Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 22.djvu/865

 STH CENT.] SYRIAC LITERATURE 829 respectively. 1 He is said, too, to have been a skilful physician. 2 To him 'Abhd-isho' assigns the following works, 3 "A book of martyrdoms, anthems and hymns on the martyrs, and a translation of the canons of the council of Nicsea, with a history of that council." The last named of these he undertook at the request of Isaac, catholicus of Seleucia, who died in 416. 4 The canons which pass under his name are those of the council of Seleucia in 41 0. 5 But his great work was the Book of Martyrs, containing accounts of those who suffered for the Christian faith under Sapor II., Yaz- degerd I., and Balmlm V., to which he prefixed two discourses on the glory of the martyrs and on their torments. One of these narratives claims to have been recorded by an eye-witness, Isaiah, the son of Hadhbo (or Hadhabhu), of Arzan (' Apfa.vi)i>ri), one of the Persian king's horsemen. 6 Portions of this work survive in the British Museum in MSS. of the 5th and 6th centuries, as well as in some of later date both there and in the Vatican. They have been edited by S. E. Assemani in the first volume of the Ada, Sanctorum Martyrum, 1748. 7 The commentary on the Gospels mentioned by Assemaui is really by MiiTiitha, the maphrian of Taghrith (Tekrit), who is also the author of the anaphora or liturgy. 8 Of him we shall have occasion to speak afterwards (see p. 838 infra). It is possible too that some of the above-mentioned Aha. Acts may belong not to the work of Mariitha but to that of Aha, the successor of Isaac in the sec of Seleucia, who likewise wrote a history of the Persian martyrs and a life of his teacher 'Abhda, the head of the school in the monastery of Dor-KonI or Dair-Kunnfi (where the apostle Mail was buried). 9 Nestorian About this time evil days came upon the Christian church in schism. Syria. Paul of Samosiita, Diodore of Tarsus, and Theodore of Mopsuestia had paved the way for Nestorius. The doctrines of these writers were warmly espoused by many of the Syrian theo- logians ; and the warfare raged for many years in and around Edessa, till it ended in the total destruction of the great Persian Rabbulii. school by the order of the emperor Zeno (488-489). 10 Rabbula, a native of Ken-neshrin (Kinnesrin), whose father was a heathen priest but his mother a Christian, was converted to Christianity by Eusebius, bishop of Ken-neshrin, and Acacius, bishop of Aleppo. He voluntarily gave up all his property, forsook his wife, and became a monk in the convent of Abraham near his native city. On the death of Diogenes, bishop of Edessa, he was appointed his successor (411-412). His admiring biographer depicts him as a model bishop, and he certainly appears to have been active and energetic in teaching and preaching and attending to the needs of the poor. u In the theological disputes of the day he seems at first to have sided, if not with Nestorius, at least with those who were averse to extreme measures, such as John, patriarch of Antioch, and his partisans ; but afterwards he joined the opposite party, and became a warm champion of the doctrines of Cyril, which he supported at the council of Edessa (431). From this time onward he was a staunch opponent of Nestorianism, and even resorted to such an extreme measure as burning the writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia. Hence Ibas in his letter to Marl speaks of him as "the tyrant of Edessa," and Andrew of Samosata, writing to Alexander of Hierapolis in 432, complains bitterly of his persecution iof the orthodox (i.e., the Nestorians). He died in August 435. l - Of the writings of Rabbula but little has come down to us. There is a sermon extant in manuscript, 13 enjoining the bestowing of alms on behalf of the souls of the dead and prohibiting all feasting on the occasion of their commemoration. Another sermon, preached at Constantinople, is directed against the errors of Nestorius. 14 There are also extant canons and orders addressed to the monks and clergy of his diocese, 15 and a number of hymns, of which Over- beck has printed some specimens. 16 He also rendered into Syriac Cyril's treatise De Recta in Dominum nostrum J. C. Fide ad T/wo- dosium Imperatorem 17 from a copy which was sent to him by the author. 18 His biographer intended to translate into Syriac a collec- tion of forty-six of his letters, written in Greek "to priests and emperors and nobles and monks 19 ; " but of these only a few remain, e.g., to Andrew of Samosata, condemning his treatise against the twelve anathemas of Cyril - ; to Cyril, regarding Theodore of Mop- suestia 21 ; and to Gemellinus of Perrhe, about certain monks and other persons who misused the sacred elements as ordinary food. 22 I See B.O., i. 174 sq.; Bar-Hebrseus, Chron. Ectles., i. 121, ii. 45, 40. ~ B.O., iii. 1, 73. and note 4. 3 Ibid., lc~. ctt. 4 Ibid., i. 195. 5 See Lamy, Concilium Seleucife et Ctesiphanti habilum anno ItlO ; comp. S. E. Assemani, Codd. MSS. Orient. Bibl. Palat. Medic., p. 94. 6 B.O., i. 15. 7 See also B.O., i. 181-194. There is a German translation by Zingerle, Echte Acten der h. Martyrer des Morgenlandes, 2 vols., 1836. 8 B.O., i. 179. 9 Ibid., ii. 401, iii. 1, 369 ; also Abbeloos, Acta S. Maris, pp. 72 sq., 88. 1 B.O., i. 353, 406. II See his biography in Overbeck, S. Ephraemi, &c., Opera Selecta, p. 159 sq., especially pp. 170-181 ; translated by Bickell, in Tlialhofer's Bibliothek, Nos. 102-104. 12 B.O., i. 403. 13 Codd. MSS. Orient, Bibl. Pnlat. Medic., p. 107. 1* See Overbeck, .S. Ephraemi, &c., Opera Selecta, pp. 239-244 ; translated by Bickell-. '5 Ibid., pp. 210-221. ' 16 ibid ., pp. 245-248, 362-378. 17 See Wright, Catal., p. 719. is Comp. the letter of Cyril to Rabbula, Overbeck, op. cit., pp. 228-229. 19 See Overbeck, op. cit., p. 200. 20 Ibid., p. 222. 21 Ibid., p. 223, a fragment. 22 Ibid., pp. 230-238. The shorter fragment should follow the longer one. Rabbula was succeeded in the see of Edessa (435) by Ihibha or Ibas. Hibhii (Grfficized Ibas), L;i who in his younger days had been one of the translators of Theodore's works in the Persian school. 24 This, with his letter to Marl the Persian - 5 and other utterances, led to his being charged with Nestorianism. He was acquitted by the two synods of Tyre and Beirut, but condemned by the second council of Ephesus (449), 26 and Nonnus was substituted in his room. He was restored, however, at the end of two years by the council of Chalce- don, and sat till October 457, when he was succeeded by Nonnus, 27 who in his turn was followed by Cyrus in 471. Besides the writ- ings above-mentioned, 'Abhd-isho' attributes to Ibas 28 "a comment- ary on Proverbs, sermons and metrical homilies (madhrdshe), and a disputation with a heretic"; but none of these appear to have come down to us. During this stormy period the name of Acacius, bishop of Amid, Acacius is mentioned as the author of certain epistles. 29 The great event of of Amid, his life, which is referred by Socrates (bk. vii. 21) to the year 422, is thus briefly recorded in the Martyrologium Romanum Gregorii XIII. (Malines, 1859), 9th April : " Amidse in Mesopotamia sancti Acatii episcopi, qui pro redimendis captivis etiam ecclesise vasa conflavit ac vendidit." The said captives were Persian subjects, who were thus ransomed and sent back to their king and country. 3 " Acacius was doubtless a favourer of Nestorianism, for his letters were thought worthy of a commentary by Marl, bishop of Beth Hardasher, 31 the correspondent of Ibas. 32 About the same time rose one of the stars of Syriac literature, Isaac of Isaac, commonly called the Great, of Antioch. 33 He was a native AutiocL. of Amid, but went as a young man to Edessa, where he enjoyed the teaching of Zenobius, the disciple of Ephraim. 34 Thence he removed to Antioch, where he lived as priest and abbot of one of the many convents in its immediate neighbourhood. In his younger days he would seem to have travelled farther than most of his countrymen, as it is stated that he visited Rome and other cities. 35 With this agivcs what is recorded by Dionysius of Tell-Mahre 36 as to his having composed poems on the secular games celebrated at Koine in 404, and on the capture of the city by Alaric in 410, which shows that he took a more than ordinary interest in the Western capital. Isaac died in or about 460, soon after the destruction of Antioch by the earthquake of 459, on which he wrote a poem. 37 Isaac's works are nearly as voluminous and varied as those of Ephraim, with which indeed they are often confounded in MSS. and in the Roman edition. 38 They were gathered into one corpus by the Jacobite patriarch John bar Shushan or Susanna, who began in his old age to transcribe and annotate them, but was hindered from completing his task by death (1073). 39 Assemani has given a list of considerably more than a hundred metrical homilies from MSS. in the Vatican. 40 Of these part of one on the Crucifixion was edited by Overbeck, 41 and another on the love of learning by Zingerle. 42 But it has been left to Bickell to collect and translate all the extant writings of this Syrian father and to commence the pub- lication of them. Out of nearly 200 metrical homilies his first volume contains in 307 pages only fifteen, and his second brings 23 B.O., i. 199. 24 ibid., iii. 1, 85 ; Wright, Catal., pp. 107, col. 2, 644, col. 1. 25 See Labbe, Concil., ix. 51 ; Mansi, vii. 241. 26 The so-called rjffrpiKri criWSoj or latrocinium Ephesinum. Of the first session of this council a portion is extant in Syriac in Brit Mus. Add. 12156, ff. 51b-61a (written before 562), containing the acta in the cases of Flavian of Antioch and Eusebius of Dorylwum. Add. 14530 (dated 535) contains the second session, comprising the acta "in the cases of Ibas, his nephew Daniel of Harran, Irenseus of Tyre, Aquilinus of Byblus, Sophronius of Telia or Constantina, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, and Doinnus of Antioch. These documents have been translated into German by Hoffmann, Verhandlungen der Kirchenversammlitng zu Ephesus am xxii. August CDXLIX., &c., 1873 ; into French by Martin, Actes du, Briganilage d'Ephese, 1874 ; and into English (with the assistance of a German scholar) by the Rev. S. G. F. Peiry, The Second Synod of Ephesivs, 1881. See also Martin, Le Pseudo-Synode connu dans I'Histoire sous le nom de Brigandage d'Ephese, &c., 1875 ; and Perry, An Ancient Syriac Document purporting to be the record in its chief features of the Second Synod of Ephesus, &c., part i., 1867. Mr Perry printed a complete edition of the Syriac text at the Clarendon Press, Oxford, but no one seems to know what has become of the copies. The copies of the English translation were purchased at the sale of Mr Perry's library by Mr Quaritch. 27 B.O., i. 257. 28 Ibid., iii. 1, 86. These are of course utterly ignored by Assemani in vol. i. 29 ibid., iii. 1, 51. 30 ibid., i. 195-196. 31 Beth Hardasher or Beth Hartasher, in Persian Weh-Ardasher or Beh-Ard- asher, Arabicized Bahurasir, close by Seleucia, on the right bank of the Tigris. See Hoffmann, Verhandlungen der Kirchenrersammlung zu Ephesus, &c., p. 93, note 160. 32 B.O., iii. 1, 172. 33 Ibid., i. 207-234 ; Bickell, in Thalhofer's Bibliothek, No. 44, and Conspectus, p. 22. 34 That he is identical with Isaac, the disciple of Ephraim (as some have sup- posed), seems wholly unlikely. He may possibly have seen Ephraim in the flesh, but this is very doubtful, considering the date of his own death. Even Jacob of Edessa appears to have got into some confusion on this subject (see Wright, Catal, p. 603, col. 2). 35 Land, Anecd. Syr., iii. 84. 36 B.O., i. 208-209 ; see Dionysii Telmahharcnsis Chronici liber I., ed. Tullberg, 1850, p. 52, and Euscbii OmORVfll Epitome ei Dionysii Telm. Chronico petita, by C. Siegfried and H. Gelzer, 1884, p. 29. The difficulty was first cleared up by Scaliger, who in his Thesaurus Temporum, Animadv. No. MDLXIV., proposed . 37 B.O., i. 211. 38 See Bickell, Conspectus, p. 23, note. 39 B.O., i. 214-215, ii. 355 ; Bar-Hebreus, Chron. Ecdes., i. 447. 40 B.O., i. 214-234. 41 s. Ephraemi Syri, &c., Opera Selecta, pp. 379-381. 42 Monumenta Syriaca, i. 13-20 ; see also some extracts in Zingerle's Chrestmn. Syr., pp. 299 sq., 387 sq. Zingerle has translated large portions of the homilies on the Crucifixion into German in the Tubinger Theolog. Quartalschrift, 1870, 1. Further, Cardahi, Liber Thes., pp. 21-25.