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Here Brought Together Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 70(3-4), 307-325. doi: 10.2143/JECS.70.3.3285157 © 2018 by Journal of Eastern Christian Studies. All rights reserved. BOOK REVIEWS Malcolm Choat and Maria Chiara Giorda (eds.), Writing and Communication in Early Egyptian Monasticism. Texts and Studies in Eastern Christianity 9. Leiden – Boston: Brill, 2017, xiii-239 pp. ISBN 978-9004-25465-7 The volume is in a sense a side-product of a research project entitled “Communication networks in Upper Egyptian monastic communities in the 6th to 8th centuries” that was funded by the Australian Research Council and coordinated by Malcolm Choat (Macquarie) and Heike Behlmer (Göttingen). Choat and Maria Chiara Giorda presided over a seminar session at the Tenth International Congress of Coptic Studies, held in 2012 in Rome, which saw first versions of a number of the essays that are here brought together. Some extra essays were commissioned for this volume. In total the book counts nine contributions. The editors co-authored an essay on communication chan- nels in monastic milieus through reading and writing texts which serves as an introduc- tion. Both also contributed an essay of their own, Choat on monastic letters on papyrus, and Giorda on monastic testaments. The other essays are by Paul Dilley (on written media and authority in Shenoute’s Canons), Esther Garel and Maria Nowak (monastic wills), Jacques van der Vliet (innovations in monastic epigraphy), Fabrizio Vecoli (monastic doctrine), Jennifer Westerfeld (monastic graffiti), and Ewa Wipszycka (bibli- cal recitations and their function in monastic piety). The selection of the topics may look a bit randomly, but they all address interesting aspects of monastic religious life as expressed through various sorts of writing and correspondence. I particularly appreciated Choat’s extensive survey of monastic letters (pp. 17-72) in which he not only presents the evidence but also discusses technical aspects of the letters themselves. Choat draws attention to the relation, at times perhaps even tension, these letters evoke between the need to travel in order to communicate and the wish not to do so. Communicating by letter avoids direct personal contact between author and addressee, but it mobilises others who are asked or required to transport the letters to their destination. “Letters allowed the creation of ‘virtual communities’, groups of monks separated by distance”, but also in time, as these letters were often collected for use and instruction by later generations (71). Chiorda studies testaments of individuals; these may be spiritual testaments, in which a monk leaves his “intellectual” or “spiritual” heritage to a later generation, or “real” testaments, in which one indicates who among the brothers will inherit his spare belong- ings. That such things were duly reflected upon is shown by a stipulation in an imperial constitution that in case one passes away without testament and without known relatives, his belongings fall to the monastery. A special case is the question of who will succeed the founder or head of a monastic community. If initially this was arranged by the founder/leader himself, it soon became the rule that the community as a whole had its say in this matter in consultation with the local bishop, though the role of the latter changed over time towards merely confirming the proposal made by the community. Giorda’s essay is a sort of companion to the one by Garel and Nowak who look at more 308 BOOK REVIEWS technical aspects (wills in Roman law, which continued to serve as a model well into late Antiquity, though not as a mere copy). An evident major difference is the concern for adding biblical quotations in the document. A second difference is the way the issue of witnesses is regulated, which reflects contemporary scribal and notarial rather than ancient juridical praxis. Epigraphy can have an ornamental, dedicatory, or commemorative function, all of which are attested in monastic circles, but it can also have an instructive value. J. van der Vliet studies some cases of the latter, in which inscriptions function as warnings or teachings on how correctly to understand particular practices. A nice example is found in Kellia, in which the famous and widespread ritual of praying “the Jesus prayer” is defended against such people who would claim that this prayer ignores the Trinity, a claim that can only stem from demonic inspiration according to the anonymous author (pp. 158-159).Walls truly can serve the proclamation of wisdom, as van der Vliet sug- gests in the title of his essay. This is a most interesting collection of essays that addresses questions of religious nature and daily-life praxis and offers a nice survey of different genres of communica- tion that were used in monastic life and in part just copy what was customary in society. Joseph Verheyden (Leuven) Nestor Kavvadas, Jerusalem zwischen Aachen und Bagdad. Zur Existenzkrise des byzan­ tinischen Christentums im Abbasidenreich. Jenaer mediävistische Vorträge 6. Stuttgart: Frans Steiner Verlag, 2017, 116 pp. ISBN 978-3-515-11879-8 This little booklet is the revised and expanded form of a lecture the author held at the University of Jena. The topic is a most interesting and also a most dramatic one. It deals with a relatively short period in the history of the Jerusalem patriarchate that would sig- nify for Christianity of the region the beginning of the turn from a majority to a minor- ity religion, as the author formulates it in his introduction (p. 8). The bulk of the work hangs on one event and its consequences – the attack on the monastery of Mar Saba on March 13 March, 797 by Arabic plunderers from “al-Yaman”, i.e., tribes from the south of the peninsula. The region had been plundered before and even Jerusalem has been threatened, but the attack on Mar Saba was particularly vicious and left twenty monks dead. The plunderers were not only interested in material goods, but were also looking for one Thomas, a medical doctor and theologian, whom the monks refused to betray or give up. The tragedy of the event, apart from the cruelty, lies in the fact that this was a premeditated attack on a venue that was known as a centre of culture that attracted many members of the better circles and had excellent contacts with the patriarch. The search for Thomas, who would become patriarch of Jerusalem a decade or so later, shows that this was not a mere act of burglary. Mar Saba was fallen victim to a struggle of much wider dimensions. Thomas played a mediating role in the diplomatic moves that were being made between the empire-to-be of Charles the Great and the newly created empire of the Abbasids. The latter event caused the downfall of the political and military establishment of Syria-Palestine in favour of the new dynasty that was not Arabic in origin. As a consequence, important families and dynasties, such as that of the Bar- makids, lost their power base. They did not surrender at once, but went down fighting. BOOK REVIEWS 309 Kavvadas describes in detail what was happening on the world scene and how it affected local communities. The change in power had ethnic aspects. The empire ceased to be “Arabic” and was turned into an “Islamic” one, as he points out. The downfall of the “Arabic” rulers in Syria-Palestine brought with it that of the delicate balance there had been between political and ecclesiastical powers. This is a fine piece of work that gives us clear insights in the real reason for the atrocities that took place in Mar Saba in the closing years of the eighth century. A new power had taken over in the East, and a raising power in the West was trying to get its place under the sun, at the expense of old Greek Christianity which itself was slowly turning into Arabic Christianity. Joseph Verheyden (Leuven) Najib G. Awad, Orthodoxy in Arabic Terms: A Study of Theodore Abu Qurrah’s Theology in Its Islamic Context. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – Tension, Trans- mission, Transformation 3. Boston – Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015, xv-466 pp. ISBN 978-1-61451-567-8 (hardcover) 978-1-61451-953-9 (e-book) 978-1-61451-677-4 (paperback, 2016) In times when the urge is felt among Christians to engage in theological dialogue with Muslims, it is not surprising to witness increased scholarly attention to the Christian apologists of the early ʿAbbāsid period. These authors were among the first Christians to seriously grapple with the religious challenge of Islam. Each of the three main Chris- tian communities brought forth apologists in the 9th century seeking to accommodate Christianity to a new Islamic context, not only by adopting Arabic as their literary language, but also by articulating their Christian doctrines of faith in forms reminiscent of Islamic beliefs and the developing modes of theological discourse. The most important names in this respect are those of the Chalcedonian (‘Melkite’) Theodore Abū Qurra (d. c. 830), the West Syrian (‘Jacobite’) Abū Rāʾiṭa al-Takrītī (d. c. 835), and the East Syrian (‘Nestorian’) ʿAmmār al-Baṣrī (d. c. 840). After the appearance of studies on these three authors together (Beaumont, 2005; Ricks, 2013; Husseini, 2014), and separate studies on Abū Rāʾṭa (Keating, 2006) and ʿAmmar al-Baṣrī (Mikhail, 2013; Varsányi, 2015; Maróth, 2015), Najib G. Awad now provides us with a study solely devoted to Theodore Abū Qurra. He is, however, not the first to provide such a study in recent years. In 2007, David Bertaina completed his PhD dissertation on the debate at the court of Caliph al-Maʾmūn ascribed to Abū Qurra, unfortunately absent from Awad’s bibliography.
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