WITHOUT MUSHE¯ OF NISIBIS, WHERE WOULD WE BE?

WITHOUT MUSHE¯ OF NISIBIS, WHERE WOULD WE BE? SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE TRANSMISSION OF

SEBASTIAN BROCK

Tiresome delays when dealing with tax officials are a familiar enough feature of every age, and so one can have sympathy with Mushe/Moses of Nisibis, the Abbot of the Syrian Orthodox Monastery in Egypt, who experienced a particularly long delay at the tax offices in Baghdad well over a thousand years ago. Without the good use to which Mushe put this delay, however, the topics covered by this, and other Syriac Symposia, would necessarily have been very different from what they are and have been. In this paper I hope to explain why and how. Deir es-Suryan,1 situated in the desert between Alexandria and Cairo, is today a flourishing Coptic Orthodox monastery, and has been in Coptic Orthodox hands since the seventeenth century (1636), but for some 900 years before that it had belonged to the Syrian Orthodox Church, having originally been acquired by Marutha son of Îabbib, a Syrian Orthodox merchant from Tagrit, but based in Fustat (Cairo) in (it seems) the early ninth (or possibly eighth) century.2 At some time in the first decade of the tenth century Mushe of Nisibis was elected abbot, an office he was to hold for over thirty years.3 We learn from inscriptions in the monastery church 1 For the history of the monastery, see above all H.G. Evelyn White, The Monasteries of the Wadi ‘n Natrun, II, The History of the Monasteries of Nitria and of Scetis (New York, 1934); III, The Architecture and Archaeology (New York, 1933), pp. 167-224. 2 The earlier date is preferred by Evelyn White, The Monasteries, II, pp. 312-318, but see J.-M. Fiey, ‘Coptes et syriaques: contacts et échanges’, Studia Orientalia Christiana. Collectanea 15 (1972/3 [1976]), pp. 297-365, esp. 323-326; and K. Innemée and L. Van Rompay, ‘La présence des Syriens dans le Wadi al-Natrun (Egypte)’, Parole de l’Orient, 23 (1998), pp. 167-202, esp. 182-186, 191-193, who point out that there is no definite evi- dence until the ninth century. 3 On him, see Evelyn White, The Monasteries, II, pp. 337-338; J. Leroy, ‘Moise de Nisibe’, in Symposium Syriacum 1972, Orientalia Christiana Analecta, 197 (Rome, 1974), pp. 457- 470; and M. Blanchard, ‘Moses of Nisibis (fl. 906-943) and the Library of Deir Suriani’, in Studies in the Christian East in Memory of Mirrit Boutros Ghali, ed. L.S.B. MacCoull, (Society for Coptic Archaeology North America, 1; Washington D.C., 1955), pp. 13-26. 16 that during his time as abbot Mushe erected a new sanctuary screen and car- ried out various other improvements.4 In 925 the Christian monasteries in Egypt were faced with a dire crisis: a new vizier from the Caliph al-Muqtadir arrived in Egypt and demanded that monks (who had previously been exempted) should now pay the poll- tax.5 The only way of appealing against this new and crippling tax assess- ment was to go to the top (in other words, to the Caliph himself), and it was the abbot of Deir es-Suryan, Mushe, who was chosen to undertake this delicate – and, as it turned out, very lengthy task. He set off for Baghdad in 927 and it was only in 932 that he at last returned, having successfully man- aged to have the vizier's demands overturned. Mushe, however, had not spent all his time endlessly sitting around waiting in different officials' of- fices, as we learn from a note in a manuscript today in the British Library:6

‘To the honour and glory and magnificence of this Syrian Orthodox monastery of the Mother of in the Desert of Sketis, Mushe known as “of Nisibis”, an insignificant sinner and abbot, strove to acquire this book, together with 250 others (many of which he himself bought, while others were given to him as a present), when he went to Baghdad on be- half of this holy Desert and the monks dwelling in it. May God, for whose glory, and for the benefit of those who read these books, grant for- giveness to him and to his departed ones, and to everyone who has shared with them. By the living word of God no one is permitted to cause harm to any of them in any way; nor to appropriate them to him- self. Nor should anyone delete this commemorative note, or make any erasure or cut anything out – or order anyone else to do so; nor may they be given away from the monastery. If anyone dares to do so, let him real- ise that he is under an anathema. These books arrived with the above-mentioned abbot Mushe in the year 1243 of the Greeks (= A.D. 932)'.

Even before Mushe's time the monastery is known to have received a con- 4 See J. Leroy, ‘Le décor de l’église du couvent des Syriens au Ouady Natroun (Egypte)’, Cahiers Archéologiques, 23 (1974), pp. 151-167. 5 Al-Maqrizi, History of the Copts, cited by Evelyn White, The Monasteries, II, pp. 337- 338. 6 Add. 14445, cited by W. Cureton, The Festal Letters of Athanasius (London, 1848), pp. xxv-xxvi note. WITHOUT MUSHE¯ OF NISIBIS, WHERE WOULD WE BE? 17 siderable number of manuscripts by donation, especially during the last quarter of the ninth century.7 After his death, too, others continued to be donated by visitors, and of course numerous manuscripts were copied in the monastery itself by the monks. What marked out Mushe's collection, how- ever, was both the number and the age of the manuscripts he had acquired in Mesopotamia. Some 60 out of the 250 manuscripts he brought back from Baghdad can definitely be identified by acquisition notes,8 and high proportion of these belong to the seventh century or earlier. By contrast, those known to have been donated either before Mushe's time, or after, are only rarely earlier than the eighth century.9 This makes it very likely that at least the majority of the large number of other very early manuscripts origi- nating from Deir es-Suryan also belong to the collection of 250 manuscripts that Mushe brought back from Baghdad, even though the absence of any specific acquisition note makes it impossible to be certain about this.Much of what I have said so far, by way of background, will be familiar to many and so will the subsequent history of the monastery's library: how a consid- erable number were bought up by the Vatican Library in the eighteenth cen- tury (by which time, of course, they were of no practical use to the monks of the monastery, now solely Coptic Orthodox); and how an even larger number came to the (now British Library) in the course of the first half of the nineteenth century. Concerning all this, and the impor- tance of abbot Mushe's role, much has already been written, notably by William Wright, H.G. Evelyn White, Jules Leroy and Monica Blanchard.10 All of these have likewise well brought out the significance of the contents of the monastery's manuscript collection, seeing that it has provided us with so many texts that had hitherto been thought lost. I shall not rehearse these again here; instead, I should like to look at the significance of the great age of many of the manuscripts in the collection from a somewhat different per- spective.

7 Evelyn White, The Monasteries, II, pp. 439-443. 8 Ibid., pp. 443-445. 9 Two notable examples are Add. 14650 (Wright, Catalogue, no. 949), of 6th/7th century (Egyptian Fathers), and Add. 14635, ff.1-15 (Wright, Catalogue, no. 568), of sixth cen- tury (Evagrius), bound in the monastery in 894. 10 W. Wright, Catalogue of the Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum, acquired since the year 1838, III (London, 1872), pp. iv, xvi-xxv; Evelyn White, The Monasteries, II, pp. 443-44; J. Leroy, ‘Moise de Nisibe’ (see n. 3); M. Blanchard, ‘Moses of Nisibis’ (see n. 3); see also Innemée and Van Rompay, ‘La présence’ (n. 2), pp. 186-189. 18 SEBASTIAN BROCK

That we are fortunate enough to have such a large number of surviving Syriac manuscripts that belong to the period from the fifth to tenth century is thanks to the combination of Mushe's zeal in collecting them and to the dry climate of Egypt in preserving them. The importance of this second fac- tor quickly becomes apparent if one tries to think of Syriac manuscripts ear- lier than (say) A.D. 1000 which have been preserved outside Egypt: the number is certainly small, as one can see if one takes as a sample only those manuscripts which bear a date. A total of 136 dated Syriac manuscripts whose dates fall prior to A.D. 1000 are at present known to me; of these, all but 17 come from either Deir es-Suryan or from the only other monastery in (modern) Egypt which possesses Syriac manuscripts, namely St Catherine's Monastery, Sinai. It could well be that some of these 17 also reached European libraries from one or other of these Egyptian monasteries, but their exact provenance is not known (or at least, not known to me). Others among these, however, have definitely been preserved over the cen- turies in the Middle East outside Egypt (though probably few, if any, that are earlier than the eighth century).11 What is important here is not the pre- cise numbers but the fact that the vast preponderance of Syriac manuscripts older than the eleventh century comes from (or is still to be found in) either Deir es-Suryan or from St Catherine's Monastery. It is very likely that the proportions will be similar for the much larger number of manuscripts which lack a specific dating but which, on palaeolographical grounds, can fairly certainly be dated to the period earlier than c. A.D. 1000. Certainly the number of sixth-century Syriac manuscripts that have been preserved outside Egypt is minimal.12 The great significance of this fact becomes clearer if one compares the general content of these earlier manuscripts with the content of manuscripts written after (the purely arbitrary) date of A.D. 1000. This can be illustrated most dramatically if one takes the writings of the most famous of Syriac au- thors, St Ephrem. Here, one has only to consult the introductions to the late Dom Edmund Beck's admirable editions in the CSCO to see that the only manuscripts to preserve madrashe in a complete form are those of the sixth 11 The ‘’ (in Florence) of A.D. 586 and the Wolfenbüttel Gospels of 633 evidently both reached Europe by way of Maronite intermediaries, rather than from Egypt. Otherwise, the earliest dated manuscript which has definitely been preserved else- where in the Middle East, outside Egypt, is Damascus Patriarchate 12/25 (formerly, Jeru- salem, St Mark’s Monastery, no. 235) of (it seems) A.D. 713 (Galen). 12 One clear example is Damascus Patriarchate 12/1 (). WITHOUT MUSHE¯ OF NISIBIS, WHERE WOULD WE BE? 19 and seventh centuries, for it will quickly be noticed that the manuscripts he uses divide themselves up into two categories: those which give the text of the hymn cycles and individual madrashe in full, and those which have only select madrashe and even these are given with various stanzas omitted. The manuscripts belonging to the first category are almost all of the sixth cen- tury, and only one may be of the seventh, whereas all those in the second category belong to the eighth century or later.13 If one turns to Ephrem's older contemporary , one finds an analogous situation. The complete text of the Demonstrations is only found in two very early manuscripts (both from Deir es-Suryan), whereas the only other direct witness is a manuscript of 1364 which contains only the final Demonstration. Some excerpts, though without indication of the source, can also be found in certain later Syriac monastic writings.14 A similar picture emerges with another important early Syriac writer, na- mely .15 While it is perhaps not surprising that his theological works dealing with the fifth- and sixth-century christological controversies should only survive in manuscripts written earlier than the seventh century, it is striking that his ascetic Discourses are only very rarely transmitted in their full form after the seventh century. Normally it is single discourses, or small groups of discourses that one finds in the many later manuscripts. Since a considerable number of hagiographical manuscripts from all peri- ods survive, it is perhaps surprising that the only complete text of John of Ephesus's Lives of the Eastern Saints is a manuscript of 688, whereas all the remaining manuscripts (from the ninth century onwards) contain selected lives only.

13 See my ‘The transmission of Ephrem’s madrashe in the Syriac liturgical tradition’, Studia Patristica, 33 (1997), pp. 490-505. 14 Thus, for example, Demonstration VI.7 features in John of Apamea’s Instructions (BL Add. 17170, f. 50r), and several quite long excerpts from the same Demonstration appear under the name of Abraham of Nathpar in BL Or. 6714 (thus VI.2 = f. 97r, VI.6 = f. 97v, VI.7 = f. 98v, VI.8 – beginning 9 = ff. 97v-98r, VI.19 = f. 98r (some of these can also be found in Mingana Syr.601, f. 56r foll., again under Abraham’s name). Certain of Aphra- hat’s Demonstrations were translated into , but under Ephrem’s name; see J.-M. Sauget, ‘Entretiens d’Aphraate en arabe sous le nom d’Ephrem’, Le Muséon, 92 (1979), pp. 61-69. 15 The information about manuscripts of Philoxenus’s works can conveniently be found in Part II of A. de Halleux, Philoxène de Mabbog. Sa vie, ses écrits, sa théologie (Louvain, 1963). 20 SEBASTIAN BROCK

Exactly the same pattern is to be found if one turns to Syriac translations of prominent Greek Fathers. Here I take as an example Gregory of Nazianzus, the ‘Theologian' par excellence. Gregory's Homilies were im- mensely influential and two Syriac versions are known, one (incomplete) of the early sixth century, and the other a revised translation made by Paul, bishop of , in Cyprus in 623/4, during the time of the Persian occu- pation of his see. The only manuscripts containing the full translation are those written either in the ninth century or earlier. After that date, the only Homilies to get copied were those which were selected for use in the great Homiliaries, arranged according to the liturgical year and intended for mo- nastic reading.16 Numerous other Syriac translations from the Greek Fathers suffered the same fate as Gregory of Nazianzus's Homilies: after about the ninth century they were never copied complete, but instead, excerpts were made, either for monastic anthologies or for liturgical Homiliaries. This pattern can readily be discerned in the manuscript tradition of such works as John Chrysostom's Homilies on the Gospels and Severus of 's Cathedral Homilies. The case of Ephrem, however, appears to be atypical for poetry, since the somewhat later Syriac poets, , the Isaacs and Narsai did not suffer the same fate. In their case, even if (as happened with Jacob and Narsai) particular memre of theirs were selected for use during the liturgical year, nevertheless manuscripts dedicated to preserving collections of their poetry still continued to be made. In the case of Jacob we have the witness of three vast collections dating from the eleventh and twelfth century, pre- served in the Syrian Orthodox Patriarchate, Damascus,17 as well as many somewhat smaller ones, sometimes copied very much later – such as the col- lection of 101 memre in a manuscript in Oxford dated 1640. In the case of Isaac, the Syrian Orthodox patriarch IuÌanon bar Shushan was in the proc-

16 For the manuscripts of Gregory’s Homilies, see A. Van Roey and H. Moors, ‘Les discours de saint Grégoire de Nazianze dans la littérature syriaque’, Orientalia Lovaniensia Periodica, 4 (1973), pp. 121-133; 5 (1974), pp. 79-126; and A.B. Schmidt and M. Quaschning-Kirsch, ‘Die syrischen Handschriften der Homilien des Gregor von Nazianz’, Le Muséon, 113 (2000), pp. 87-114. 17 Damascus Patriarchate 12/13-15, for whose contents see A. Vööbus, Handschriftliche Überlieferung der Memre-Dichtung des Ja‘qob von Serugh, II, CSCO 345, Subs. 40 (Lou- vain, 1973), pp. 124-159. WITHOUT MUSHE¯ OF NISIBIS, WHERE WOULD WE BE? 21 ess of collecting together a corpus of his poems when he was overtaken by death (in 1073). Collections of Narsai's memre have continued to be copied right into the twentieth century.18 It seems then that, while the break in transmission of texts somewhere around the end of the ninth century is one that affects the vast majority of Syriac translations from Greek, it applies to certain categories of native Syriac writing only, notably to early prose authors and to Ephrem's madrashe. These are of course only those cases which one can specifically pinpoint, thanks to the witness of the library of Deir es-Suryan: needless to say, this library's holdings were certainly not representative of the entire range of Syriac literature that was still available in manuscripts at the end of the first millennium A.D., and consequently there is no means of telling what else might have been dropped out from the repertory of texts being copied. Though the library of Deir es-Suryan did contain a small number of manuscripts of East Syriac provenance,19 it was naturally Syrian Orthodox interests which guided the selection of the great majority of its contents. If, as seems likely, there was in the a similar break in the transmission of certain types of texts (the situation with Ephrem would cer- tainly suggest this),20 then one should assume that a large body of early lit- erature of specifically East Syriac provenance has been lost. This seems to be borne out by the considerable number of works mentioned by ‘Abdisho’ in his Catalogue which are no longer extant today. In the case of Melkite (Byzantine Orthodox) literature in Syriac, one is a little better off, in that a certain amount of this has been preserved in the library of St Catherine's Monastery, Sinai. Here too one can observe a change in the type of texts which continued to be copied over the course of time: the latest manuscripts containing patristic texts seem to be from about the tenth century, after which only liturgical texts were copied (these con- tinue till the early seventeenth century).

18 See W. Macomber, ‘The Manuscripts of the Metrical Homilies of Narsai’, Orientalia Christiana Periodica, 39 (1973), pp. 275-306. 19 E.g. the ‘Massorah’ copied in Harran in 899 (BL Add. 12138; Wright, Catalogue, no. 161) and the sixth-century fragment of an (BL Add. 14669, ff. 20-21; Wright, Catalogue, no. 255). 20 See n. 13. 22 SEBASTIAN BROCK

Before turning to some conclusions, let me mention some puzzling ex- ceptions, or apparent exceptions, to the general pattern that has emerged. The late nineteenth century was a period of remarkable scribal activity, and amongst the manuscripts copied at this period are three in particular whose contents include some very surprising texts. The Book of the Laws of the Countries (Bardaisan), together with the Apology of Melito, features in a manuscript (which I suspect is late nineteenth-century) preserved today in the Catholic Bishop's House in Trichur, ;21 Philoxenus's First Letter to the Monks of Tel ‘Ade, was copied at Alqosh probably shortly after 1887;22 and the Syriac translation of the agricultural treatise entitled the Geoponika, was copied, also in Alqosh, as late as in 1932;23 this last text is known to have been derived from an earlier Alqosh manuscript of 1902. In each of these three cases the only other known manuscript is a very early one which was already in a European library by the end of the nine- teenth century. Does this mean that the break in the transmission of such texts which I have tried to identify is in fact purely illusory, and that such manuscripts containing early texts indeed continued to be copied in the Middle East throughout the Middle Ages, and that the Vorlagen for these late copies may still be around in uncatalogued Middle Eastern libraries? This is certainly conceivable, but personally I consider this to be most un- likely, and in the case of the third text mentioned, the Geoponika, one can definitively show that it was copied from the printed edition by de Lagarde, published in 1854 (what is surprising in this particular case is that this book, published in a rather limited edition, should have been available in Alqosh in 1902, when it was first copied).24 With this lead, can one go on to claim the same for the other two texts? The printed edition of the Book of the Laws of the Countries and the Apology of Melito was published by W. Cureton in 1855 from the only known manuscript, BL Add. 14658 of the seventh century;25 unfortunately van der Ploeg's list does not give the

21 See J.P.M. van der Ploeg, The of St Thomas in South and their Syriac Manuscripts (Bangalore, 1983), p. 132 (no. 7). 22 Alqosh syr. 215. 23 Mingana syr. 509. 24 See my ‘A Note on the Manuscripts of the Syriac Geoponicon’, Oriens Christianus, 51 (1967), pp. 186-187. 25 W. Cureton, Spicilegium Syriacum (London, 1854), pp. 22*-31*, 41-51, 85-95. WITHOUT MUSHE¯ OF NISIBIS, WHERE WOULD WE BE? 23 date of the Trichur manuscript, and only a careful comparison of this with the printed text could show whether or not the latter is the source (as I sus- pect it is). The same applies to the Letter by Philoxenus, where the chronol- ogy definitely does not rule out this possibility. The text of the Letter, based on the single known old manuscript (Vatican Syr. 136, sixth century), was published by I. Guidi in 188626, thus a few years before the probably date of the Alqosh manuscript. Here again, only a comparison of the two texts can provide the answer; seeing that Guidi's text indicates some lacunae in his manuscript base, it should not be difficult to discern whether or not the printed text served as a basis for the Alqosh copy – the only problem is a purely practical one, in that one would need to follow abbot Mushe's foot- steps all the way to Baghdad in order to consult the Alqosh manuscript which has now been removed to there.27 It is the combination of these two factors, firstly that manuscripts earlier than the tenth/eleventh century have only very rarely been preserved outside of Egypt and Sinai, and secondly that there was a break, at about the end of the ninth century, in the choice of which texts were selected to be copied, which makes the collecting activities of abbot Mushe so very important for us today. One only has to reflect a little on what our picture of Syriac litera- ture would be today if we had not been the beneficiaries of Mushe's work. By far the greatest loss would concern literature produced during the ‘golden age' of Syriac literature, that is, approximately the fourth to seventh centuries. Above all, we would have had no complete madrashe cycles of Ephrem, and only selections or excerpts from important early Syriac writers such as Aphrahat, Philoxenus and John of Ephesus; we would have nothing from the circle of Bardaisan apart from the passages in Greek translation quoted by Eusebius and in the Clementine Recognitions; we would have very little in the way of translations from the Greek Fathers – and thus be without any (or only a partial) knowledge of those works whose Greek origi- nals have been lost, such as Eusebius's Theophania, Titus of Bostra's Against

26 ‘La lettera di Filosseno ai monachi di Tell ‘Ada (Teleda)’, Reale Accademia dei Lincei, 232; Memorie della Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche, ser. 3:12 (Rome, 1886), pp. 446-506. 27 To the Chaldean Monastery in Baghdad. Vosté’s Alqosh 215, however, is not given any equivalent in the concordance to the new catalogue numbers provided by B. Haddad and J. Isaac, Syriac and Arabic Manuscripts in the Library of the Chaldean Monastery, Baghdad. Part I, Syriac Manuscripts (Baghdad, 1988), p. 515. 24 SEBASTIAN BROCK the Manichaeans, and numerous works by Evagrius and Severus. From the first two centuries of Arab rule, too, we would be left without a number of important works by Syrian Orthodox writers such as Athanasius of Balad and Jacob of Edessa. Looked at the other way round: from the pre-Islamic period we would still have the benefit of the poetry of the great fifth- and sixth-century poets, and the Egyptian monastic literature would still be available, thanks to ‘Ananisho's Paradise of the Fathers. Hagiography, too, would not be badly affected. But supposing we did not have the benefit of abbot Mushe's manuscripts, the Syriac texts we would have available, although not negligeable, would nevertheless have given only a very inadequate idea of the range and extent of the immense literary activity and creativity of this early period. The Syriac Symposium of 2000 seems an appropriate occasion on which to offer the present paper by way of a small tribute to the far-sighted vision and labours of abbot Mushe of Nisibis, a man without whom our knowl- edge – and enjoyment – of early Syriac literature would have been very much the poorer, and whom a contemporary scribe had already aptly de- scribed as ‘our pride and the adornment of the entire holy Church'.28

28 Donor’s note of A.D. 943 in BL Add. 14525 (Wright, Catalogue, no. 514, p. 394).