Languages and Cultures of Eastern Christianity: Greek

Scott Fitzgerald Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351923231
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ancient Languages

This volume brings together a set of fundamental contributions, many translated into English for this publication, along with an important introduction. Together these explore the role of Greek among Christian communities in the late antique and Byzantine East (late Roman Oriens), specifically in the areas outside of the immediate sway of Constantinople and imperial Asia Minor. The local identities based around indigenous eastern Christian languages (Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, etc.) and post-Chalcedonian doctrinal confessions (Miaphysite, Church of the East, Melkite, Maronite) were solidifying precisely as the Byzantine polity in the East was extinguished by the Arab conquests of the seventh century. In this multilayered cultural environment, Greek was a common social touchstone for all of these Christian communities, not only because of the shared Greek heritage of the early Church, but also because of the continued value of Greek theological, hagiographical, and liturgical writings. However, these interactions were dynamic and living, so that the Greek of the medieval Near East was itself transformed by such engagement with eastern Christian literature, appropriating new ideas and new texts into the Byzantine repertoire in the process.

1
Sextus Julius Africanus and the Roman Near East in the Third Century

William Adler

SEXTUS JULIUS AFRICANUS ranks among the most active and publicly visible Christians of the pre-Constantinian era. He seems to turn up everywhere—in Edessa for an extended stay in the court of Abgar the Great, on location at various archaeological and pilgrimage sites throughout Palestine and the Roman Near East, scouring libraries throughout the Mediterranean world in search of manuscripts of Homer, presiding over a delegation to Rome from Emmaus, and even assisting the emperor in his cultural and building projects.

Studies of Africanus have in the past treated these acts as expressions of his Christian self-understanding, and thus connected somehow to the interests of the Church. Demonstrating this connection usually entails the invention of imaginary or improbable scenarios, lacking any basis in fact. The problem of Africanus' Christian identity extends into the literary realm as well. Scholars have yet to find a place for his Kestoi, a curious work devoid of distinctively Christian content and unlike any other writing surviving from the early Church.¹ I would like here to explore a different approach to these issues, and that is to situate Africanus in the context of broader cultural and political trends in the Romanization of Greek-speaking elites in the Near East of the late second and early third centuries.

Africanus and the Romanization of Palestine

By most applicable measures, Sextus Julius Africanus would have to be considered one of the great success stories of Roman imperial policy in the Greek-speaking Near East. The Romans pursued here the same policy that they implemented in other places where Greek was already the language of culture, government, and trade. By leaving language and local institutions intact, Rome was able to retain the support of philhellene elites. But Romanization took other forms, principally in the enfranchisement of the local ruling classes through Roman citizenship, granting of immunity from taxation, and other emoluments in exchange for services to Rome.² This policy paid a dividend. At one time it was thought that the Eastern aristocracy must have been resentful of Rome's encroachments upon their territory. But in his study of the Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire, Glen Bowersock has impressively demonstrated the opposite. Whatever grievances they may have privately harboured against Roman rule did not deter Greek literary men—sophists, rhetors, and philosophers—from engaging in public service, serving as advisers to emperors, and interceding in Rome on behalf of Eastern cities.³

Africanus dealings with Rome may be one or the better advertisements for the effectiveness of this policy. For a long time commentators, misled by his name and strong attachments to Rome, were reluctant even to concede that he hailed from the East. 'Kein Ostländer', declared Heinrich Gelzer, who also managed to convince himself that Africanus was a native of Roman Africa, knew Latin, and had studied Roman law.⁴ The Qxy-rhynchus papyrus fragment from the Kestoi, published not long after Gelzer made this statement, tells a different story about Africanus' origins. The relevant sentence of the fragment appears after a lengthy discussion of a variant text of Homer's Odyssey purportedly containing the actual incantation recited by Odysseus to conjure up the dead (Od. 11.34ff.). As evidence of its authenticity, Africanus cites its attestation in three manuscripts, one of which he found in the city of his birth. 'You will find this whole passage', he writes, 'deposited in the archives of the ancient fatherland, Colonia Aelia Capitolina of Palestine

⁵ Africanus is a Palestinian, apparently born in Jerusalem around a quarter century after its foundation as a Roman colonia.

Since the publication of this text, scholars have pored over Africanus' writings for evidence of his Eastern 'ethnicity'.⁶ If exploration of this question has yielded so little, it is mainly because the ancient witnesses, including Africanus himself, give us almost nothing to go on.⁷ Language and cultural identification provide few clues. The little Syriac and Hebrew that he may have known amounts to a few words and a bookish knowledge of the etymological meanings of some proper names.⁸ Africanus' language is Greek, but not the vulgar Greek of the koine. Atticizing tendencies in his prose typical of writers of the Second Sophistic, formal training in rhetoric, and familiarity with the canons of textual and philological criticism bespeak an author with the resources and education available only to the Hellenized upper classes of the Roman Near East.⁹

Allusions to indigenous Near Eastern peoples—among them Syrians, Jews, Parthians, Babylonians, and Arabs—are strewn throughout Africanus' writings. But he always refers to them in the third person. Africanus once speaks of the 'kab', a Semitic unit of measurement, as a standard that 'we' use. But this section of the Kestoi was probably extracted from the Geometrica of Heron of Alexandria.¹⁰ Besides, who are the 'we'?¹¹ There is only one place in Africanus' entire preserved corpus in which he identifies himself with a particular nation. And that is in the first chapter of the seventh book of the Kestoi. The ethnographic categories that Africanus uses here are the familiar broad-brush ones of 'Romans, Greeks, and Barbarians'. But there is no question in his mind to which of these groups he belongs. Rome's inability to subdue a resurgent Persian empire, he writes, has made the nations of inner Asia overconfident of their freedom. It has also given them reason to boast that through the application of force they have attained 'equality in rank with us (τήν

¹² What he means by 'us' here is hardly in doubt. It is 'us Romans'.

In the late second and early third centuries, that sort of self-identification with Rome was still unusual among Greek writers from the Eastern Mediterranean and Roman Near East. For the most part, they remained guarded about referring to the Romans, as Africanus does, in the first person plural.¹³ Some purists might also have objected to his adoption of a Roman name. Apollonius of Tyana, for example, is even said to have condemned it as a form of barbarism.¹⁴ To be sure, the practice was not at all uncommon, especially among the enfranchised upper classes. But those Greek-speakers who were self-conscious about appearing too 'Roman' could change a Roman name to a corresponding Greek form or retain a Greek cognomen.¹⁵ Africanus resorts to none of these niceties. His name is fully Romanized: Sextus Julius Africanus.¹⁶

His comfort with Roman nomenclature extends to the political realm as well. To my knowledge, Africanus is the only Greek Christian writer before Eusebius to refer to Jerusalem by the name conferred upon it by Hadrian not too long before his birth: 'Colonia Aelia Capitolina'. There is no suggestion here that in making this symbolic gesture of concession to Roman hegemony, Africanus was pronouncing judgement on the alienation of the Jews from their former first city. It is true that Christian writers of the second and third centuries often treated the earthly city of Jerusalem with contempt. Although the Jerusalem below was precious', writes Melito of Sardis, 'it is worthless now because of the Jerusalem above.'¹⁷ But this is a theological distinction completely foreign to the purpose of the Kestoi. In calling Jerusalem 'Colonia Aelia Capitolina', Africanus was simply acknowledging a political reality: the place of his birth is a Roman, not a Jewish, city.

Nor was it a passive recognition of this tact. Sometime around the year 221, Africanus contributed his own part to the Romanization of Palestine by serving as an ambassador in Rome on behalf of the Palestinian village of Emmaus. The purpose of this embassy was to seek permission to have the village refounded as a polis. Henceforth Emmaus would be known as Nikopolis, or, to use the more formal designation found on local coinage: M(αρκία

NΙκόπολις.¹⁸

Looking back at this embassy, later writers have sought, unpersuasively in my view; for some underlying Christian motive to explain Africanus' conduct in leading this embassy to Rome. It has been suggested, for example, that he pressed for special benefits for the Christian community of Emmaus, or that he represented the Church in some official capacity.¹⁹ But...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• General Editors' Preface
• Editor's Preface
• Introduction: The Social Presence of Greek in Eastern Christianity, 200—1200 CE
• 1 Sextus Julius Africanus and the Roman Near East in the Third Century
• 2 Ethnic Identity in the Roman Near East, AD 325—450: Language, Religion, and Culture
• 3 Bilingualism and Diglossia in Late Antique Syria and Mesopotamia
• 4 At the Desk of a Man of Letters: Literate Practices in Byzantine Egypt according to the Dossier of Dioscorus of Aphrodite
• 5 Dioscorus and the Question of Bilingualism in Sixth-Century Egypt
• 6 Palestinian Hagiography and the Reception of the Council of Chalcedon
• 7 The Christian Schools of Palestine: A Chapter in Literary History
• 8 Embellishing the Steps: Elements of Presentation and Style in The Heavenly Ladder of John Climacus
• 9 The Works of Anastasius of Sinai: A Key Source for the History of Seventh-Century East Mediterranean Society and Belief
• 10 Greek Literature in Palestine in the Eighth Century
• 11 Greek Culture in Palestine after the Arab Conquest
• 12 Some Reflections on the Continuity of Greek Culture in the East in the Seventh and Eighth Centuries
• 13 From Palestine to Constantinople (Eighth—Ninth Centuries): Stephen the Sabaite and John of Damascus
• 14 The Life of Theodore of Edessa: History, Hagiography, and Religious Apologetics in Mar Saba Monastery in Early Abbasid Times
• 15 Why did Arabic Succeed where Greek Failed? Language Change in the Near East after Muhammad
• 16 From Arabic to Greek, then to Georgian: A Life of Saint John of Damascus
• 17 Greek — Syriac — Arabic: The Relationship between Liturgical and Colloquial Languages in Melkite Palestine in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries
• 18 The Liturgy of the Melkite Patriarchs from 969 to 1300
• 19 Byzantium's Place in the Debate over Orientalism
• Index