENTITY OF ‘ABD-AL-MASĪḤ With no details given about ‘Abd-alMasīḥ, one can only guess who he actually was. He may have been just an individual bearing that name who decided to commemorate himself, but since his edifice is quite elaborate, he is more likely to have been a person of some importance. Two Christian men named ‘Abd-al-Masīḥ connected with Ḥīrā are known, one of whom was a writer mentioned by ‘Abd-’Īšō‘ of Nisibis in his Catalogue of Authors.15 In the context of the monastery of al-Anbār founded by Mār Jonas, Kitāb al-Majdal

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 64

Report on the Excavations of Ḥīra in 2010-2011 _________________________________________________________________________________________

(“Book of the Tower”) talks about another ‘Abd-al-Masīḥ. This is what this source says in the context of a discussion of a monastic abbot named Mār Jonas: “and ‘Abd-alMasīḥ of Ḥīrā built his monastery in which he (Mār Jonas) is (buried) now. Mār ‘Abdā of Ḥīrā transferred [him from the placed where he was buried] to the monastery built by ‘Abd-al-Masīḥ. When ‘Abd-alMasīḥ died, he was buried in the monastery, in the small sanctuary to the left side of the altar [domain].”16 Another source also mentions him in the context of the church building of Kokhē: “Mār Abbā the Catholicos expanded it (=church of Kokhē) and enlarged its sanctuary. He spent a considerable amount from the money of the faithful ‘Abd-al-Masīḥ of Ḥīra.”17 These sources highlight the building activities of the man named ‘Abd-al-Masīḥ of Ḥīra, but there is no evidence that the recently excavated building is actually part of his monastery. The other man was ‘Abd-al-Masīḥ son of Buqayla, known only in Islamic sources; he was among “the nobles of Ḥīra,” who negotiated the surrender of the city to the Islamic army of Khālid ’ibn al-Walīd. The place was called Diyārāt al-Asāqifā (the monasteries of the Bishops) “located at the front of Ḥīra, between Najaf and Kūfa; it consists of a large complex of elaborate structures, among which are monasteries of churches of the Naṣāra.”18 The Mu‛jam albuldān of Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī adds the following detail: “Monastery of ‘Abd-alMasīḥ son of ‘Amrū son of Buqayla the Ghassanid (…). This monastery is behind Ḥīra in a place called al-Jur‛ā. This ‘Abdal-Masīḥ is the one who had met Khālid ibn al-Walīd, may Allāh be pleased with him, when the latter invaded Ḥīra and fought the Persians.”19 The time of this historical event corresponds to the Kufic script of the inscription, but whether or not the Arabic inscription belongs to this ‘Abdal-Masīḥ son of Buqayla is another matter.

THE CROSSES Among the archaeological artefacts uncovered in Ḥīra are crosses, three of them on gypsum tablets and one in metal. The design of two of the gypsum crosses is very common in the Christian iconographic repertoire of Mesopotamia: the khachkartype. The first cross ends with its double bulbs at the extremities of the horizontal arm and at the top of the vertical arm (fig. 4A). It seems to rest on a mountain (perhaps Golgotha) but it is damaged at that spot as elsewhere. The cross is inserted inside a frame whose top part bulges out. At the very top of the gypsum tablet are figures that are heavily effaced, and on its right side a pillar made of zigzags is seen. The second gypsum cross (fig. 4B), missing most of its sides, shows similar features, with perhaps two streams or branches emanating from its base, although we see the same above the horizontal arm too. Similar crosses, but better preserved, are attested in Quṣair near the holy city of Najaf 20 and as far north as Sulaymāniyya at the site of Bazian.21

(Fig. 4)

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 65

Report on the Excavations of Ḥīra in 2010-2011 _________________________________________________________________________________________

A lump of gypsum shows a cross with bars at its four ends (☩), and four dots at its corners (fig. 4C). Similar crosses are found elsewhere, as in the façade of the church in the monastery of Mār Behnām near Mosul (Iraq). Such crosses are not official, but rather something like graffiti. The last cross is in metal (fig. 4D); both arms are attached by a nail and the hole on its top suggests that it was hung around the neck.

In short, the clearly Christian remains recently uncovered in Ḥīra by Iraqi archaeologists, including large buildings, stuccos, several stylized crosses, and a Christian Arabic inscription commemorating a local man add precious details to our current information about the city and its culture. Further studies need to be done on these excavations while consulting all the relevant literary sources.22

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 66

Report on the Excavations of Ḥīra in 2010-2011 _________________________________________________________________________________________

NOTES * I would like to thank Mr. Qays Rashīd, Head of the General Directorate of Antiquities and Heritage for his kind assistance and permission to consult the reports of excavations and to photograph the antiquities found in this article. My thanks are also due to Mr. Muḥammad alMayyālī, Director of the Inspectorate of Antiquities and Heritage, Najaf City, for his kind help while writing this research. 1 Al-Ḥirā al-madīna wa-al-mamlaka al-‘arabiyya [The city of Hīra and the Arab Kingdom] (Baghdad, 1936). 2 Al-mufaṣṣal fī tārikh al-‘arab qabl al-Islām (Details on the History of the Arabs before Islam], vol. 1 (Baghdad, 1951), 506-528. 3 Gustav Rothstein, Die Dynastie der Lahmiden in al-Hira, ein Versuch zur arabischpersichen Geschichte zur Zeit der Sasaniden (Berlin: Reuthar, 1899). 4 M.J. Kister, “Ḥīra: Some Notes on Its Relations with Arabia,” Arabica 15 (1968) 143-169; id., Studies in Jāhiliyya and Early Islam (London: Variorum Reprints, 1980), 143-169. 5 Th. Nöldeke, Geschichte der Perser und Araber zur Zeit der Sasaniden aus der arabischen Chronik (Leiden: Brill, 1879). 6 N. V. Pigulevskaia, Araby u granits Vizantii i Irana V IV-VI VV (Moskva: Nauka 1964). 7 I. Shahid, “Ḥīra,” Encyclopedia of Islam, vol. III (Leiden: Brill, 1971), 642-43; see also http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/en cyclopaedia-of-islam-2/al-hira-SIM_2891?s. num=14&s.au=%22Shahid%2C+Irfan%22&s.f. s2_parent_title=Encyclopaedia+of+Islam%2C+ THREE. 8 D. T. Rice, “Hira,” JRAS 19 (1932) 250268; id., “The Oxford Excavations at Hira 1931,” Antiquity 6 (1932) 276- 291; id., “The Oxford Excavation at Hira,” Ars Islamica 1 (1934) 54-73. 9 Maḥmūd al-‘Aynajī, “Excavations in Ḥīra,” Sumer 2 (1946) 29-32 (in Arabic). 10 Muṣṭafā Muḥammad ‘Alī, “First Report on Ḥīra, Third Season,” Sumer 12 (1956) 32-33 (in Arabic). 11 Mājid ‘Abd-Allāh al-Shams, “The Diggings of the Cemetery of Ḥīra,” Sumer 45 (1987-1988) 42-56 (in Arabic).

12

H. Fuji et al., “Excavations at Ain Sha’ia Ruins and Dukakin Caves,” Al-Rāfidān 10 (1989) 27-88. See also Yasuyoshi Okada, “Early Church Architecture in the Iraqi SouthWestern Desert,” Al-Rāfidān 12 (1992) 71-83, and by the same author “Ain Sha’ia and the Early Gulf Churches: An Architectural Analogy,” Al-Rāfidān 13 (1992) 87-93. 13 Report of the (Directorate) of Archaeology and Heritage Mission in Ḥīra: Season of 2007,” 7-21 (in Arabic; unpublished). 14 ‘Abd-al-Majīd M. ‘Abd-al-Raḥmān alḤadīthī, Results of the Excavations in the region of a-Ḥīra (in Arabic), Master’s Thesis, Baghdad University (unpublished), 55. 15 J.J. Assemanus, Bibliotheca Orientalis, vol. 3 (Rome: Typis Sacrae Congregationis de Propaganda Fide, 1725), 198 Caput CXXXII; see also Y. Ḥabbī, Fihris al-mu’allifīn (Baghdad, 1987), 100 # 139. 16 R. Gismondi, Akhbār Faṭārika kursī almashriq [History of the Patriarchs of the See of the East] (Rome 1899), 26. The addition between the square brackets is taken from Mukhtaṣar al-akhbār al-bī‛iyya [Abridged Ecclesiastical Chronicle], edited by Fr. Dr. Buṭrus Ḥaddād (Baghdad, 2000), 216. 17 Mukhtaṣar al-akhbār al-bī‛iyya, 114. 18 ‘Alī ibn Muḥammad Abū al-Ḥasan alShābushtī, Kitāb al-diyārāt, edited by Kūrkīs ʿAwwād (Baghdad 1966). 19 Shahab al-Dīn Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī, Mu‛jam al-buldān, vol. 2, no editor (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1986), 521. 20 A. Harrak, Syriac and Garshuni Inscriptions of Iraq, Répertoire des inscriptions syriaques, 2 (Paris: Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, 2010), vol. 2 Pl. 282 : GA.01.03. 21 Narmen Muhammad Amen Ali, “The ‘Monastic Church’ of Baziān, in Iraqi Kurdistan,” Journal of the CSSS 8 (2008) 74-77 and figs. 10, 11 and 12. 22 One highly relevant but hitherto littlenoticed text is entitled “Account of Ḥīra the Arab City.” This text, included in the Abridged Ecclesiastical Chronicle (in Arabic) published in 2000 by the late Father Buṭrus Ḥaddād (Mukhtaṣar al-akhbār al-bī‛iyya, 130-134), is by far more detailed than all other ancient sources relevant to the Christian city of Ḥīra.

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 67

______________________________________________________________________ A NEW SYRIAC INSCRIPTION FROM TAKRIT (IRAQ)1

AMIR HARRAK UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

T

he city of Takrit was Christian at least from the 6th to the 14th centuries and its antiquities tell much about its history as an ancient Assyrian site, a Syrian Orthodox stronghold, and a late Islamic centre.2 The modern city, bearing a form of the Assyrian and Syriac name, is located on the west bank of the Tigris, almost mid-way between Mosul and Baghdad. A sizable number of Syriac inscriptions have been uncovered in monumental churches and monasteries in Takrit, some of which originate with metropolitans and monastic leaders, while others were produced by the laity.3 The focus of this paper is on an item belonging to the latter category. It was found in a well, the exact location of which within Takrit is not known, and appropriately, it commemorates the digging of the well.

DESCRIPTION The inscription consists of two fragments (A and B) of fragile jaṣṣ-plaster, each of which measures around 30 by 30 cm and 12 cm in thickness. The fragments were apparently found by accident on private property by local people who gave them to a Dominican sister who was studying there,

and they remain in the possession of her congregation.4 The inscription was written by an unprofessional scribe who committed at least two mistakes (in A4 and B4), and was incised by an unskillful stonecutter who confused medial and final mīm in A1. These deficiencies reflect the fact that the inscription was produced by and for ordinary people who preferred to write in Syriac and not Arabic, although it is dated according to the Hegira computation system alone.5 The script is essentially Estrangela, although a Serto olaf in initial and final positions is found in fragment A. The rest of the letters, including the triangular and hollow šīn, reflects more or less the same shapes found in Syriac inscriptions from the archaeological site of al-Chenīsa in the region of Takrit dated to the 8th and 9th centuries. The inscriptions of al-Chenīsa include three ṭablyōthō-plaques bearing the names of local ecclesiastics, all known in Syriac ecclesiastical histories: Bishop Joseph (ca. 774), John Bishop bar-Kiphō (709/ 710), and Bishop Athanasius I (887904).6 However, the shapes of the letters in the present inscription are more triangular, and less attractive, than those found on the plaques.

________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 68

A New Syriac Inscription from Takrit (Iraq) _________________________________________________________________________________________

TEXT AND TRANSLATION

4. of the Arabs, was dug 5. this well, B) 1. + of the sons of Mōr2. Isaac son of Mōr3. Bacchus, at the hand of 4. Sōhdō son of 5. Mōr Ath[anasius?].

COMMENTARY

Fig. A

Fig. B

A) ‫ ܒܫܡ ܐܠܗܐ‬.1 ‫ ܚܝܐ ܒܫܢܬ‬.2 ‫ ܡܐܐ ܘܫܬܝܢ‬.3 ! ‫ ܕܛܝܝܐ ܐܬܚܦܪܢ‬.4 ‫ ܝܪܕܐ ܗܢܐ‬.5 B ̈ + .1 ‫ܕܒܢܘܗܝ ܕܡܪ‬ ‫ ܝܣܚܩ ܒܪ ܡܪ‬.2 ‫ ܒܟܘܣ ܒܐܝܕܝ‬.3 ‫ ܣܗܗܕܐ! ܒܪ‬.4 [‫ ܡܪ ܐܬ]ܢܣܝܘܣ؟‬.5 A) 1. In the name of God 2. the merciful. In the year 3. one hundred and sixty

A1-2: the final mīm of the first phrase is unusually written with the initial form of the letter. Countless Syriac inscriptions, commemorative and funerary, begin with this invocation, but the cross seen at the beginning of the second fragment (B1) ought to be placed before this formulaic prayer. A2-3: It is very rare to find in Syriac epigraphy the Hegira computation system without being preceded by its Seleucid counterpart, especially at this relatively early stage of the Islamic era (AD 777). The Hegira was used with its Seleucid counterpart as early as AD 682 in an East Syriac manuscript,7 and a Syriac inscription from Kāmid (Lebanon) is dated to Hegira 96 alone, which is perhaps to be expected since this and other inscriptions from the same locality are linked to building activities required by Caliph al-Walīd I.8 Although our inscription is of a Christian Takritan family, the Hegira and not the Seleucid year is given. Elsewhere in Iraq, a Syriac-Arabic bilingual inscription used the Hegira alone in the Arabic version, but this is typical since the Seleucid system is found in its Syriac counterpart.9 A4: The final nūn, quite visible, is erroneous since the form is Ethp. Perhaps the scribe or the one who traced the inscription had in mind ‫“ ܚܦܪܢܢ‬we dug” which would also fit the context. A5. Digging a well is surely worth commemorating! In 1739 the bishop of the

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 69

A New Syriac Inscription from Takrit (Iraq) _________________________________________________________________________________________

monastery of Mār Behnam, Karas, devoted a lengthy inscription to celebrate the end of digging a “well of water named after the name of Mār Behnām the sublime,” and as late as 1871 a “source of water,” i.e. a well, was built besides the monastery of Our Lady of Seeds near Alqōsh.10 B1-5: The composite names made of Syriac Mōr (lord, saint) + name of a holy man were in vogue in Takrit, as the following names attested there suggest: MōrBacchus (as in our inscription), MōrGeorge, Mōr-John, Mōr-Ṣlībō (“St. Cross”), and Mōr-Sergius.11 The latter name is also attested in a Syriac inscription dated to the Mongol period now housed at the Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto).12 Other names

include Mār-Bena (for Mār-Behnām) and Mār-Abbā. B2: The name Isaac was unusually written without initial olaf since this is a West Syriac inscription (in East Syriac, a small alap is placed over the yōd). In other inscriptions of Takrit, the same name occurs fully spelled.13 B4: One of the two hē letters in the name sōhdō (lit. “martyr”) is obviously superfluous. It is quite possible to take the first hē as wāw, which would represent the long vowel ō (zqōfō) as in ‫ܣܘܗܕܐ‬, but this spelling is not proper. B5. The inscription is damaged at its end, though the reconstruction of the name Athanasius is likely.

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 70

A New Syriac Inscription from Takrit (Iraq) _________________________________________________________________________________________

NOTES 1

An earlier version of this paper was published in Arabic in the Iraqi journal al-Fikr-alMasīhī (Christian Thought) 475-476 (2012) 123-34 2 On Takrit see Jean Maurice Fiey, “Tagrît,” L’Orient Syrien 8 (1968) 323-25. On the city’s ecclesiastical leaders see id., Pour un Oriens Christianus Novus: répertoire des diocèses syriaques orientaux et occidentaux, Beiruter Texte und Studien 49 (Stuttgart : Steiner, 1993), p. 270-71. 3 See Amir Harrak, Syriac and Garshuni Inscriptions of Iraq, Répertoire des inscriptions syriques 2 (Paris : Académie des inscriptions et belles lettres, 2011), nos. FA.01.09 to FA.01.12 (these are business documents). 4 I am thankful to Father Dr. Yousif Toma, Chief Editor of the Iraqi al-Fikr al-Masīḥī (Christian Thought) Magazine, for telling me about the inscriptions and for sending me photographs. 5 It is a fact that the collection of inscriptionsfrom Takrit included in my Syriac and Gar-

shuni Inscriptions of Iraq is entirely in Syriac despite the fact that this city was located in the midst of Arabs. 6 Harrak, Syriac and Garshuni Inscriptions, p. 634, no. AD.02.10, p. 635, no. FA.02.11, and p. 610-611, no. FA.01.04. 7 Wright, William, A Catalogue of the Syriac Manuscripts Preserved in the Library of the University of Cambridge. Vol. I (Cambridge, 1872), p. 92, no. 42. 8 Paul Mouterde, Inscriptions en syriaque dialectal à Kāmid (Beq’a), Mélanges de l'Université Saint Joseph XXII/4 (Beyrouth, 1939), nos. 10, 20-21, 28. 9 Harrak, Syriac and Garshuni Inscriptions, p. 224-25, no. AD.01.02. 10 Ibid., p. 268-69, no. AD.04.01, and p. 527-27, no. AP.02.32, respectively. 11 Ibid., section FA, pp. 611-17. 12 See Harrak, “Mar-Sargis son of Gabriel in a Syriac Inscription from the Royal Ontario Museum;” (forthcoming). 13 Harrak, Syriac and Garshuni Inscriptions, p. 624 no. FA. 01.18; p. 625-26 no. FA.01.20A; p. 626-27 no. FA.01.21.

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 71

______________________________________________________________________ OBITUARY BISHOP ISḤAQ SAKA (1931-2011)

KHALID DINNO UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

O

n December 19, 2011 the Syrian Orthodox Church and many others who knew Isḥaq Saka bid farewell to this esteemed ecclesiast and scholar. Isḥaq Saka was born in 1931 in Bartella, a town located 20 km to the east of Mosul-Iraq, from a family that was not alien to scholarship; his uncle Ya‛qub was a renowned ecclesiastic, teacher and poet. He was honoured from an early age by being ordained junior deacon (qōrūyō) in 1945 at the hands of Patriarch Aphram Barsoum who was on a visit to his home country, Iraq. Young Isḥaq joined the Ephremic Ecclesiastic Seminary in Mosul in 1946. Upon graduation he took up religion instruction as ministry, teaching in schools in Hasaka (Syria) and at the Ephremic Ecclesiastic Seminary in Mosul and then in its new location in Zahla (Lebanon) after 1961, and was ordained priest in the same year. He traveled to India as an Apostolic Delegate in the late sixties, and then returned to settle for a while in the monastic settings of the historic and famous Mar Mattai Monastery, located not far from his home town. There he wrote several books on the Syriac heritage and on church history, as well as didactic books on exegesis. In 1981 he was ordained bishop as Severus at the hands of

Patriarch Zakka Iwas, who assigned him the editorship of the Patriarchal Magazine. He also resumed his teaching activity first at the Ephremic Ecclesiastic Seminary, which

had by then been moved to Damascus, then at the newly established Ecclesiastic Seminary of Mosul in 1987. In appreciation of his role in promoting scholarship, Patriarch Iwas designated him in 2005 as a Patriarchal Vicar for Higher Studies. Bishop Saka published no fewer than twenty-eight books in Arabic for the benefit of the Arabic-speaking Syriac Christians. The books cover a wide scope that included exegetic and liturgical studies, the Syriac heritage and church history. Of in-

________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 72

Bishop Isḥaq Saka (1931-2011) _________________________________________________________________________________________

terest to Syriac studies is his kanisatī al Suryāniyya (My Syriac Church—a history of the Syrian Orthodox Church over the ages) published in 1985 and in 2006; it is a mine of information drawn on Syriac and archival sources about patriarchs, bishops, and metropolitans, and his list of the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchs must be consulted alongside other lists including the one in Jean Fiey’s Pour un Oriens Christianus Novus (1993). His History of Mar Mattai (2008) is the most updated study of this venerable monastery—history, architectures, antiquities—a true supplement to Dafaqāt al-ṭīb fī tārīk dayr al-qiddīs Mār Mattā al-‛ajīb [Gush of Perfume: The History of the Monastery of the Admirable Mār Mattā] authored by Patriarch Ignatius Ya‛qūb III (Zaḥlā, 1961). His worthwhile Commentary on the Liturgy of the Syrian Orthodox Church of Antioch, based on such liturgical fathers of the Church as Jacob of Edessa, Moses bar Kipho, and BarSalibi, is now made available in English thanks to the translation of Matti Moosa (Gorgias Press, 2009). His exegetical work includes an annotated translation and commentary on BarSalibi’s exegesis of St. Paul’s letters to the

Romans in1997; to the Corinthians 1 and 2 in 2003; and to the Galatians, to the Philippians, to the Colossians, and to the Ephesians in 2004. He also published a monograph in 2005 entitled The Psalms in the Syriac Orthodox Liturgy. Among his books that proved to be very popular among Syriac Christian readership is his Al-Asrār al-Sab‛a (The Seven Sacraments)—authored jointly with (then) Bishop Zakka Iwas in 1970—that still attracts much attention for its literary and pedagogical value. His six volume monograph Al-Suryān: Īmān wa-Ḥaḍāra (The Syrians: Faith and Heritage), which he published between 1983 and 1986, fall in the same category. Isḥaq Saka was blessed with remarkable humility. I knew him personally and had the honour of working with him in setting up the Ecclesiastic Seminary in Mosul in 1987. Fulfilling his last wish ‘bury me in the mountain,’ referring to the Al-Fāf Mountain where Mar Mattai’s Monastery is situated, he was indeed interred in the mountain he loved on December 20, 2011, not far from where Gregory Bar Hebraeus was buried in 1286. What a fitting tribute to you, Mōr Severus Isḥaq Saka!

_________________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) ― Page 73

___________________________________________________________________________

THE CANADIAN SOCIETY FOR SYRIAC STUDIES

MEMBERS OF THE YEAR 2011-2012

Honorary Member BROCK, Sebastian, Oxford, UK GRIFFITH, Rev. Sidney H., Gaithersburg MD VAN ROMPAY, Lucas, Durham NC Corporate Members GORGIAS PRESS, Piscataway NJ SALAM Social Club, Toronto ON GENERAL DIRECTORATE OF SYRIAC CULTURE AND ARTS, Erbil, IRAQ

Life Members BADWI, Fr. Abdo, Kasilik, LEBANON DAVID, Sargon, Scarborough ON DINNO, Khalid, Mississauga ON EMMANUEL, Mar Emmanuel, Toronto ON GREATREX, Geoffrey, Ottawa ON GREATREX, Marina, Ottawa ON MALAS, Gabriel, UK MURAD, Janan, Mississauga ON SMITH, Helen, Toronto ON Members ABBA, Rev. Yusif, Toronto ON ABDULAHAD, Raika, Thunder Bay ON AFRAM, Zyad, Mississauga ON AKOPIAN, Arman, Ottawa ON ALIBERTIS, Demetrios, Toronto ON BADOVINAC, J. & Ed. Mississauga ON BASMAJI, John, Markham ON

BEAULIEU, Paul-Alain, Toronto ON BENJAMEN, Alda, Maple ON BENJAMIN, Renya, Woodbridge ON BIHNAN, Adnan, Brampton ON BORBONE, Giorgio Pier, Pisa, ITALY BOUJIKIAN, Stephen, Scarborough, ON BRIQUEL CHATONNET, Françoise, Paris, FRANCE BROWN, Kenneth, Aberdeen MD BOUTROS, Ramez, Toronto ON BUTS, Aaron, New Haven CT CASSIS, Marica, St. John’s NL CLARKE, Colin S., Hamilton ON COCHRANE, Steve, Weston CO CONTINI, Riccardo, Rome, Italy CORBETT, John H., Kingston ON COX, James, King City ON DAWOID, Fatdal, Täby, SWEDEN DAWOOD, Fadi, Barrie ON DAWOOD, Issam, Barrie ON DAWOOD, Massarah, Barrie ON DEBIÉ, Muriel, Paris, FRANCE DESREUMAUX, Alain, Paris, FRANCE DINNO, Deena, Mississauga ON DODD, Erica, Victoria BC DOHLER, Anna, Toronto ON DONABED, Sargon, Toronto ON FAIBISH, Neil, Toronto ON FATHI, Jean, Toronto ON FOREN, Symon, Toronto ON

___________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) — Page 74

Members of the Year 2011-2012 ____________________________________________________________________________________

FRAME, Grant, Philadelphia PA GEORGE, Elia, Toronto ON GODBOUT, Alain, Halifax NS GRAHAM, Mark, Toronto ON HANNA, Robert, Mississauga ON HANNAH-SHMOUNI, Fady, Richmond BC HARRAK, Amir, Toronto ON HARRAK, Ryan, Toronto ON HARRAK, Sarah, Toronto ON HARVEY, Susan A., Lincoln RI HEAL, Kristian S, Provo UTAH HINDO, Tariq R., Toronto ON HIRSCH, Antoine, Toronto ON HUMPHRYS, Peter, Peterborough ON ISSA, Rev. Stephanos, Scarborough ON ISSAK, Rev. John, Hamilton ON JOHNSON, Nola J., Toronto ON JWAIDEH, Albertine, King City ON KASSIR, Zuhair, Milton ON KIRAZ, George, Piscataway NJ KITCHEN, Rev. Robert, Regina SK KRIZMANIC, Dorothy, Scarborough ON KYDD, Ronald, Colborne ON LAWSON, Todd, Toronto ON LEHTO, Adam, Waterloo ON LONDES, Arlette, Thornhill ON MATHEW, Parackel, Rev. Dr. Toronto ON MATHEWS Jr., Edward G, Dalton PA MORRISON, Rev Craig, Rome, ITALY

MOUSSA, Helene, Toronto ON NINAN, Mathew, Brampton ON ORAHA, Alhan, Toronto ON POSSEKEL, Ute, Reading MA POIRIER, Paul-Hubert, Quebec PQ RASSAM, Suha, Surrey, UK ROMENY, R. B. ter Haar, Leiden, NL ROYEL, David, San Jose CA SALEH, Walid, Toronto ON SHAMOUN, Ashorina, Mississauga ON SKIL, Sonia, Toronto ON (†) SMITH, Kyle, Durham, NC TAKAHASHI, Hidemi, Tokyo, JAPAN TALIA, Shawqi, Washington DC TANOUS, Rami, Toronto ON TARZI, Habib, Unionville ON TARZI, Albert, Unionville ON TARZI, George, Unionville ON TARZI, Salwa, Unionville ON TAWEEL, al-, Elias, Mississauga ON TREIGER, Alexander, Halifax NS THEKEPARAMBIL, Rev. Jacob, Kerala INDIA WEATLEY-IRVING, Linda, Chicago IL WERYHO, Jan, Montreal PQ WHATELY, Conor, Winnipeg, MB YACOUB, Fr. Jack, Montreal, PQ YOUSIF, Ashoor, Toronto ON YU, Alexander, Toronto ON ZAIYOUNA, Ahsan, Thornhill ON

________________________________________________________________________________ Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 12 (2012) — Page 75