Jewish Influences on the "Heliand" Gilles Quispel

JEWISH INFLUENCES ON THE "HELIAND"

When I last saw my good friend Erwin Goodenough, some weeks before his death, he told me with impressive courage about the nature of his illness and mentioned his intention to write now the book about St. Paul, which he ever had in mind when he was working at the Jewish Symbols. Few of us do not have such a last perspective for their work, a last and decisive word that is never spoken and inspires us during our whole life. So the present writer would like to write, but probably never will do so, a "History of the Churches". Not of the Church, but of the Latin, Greek and Syrian Churches. In such a book conventional labels would be avoided. Calvin would be just an extreme representative of African, Augustinian theology, Nestorianism nothing more than a reform, due to Barsauma, of the indigenous Syro-Palestinian Semitic type of Christianity, Messalianism nothing but an interesting and perfectly legitimate revival of a very old and very Syrian spirituality. Then a phenomenological description of these three varieties of re• ligious experience would be possible. Latin Christianity was so practical and unspeculative as the Romans always were, only interested in the great realities of existence, guilt and grace, sober and efficient in its cult as the Old-Roman pagan Prayerbooks once were, stressing order, obedience, stability, all good, old, conservative Roman virtues, aiming at a theocratic order of society, the rule of God's commandment over the whole world. Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento. How different from the very beginning the Greek Christians were: their cult a mystery, an initiation, their life a new being, their christo• logy a synthesis of Being and time (Christ is "ho On"), their mysticism an oceanic experience. No doubt that the ontological aspirations of the Greek found their fulfilment in their type of the Christian religion. The Syrian Christian, on the contrary, was not interested in the ontological speculations of the Greeks. Aphraates, though catholic JEWISH INFLUENCES ON THE "HELIAND" 245 and orthodox, does not contain the slightest echo of the dogmatic controversies which shook the Greek world during his lifetime, the fourth century. Syrian Christianity is not a holy Empire, or a logos about Being, but a Way towards an eschatological horizon. The Syrian was primarily a wanderer, critical about bourgeois institutes like marriage and property, always on the move in the steps of that great Foreigner from Galilee. And this is understandable. It becomes more and more clear, that Christianity has been brought to Syria by Jewish missionaries from Palestine; and even when it spread over Asia, towards India and China, it preserved its Syrian liturgy and its Semitic character. Syrian Christianity has integrated the eschatological restles• ness of the Jewish mind. It is my aim to show in this paper that this Syrian Christianity of Jewish origin has remained an important factor in Western develop• ments. As an example I choose the Old Saxon Heliand, written about 830 A.D. under the reign of Lewis the Pious. Curiously enough the English speaking peoples are not very interested in the Heliand though this beautiful poem belongs without any doubt to world literature, was inspired by English epical poets like Caedmon and both by its language and by its subject matter, an epical presentation of a Biblical subject, seems to be closely connected to English literature.1 During a certain period the Heliand was considered by German scholars to be typically German: combining certain data of the language of the poem with the results of the study of modern dialects, they concluded that the Heliand had been written in the Eastern part of the Saxon realm, in Magdeburg or some other German city. But it has been established that the language of the Heliand is artificial or rather artistic, like the idiom of Homer, with strong English and Frisian elements; therefore dialect-study is of no avail for the local• isation of the "Heliand". 2 Other scholars thought that the poem originated from Fulda, the monastery of St. Boniface, because it is based upon a Gospel Harmony, a version of the Diatessaron of the Syrian Tatian, like the Codex Ful• densis, once used by St. Boniface. Its author was supposed to have used as a source this latter very vulgatised recension of the Diatessaron and was therefore localised at Fulda. But the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas and the light it threw on the various recensions of the Diates-

1) Text: 0. Behaghel, Heliand und Genesis, 6 ed., Halle 1948. Translation: Wilhelm Stapel, Der Heliand, Milnchen, 1953. 2) T. A. Rompelman, Heliandprobleme, Wilhelmshaven, no year.