woodbrookestudie01theouoft.pdf

Reading text uses the stored archive index when available. Document text preserves reading order where available; original layouts, formulas and embedded images may differ. Speech reads the text as written and does not translate it.

WOODBROOKE STUDIES VOL. I

PUBLISHED FOR THE TRUSTEES OF THE WOODBROOKE SETTLEMENT, SELLY OAK, BIRMINGHAM BY W. HEFFER & SONS LIMITED CAMBRIDGE

WOODBROOKE STUDIES CHRISTIAN DOCUMENTS IN SYRIAC, ARABIC, AND GARSHUNI, EDITED AND TRANSLATED WITH A CRITICAL APPARATUS BY A. MINGANA WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY RENDEL HARRIS VOLUME I 1. BARSALlBI'S TREATISE AGAINST THE MELCHITES 2. GENUINE AND APOCRYPHAL WORKS OF IGNATIUS OF ANTIOCH 3. A JEREMIAH APOCRYPHON 4. A NEW LIFE OF JOHN THE BAPTIST 5. SOME UNCANONICAL PSALMS Reprinted from the "BULLETIN OF THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY," Volume n, 1927 CAMBRIDGE W. HEFFER & SONS LIMITED 1927

TO MR. EDWARD CADBURY WHOSE GENEROSITY AND ENCOURAGEMENT HAS MADE POSSIBLE THE PUBLICATION OP THE " WOODBROOKE STUDIES "

INTRODUCTORY NOTE. The "Woodbrooke Studies " will consist of texts and translations of Christian documents in Syriac, Arabic, and Garshuni drawn from the manuscripts forming part of my own collection, which, for the time being, is in the custody of the Rendel Harris Library, Selly Oak, Birmingham. 1 These Studies will appear first in serial form in the columns of the " Bulletin of the John Rylands Library," which is published twice during the course of the year, in the months of January and July. At the end of each year they will be issued in a separate volume uniform with the present initial issue. Dr. Rendel Harris has kindly consented to write an introduction to each treatise in the series. I find it impossible adequately to express my feelings of grateful appreciation of the generosity of Mr. Edward Cadbury, whose finan- cial assistance and encouragement has made possible the publication of these studies ; and for that reason I take the liberty of dedicating to him this first-fruit of his generous encouragement. To my colleague, Dr. Henry Guppy, the editor of the " Bulletin," I offer my sincere thanks for his painstaking interest in the editing and publication of these Studies. A. MINGANA. THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY, MANCHESTER. 1 The history of the collection will be dealt with in the introduction to the catalogue of it, upon which I am at present engaged. vii

CONTENTS. Introductory Note A Treatise of BarsalTbi against the Melchites : Introduction........ Preface and Translation ..... Text in Facsimile....... Index of Proper Names ..... Genuine and Apocryphal Works of Ignatius of Antioch Introduction . Preface and Translation Garshuni Text ....... Facsimile of the First Page of the Paris MS. Facsimile of the First Page of the Mingana MS. Facsimile of the Canon of Ignatius A Jeremiah Apocryphon : Introduction........ Preface and Translation Text in Facsimile of Mingana Syr. MS. 240 . Text in Facsimile of Paris Syr. MS. 65 A New Life of John the Baptist : Introduction Preface and Translation . Garshuni Text . Facsimile of Page from Mingana Syr. MS. 22 Facsimile of Page from Mingana Syr. MS. 183 . Some Uncanonical Psalms : Introduction Preface and Translation Text in Facsimile of Mingana Syr. MS. 31 . PAGE vii 2-9 17-63 64-92 93-96 9-16 96-109 110-120 121 122 123 125-138 148-191 192-216 217-233 138-145 234-260 261-285 286 287 145-147 288-292 293-294 viii

WOODBROOKE STUDIES

WOODBROOKE STUDIES. CHRISTIAN DOCUMENTS IN SYRIAC, ARABIC AND GARSHUNI EDITED AND TRANSLATED WITH A CRITICAL APPARATUS BY A. MINGANA. WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY RENDEL HARRIS. FASC. 1. (i) A Treatise of Barsalibi against the Melchites. (ii) Genuine and Apocryphal Works of Ignatius of Antioch. INTRODUCTIONS. BY RENDEL HARRIS. I. A TREATISE OF BAR SALIBI AGAINST THE MELCHITES. WE have been advised by our Master (whose name is Peace andwhose admonitions are all of the nature of Benedictions) that we ought not to waste our time gathering grapes of thorns or searching for figs among thistles ; his words and warnings, no doubt, include in their scope our literary occupations as well as our theological studies or our philanthropic activities. Here, as elsewhere, wasted time and unremunerative labour are under His ban ; and it may, therefore, well be asked whether it is wise to spend our slender residue of years over extinct literatures, forgotten writers and churches that are near to disappearance (e'yyus d^avtcr/^oi), as the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews would say, in view of the inveterascence which came under his own observation). We have before us a treatise by one who was once a great leader in the religious life and thought of the Syrian Church ; but his name

INTRODUCTIONS 3 is scarcely known in the West, and the church of which he was the leader has practically perished, its literature has ceased and has become the dryest of dry roots ; persecution has accomplished a disintegration which piety was insufficient to prevent. How many people know, or care to know, about Bar Salibi and his writings ? Why should we try to recall the author or search the dust heap of his literary remains for grains of possible gold ? When we have asked ourselves that question, there is one direction in which we immediately receive an encouraging response. Bar Salibi was not only a great ecclesiastic in a church that had passed its zenith, he was also a great scholar in the time of decline of the Syriac literature, and being a scholar as well as an administrator, he had a great library, which he knew how to use as well as to value. Alas ! that it has perished ! It had many ancient works of great worth, not only the original writings of Syrian fathers, but early translations made from Greek writers which have disappeared in the West. For instance, it is almost certain that he had a copy of the Diatessaron or Gospel Har?nony of Tatian, to which he refers and from which he quotes ; he had also a copy of a work of Hippolytus of Rome, called Heads against Gaius which was lost in the West ; its value can be inferred from its theme when the heads of the contention referred to are defined. There was a certain Gaius, who in the second or third century exercised his critical faculties, exactly as scholars are doing in the twentieth Christian aeon, over the authorship of the Fourth Gospel, and its irreconcilability with the authorship of the Apocalypse. Bar Salibi gives us many quotations from the lost Gaius, and helps us to see that this early devotee of Higher Criticism was not, as Lightfoot supposed, a mere phantom, a creation by Hippolytus of a straw-man for subse- quent demolition, but a real man of flesh and blood, with a powerful intellectual apparatus attached to his anatomy. The greatest of Bar Sahbi's works, both in compass and in variety is his commentary on the Scriptures covering the whole space from Genesis to Revelation, and filled with patristic matter both Eastern and Western. Complete copies are very rare, and we have the good fortune to possess the whole in one of our Woodbrooke MSS. It was this commentator's work that first drew the attention of Western scholars ; the portion of the commentary which deals with the Four Gospels was done into Latin by Dudley Loftus, in the seventeenth

4 WOODBROOKE STUDIES century, from a MS. in Trinity College, Dublin ; and in recent times the commentary on the Apocalypse, Acts and Catholic epistles, and in part the Gospels has been edited by Sedlac.ek in the series of Scriptores Syri. If we may judge from the parallel case of his successor Bar Hebraeus, there will, before long, be many theses presented for doctor's degrees in German Universities, from the commentaries of Bar Salibi. The treatise which we present in the following pages has no special scriptural interest ; it is ecclesiastical rather than Biblical ; but it has a value of its own, inasmuch as the controversy which it reflects throws a good deal of light on the relations of the Greek and Eastern churches in Bar Salibi's own day. It will bring vividly before us the facts of the subdivision of the Syrian churches and its three branches, in the days before the Roman church had invaded the area, and, in the in- terests of unity, made three divisions into six. We shall have before us the Nestorian or East Syrian Church with its God-and-Man doctrine of Christ, its noble protest against the deification of the Blessed Virgin, and its unparalleled record in the Mission fields of the far East ; next to them we shall have the Jacobite or West Syrian Church with its God-Man Christology, or as it is called by the wise, its Monophysite theology, its exaltation of the Virgin to celestial rank, and its defect of missionary zeal. Between the two lies a slender group of Syrian believers who have succumbed to the claims of the Greek theology of Antioch and Constantinople, securing their orthodoxy on the one hand by the acceptance of the decrees of the Council of Chalcedon, which made other Syrian churches excommunicate on one side or the other, and at the same time obtaining protection as well as patronage by attachment to the State church and the Imperial city. They are known as Melchites, or Royalists, and if few in number and confined to Palestine and North Syria for the most part, are an aggressive minority with the Ruling State and Dominant Greek Church at their back. We shall not hear much of the Nestorians in our tract ; they are too far East to be troublesome or troubled ; it is the little Melchite community that provokes the controversy reflected in the following pages of Bar Salibi ; the little man that is trying to put its arms round its big brother, and to annex him ; in reality a half-anonymous monk, one Rabban 'Isho', who seems to have been reconciled to the Greek Church and its theology and rituals, and who will have the great Bar Salibi in his embrace, and will prove to him that he is both insignificant

INTRODUCTIONS 5 and wrong, a terrible combination. We shall see presently the chief points of the appeal ; but it is as well to be forewarned, lest dis- appointment ensue. The matters discussed will not strike us as being of any great importance. Probably the reader will say, as he watches the two dogs over their bone of contention (as indeed happens com- monly in ecclesiastical strife), that, if this is Christianity, then I have little chance of being a Christian. The trivialities of ritual will have proper attention, the supposed decencies of liturgical usage and the like ; we shall know all about the war, and what they killed (or ex- communicated) each other for. When we have finished our study, we can set the infinitely little on one side, and estimate the value of what is left. We shall probably be impressed with the adroitness of Bar Salibi, but still more with his noble Christian spirit and temper, worthy of the Patriarch of half the East ; and, even if we do not feel drawn to his Monophyite doctrine, we shall be glad that he held it too tenaciously and too intelligently to be allured to its abandonment, by the bait of a personal attachment to, and promotion in a State church, which he knew to be a focus of increasing impurity, and political corruption. Now let us very briefly analyse the discussion of which Bar Salibi's portion is before us. Rabban ' Isho ' has written to Bar Salibi, a re- union tract to which the latter replies in ten chapters. The first condi- tion of re-union is that the Jacobites must learn how to cross themselves with two fingers, as do the Greeks and Latins ; and they must give up the practice of crossing themselves with one finger, which is a dangerous illustration of the Monophysite doctrine. They must also change the direction in which the crossing is exhibited, and no longer operate from left to right Further, in making such changes, Bar Salibi will find that he

Only voices installed on your device are offered. Install an Arabic voice in your device settings if none appears.