Johan D. Hofstra, ed. and tr.,
Ishoʿdad of Merw, Commentary on the Gospel of John
J. F.
Coakley
Alexandria, Virginia
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
George A. Kiraz
James E. Walters
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James E. Walters
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
2021
Volume 24.1
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https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/article/hv24n1prcoakley
J. F. Coakley
Johan D. Hofstra, ed. and tr.,
Ishoʿdad of Merw, Commentary on the Gospel of John
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/pdf/vol24/HV24N1PRCoakley.pdf
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute, 2021
vol 24
issue 1
pp 323-328
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies is an electronic journal dedicated to the study
of the Syriac tradition, published semi-annually (in January and July) by Beth
Mardutho: The Syriac Institute. Published since 1998, Hugoye seeks to offer the
best scholarship available in the field of Syriac studies.
File created by James E. Walters
Johan D. Hofstra, ed. and tr.,
Ishoʿdad of Merw, Commentary on the Gospel of John, CSCO
671–672, Scriptores Syri 259–260 (Louvain: Peeters, 2019). Pp. xciv + 134
(text) and lxxii + 156 (translation); €115 and €110.
Ishoʿdad of Merw’s commentaries on the New Testament gospels
were edited and translated into English by Margaret D. Gibson and published
in three volumes in a generous format by Cambridge University Press in 1911.
This work is well known and respected, and one’s first question on seeing
the present new edition of the commentary on John is why it should be
needed. The editor Johan D. Hofstra explains this in his introduction (text
vol., pp. xiii–xv) under three heads. First, new Syriac texts have been
published since 1911, in particular some that are possible sources for
Ishoʿdad’s work. Secondly, the text of the commentaries is known from more
manuscripts now than in 1911, while Mrs. Gibson (for all her “enormous
achievement”) made mistakes in collating the manuscripts she did have.
Thirdly, her translation is not always “accessible”; that is, it does not
always make clear the meaning of the Syriac. We can consider these points in
reverse order here.
Mrs. Gibson’s translation of Ishoʿdad is on the whole
correct word by word, and Hofstra has done well to follow, as he most often
does, her choice of English equivalents. Frequently enough, however,
Ishoʿdad’s meaning eluded her, and Hofstra has found it, or at least come
closer to it. To take one example, on John 1.14, Ishoʿdad comments on the
phrase “glory as of the Only-begotten”:
This addition and position of dolath (“of”) is suitable … for from what he says on the one hand
without addition; He has taught us one nature and person, of the Word and of His
flesh… (Gibson).
And he (the evangelist) said it (very) well with the
addition, that “dalat”… If now, instead of it, he had spoken without
addition, he would be teaching us one nature and hypostasis of “the Word”
and of his “flesh” (Hofstra).
Hofstra’s translation rightly captures the commentator’s
christological aversion, typical of East Syrian authors, to “one nature” or
“one hypostasis (qnoma)” in Christ.
Occasionally, the reader may wonder if Ishoʿdad’s
compressed comments have still been elusive. On the enigmatic 153 fish in
John 21.11, Hofstra translates:
Origen (says) it symbolizes the Holy Trinity. By the
fifties and the three it symbolizes also the Psalms of David, a hundred and
fifty in number; and by the three (it symbolizes) the three praises which
they add to the Psalms from the Law and the Prophets.
This does not quite catch the Syriac. “By the fifties and the
three” is part of Origen’s alleged Trinitarian explanation: 153 = 3 x 50 + 3. And the
Psalms are 153 including the 3 odes (ܬܫܒ̈ܚܬܐ, not “praises”) that are added in the liturgical
Psalter. (Ishoʿdad usually stays away from allegorizing details of the
gospel story, although a similar comment to this one comes on John 19.23
where he quotes Ephrem on the treatment of Jesus’s garments by the
soldiers.)
Hofstra lists and describes fifteen manuscripts,
including the three which Mrs. Gibson had used. His detailed descriptions
leave nothing to be desired, recording scribal characteristics, and counting
and listing variant readings large and small. Most readers will probably
take the details as read and skip to the stemma
codicum (p. lxix) which, although not a strict stemma, organizes
the manuscripts into families. Following this classification, the editor
chooses five as his “base manuscripts” (p. lxxxv). The choice is not clearly
explained, but seems to rest on the others, in particular those that derive
from Alqosh, reflecting a revised text. In any case, the base manuscripts
include the two oldest codices, Berlin 81 (1490) and Saint Petersburg Syr.
33 (16th cent. in its older part), neither of which was accessible to Mrs.
Gibson in 1911. But she used them in her later volumes, on
Acts and the catholic epistles (1913) and the Pauline epistles
(1916). Photographs of the Petersburg ms. (borrowed and photographed
in Cambridge!) is now Cambridge University Library ms. Or. 1750.
Photographs of the Berlin ms. are likewise in the archives of
Westminster College, Cambridge, WGL2/2. But they also
include ms. Harvard Syriac 131 (formerly Harris 130) on which she based her
edition; and this means that Hofstra’s text is not very different from hers.
All the same, among the tabulations in his introduction I wish there were
one that pointed out the places, or at least the important ones, where his
text does differ from Mrs. Gibson’s. (The long table of “errata in Gibson’s
edition” on pp. lxx–lxxxiv does not do this, but only lists readings where
she misread one or other of her manuscripts, something that hardly seems
worth recording now.) Although the text may not be a major issue for the
whole commentary, there are occasions where the translation can be
significantly affected by variants in the principal manuscripts. When
Caiaphas pronounces that it is better for one man to die for the people than
that the whole nation should perish (John 11.50), was it Ishoʿdad’s view
that he spoke by the gift of the Holy Spirit (Hofstra), or not (Gibson)? At
the last supper (on John 13.18), does Jesus eat the passover with his
disciples (Gibson) or does he only eat by himself after them (Hofstra)? In
these two cases, it is a question whether to read ܠܘ “not” with some of the manuscripts. In the same passage
(on v. 27), did Judas go out (ܐܙܝܠ,
Hofstra) to bring in the Jews, or was he moved (ܐܙܝܥ, Gibson) to do so? Hofstra may be right, on the textual
evidence and even on the sense of the passages, to correct Gibson; but these
matters are arguable, and there ought to be footnotes in the translation to
call attention to the alternative possibilities.
It may be in place to comment here in passing on the
sentence-punctuation and diacritical pointing of Hofstra’s Syriac text. He
says (p. lxxxv), “The edition generally follows the punctuation of the base
manuscripts.” But this rule, even if strictly applied, does not prescribe
the punctuation where these six manuscripts differ. Editors are generally
allowed some freedom here; The received wisdom of R. Draguet is that for
any text, even one edited from a single manuscript, the editor may
impose “une ponctuation normalisé.” See his “Une méthode d’édition
des textes syriaques” in A Tribute to Arthur
Vööbus, ed. R. H. Fischer (Chicago 1977), 13–18, specif.
15–16. but I found that Hofstra often chose punctuation
that was unnecessarily against the grain of the translation. Reading is
also not helped by the punctuation in Peeters’s Syriac font, which
has become curiously tiny. The single and double points ought to be,
as they were in past publications, of the same boldness as the
letters. With diacritical marks, the text “retains the
points meant to distinguish homographs and the points used to distinguish
perfect tense verbs from participles.” It is no fault of Hofstra’s that
there is no set of such points that is accepted by all editors, but there
would be no harm in being more liberal with these, especially since
vocalized East Syriac manuscripts make the choices clear. Such pairs as
ܗ̇ܢܘܢ and ܗ̣ܢܘܢ should at any rate
always be included.
It is in the investigation of the sources that Ishoʿdad
used for his commentary on John that Hofstra makes his most valuable
contribution. His discussion occupies most (pp. xx–lxxii) of his
introduction to the translation volume. Mrs. Gibson’s translation had
pointed out only occasional contacts with Ephrem on the Diatessaron. J. R.
Harris in his introduction remarked on the much more important contribution
of Theodore of Mopsuestia, whose commentary on John is available to us, as
it was to Ishoʿdad, in Syriac; but it seems this came as an afterthought to
her. She
gives a table, without comment, on 221 “coincidences” between
Ishoʿdad and Theodore. This contribution is now
thoroughly explored by Hofstra. It amounts by his reckoning to no less than
40% of the text of Ishoʿdad. Each of 371 instances of dependence on Theodore
is recorded in the footnotes to the translation. A similar treatment is
given to John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nazianzen, and Ephrem, Ishoʿdad’s other
three considerable (although far less so than Theodore) patristic sources.
This analysis facilitates the translation of many obscure passages in
Ishoʿdad. An example is his elaborate discussion of John 5.19ff. (“the Son
can do nothing … but only what he sees the Father doing”) where he comments,
“Are there four worlds then?” – that is, the two, present and future, that
the Father creates, and two more that would be created by the Son if we
supposed the Son did all that the Father did. The line of reasoning comes
from Gregory of Nazianzen, and it is explained clearly by Hofstra’s footnote
– only leaving one wondering how many readers of Ishoʿdad would ever have
understood his comment without this context.
Hofstra also considers Ishoʿdad‘s dependence on writers
in his own East Syriac tradition. He joins a long-running discussion on this
subject, and concludes, carefully, that Ishoʿdad used the works of both
Ishoʿ bar Nun and Theodore bar Koni directly; and among other occasional
sources, also the letters of Catholicos Timothy. Only notably missing in his
list of sources is Henana, whose commentaries were certainly known to
Ishoʿdad but who is not cited by him on John at all. It is possible that
some comments by this ambiguous figure may be concealed under the name of
the “Theophoroi” or the “Tradition of the School” of Nisibis; but since
Henana is repeatedly cited by Ishoʿdad on Matthew, it may be either that his
commentary on John was lost early on, or simply that his exegetical work
never extended to this gospel.
Hofstra’s detailed and painstaking volumes will
supersede Mrs. Gibson’s as the edition of choice for anyone using the work
of Ishoʿdad on John. This is particularly so with respect to the text,
although the reader may need to be alive to the apparatus for the sake of
variant readings not signalled in the translation. For the translation
itself, it may still be helpful sometimes to compare Mrs. Gibson. But for
the identification and analysis of Ishoʿdad’s sources, readers have now been
well served as never before.