Invitation to Syriac Christianity

An Anthology

Michael Philip Penn

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780520299207
• eBook ISBN: 9780520971035
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ancient History

Despite their centrality to the history of Christianity in the East, Syriac Christians have generally been excluded from modern accounts of the faith. Originating from Mesopotamia, Syriac Christians quickly spread across Eurasia, from Turkey to China, developing a distinctive and influential form of Christianity that connected empires. These early Christians wrote in the language of Syriac, the lingua franca of the late ancient Middle East, and a dialect of Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Collecting key foundational Syriac texts from the second to the fourteenth centuries, this anthology provides unique access to one of the most intriguing, but least known, branches of the Christian tradition.
 

PART I

FOUNDATIONS

1

ORIGIN STORIES

The nature of our surviving sources obscures the historical origins of Syriac Christianity. But a rich variety of literary stories about those origins survives in the later traditions themselves. As Syriac traditions divided in the schisms of the fifth and sixth centuries, origin stories for Christianity in the different regions where Syriac Christianity thrived also multiplied. The early traditions of the apostle Thomas’s travels to India and of Christianity arriving in Edessa were supplemented by more extended stories about the adventures of the apostle Addai, and later about the apostle Mari. By the twelfth century, texts like Michael the Great’s Chronicle also included origin stories for the Syriac language itself, which Michael identified as the original human language before the Tower of Babel.

One of the earliest surviving Syriac narratives is the Acts of Thomas, which describe how Christianity arrived east of the Euphrates. In this tradition, after Jesus’s resurrection, Jesus appoints his apostle Thomas to bring Christianity as far east as India. This tradition continues to be formative today, not least in the Syriac Christian communities of modern India in the region of Kerala. By the early fourth century, however, new origin stories focused on the city of Edessa, centered around a letter that King Abgar of Edessa ostensibly wrote to Jesus, and Jesus’s alleged reply. Eusebius of Caesarea’s early fourth-century Church History is our earliest source for this correspondence, a legend that expanded by the time the late fourth-century pilgrim Egeria wrote about her visit to Edessa, and that expanded further still in the early fifth-century Teaching of Addai. Edessa’s long history with Christianity is also recorded in the sixth-century Chronicle of Edessa to 540, which mentions a flood in 201 that damaged an early church in the city. By the seventh century, East Syrian Christians celebrated their origins through the travels of Addai’s disciple, the apostle Mari, whose evangelism in communities all over Mesopotamia is narrated in the Acts of Mar Mari. Other seventh-century Christians produced grander narratives that suggested a prehistory of Christianity in Mesopotamia with a Christianized narrative of Alexander the Great (d. 323 BCE) in the Alexander Romance.

A community’s stories of origin are often closely tied to its efforts to distinguish itself clearly from other communities it sees as outside its boundaries. It is no surprise, therefore, that these origin stories are rife with polemic against religious “others”—Jews, pagans, and a wide variety of “heretical” Christians. The long-lived traditions of Christianity’s arrival in Edessa thanks to the invitation of King Abgar are, for example, built on the anti-Jewish rhetoric of the king’s letter; while other texts criticized Edessa’s traditional worship of such gods as Bel, Nebo, and Atargatis; and the Acts of Mar Mari denigrate other pagan practices. Later traditions like the stories of Mari create a distinct origin story for the East Syrian Church in contrast to the West Syrian traditions. Perhaps most comprehensive in polemical self-definition among the excerpts collected here are the fourth-century writings of the theologian-poet Ephrem (d. 373), who denounces the falsehood of a vast number of other teachings while decrying the injustice of his own community’s earlier followers being denied the name “Christians” in local competitions to claim that contested title.

Further Reading While there are numerous places one could look for introductions to the origins of Syriac Christianity, the following are some of the most common. Two works from the 1970s represent older models of scholarship but nevertheless remain popular introductions. See Judah B. Segal, Edessa: The Blessed City (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970; repr., Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2001) and Robert Murray, Symbols of Church and Kingdom: A Study in Early Syriac Tradition, rev. ed. (2004; repr., London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2006). A brief overview with bibliography appears in Christine Shepardson, “Syria, Syriac, Syrian: Negotiating East and West in Late Antiquity,” in A Companion to Late Antiquity, ed. Philip Rousseau (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 455–66. On East Syrian traditions, see Wilhelm Baum and Dietmar Winkler, The Church of the East: A Concise History (New York: Routledge Press, 2010). For a French-language study, see Françoise Briquel Chatonnet and Muriel Debié, Le Monde Syriaque: Sur les routes d’un christianisme ignoré (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2017).

ACTS OF THOMAS

Third century. Originally Syriac. Taken here from the Greek translation of the Syriac.

The Acts of Thomas form one of many apocryphal Acts that each claims to narrate the life of one of Jesus’s apostles beyond what is known from the New Testament texts. Although originally composed in Syriac, surviving Syriac manuscripts have a substantially edited version of the original text. As a result, the Greek translation of the Syriac often provides a version closer to the original narrative. The story advocates a strongly ascetic form of Christianity with a particular emphasis on celibacy, a theme prevalent in many early Syriac Christian texts. The Acts of Thomas are particularly significant as an origin story for Christianity in India. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Subvention
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Translation, Transliteration, and Nomenclature
• Maps by David A. Michelson and Ian Mladjov
• Introduction
• Part I. Foundations
• Part II. Practices
• Part III. Texts and Textual Transmission
• Part IV. Interreligious Encounters
• Appendix A. Translations and Editions
• Appendix B. Biographies of Named Authors
• Appendix C. Glossary
• Index