Aaron M. Butts and Robin Darling Young, eds. Syriac Christian Culture: Beginnings to Renaissance (Washington, DC:
Catholic University of America Press, 2021)
Yuliya
Minets
University of Alabama
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James E. Walters
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
2023
Volume 26.2
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https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/article/hv26n2brminets
Yuliya Minets
Aaron M. Butts and Robin Darling Young, eds. Syriac Christian Culture: Beginnings to Renaissance (Washington, DC:
Catholic University of America Press, 2021)
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/pdf/vol26/HV26N2BRMinets.pdf
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute, 2023
vol 26
issue 2
pp 568-572
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
Aaron M. Butts and Robin Darling Young, eds. Syriac Christian Culture: Beginnings to Renaissance (Washington, DC:
Catholic University of America Press, 2021). Pp. xii + 354; $75.00.
The edited volume Syriac Christian
Culture: Beginnings to Renaissance is a carefully organized and beautifully
published collection of articles on various aspects of Syriac Christianity that
offers valuable updates on the status artis of the academic
field. The volume contains thirteen chapters, organized into five thematic sections,
that originate from the Seventh North American Syriac Symposium, held at the
Catholic University of America in 2015. It represents a selection of papers with a
shared goal to explore “texts as sources and especially
literary texts.” This theme –
Ad fontes, “to the sources” – remains
the unifying principle of the thematically and methodologically diverse chapters
covering various periods, authors, genres, and research tools and ranging from case
studies to surveys and project overviews. The thematic sections exemplify the main
foci of the volume. Individual articles within a section complement each other,
while often offering different perspectives on the same issue.
The first section, Aphrahaṭ and Ephrem: From
Context to Reception, includes five articles. In “Making Ephrem One of Us,”
Joseph Amar explores how the figure of Ephrem and his legacy have been reshaped and
repurposed over the centuries, from the fifth- and sixth-century monastic writers
and hagiographers to the inventors of the Ephraem Graecus
corpus, to seventeenth-century Vatican scholars, to modern editors and beyond. Above
this, the article seeks to recover the historical Ephrem from the layers of later
literary and scholarly interpretations and to speak about him on his own terms. If
anything, the chapter is a cautionary tale against an attempt to force “a complex,
multi-faceted creative genius” into a manageable mold and to make a deep and
intentionally ambiguous thinker fit a certain agenda. Such an attempt would
unavoidably tell more about us than about Ephrem, and “in the process, we do not
simply cut Ephrem down to size; we cut him down to our own size.” Next, Blake
Hartung in “The Significance of Astronomical and Calendrical Theories for Ephrem’s
Interpretation of the Three Days of Jesus’ Death” zooms into a specific issue in
this writer’s legacy, namely, Ephrem’s solution to the so-called three-day problem,
the time between Jesus’ death and resurrection. Comparing his views with other early
Christian authors and contextualizing them within the late antique calendar and
astronomical knowledge, Hartung highlights the unique aspects of Ephrem’s chronology
meant to emphasize “the fundamental agreement between scripture and nature.” He also
argues that some of Ephrem’s compositions, such as the hymn De
crucifixione analyzed here, better fit educational, rather than liturgical
settings. The next article by J. Edward Walters, “Reconsidering the Compositional
Unity of Aphrahaṭ’s Demonstrations,” is an intriguing study
that challenges our understanding of the authorship, structure, and editorial
history of this collection. Upon reconsidering previously known evidence, Walters
examines newly discovered manuscript passages that suggest that the Demonstrations in its current form is a result of later
editing and that an earlier collection of texts was in circulation before the sixth
century; moreover, the long-neglected attribution to Jacob of Nisibis may not be so
outlandish after all. The section closes with a chapter by Erin Galgay Walsh on
“From Sketches to Portraits: The Canaanite Woman within Late Antique Syriac Poetry.”
She explores the evolution of this female image in the poetry of such theologically
distinct authors as Ephrem, Narsai, and Jacob of Sarugh.
The second thematic block, Translation,
opens with Yury Arzhanov’s study “The Syriac Reception of Plato’s Republic.” Arzhanov demonstrates that Syriac writers were often familiar
with (pseudo-)Platonic ideas not via original dialogues, but rather through
summaries and pseudepigrapha mediated by Church authorities that provide a very
special image of Plato Christianus. The next chapter by Craig
Morrison, titled “Did the Dying Jacob Gather His Feet into His Bed (MT) or Stretch
Them Out (Peshiṭta)? Describing the Unique Character of the Peshiṭta,” explores
unusual readings attested in the Peshiṭta that cannot be explained by traditional
categories (“faithful” vs. “idiomatic” translations). He compares Hebrew, Aramaic,
and Greek versions of Genesis 49 to gain insight into the social and intellectual
milieu in which the Syriac translation appeared as well as the character of the
original Hebrew passage.
Two articles of the next section, Hagiography: Formation and Transmission, focus on the Persian Martyr Acts. While Adam Becker’s contribution (“The Invention of
the Persian Martyr Acts”) offers a valuable overview of the
diverse origins, typology, manuscript history, and reception of various textual
subgroups within the collection, Simcha Gross takes a deep dive into one of those
texts and demonstrates its literary, rather than historical, background by pointing
to an earlier Western source that underwent a multi-stage reworking process in Greek
and Syriac (“The Sources of the History of ʿAbdā damšiḥā: The
Creation of a Persian Martyr Act”). Similarly, Reyhan Durmaz
explores the transmission of a fifth-century Syriac hagiographical text – on the
journey of Bishop Paul and the priest John of Edessa to Himyar – into the Islamic
literary tradition (“Stories, Saints, and Sanctity between Christianity and Islam:
The Conversion of Najrān to Christianity in the Sīra of
Muhammad”). She argues that the accompanying transformations bear witness
to different Christian and Muslim visions of asceticism, sanctity, and religious
communities.
The section Christians in the Islamic
World contains four articles: Thomas A. Carlson introduces a new integrated
platform, the Historical Index of the Medieval Middle East (HIMME), which can
facilitate and enrich the study of the complex multilingual environment of the
region (“Syriac in the Polyglot Medieval Middle East: Digital Tools and the
Dissemination of Scholarship Across Linguistic Boundaries”); Maria Conterno outlines
the avenues for the future study of the early Christian Arabic historiographical
tradition, a topic long awaiting a special monograph (“Christian Arabic
Historiography at the Crossroads between the Byzantine, the Syriac, and the Islamic
Traditions”); Zachary Ugolnik analyzes the spiritual program of John of Dalyatha, an
eight-century East Syriac theologian, and his ideas about visuality, hierarchical
revelations, and reflections of divine glory in human and angelic nature (“Seeing to
be Seen: Mirrors and Angels in John of Dalyatha”). The final article of this
section, “On Sources for the Social and Cultural History of Christians during the
Syriac Renaissance” by Dorothea Weltecke, is a broad and very helpful survey for
everyone working on the period of the eleventh to thirteenth century. Regardless of
the cultural implications of the “renaissance” as a concept, the period invites a
number of questions about sources of political and religious authority, social
structures, milieus and networks, forms of cultural preservation, change, and
synthesis. The author explores various groups of sources for the study of social and
cultural history, including epigraphy, archaeology, art history, intellectual prose,
and legal materials.
The volume ends with an epilogue, “Syriac Studies in the
Contemporary Academy” by Kristian Heal, which fills the need for self-reflection on
the current state of the academic field, proposing to focus on three tasks: editing
and translating Syriac texts, producing
larger scholarly
interpretations, and promoting the area among the wider public. The book is an
important milestone in current Syriac scholarship.