hatsoff

Hey, guys.

It struck me just now that almost no *original* Christian writings were composed in Aramaic or Syriac, despite those being (allegedly) the prevailing dialects of the earliest Christians. I was curious, was there perhaps some kind of anti-literary sentiment which permeated Aramaic-speaking communities? If not, why did they fail to document their own religion?

It's easy to understand why Greek prevailed, but I would expect at least an Aramaic remnant. Yet none survives, in text or in reference! How should we explain this curious absence of evidence?

Thanks in advance!
--Ben

mountainman

We know that Arius retired to Syria
and that Constantine was trying to
tease his out into the open.

The Syriac and the Coptic appear to
be the two languanges used by the
anti-christian resistance and polemic
of the fourth century.

Many non canonical sources were preserved
in the Syriac and the Coptic. They were translated
away from the Greek and Latin so that they
could not be identified by prying, seeking and
destructive "canonical authoritative eyes".

Have a look at the Coptic Nag Hammadi.
The Syriac IMO is another version of the
mechanism of preservation of Greek values
and literature which would otherwise have
been destroyed by the christian councils
and imperial decrees of the later fourth century.

Another classic Syriac preservation miracle is
the text belongling to the ex-Archbishop of
Constantinople, Nestorius, whose writings
became contaversial and were burnt by the
authodox murderers and brigands who comprised
the christian political regime at that time.

Late in the 1800's "The Bazaar of Heraclites"
in the Syriac was unearthed. This turned out
to the the writings of Nestorius, in disguise, and
disguised from Greek and Latin christian eyes
being written in the Syriac, under a pseudonym.

http://www.mountainman.com.au/essene...tantinople.htm


Best wishes,


Pete Brown

Roger Pearse

This is mistaken, I'm afraid. Have a read of Wright or Brock. The quantity of original Syriac stuff is immense. There were pagan poetry collections in Syriac too, which still existed until the 13th century (which is when Syriac culture is pretty much destroyed by the Mongols).

That we are mainly concerned with translations from Greek reflects our interests, not theirs.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

judge

Roger's point is probably very relevant. Their culture was decimated. It might be difficult for us westeners to grasp this as we have been taught that the RCC was the original church and that the reformation was the reforming of that divinely ordained exclusive institution.

For many years most christians were not part of this church though.

From here

Their liturgy shows signs of being extremely ancient also.

Roger Pearse

Sounds a bit dubious to me.

That is a reprint of a 19th century text, tho, isn't it?

All the best,

Roger Pearse

mountainman

Constantine decimated the Hellenics by prohibition.
His christian regime decimated the Hellenic civilisation.
The term you are seeking is called the universal church.

Here is what ArnaldoMomigliano says about the
the universal church from my notes in his work:

The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography
Sather Classical Lectures (1961-62)
Volume Fifty-Four
University of California Press, 1990

Sorry about the formatting.

p.150 re:the universal church
"Eusebius dealt with heresies, but he had no suspicion that the very course of
events of the first Christian centuries could be disputed and that there might
be more than one interpretation of basic events. The position of St. Peter,
the development of ecclesiastical hierarchy, the origin and development of at
least certain sacraments were not a matter of controversy for him. They were,
needless to say, at the centre of attention both by Flacius Illyricus and by
Caesare Baronio, who, after attempts by others, at last produced the Catholic
answer to the Protestant ecclesiastical historiography. What characterises the
new historiography of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation is the search
for the true image of Early Christianity to be opposed to the false ones of the
rivals."


p.151
"As long as the notion of a Universal Church was not in dispute, Eusebius remained
the source of inspiration for ecclesiatical historians. The enormous, almost
pathological, output of ecclesiastical history in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries becomes more and more involved in the discussions of details, and more
and more diversified in theological outlook, but it never repudiates the basic
notion that a Universal Church exists beyond the individual Christian comminities."


"It is of course impossible to indicate the exact moment in which the history
of the Church began to be studied as the history of a human community instead
of a divine institution."


"If I had to produce my own candidate, I would go back to the first half of the
eighteenth century and name Pietro Giannone, who meditated deeply on the relation
between ecclesiastical and political history and about 1742 wrote in prison
a sketch of the history of ecclesiastical history which would be published only
in 1859 (Istoria del Pontificato di Gregorio Magno in Opere di Pietro
Giannone, ed. Bertelli-Ricuperati, Naples, 1971).

The truth is of course that historians of the church are still divided on the
fundamental issue of the divine origin of the church. The number of professional
historians who take the Church as a divine intitution -- and can therefore be
considered to be the followers of Eusebius -- increased rather than decreased
in the years after the FIrst World War. On the other hand the historians who
study the history of the Church as that of a human institution have consolidated
their methods. They have been helped by the general adoption in historiography
of those standards of erudite research which at seems at one time to have been
confined to ecclesiastical historians and controversialists. We sometimes forget
that Eduard Meyer was, at least in Germany, the first non-theologian to write a
scholarly history of the origins of Christianity, and this happened only in 1921.


p.152
"Those who accept the notion of the Church as a divine institution
which is different from the other institutions
have to face the difficulty that the Church history reveals only too obviously
a continuous mixture of political and religious aspects:
hence the distinction frequently made by Church historians of the last two centuries
between internal and external history of the Church,
where internal means (more or less) religious
and external means (more or less) political.



p.152

"At the beginning of this imposing movement of research and controversy
there remains Eusebius of Caesarea. In 1834 Ferdinand Christian Baur
wrote in "Tubingen" a comparison between Eusebius and Herodotus:
Comparatur Eusebius Caesarensis historiae ecclesiasticae parens cum
parente historiarum Herodoto Halicarnassensi.

We can accept this comparison and meditate on his remark
that both Herodotus and Eusebius wrote under the inspiration
of a newly established freedom.

But scholars are convinced that there not many in the
population who supported Constantine, and that the
bulk of the eastern civilians belonged to pagan churches,
or rather associated themselves with pagan temples and
shrines, as had been the custom for centuries.

Since the dominant language in the academic world at
that time was Greek, and that the authodox Romans
spoke Latin, there was a huge impetus to start writing
in non-Latin and non-Greek languages, in order to
preserve the writings which were being otherwise
-- to use the earlier phrase -- decimated by
the new imperial christian regime.

The Syriac language has many fine examples of this
principle, as does the Coptic, which is a kind of
Egyptian Greek.

These non Greek/Latin literay languages were the only
viable means for the preservation of any material which
was --- for one reason or another -- classified as
heretical or inappropriate for preservation.

Have a good long look at the Coptic of Nag Hammadi.

Have a look at the Syriac documents which have come
to light during the period 1850 to present. Some of
these are not well studied as compared to the texts
transmitted from antiquity "direct", and some of them
have literally overturned "scholarly opinion" of the
earlier years due to their content. (I have mentioned
the text of Nestorius above somewhere).

There will be I think many more surprises out of the
Syriac language in store for BC&H. It was the language
of the Greek resistance, in part. It hosted the
underground texts because of its anonymity.

Best wishes,


Pete Brown

arnoldo

Minimalists demand archaelogical evidence. here.
Source: Assyrian Christian Missions in China 635 - 1550 AD By Esha Emmanuel Tamras

Roger Pearse

The link appears to be about the Xian monument, but I'm not sure how that relates to my post. Nevertheless it's always welcome to see awareness of the Nestorians being promoted.

For those not familiar with it, East Syriac (Nestorian) missionaries travelled into the East as far as China. A large bi-lingual Syriac-Chinese inscription was discovered in Xian in China a century ago. Even today Mongolian is written in Syriac characters.

There is some question as to whether the Nestorians were ever actually 'Nestorian' as defined in western formularies. In reality they were the people who felt that Nestorius was condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 433 for things which in fact he did not teach. This view is supported by the 19th century discovery at the court of the Nestorian Catholicos in Kotchanes of a manuscript of a Syriac translation of Nestorius' apology, the "Bazaar of Heracleides". (This manuscript was destroyed during WW1, but copies were made first, mainly secretly).

The actions of his enemy, Cyril of Alexandria, at that council have a curious look to them by modern standards, and Cyril was advised by his friend Isidore of Pelusium that many people thought that he behaved there in a self-serving manner, rather than for the benefit of the church. Cyril was temporarily deposed by the emperor afterwards. But Byzantine synods were mainly about power, about demonising and excluding your enemy and his supporters, not about agreement, and so were primarily a vehicle for politics-by-other-means. There is a reason why the RCC doesn't recognise any Greek council later than Chalcedon, and not all of them before then.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

judge

But is this really the best way to describe them?

When one reads the NT in Aramaic/Syriac one can find a slightly different Christology than that which developed within the Roman Empire, which used Greek versions of the NT.

In the Aramaic we have the term qnome which has no direct parallel in Greek. IIRC Nestorius although not part of the COE community was taught, in part at least, by Theodore which would have meant that he understood that there was one God and three qnome. This is different to the idea of the trinity which developed ijn the western churches.
With this understanding Nestorius could never agree with the idea of Theotokos, that Mary was the mother of god.
So Nestorius was condemned as he could agree mary was the mother of Jesus but not of god.
Many years after this when Nestorius was already dead, those christians to the east, the COE community were asked to condemn Nestorius.
They refused to condemn a man unable to defend himself (as he as dead).

So they were branded Nestorians, even though Nestorius was not ever part of their church.

In effect the RCC said .."You guys don't agree with what we say? You must be heretics"

BUt the COE has at least as early as 411 , at thier own council, declared themselves independent of western authority anyway.

andrewcriddle

IIUC the RCC does recognise some later Greek Councils See http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04423f.htm where the list of Eastern General Councils is extended to Constantinople IV 869.

IIUC the Anglican church recognises only the councils up to Chalcedom http://uk.encarta.msn.com/encycloped...f_England.html

Andrew Criddle