Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Series II/Volume XIII/Ephraim the Syrian and Aphrahat/Introductory Dissertation/Ephraim the Syrian/Section II

II.&#8212;Materials for His Biography.

Fuller details, of more or less authentic character, are forthcoming in many quarters.&#160; In Syriac, we have two Lives, a longer and a shorter; but whether the latter is an abridgment of the former, or is rather the nucleus from which the other has been expanded, is questionable.&#160; Of both alike, the date and the authorship are undetermined.&#160; The longer of the two is entitled, the History [tash itha] of the holy Mar Ephraim.&#160; It varies not a little in the two copies of it [the Vatican and the Parisian] which have been edited; and contains many things that are not easily credible, and some things that are irreconcilable with one another, or with established facts.&#160; In the main facts, however, this History is borne out by the Greek authorities&#8212;the narrations of three fifth-century historians, Socrates, Sozomen and Theodoret, the brief notices of Jerome, De Viris Illustribus (392), and of Palladius, in his Lausiac History (circ. 420) ci., and (what is of most weight) the almost contemporary biographical particulars contained in the Encomium pronounced on Ephraim by Gregory of Nyssa.&#160; Other Greek Lives are extant;&#8212;one which bears the name of a writer coeval with Gregory, Amphilochius of Iconium, but is certainly by a later hand; one anonymous, and one ascribed to Simeon the Metaphrast, a writer of the tenth century.

We proceed to give an outline of the contents of the Syriac History, adding to it here and there such further noteworthy details or incidents as have reached us from the other sources indicated.&#160; Further on, it will be our business to examine this narrative and ascertain how far its statements are in themselves credible, or attested by other and earlier evidence.