The Exegesis of Theodore of Mopsuestia and the East-Syriac Tradition 14:00 - 16:00 Friday, 23rd August, 2019 Room 12 Presentation type Workshop Hagit Discussant: Emiliano Fiori The importance of Theodore of Mopsuestia, the most distinctive representative of the ‘Antiochene’ approach to the Bible and the Interpreter par excellence for the the Church of the East, has been studied and reappraised from several perspectives in the ERC project headed by Dr Hagit Amirav, The Christian Appropriation of the Jewish Scriptures: Allegory, Pauline Exegesis, and the Negotiation of Religious Identities, and also in the project Theodore of Mopsuestia’s Pauline Commentaries: A Reappraisal on the Basis of Newly-Discovered Syriac Sources, funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. In this workshop we propose to explore Theodore's commentaries and exegesis especially from the perspective of the East-Syriac tradition, which is a testimony to his lasting influence. In several of the intended contributions new manuscript evidence will be presented, in particular the Syriac manuscript (olim) Diyarbakir 22. This manuscript has largely remained an untapped source for considerable fragments of Theodore’s Syriac version of the commentary on the Minor Epistles, as well as on other parts of the New Testament. The manuscript, parts of which have already been studied by Gerrit Reinink and Lucas Van Rompay, contains an East-Syriac anonymous commentary on the entire Old and New Testaments, although so far only parts of its Old Testament section have been edited and translated (Lucas Van Rompay, 1986). It is the aim of our project as a whole not only to provide access to substantial fragments of Theodore’s Syriac version of the commentary on the Minor Epistles, but also to offer a valuable demonstration of the transmission and reception of Theodore’s work in the mediaeval East-Syriac exegetical tradition and to contribute to the understanding of Theodore of Mopsuestia as an interpreter of the Bible. The workshop is also open to scholars who were not involved in the research projects mentioned above. 521 Theodore of Mopsuestia’s Interpretation of the Birth Announcements of Ishmael and Isaac (Genesis 16 and 18) and Its Reception in East-Syriac and Greek Sources Cornelis Hoogerwerf Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Netherlands Bible Society, Haarlem, Netherlands Abstract Only one of Theodore of Mopsuestia’s commentaries on the Greek Old Testament has survived in a complete form in the original Greek. The other commentaries can be reconstructed partially on the basis of fragments, quotations, and paraphrases in various sources and languages. As a result, we have a fragmentary view of Theodore’s hermeneutics of the Old Testament in his actual exegesis. The reception of Theodore’s commentaries in the East-Syriac tradition, compared with the Greek tradition after Theodore, may help to attain a richer picture of his exegesis and of his handling of the relationship between the Old and the New Testament. This paper will present an example from Genesis, where Theodore’s influence is certain, but his actual commentary (almost) lost. The investigation of the various commentaries shows that the apostle Paul’s use of the Old Testament was forged into an authoritative model with which the Jewish Scriptures could be interpreted in unity with the New Testament without falling into the pitfall of ‘pagan’, allegorical exegesis..