Early Christianity outside the Roman Empire/Introduction

by Francis Crawford Burkitt

 

INTRODUCTION.

 

To the student of general history Christianity makes its appearance as a Greek religion. The first Christian communities of any considerable size had their home in the great Greek cities on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. In Alexandria, in Antioch, in Ephesus, in Smyrna, in Corinth—all near the sea, and in easy communication with one another—the little Churches came into being and developed their organisation. The whole Ecclesiastical vocabulary is Greek. Bishops, Priests, Deacons, the Laity, Baptism, the Eucharist, all the terms are Greek in origin. It is the same with literature. From the alien religion out of which Christianity had sprung the Church inherited her Sacred Books in a Greek translation, and the writings of Christians that after a time were added on to the Canon of Scripture as a New Volume—these writings were composed in Greek also. In a word, the Church grew up on Greek soil.

The life of the Greek cities reacted on the development of the Churches. The thought and activity of small and progressive bodies must always be largely determined by the atmosphere of the great world outside, whether by way of protest or of assimilation. For this reason early Christian literature, apart from the Jewish controversy, is mainly occupied with an attack upon Greek vices and the Greek Pantheon. With these no terms were possible. But as Christianity advanced an antagonist came on the scene more honourable and therefore more dangerous than Jupiter and his court or even than the Genius of the Emperor. No Religion could establish itself in the Greek-speaking world without coming to a reckoning with Greek Philosophy. Christianity had to face the old problems of the One and the Many, of Mind and Matter, of the infinite Divine Essence and its Manifestation in time and place.

Not that the Church, the main body of Christians, was in any hurry to engage in these difficult studies. They were forced on her from outside, from the borderland between Christianity and Heathendom, where thinkers such as Valentinus and Basilides attempted to unite the science and philosophy of the then civilised world with the life and doctrines of the new religion. The instinct of the Church, rather than her logical power, rejected the early Gnostics and their Ogdoads, but it was not possible to go on for ever with mere refutation. After three centuries a system was elaborated which the Church was able to recognise, and the Christian Faith was enshrined in a fixed symbol, which remains to this day as the accepted Christian account of the nature of God in Himself and of the relations between God and man. The Creeds mark the final Concordat between Christianity and Philosophy.

We all know that this is not the whole truth. The Church may have grown up on Greek soil, but Christianity itself is not Greek in origin. The very earliest stage of all, that stage which it is most important for all of us to know and understand, is not Greek but Semitic. Our Lord was not sent save unto the lost sheep of the House of Israel. He lived the life of a Jew. He spoke in the current dialect of Palestine to His fellow-countrymen, and His conversations with his friends and His controversies with His foes turned on the things which troubled or interested the Jewish community of Palestine in the early part of the first century of our Era. Christ came not to promulgate a Creed, a form of words containing the quintessence of philosophical truth, but to live a life among men; and for us to feel the true force of His words, to appreciate the attitude He took up towards the current hopes and beliefs of those among whom He lived, we must find out and understand those beliefs. We must learn the language that His contemporaries spoke and study their phraseology.

When we attempt to do this we catch a glimpse of a very different world from that of Greek Christianity. Alas, it is only a glimpse! The great catastrophe of the Jewish War, culminating with the sack of Jerusalem, finally separated the Church and the Synagogue. The Jewish state came to an end, and with it perished the primitive Semitic Christianity. The Christians of Judaea fled to the mountains, and when the troubles were over the survivors seem to have mingled themselves with the Greek-speaking urban population. Thus the one community which might have preserved the earliest traditions was swallowed up. So far as we can find out, Christianity ceased in the land of its birth, save that a small colony about which we only know the Greek names of its Bishops is said to have struggled on in Jerusalem. The shadow of their names falls across the page of Eusebius, but no deed or word is assigned to the silent figures.

Thus it has come to pass that our information even about the outward events of our Lord's ministry is so painfully scanty. The story of the earthly life of Jesus of Nazareth and of the first days of the infant community was known to the Church, and has come down to us, only through certain literary channels. Those events of the early Galilean ministry which are recorded in S. Mark's narrative are known to us, but how few others! The Church's acquaintance with the first stage of Christianity rested on written documents, not on living tradition: for good and for evil the Greeks did not know Christ after the flesh.

Let me remind you in passing that this is not a mere literary question of Quellenkritik. On the contrary, it is the keystone of Protestantism. The one thing which historically justifies us in breaking with the Catholic tradition is this breach of continuity at the earliest period. We are entitled to criticise the Greek Gospels freely, to suggest on due evidence that phrases or figures have been wrongly or imperfectly apprehended, in a word we have a right privately to revise the judgments of the Church, mainly because the Church of the second century was so far removed in spirit and in knowledge from the life of Judaea in our Lord's day. Do not let me be misunderstood. I am not maintaining that this separation was not inevitable. The work of the Church was to overcome the world, not to furnish material for archaeologists. Still, if we could know more about the beliefs, the rites, the sacraments, of the community of 'Nazarenes' that S. Jerome mentions more than once with such tantalising brevity, it is my firm conviction that we should possess a key that would unlock many of the riddles which obstruct the Evangelic history and darken to us the recorded sayings of Christ.

But if between the Church of the second century and the Apostles there is a great gulf fixed, in what words are we to describe the difference between the Nicene and Post-Nicene Church and primitive Christianity? Here all will acknowledge the vastness of the change. At the same time, it may be said that the change was due to natural growth: the line that it took was, as a matter of fact, the historical development of Christianity. The Church of Justin Martyr and Irenaeus is undoubtedly continuous with that of Athanasius and Hilary, and that Church came to Nicaea and proceeded to Chalcedon. After all, the Creeds are merely the formal ratification of the best theology of the great Churchmen. The new Constitution was, in fact, inevitable—like the promulgation of the Pope's Infallibility at a later day, long after the dogma had been a pious inference in the Roman communion.

This may indeed be so, and I for one should be very willing to believe that the rigidity of the later Church was indispensable for it to withstand the shock of the Barbarian invasions which swept away the ancient Civilisation. But the object that I have chiefly had in view in these Lectures is to glance at a strangely neglected branch of the Church, a branch in full communion and fellowship with the rest of the Christian body and proud of its Apostolic descent, yet cut off by political and linguistic circumstances from that struggle with Greek philosophy which so greatly influenced the Christianity of the Greek-speaking populations within the Roman Empire.

I speak, of course, of the Christianity of the Euphrates valley, of the Church whose language was Syriac and its metropolis Edessa. But before we settle down to our study of this Church we shall do well to consider how it came to pass that it is the only historical rival of the Greeks.

Let us look round the Roman Empire. To the north and west it is obvious that Greek-speaking Christianity could have no competitors. Marcion of Pontus to all intents and purposes counts as a Greek. The few Christians of Armenia used Syriac until the 4th century. The Latin Christianity of the West and of N. Africa is wholly the child of Greek Christianity. At a much later period it also developed distinctive characteristics, but it inherited nothing of primitive Christianity which it did not get through Greek Christianity. The language, the laws, the customs of the Latins are all utterly foreign to Palestine and Semitic thought.

Nor does Egypt supply anything for our purpose. Christianity was early established in Alexandria, but Alexandria was less Egyptian than Gibraltar is Spanish. There is little to shew that Christianity spread among the native Egyptians till the rise of monasticism, still less that a Christian, literature existed in any Coptic dialect before the latter half of the 3rd century. The vast increase of information about the condition of Egypt under the Empire which the last fifty years has witnessed, has served only to confirm the familiar words of Gibbon. "The progress of Christianity was for a long time confined within the limits of a single city, which was itself a foreign colony; and, till the close of the 2nd century, the predecessors of Demetrius were the only prelates of the Christian Church. … The body of the natives, a people distinguished by a sullen inflexibility of temper, entertained the new doctrine with coldness and reluctance; and even in the time of Origen it was rare to meet with an Egyptian who had surmounted his early prejudices in favour of the sacred animals of his country. As soon, indeed, as Christianity ascended the throne, the zeal of those barbarians obeyed the prevailing impulsion; the cities of Egypt were filled with bishops, and the deserts of Thebais swarmed with hermits^[1]."

The political fortunes of Edessa, the metropolis of the Syriac-speaking Church, offer a remarkable contrast to any other centre of early Christianity. Until a.d. 216, in the reign of Caracalla, Edessa was outside the Roman Empire. The Toparch or kinglet of the place, whose name seems always to have been Abgar or Maʿnu, owed some allegiance to the Parthian monarchs, but the little state enjoyed most of the conditions favourable for independent literary development. The language of the people was also the language of the nobles and of government. The local patriotism was that of the ancient Greek states or the Italian commonwealths of a later day, and was as far as possible removed from the cosmopolitanism of the Empire. At the same time the city was not cut off from a wide intercourse with surrounding communities. The Aramaic of Edessa was more than a mere local dialect: it was the medium of commerce throughout the Euphrates valley, while the Aramaic of Palmyra and of Palestine hardly differed from it more than Lowland 'Scots' differs from the standard English. Edessa, in one word, was situated on the confines of two great civilisations, the Greek and the Persian, while at the same time it had not been robbed of its own Semitic culture. The extant remains of Syriac literature are almost wholly the product of later ages and less fortunate conditions; it is the misfortune of Edessa, not her fault, that she was unable to maintain her intellectual freedom through the shock of the Persian wars. But, the ease and vigour of the earliest surviving literature of the Syriac-speaking Church, whether prose, poetry, or philosophical discussion, unmistakably reflect the glory of Edessa's three hundred years of honourable independence.

Christianity appears to have reached the Euphrates valley about the middle of the second century. The Bishops of Edessa trace their succession to Serapion, Bishop of Antioch from 190 to 203, and there is all the more reason for believing this tradition to be historically exact, because it contradicts so glaringly the alternative story of the successful preaching of Christianity at Edessa by Addai, one of the 72 disciples. We need not, however, delay long over the outward history of the Syriac-speaking Church. The subject has been well worked out by the Rev. Prof. Tixeront, a French scholar of the school of Duchesne^[2]. The main thing that concerns us here is that Christianity was planted in Edessa and the Church organisation established there while it was yet an independent state.

For the inner character of Syriac-speaking Christianity in its early stages we must turn from history to the surviving documents. The list, alas, is miserably scanty. The later Syrians had different tastes and a different standard of orthodoxy from their forefathers and we may certainly add from ourselves. Syriac literature, as it has come down to us, consists for the most part of the contents of one great Monophysite library, that of the Convent of S. Mary Deipara in the Nitrian desert. The mere fact that it did not contain a ms. of the Diatessaron is enough to shew that its collection of the earlier Syriac writings is quite inadequate. Nevertheless, enough remains to give us some idea of the temper of the first two centuries of Syriac Christianity in its very varied forms. It will be convenient to give here a list of the works which supply the materials for our investigation. They may be grouped under six heads, as follows:

1. The Old Testament in Syriac, commonly called the Pĕshiṭtā.

2. The Evangeliôn da-Mĕpharrĕshê or Old Syriac Version of the Gospels, and the closely allied Diatessaron of Tatian.

3. The Doctrine of Addai and the early Martyrologies (Acts of Sharbêl, Barsamyâ, etc.).

4. The Book of the Laws of Countries, commonly known as 'Bardesanes De Fato,' but really composed by Bardaisan's disciple Philip.

5. The Syriac Acts of Thomas, including the great Gnostic Hymn which is ascribed by modern scholars to Bardaisan himself.

6. The Homilies of Aphraates.

It is the two last of these, the Acts of Thomas and Aphraates' Homilies, which more especially concern us. You will notice that I have included neither the works of Ephraim Syrus nor the revised version of the N.T. in Syriac which goes by the name of the Peshitta. The reason is only partly chronological. Ephraim's chief literary activity and the publication of the N.T. Peshitta may both be placed about the middle of the 4th century. But they stand apart from the list given above for other reasons. Both represent that effort to keep pace with the Greeks, which ossified the Syriac language and landed the Syriac-speaking Churches in the course of a hundred years in the opposite errors of the Monophysites and the Nestorians.

The N.T. Peshitta is a revision of the Old Syriac, not a fresh translation. It must have been the work of learned and conscientious scholars: its great merit is that it left so much of the old work standing. Accuracy and timidity are the chief characteristics of the revisers, and we can still trace the influence of Greek theology and the Greek grammarians as well as the use of Greek mss.^[3]

Ephraim's excessive verbosity makes it difficult to discover his real theological position. In a time of transition, such as he lived in, the art of saying nothing in a great many words must have been exceedingly useful, and the saint who preferred to glue together the pages of Apollinaris's book rather than attempt to confute the writer must have been aware that argument was not his strong point. The ultimate reasons which led to the short-lived and disastrous triumph of Greek thought over the native Syriac Christianity were political rather than theological, and Ephraim only too well represents the temporary and verbal complaisance of the Syriac-speaking subjects of the Christianised Empire at the end of the 4th century^[4]. It was a state of things which could not last long, and in a couple of generations after Ephraim hardly a single orthodox community was left in Mesopotamia. Let us not linger now over the ill-matched union of Greek and Semitic thought, but go back to the time when the Syriac-speaking Church was still free and innocent.

The Old Testament in Syriac first claims our attention, and chiefly because it may serve to remind us of one most important factor among the populations of the Euphrates valley, viz. the Jews. The appellation Pĕshiṭtâ (i.e. 'simple') by which this version is familiarly known to us does not seem to be older than the 9th century. It was probably given to distinguish it from the work of Paul of Tella, which is a translation made from Origen's Hexapla and consequently embellished with a complicated apparatus of critical signs. But the Syriac Vulgate of the O.T. is much more ancient than the name Pĕshiṭtâ. It is largely and accurately quoted by Aphraates, and unmistakeable traces of its use appear in the Acts of Thomas: in other words, it has as early an attestation as our surviving materials carry us.

The Peshitta is a direct translation from the Hebrew, in all essentials from the Massoretic text. Some books, such as Chronicles, are amazingly paraphrased, but the variations appear to be due to the caprice of the translator or his exegetical tradition, not to differences of reading in the underlying Hebrew. Apart from intentional paraphrase the translation is fairly done: so well, in fact, that we cannot think of it as the work of Gentiles. It seems to me not improbable that it is a monument of Jewish learning of the great age of translations, the age of Aquila and Symmachus, which has been taken over by the Christian Church. Had it been wholly the work of Christians, I cannot but think that we should have heard of the singular erudition of the translators and of their courage in breaking away from the Greek tradition. However that may be, the Peshitta is in itself an unanswerable demonstration that the earliest Syriac Church contained a large Jewish element. This is quite in accordance with the early traditions in the Doctrine of Addai^[5], and harmonises (as we shall see) with what is found in Aphraates. Thus the independent civilisation of Edessa made a vernacular translation necessary, while the presence of an influential Jewish factor in the infant Church secured that the translation of the Old Testament should be made from the original Hebrew.

The earliest N.T. Canon of the Syriac-speaking Church consisted of the Gospel, the Epistles of S. Paul, and the Acts. "The Law and the Prophets and the Gospel from which ye read every day before the people, and the Epistles of Paul which Simon Cephas sent us from the city of Rome, and the Acts of the Twelve Apostles which John the son of Zebedee sent us from Ephesus,—from these writings shall ye read in the Churches of the Messiah and besides them nothing else shall ye read." This is the Canon of the Doctrine of Adai^[6],and the list is confirmed by the actual practice of Aphraates. I am not going to enter on the difficult and disputed question of the relative priority of the translation into Syriac of the Four Gospels and of the Diatessaron, important as it is in many ways. The investigation would involve us in a mass of detail quite foreign to the scale of this Lecture. Speaking generally, we may say that the scanty notices in Syriac writings and the usage of Aphraates himself are most naturally interpreted if we assume the Diatessaron to have been first in the field. Before the discovery of the Sinai Palimpsest of the Four Gospels in the Old Syriac version there was no doubt that the arguments for the priority of the Diatessaron seemed much the stronger. But now the balance of internal evidence has very considerably shifted: the more intimately we know the Evangeliôn da-Mĕpharrĕshê, the more primitive seems to have been its original form.

What concerns us now is not so much the literary history of the Gospel in Syriac as the light thrown by these early versions on the knowledge accessible to the translators. The earliest retranslation of our Lord's words into a Semitic tongue cannot fail to contain much that is of interest for us. And we find, as might have been anticipated, a mixture of happy intuition and of helplessness. At every turn we are reminded that we are dealing with mere translations and adaptations of the Greek Gospels, yet with translations which have often the rare opportunity of being more exact and more happy than the original work. Happily also the translator was unhampered by pedantic methods, such as some four centuries later disfigured the effort of Justinian's clergy to give the people of Palestine the Scriptures in their own tongue: no version is more idiomatic than the Old Syriac or less affected. The Proper Names are given in the original forms or an approximation thereto: Ḥalpai, Mattai and Malku replace Αλφαῖος, Μαθθαῖος and Μάλχος. By the Latins and ourselves Χριστὸς is transliterated, but the Syriac has Mĕshîḥâ, the Messiah or Anointed one; in the accusation of Lk xxiii 2 ("saying that he is Christ a king") the term used is Malkâ Mĕshîḥâ, the very same phrase syllable for syllable that we so often meet with in Jewish literature and usually translate by 'King Messiah^[7].' It is still more surprising and instructive to find that 'salvation' is identified by the Syriac usage with 'life.' Σωτὴρ is Maḥyânâ 'Life-giver,' and 'to be saved' is 'to live.' This is the more remarkable, as Syriac has several words meaning 'to deliver,' 'to protect,' and 'to be safe and sound.' May we not therefore believe that this identification of 'salvation' and 'life' is the genuine Aramaic usage, and that the Greek Gospels have in this instance introduced a distinction which was not made by Christ and His Aramaic-speaking disciples?

But exegetical help of this kind is not always to be got out of the Syriac versions. In cases of real difficulty we can often see that the translator is only struggling with the unknown meaning of the Greek, and that his rendering, for all its Semitic appearance, contains no element of originality. There is one very marked instance, which will serve to illustrate what I mean. No phrase in the Gospel is more characteristic or more obscure than the title ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου, the Son of Man, used by our Lord of Himself in many very varied aspects of His mission. To seize the full meaning, or meanings, we must be able to retranslate the Greek words into the original Aramaic expression. It is well known that in some circumstances the Aramaic dialects use the phrase 'a son of man' for 'a human being '; moreover, there is an undoubted connexion of some kind between our Lord's use of 'The Son of Man' and the very similar phrase in Daniel's Vision^[8] which itself was written in Aramaic. For many reasons, therefore, we turn to the Syriac renderings of ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου with some justifiable expectation of obtaining help. As a matter of fact, we get none at all. The ordinary rendering in the Old Syriac documents, as in the Peshitta N.T., is b'reh d'ʾnâshâ—a phrase sufficiently like barnashâ 'a human being' to sound original, but really just as little native Syriac as 'The Son of Man' is English. 'The Son of Man' has no natural meaning in English: it is a mere conventional rendering of ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου. Similarly, b'reh d'ʾnâshâ has no natural meaning in Syriac. Moreover, it is not the rendering of the O.T. Peshitta in Dan vii 13, which has bar ʾnâshîn which means (if it has any real meaning) 'son of some folk.' Nor is this all. if B'reh d'ʾnâshâ not a very illuminating translation, is at least inoffensive. But the earliest Syriac documents give us here and there, sometimes singly and sometimes in conjunction, the amazing alternative b'reh d'γaβrâ. This is a literal, a too literal, rendering of ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου. It means filius uiri, 'the son of the man.' The fact that so inadequate a rendering is actually found can only be explained on the supposition that it was the primitive Syriac equivalent for the Greek words. But if it could be tolerated at all, there must have been an utter absence of exegetical tradition in the Church.

Thus we come back to the point from which we started. The Greek-speaking Church and its daughters were wholly dependent for its historical information about our Lord and His times on the bare letter of the Greek Gospels, and the only advantage in this respect enjoyed by the Christians of Edessa was that their native idiom was akin to that of Palestine.

In studying the Syriac-speaking branch of the Church, therefore, we may not hope to find an organisation more primitive than that of Justin Martyr or Hegesippus. But we know too little about the Church of the second century not to be grateful for anything that promises to throw light upon its aims and beliefs. And here the Syriac evidence is of real value. The Christianity planted in the Euphrates valley in the latter half of the second century seems to have developed more slowly—in other words, changed less—than that of the Greeks. Two hundred years later, in the middle of the fourth century, we still hear the old watchwords in their full vigour from the mouth of a monk and bishop of the orthodox communion.

 

1. Bury's Gibbon ii 60.
2. Les Origines de l'Église d'Édesse … par L.-J. Tixeront, Paris, 1888.
3. The Word and the Spirit are treated for theological purposes as masculine, contrary to the genius of the language, and in Joh i 14 flesh is substituted for the Old Syriac body. In Grammar we may notice the consistent omission of the Semitic 'and' at the beginning of the apodosis, e.g. in Lk xii 46.
4. Ephraim's emancipation from the native tradition is well illustrated by the fact that he quotes the Apocalypse by name (Opp. Syr. ii 332 c), though the book was not, and is not to this day, included in the Syriac Canon.
5. Phillips, E. tr. pp. 32, 33.
6. Syriac text, p. 46.
7. According to Dalman (Worte Jesu, 240) we ought not to render it 'King Messiah' but 'The anointed King.'
8. Dan vii 13.