INTRODUCTION the Study of Early Syriac Christianity Has for Decades

INTRODUCTION The study of early Syriac Christianity has for decades been steadily expanding, with significant achievements and highlights along the way; yet its scope still lags way behind that of research relating to Greek and Latin Christianity. While many important texts have appeared in critical editions, been translated into European languages, and received scholarly treatment, there is clearly still much room for the thematic investigation of various aspects of this literature. One of the intriguing and understudied topics here is the nature of Syriac Christianity’s autonomous identity and the extent of its independence from Greek Christianity in late antiquity. This question is intrinsically connected to Syriac Christianity’s genesis from an indigenous Chris- tian Aramaic background as well as its interaction with the neighbor- ing Jewish milieu. The geographical and cultural affinity of the two communities—with the Aramaic (Syriac) language being common to both of them—strongly suggests the possibility of religious and cultural contacts between them. The independent Christian Syriac identity that can be discerned in early Syriac literature later succumbed totally to Greek patristic hegemony. Yet at the end of the 7th century the forces of that identity para- doxically rallied again, this time largely motivated by opposition to Byzantium and Chalcedon, and facilitated by the divide created by the Islamic conquest.1 But this “new” identity retained few of the salient early Syriac features, becoming to a large extent a Greek Christianity in Syriac garb. Curiously, however, a form of group identity that looks back to its Syriac Christian roots vis-à-vis the “negative” Greek influ- ence is reemerging as part of their religious self-perception among leaders of various modern Syrian Christian communities. A striking example of this trend is the East Syrian Catholicos Patriarch Mar Eshai Shimun XXIII, who refers to his forerunners as “the Semitic, Hebraic, Aramaic speaking Church”: 1 See B. ter Haar Romeny, “Les Pères grecs dans les florilèges exégétiques syri- aques”; A. Juckel, “La réception des Pères grecs pendant la « Renaissance » syriaque: Renaissance—acculturation—identité,” in A. Schmidt and D. Gonnet (eds.), Les Pères grecs dans la tradition syriaque (Paris, 2007), pp. 63–76; 89–126. 2 introduction The message of the Christian faith which was totally alien to the Western people, such as Greek, Latin and other races, to the Semitic people of the Middle East, who also spoke the Aramaic language, this faith was merely a completion and perfection of the faith of the Old Testament, and, therefore, they were able to understand, accept and embrace it without reservation. “And in Persia from the time of the apostles to this day, no heretics have risen in it and challenged this faith. But in the territories of the Roman Empire from the time of the apostles many heresies and changes have taken place, and they have defiled many. .” (Quoting a statement of faith by the Church of the East from 612 C.E.) The Church of the East, on the other hand—having received the Scriptures from the hands of the apostles, in a language common to both, namely, to them and the Assyrians, and free from the pagan phi- losophies and political pressures which plagued the Church within the Roman Empire—never compromised its faith and kept it in its purity to this very day. .2 The altogether different time and historical setting, and the program- matic character of the above manifesto are fairly clear. Nevertheless the special cultural circumstances of the emergence of a Syriac-speaking Church—before the onslaught of Greek hegemony, accompanied by voluminous translations of Greek patristic literature in the 5th–6th centuries—did indeed engender the peculiar traits of thought and expression to be found in early Syriac sources. It is some of these idio- syncrasies—mainly pertaining to trinitarian theology, christology and hermeneutics—that our study pursues. As for hermeneutics, we focus especially on the foundational story of paradise and its intricate nexus with theology, which finds expression in uncommon anthropological and soteriological perceptions. It goes without saying that we have not attempted an exhaustive study of the subject; we merely present here a number of case studies. The choice of the texts studied naturally derives to a certain extent from our own idiosyncratic preferences, our regarding them as gems of early Syriac literature. Nevertheless, most of them—from the Old Syriac Gospels to Aphrahat’s Demonstrations, and from Ephrem to Philoxenus of Mabbug—are also clearly landmarks of early Syriac thought, marking its development from the late 2nd to the early 6th centuries. 2 Mar Eshai Shimun XXIII, Introduction to Mar Odishoo, Metropolitan of Suwa (Nisibin) and Arementia, The Book of Marganita (the Pearl) on the Truth of Christian- ity (Kerala, 1965), pp. III–VIII..

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