布洛克《叙利亚传统研究导论》（中英文对照版）第四部分

EPILOGUE: THE DELIGHTS OF MANUSCRIPTS

To read, as one sits in the Oriental Studies Room of the British Library, the words “this volume was completed in the month Teshri II of the year 723 in Urhay, capital of Beth Nahrin” is a moving experience, for at the end of this, the earliest of all dated Syriac manuscripts (411 of the Christian era), is also a list of names of Persian martyrs, almost certainly brought back from Seleucia-Ktesiphon only a few months previously by Marutha, bishop of Martyropolis, who had been serving as ambassador to the Sasanid court. It does not take much imagination to find oneself transported back across time and space to Edessa in November 411. This moving experience was repeated when, in 2005, in the course of cataloguing, with Lucas van Rompay, the Syriac materials in the Library of Deir al-Surian, I suddently recognized, on a diminutive fragment, the very distinctive small script of the same manuscript: indeed it turned out to be part of the torn final folio of the manuscript now in the British Library; equally moving was the discovery that this fragment contained the names of the women martyrs.

As a matter of fact the first Syriac manuscript I ever had the joy of handling was a rather scruffy and torn fragment on a visit to Beirut as an undergraduate; although it was no more than a couple of hundred years old at the most, my curiosity was aroused by the mention of the fifth century emperor Marcian. On return home I managed to identify the text as a fragment of the Life of the fierce monk Barsoma who successfully scared off his theological opponents at the second council of Ephesus in 449. The excitement caused me by this very minor discovery proved addictive, but fortunately for one’s pocket one does not necessarily have to go to the Middle East to browse among Syriac manuscripts; London and Birmingham happen to possess two of the largest collections of Syriac manuscripts in the world. The bulk of those in the British Library are exceptionally old, some belonging to the fifth and sixth centuries—thanks to their having been preserved until the mid-nineteenth century in the Syrian monastery (Deir al-Surian, now Coptic Orthodox) the Nitrian desert, between Alexandria and Cairo. The manuscripts in the Mingana Collection

to the Syriac cultural world.

A few words should be said about each of these Churches, which all belong of the Selly Oak Colleges Library, Birmingham, on the other hand, are mostly very recent (one was copied as late as 1932), but nevertheless they contain several works not otherwise represented in Western libraries. They were collected by Alphonse Mingana (whose name has figured earlier) during the course of two journeys to the Middle East financed by the generosity of Edward Cadbury.

Syriac scribes usually follow the old tradition, already found in ancient Mesopotamia, of adding at the end of the text they are copying a colophon, giving details of the date and place of writing, as well as their own name; and if there was empty space still available, their horror vacui might lead them to fill it with imprecations against anyone who borrowed the book and failed to return it. Jottings about some contemporary event might also find their way into empty end leaves, and one of the earliest accounts, and probably contemporary, of the Arab invasion of Palestine is to be found on the fly leaf of a sixth-century Gospel manuscript in the British Library. The scribe of a much more recent (late nineteenth-century) Mingana manuscript has left us with a moving narrative of several pages describing the massacre just suffered by the Syrian Orthodox communities of southeastern Turkey in 1895–96. indicate separate Churches. thing in the Middle East, and quite another in India! Separate numbers noticed that, to add to the confusion, the term “Chaldean” denotes one those names in italics refer to Churches of Syriac tradition in India; it will be

Churches can best be set out diagrammatically. In the following Table 3

The confusing situation presented by the various different Syriac

Orthodox Church, the Mar Thoma Syrian Church. in India (mainly in the State of Kerala); these include the only Reformed there are no less than seven different Churches of Syriac liturgical tradition led to fragmentation of the once single ecclesiastical tradition, and today da Gama in 1498). The misguided attempt to latinize the liturgical tradition

Habent sua fata libelli. Later owners, as well as the original scribes, were apt to add their names to manuscripts, sometimes even mentioning the price they paid for it. One such owner, to whom Syriac scholarship owes an inestimable debt, was Moses of Nisibis, abbot of Deir al-Surian. Shortly after 926 he went to Baghdad to petition the Caliph on the matter of the tax problems faced by his own and other Egyptian monasteries. Sorting out tax affairs was a slow business then, just as it often is now, and before he finally returned to his monastery in 932 he took the opportunity to visit various Mesopotamian monasteries, buying up old Syrian manuscripts wherever he could. In this way he accumulated a magnificent collection of texts—which today form the nucleus of both the Vatican and the British Library holdings of Syriac manuscripts (some of those in the Vatican, bought in the early eighteenth century, still bear the marks of a mishap on the journey to Rome, when a load of them fell into the Nile). An attempt to reconstruct the contents of Moses’ superb library, on the basis of his various notes of ownership, was made by H. Evelyn White in his The History of the Monasteries of Nitria and Scetis (New York, 1923). records are available prior to the arrival of the Portuguese (first with Vasco the Church of the East in Mesopotamia. Unfortunately very few historical certainly establised there by an early date, its hierarchical links being with tradition. This is not inconceivable, and a Christian community was

Although the authorities of the British Museum were led to believe that they had bought up from the monastery all remaining Syriac manuscripts that had been left by Elias Assemani in 1707, it is now known that several dozen old Syriac manuscripts still remain in the monastery;

Christianity reached south India with St. Thomas, according to an early

these have now been described by Lucas van Rompay and myself in our Catalogue of the Syriac Manuscripts and Fragments in the Library of Deir al-Surian, Wadi al-Natrun (Egypt) (Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 227; Leuven, 2014), accompanied by over 300 pages of images of manuscripts.

Owners of manuscripts, both ancient and modern, sometimes like to obliterate any too telling evidence of a manuscript’s origin. In the Mingana collection there is a group of single leaves of early manuscripts cut out with scissors from their rightful home, and in several cases it is possible to mate them up—at least figuratively—with the original manuscripts from which they were taken—all at St. Catharine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai: one pair of leaves indeed proved to be part of a unique manuscript containing the works of the seventh-century mystic Sahdona (or Martyrius), the author of a very fine work on spirituality. Today this manuscript, not quite complete, is divided up between Birmingham, Strassbourg, St Petersburg, and Milan. The publication of Mother Philothea of Sinai’s catalogue of the “New Finds” at the Monastery has happily revealed that part of the manuscript in fact still remains in the Monastery.¹ A word of warning: such chance discoveries of “marriages” between loose leaves in different libraries can have unexpected, and time-consuming consequences: one turned out to involve me in the writing of an entire book.[^22] But this is part of the fascination of the whole business.

European and American libraries are usually reasonably well catalogued, but catalogues do not always give away the true nature of a manuscript’s actual contents. I would never have looked at “Initium martyrii Maximi Palaestinensis” if I had not been interested in another text in the same manuscript, yet this turned out to be an astonishing document—an early “anti-life” of Maximus the Confessor (died 662), written by a theological opponent, evidently within a few decades of his death. According to this work, Maximus was born and educated in Palestine, and not Constantinople—which would nicely explain his friendship with Sophronius, patriarch of Jerusalem. The manuscript in

question proved to be a very rare example of an early Maronite text, and it incidentally threw some light on the exceedingly obscure origins of the Maronites themselves.

In the case of Middle Eastern libraries, for which catalogues are a rarity, the unexpected is always present (provided one can get access in the first place!). What treasures are still to be found there can be seen from the lengthy list of Arthur Vööbus’ discoveries as a result of his systematic examination of these collections (the bibliography of his publications, given in the recent Festschrift in his honour, runs to over 50 monographs and 200 articles!). Fortunately today, thanks to the work of the Hill Museum & Monastic Library (HMML) at St John’s University, Collegeville, many of these Middle Eastern collection have been digitized and catalogued, thus making them immensely more accessible to scholars.

One exciting moment in my own experience was when I came across a note going back to the great twelfth-century Patriarch, Michael the Great, author of the largest and most important Syriac Chronicle. The note was to the effect that it was he who was behind the copying of the huge twovolume collection of Lives of the Saints which I had perched precariously on a diminutive coffee table in the office of the secretary to the Syrian Orthodox Patriarch in Damascus. (On a subsequent visit the Patriarch, His Holiness Mar Ignatius Yakub III, had very kindly allowed me to work in the library itself—almost an embarras de richesse!).

It is usually only in the larger episcopal libraries that really old manuscripts are now to be found, but almost every village church will have a small collection of liturgical manuscripts (for the most part printed books are not used in church services). The colophons of these can often prove to be an unexpected source for local history. An unusually long colophon in a Fenqitho (the approximate equivalent of a Western breviary) which I once saw at the Syrian Orthodox monastery of Mar Gabriel in Tur Abdin told how the manuscript had originally been written in 1838 by a novice called Zaytun at Mar Gabriel, then recently repopulated after it had lain desolate for 120 years as a result of various pillages. Probably in 1915, called “the year of the sword” in local tradition (because of the large-scale massacres), it had been taken as plunder by Muslims from the monastery, but eventually in 1929 it had been bought back by a certain sub-deacon George, who then donated it to the village church of Keferze (also in Tur ‛Abdin), where it had remained until some years ago, when the abbot of Mar Gabriel, Rabban Samuel Aktash (now Mar Timotheos, bishop of Tur ‛Abdin), together with the head of the monastic school there, Malfono Isa Gülten (Garis), happened to visit the church and read the colophon; they arranged to have

another Fenqitho copied for the church, and so the manuscript of 1838 (a fine piece of calligraphy) has now been returned to its original home where it is greatly cherished.

As my experience with the Life of Maximus the Confessor had indicated, it is not always necessary to travel far in order to make an exciting discovery. One that was almost literally on my doorstep took place in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Idly looking through a card index of uncatalogued manuscripts I noticed one containing works by the seventhcentury monastic author, Isaac of Niniveh, whose works have come to be widely read in many European languages, thanks to a Greek translation made at the Monastery of St. Saba, near Jerusalem, in the late eighth or early ninth century. As the Bodleian manuscript was said to be an early one, I ordered it up—to discover that it was a further volume of his writings, of which the only other complete manuscript had been destroyed during the First World War. The interest of these new texts can be gauged from the fact that there have already been translations into English, French, Italian, Catalan, Russian, Romanian, and Arabic.

It will come as a surprise to many to learn that Syriac manuscripts are still being copied in the Middle East. Facilities for printing Syriac are rare, and the printing press, donated by Queen Victoria, which the previous Syrian Orthodox metropolitan of Mardin, Mar Yuhannon Dolabani (+ 1969), had used for publishing a Syriac periodical, ceased to be active after 1956. The scribes are normally deacons, priests, or monks; the late Father Butrus Ögünc, who was a priest to one of the émigré Syriac communities in Germany, whom I first met when he was schoolmaster in the small town of Midyat in Tur ‛Abdin, had written some 100 manuscripts by the time he was thirty years old! At first all the various liturgical books (and several literary texts) published from the Monastery of St. Ephrem in the Netherlands in the 1970s and 1980s were reproduced from the beautiful handwriting of Mor Julius Çiçek (died 2005), the first Syrian Orthodox bishop in Europe. With the advent of the possibility of printing Syriac with the computer, this has of course now changed. There is, however, a nice example of continuity: at the end of many of the books published by Mor Julius using computer technology he has retained a colophon that he had previously used when copying manuscripts; this reads “As the sailor rejoices when his boat reaches harbour, so does the scribe when he writes the last line.” This happens to be a very ancient and widespread colophon, for it is also found in both Greek and Latin manuscripts in the Middle Ages; the earliest example of its use, however, is in Syriac, in a manuscript dated AD

543, and this happens to antedate the earliest Greek use of it by over a century.

If one has the privilege of meeting people from the different communities of Syriac tradition, such as Mar Aprem, Mor Gregorios Ibrahim, Mor Julius Çiçek, Fr. Yusuf Habbi, Chorepiscopus Pierre Yousif, Fr. Jacob Thekeparampil, Dr. George Kiraz, and Malphono Abrohom Nouro, to mention only some of those whose names have come up in the course of this Introduction, one quickly becomes aware that to study Syriac is to study a tradition which is still very much alive.

For further reading: There are helpful contributions on different aspects of Syriac manuscripts and codicology by E. Balicka-Witakowska, A. Binggeli, P.-G. Borbone, F. Briquel-Chatonnet, A. Desreumaux, G. Kessel, A. Mengozzi, A. Schmidt, and W. Witakoswki in A. Bausi (ed.), Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies. An Introduction (Hamburg, 2015). Some basic information can also be found in chapter 8, “The Art of the Scribe”, in vol. II of The Hidden Pearl (for which, see Section H, at the end).

APPENDIX: THE SYRIAC CHURCHES

Syriac literature is closely tied to church history, and the variety of names in use for the various Syriac churches, coupled with the popular misconceptions which are current (even in otherwise reliable modern works) about their theological position, combine to increase the bewilderment of the outsider and the newcomer to the subject.

First of all it will be helpful to clarify the confusing terminology by means of a table:

The terms “Nestorian” and “Monophysite” were originally devised as opprobrious epithets, and imply the holding of heretical opinions; as such they are misleading and should definitely be avoided. “Jacobite” derives from Jacob Baradaeus who reorganized the Syrian Orthodox Church in the mid-sixth century at a time when the emperor Justinian was trying to suppress its hierarchy. “Assyrian,” very popular today in the Middle East and émigré communities (since for many it provides a much sought for “national” identity) seems to originate, as far as its present day connotations are concerned, with the conjecture of some nineteenth-century archaeologists and missionaries that the modern Christian population of

northern Iraq are descendants of the ancient Assyrians. ² This was taken up especially among people in the Church of the East. (One consequence of the adoption of an Assyrian identity has been the giving of names such as Sargon and Hammurabi to children). As it happens, “Assyrian” serves well alongside the term “Chaldean” which applies to that part of the Church of the East which first entered into union with Rome (in the mid-sixteenth century).

The need felt for a recognizable ethnic (as opposed to religious) designation arises above all in the large diaspora communities in Europe, the Americas, and Australia. For the Syrian Orthodox, the term “Syrian” has been usurped by the modern state of Syria, and for those who come from other Middle Eastern countries this is particularly problematic. Various alternatives have been adopted, including (by the more secularminded) “Assyrian,” which has caused considerable controversy (and trouble in some countries);24 a better choice would seem to be “Aramaean.” Another recent solution is to use “Syriac” as an ethnic term, as well as referring to the language and the literature. In the present Introduction I have used “East Syriac” and “West Syriac” as the most practical general designations.

The matter is in fact even more complicated by the fact that there are today eight different Churches which have a Syriac liturgical tradition (even if only a few of them actually still employ the language Syriac in their liturgy). At their roots, the divisions that exist today between the various Syriac (and other Eastern) Churches originate in the different stands taken over the christological controversies of the fifth century. Convenient touchstones are provided by the two main councils of that century: the Council of Ephesus in 431, and the Council of Chalcedon in 451. The mainstream of Christian tradition, represented today by the Eastern Orthodox Churches (Greek, Russian, etc.), the Maronite and other Eastern Rite Catholic Churches, the Roman Catholic Church together with the various derived Western reformed Churches, accept both Councils, whereas the Syrian Orthodox Church (along with the other Oriental Orthodox Churches, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopic) accepts Ephesus but rejects the

Assyrians—name and nation’, in R. Contini and others (eds.), Semitica. Serta Philologica C. Tsereteli dicata (Turin, 1993), pp. 99–114.

definition of faith laid down at Chalcedon (which eventually became the official doctrine of the Roman Empire from the reign of Justin I (518–27) onwards). The Church of the East, situated outside the Roman Empire at the time of the Councils convened by the Roman Emperor, had no part in either, but disapproves of the Council of Ephesus and finds the Chalcedonian Definition of Faith illogical.

Looked at theologically, the Church of the East represents one end of the theological spectrum, making a distinction between the divine and human natures in the incarnate Christ (with the consequence that they do not give Mary the title of Theotokos, “bearer of God,” but only Christotokos). The mainstream Christian also makes a distinction between the two natures, while the Syrian Orthodox (and other Oriental Orthodox) speak of see only one nature in the incarnate Christ, “composed” out of two: to them, the presence of any duality in the incarnate Christ would vitiate the full reality of the incarnation. Ironically the Chalcedonian definition of faith, which ended up by declaring that the incarnate Christ existed “in two natures,” had in the text of its earlier draft “out of two natures”—a formula which is perfectly acceptable to the Oriental Orthodox Churches. Here it should be emphatically stressed that, contrary to widespread Western opinion, the Syrian Orthodox do not hold that the one nature in Christ is only the divine, having “swallowed up” the human: this is the Eutychian position, which the Syrian Orthodox have always condemned as completely heretical. Thus the term “Miaphysite”, recently introducied, rather than “Monophysite,” is a much more appropriate one by which to describe the Oriental Orthodox Churches, in contrast to the “Dyophysite” Churches which accept Chalcedon.³

In the course of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries contact with the Roman Catholic Church led to the creation of separate Eastern Rite Catholic hierarchies, thus bringing into existence the Chaldean Catholic Church (in the mid-sixteenth century) and the Syrian Catholic Church in the seventeenth.

The following Table will help to illustrate the place of the various Syriac Churches within the Christian tradition as a whole (the Syriac Churches are indicated in bold):

Christianity reached south India with St. Thomas, according to an early tradition. This is not inconceivable, and a Christian community was certainly establised there by an early date, its hierarchical links being with the Church of the East in Mesopotamia. Unfortunately very few historical records are available prior to the arrival of the Portuguese (first with Vasco da Gama in 1498). The misguided attempt to latinize the liturgical tradition led to fragmentation of the once single ecclesiastical tradition, and today there are no less than seven different Churches of Syriac liturgical tradition in India (mainly in the State of Kerala); these include the only Reformed Orthodox Church, the Mar Thoma Syrian Church.

The confusing situation presented by the various different Syriac Churches can best be set out diagrammatically. In the following Table 3 those names in italics refer to Churches of Syriac tradition in India; it will be noticed that, to add to the confusion, the term “Chaldean” denotes one thing in the Middle East, and quite another in India! Separate numbers indicate separate Churches.

A few words should be said about each of these Churches, which all belong to the Syriac cultural world.

THE WEST SYRIAC LITURGICAL TRADITION

The Syrian Orthodox Church only gradually became separated from the mainstream church in the course of the late fifth and the sixth century, and it was not until the first half of the sixth century that a separate hierarchy developed as a result of the deposition, by the emperor Justin, of the antiChalcedonian patriarch of Antioch, Severus. Since then their patriarch (one of five patriarchs of Antioch today) has never resided at Antioch; the present patriarch, His Holiness Mor Ignatius Aphram II resides in Damascus. Syrian Orthodox communities are now chiefly to be found in Syria, Lebanon, Turkey (Tur ‛Abdin in the southeast, and Istanbul), Iraq, and India (Kerala); there are also very sizable émigré communities in Western Europe (Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and several other countries) and the Americas: the first Syrian Orthodox Archbishop of North America, Mor Athanasius Yeshue Samuel, was the first purchaser of the famous Isaiah scroll from Qumran; there is a fascinating account of this episode in his Treasure of Qumran: My Story of the Dead Sea Scrolls (London, 1968), though this should now be read in conjunction with George Kiraz (ed.), Anton Kiraz’s Archive on the Dead Sea Scrolls (Piscataway NJ, 2005).

The Syrian Catholic Church, with its own Patriarch (in Beirut), has its origins in the late seventeenth century.

The twentieth century has witnessed two great scholar patriarchs, the Syrian Catholic Ephrem Rahmani (died 1929), and the Syrian Orthodox Ephrem (Afram) Barsoum (died 1957), the latter being the author of the important history of Syriac literature entitled The Scattered Pearls, mentioned earlier.

The presence of a West Syriac hierarchy and liturgical tradition in India goes back to the mid-seventeenth century and the reaction against the Portuguese policy of latinization. Both the Malankara Syrian Orthodox and Orthodox Syrian Churches now have their own Catholicos, the former being under the Patriarchate of Antioch; this sad schism goes back to the early twentieth century and attempts to heal it have unfortunately been short-lived. The Malabar Independent Syrian Church (a single diocese) goes back to 1774, while the reformed Mar Thoma Church came into existence at the end of the nineteenth century. The Malankara Catholic Church goes back to 1930, when Mar Ivanios and his flock entered into communion with Rome.

THE EAST SYRIAC LITURGICAL TRADITION

The Church of the East was from the first based outside the Roman Empire, and so its history has always been distinct from that of the other Churches, whose roots all lie within the Roman Empire. It is indicative of the poor communication between Christians in the two Empires that it was only in 410 that the Council of Nicaea (325) became known to, and was officially accepted by, the Church of the East. Whereas martyrdom was effectively brought to an end in the Roman Empire by the conversion of Constantine, it was only in the mid-fourth century that Persian Christians experienced their first serious bout of persecution from the Zoroastrian authorities. Persecution was to continue intermittently right up to the collapse of the Sasanid Empire in the seventh century; in many instances the martyrs were converts from Zoraoastianism who came from prominent families. A remarkable feature of the history of this Church is its missionary expansion across Asia, reaching China by 635—an event recorded on a bilingual Syriac-Chinese stele erected in 781, mentioned above.

Although European writers have derogatively called this Church “Nestorian,” its connections with Nestorius are rather tenuous, and the term is definitely misleading since it means very different things to different people.⁴ As a matter of fact, beside their own great theologian, Babai (died 628), the East Syrian Church’s main source of theological inspiration was provided by the writings of the Greek Theodore of Mopsuestia (died 428), several of whose works survive complete only in Syriac translation.

During the last hundred years or so the history of this Church has been a particularly tragic one, and since 1972 there has been a schism: currently there are two patriarchs, one, Mar Dinkha IV (and from 2015, Mar Gewargis III Sliwa), of the Assyrian Church of the East (which follows the Gregorian, or New, Calendar), the other, Mar Addai II, of the Ancient Church of the East (which follows the Julian, or Old, Calendar). It so happened that the late patriarch, Mar Dinkha, was consecrated in England, in St. Barnabas’ Church, Ealing (on October 17, 1976), but was resident in the United States, whereas Mar Addai is in Baghdad; Mar Gewargis, who had been Metropolitan of Baghdad, has remained in Iraq, based in Erbil. Their people are to be found in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, and south India (Kerala), though today, with the large-scale emigration of Christians from the Middle East, there are probably many more living in America, Europe,

and Australia. This also applies to the vigorous Chaldean Catholic Church, whose Patriarch still resides in Iraq.

The Chaldean Church (in particular through the work of the late Fr. Yusuf Habbi) was the moving force behind the creation of Babel College in Baghdad (in 1991), which offered courses in Theology and Philosophy for the benefit of all the Christian communities in Iraq—a remarkable contribution to ecumenism in the field of theological education; alas, however, recent events have brough all this to an end. Among the cultural publications of the Chaldean Church, the periodical Bayn al-Nahrayn (“Mesopotamia”) has many acticles of academic interest for Syriac studies. In recent years there have been important moves aimed at bringing the Chaldean Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East together.

Needless to say, the Gulf War of 1990 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 have had a disastrous effect on all the Christian communities in that country, causing massive emigration as well as destruction.

THE MARONITE CHURCH

The origins of the Maronites as a separate church are obscure, although they are evidently tied up somehow with the monothelete/dyothelete controversy of the seventh and early eighth century. The Maronite Church has accepted the authority of Rome since the time of the Crusades and their Patriarch Jeremiah II assisted at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. The Maronite Patriarch (one of the five Patriarchs of Antioch) now resides outside Beirut; over the last century or so, in particular, the Maronite patriarchate has played an important role in Lebanese politics.

At Kaslik, just south of Jounieh in the Lebanon, there is a Maronite university run by the Order of Lebanese Monks, the Université SaintEsprit, which produces the excellent periodical Parole de l’Orient, mentioned earlier. Another monastic order, that of the Antonines, is also active in promoting a better knowledge of the Syriac heritage, and their Centre d’études et de recherches orientales (CERO), at Antelias, has organised the annual colloquia on the “Patrimoine syriaque,” also mentioned earlier.

As has already been seen, the Maronites played an important role in the history of Syriac scholarship in Europe ever since the establishment in Rome of the Maronite College (in 1584). In the seventeenth century it was a Maronite, Gabriel Sionita, who was largely responsible for the Syriac text in the great Paris Polyglot Bible, while in the eighteenth century the Assemani family produced a notable succession of Syriac scholars, chief among whom was Joseph Simon Assemani (+ 1768): his Bibliotheca Orientalis, a survey of Syriac literature based on the riches of the Vatican Library (Rome, 1719–

28), has already been mentioned as still being a basic resource for Syriac studies.

THE BYZANTINE (RUM) ORTHODOX PATRIARCHATE OF ANTIOCH

Besides the Syrian Orthodox, Syrian Catholic, and Maronite Patriarchs of Antioch, there are two further ones, both belonging to the Chalcedonian tradition, the Byzantine (Rum) Orthodox and Melkite Catholic. The Chalcedonian Patriarchate of Antioch historically belongs to the Churches which have a Syriac heritage, for one of its literary and liturgical languages was once Syriac: Syriac, however, was replaced as a literary language by Arabic from the ninth century onwards, though it continued in use as a liturgical language in certain areas until as late as the seventeenth century. Furthermore, its liturgical tradition was once Antiochene (and thus closely related to the Syrian Orthodox and Maronite traditions), but in about the tenth and eleventh centuries (when part of north Syria was termporarily reconconquered by the Byzantine Empire), its rite was completely adapted to that of Constantinople.

The term “Melkite” is regularly used when speaking of Syriac manuscripts belonging to this tradition, but it should be noted that when “Melkite” is used as an ecclesiastical term it refers specifically to the Eastern Rite Catholic Patriarchate of Antioch (which came into existence in the eighteenth century), and not to the Orthodox one.

ECUMENICAL DIALOGUE

All the different Syriac Churches are now involved in ecumenical dialogue. Particularly important events have been the joint declarations of faith made by the Syrian Orthodox Patriarch, Ignatius Zakka I and Pope John Paul II in 1984, and by the Patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East, Dinkha IV, and Pope John Paul II in 1994. It was also in the year 1994 that the PRO ORIENTE Foundation in Vienna initiated its series of “Syriac Dialogue,” involving all the different Churches of Syriac tradition, Chalcedonian, Oriental Orthodox, and Church of the East. The papers produced for these meetings are published under the title Syriac Dialogue (1, 1994; 2, 1996; 3, 1998; 4, 2001; 5, 2003; 6, 2004).

SOME LITERATURE

A general historical survey of all the various oriental churches is given in A. S. Atiya, A History of Eastern Christianity (London, 1968). For the modern

period both D. Attwater’s The Christian Churches of the East (2 volumes; London, 1968), which gives information on ecclesiastical matters, and R. B. Betts’ Christians in the Arab East (London, 1979), which is concerned more with demography and politics, are still useful. A listing of the current hierarchy of all the Syriac Churches is given by J. Madey, The Hierarch of the Churches of East and West Syriac Traditions (Moran Etho 17; Kottayam, 2002).

Helpful introductory works on the individual Syriac Churches today include the following: Syrian Orthodox and Syrian Catholic:

• S. P. Brock, with D.G.K. Taylor (eds.), The Hidden Pearl, III. At the Turn of the Third Millennium: the Syrian Orthodox Witness (Rome, 2001). [For the contents, see above, at the end of Ch.V H]. | • C. Chaillot, The Syrian Orthodox Church of Antioch and all the East. A Brief Introduction to its Life and Spirituality (Geneva, 1998). This delightful personal account provides a lot of information that is not readily available elsewhere. | • C. Sélis, Les syriens orthodoxes et catholiques (Turnhout, 1988).

Church of the East and Chaldean Church:

• Mar Aprem, The Assyrian Church of the East in the Twentieth Century (Kottayam, 2003). | • W. Baum and D. Winkler, The Apostolic Church of the East (London 2003), ch. 5. | • C. Baumer, The Church of the East. An Illustrated History of Assyrian Christianity (London, 2006).

• H. Teule, Les Assyro-Chaldéens. Chrétiens d’Iraq, d’Iran et de

Turquie (Turnhout, 2008). An excellent general introduction. The Maronite Church:

• P. Dib, History of the Maronite Church (Detroit, 1971). | • J. Mahfouz, Short History of the Maronite Church (Jounieh, 1987). | • R. Mouawad, Les Maronites (Turnhout, 2009). An excellent general introduction.

The Chalcedonian Patriarchates of Antioch, Orthodox and Catholic:

• I. Dick, Les Melkites. Grec-orthodoxes et grec-catholiques des patriarcats d’Antioche, d’Alexandrie et de Jérusalem (Turnhout, 1994). English translation 2004.

Middle Eastern Christianity in general See especially the various contributions to A. O’Mahony (ed.), Eastern Christianity: Studies in Modern History, Religion and Politics (London, 2004), and Christianity in the Middle East. Studies in Modern History, Theology and Politics (London, 2008); and A. O’Mahony and E. Loosley (eds), Eastern Christianity in the Modern Middle East (London, 2010).

India:

• L. W. Brown, The Indian Christians of St Thomas (2nd ed., Cambridge, 1982). | • C. Chaillot, The Malankara Orthodox Church (Geneva, 1996). | • D. Daniel, The Orthodox Church of India. A History (2nd ed. New Delhi, 1986).

Among the many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century works, a particularly fascinating account of the Syrian Orthodox Church at the end of the nineteenth century is given by O. H. Parry, Six Months in a Syrian Monastery (London, 1895)—the monastery was Deir ez Zafaran, on the edge

of Tur ‛Abdin in southeastern Turkey; at that time it was the seat of the patriarch. Thanks to the Anglican educational missions to the Church of the East there are several readable accounts of this Church and its people, notably A. J. Maclean and W. H. Browne, The Catholicos of the East and his People (London, 1892), and W. A. Wigram, The Assyrians and their Neighbours (London, 1929). The older work by G. P. Badger, The Nestorians and their Rituals (two volumes; London, 1852) has become something of a classic.

An outline of ecumenical developments involving the Syriac Churches can be found in my “The Syriac Churches in ecumenical dialogue on christology,” in A. O’Mahony (ed.), Eastern Christianity. Studies on Modern History, Religion and Politics (London, 2004), pp. 44–65, and “The Syriac Churches of the Middle East and Dialogue with the Catholic Church”, in A. O’Mahony and J. Flannery (eds), The Catholic Church in the Contemporary Middle East (London, 2010), pp. 107–18. Regular updates on dialogue can be found in the journal Proche Orient Chrétien. For Oriental-Eastern Orthodox Dialogue, see the contributions by Mor Polycarpus Aydin and B. Varghese in C. Chaillot (ed.), The Dialogue between the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches (Volos, Greece, 2016).