Aphrahat the Persian Sage

The author of the Demonstrations, eight of which appear in this volume, in English for the first time, has an unusual literary history. He was a Persian by nationality, in an age when the religion of Persia was Zoroastrianism, and yet he wrote in Syriac as a Christian theologian. His writings, now known to us as the works of Aphrahat, were remembered, quoted, translated and copied for at least two centuries after his death. But his own name seems to have been forgotten for a time. So in the manuscripts of the fifth and sixth centuries the Demonstrations are described as written by “the Persian Sage,” or by “Mar Jacob the Persian Sage.” And a writer of the eighth century, who had made a close study of these writings and worked out their date, admits that he has been unable to find out “who or what he was, his rank in the church, his name or where he lived.” More than that, the name Jacob, given to him rightly or wrongly, has led to his being confused with someone else. For many hundreds of years, from a time not long after they were written down to quite recent times, his works have been credited to an earlier Jacob, the famous and saintly bishop of Nisibis in the days of Constantine the Great. Not until the tenth century does the true name of “the Persian Sage” come to light as Aphrahat. Several well-informed and accurate authorities of that century and the three that followed call him by that name without hesitation, and it is the name by which modern scholars know him.

The Demonstrations are twenty-two in number, matching the number of letters in the Syriac alphabet, and each one begins with the letter that matches it in order. The first ten form a group of their own and are somewhat earlier in date than those that follow. They deal with Christian virtues, hopes and duties, as their titles show: “On Faith, Love, Fasting, Prayer, Wars, Monks, Penitents, the Resurrection, Humility, Pastors.” Of those that make up the later group, three concern the Jews: “On Circumcision, the Passover, the Sabbath.” These are followed by one described as “An Exhortation,” which seems to be a letter of rebuke written by Aphrahat, on behalf of a synod of bishops, to the clergy and people of Seleucia and Ctesiphon. After this the Jewish series resumes in five discourses: “On Various Foods, the Call of the Gentiles, Jesus the Messiah, Virginity, the Scattering of Israel.” The last three are of the same general kind as the first ten: “On Almsgiving, Persecution, Death and the Latter Times.” To this collection is added a twenty-third Demonstration, a supplement to the rest, “On the Grape.” By this title is meant the blessing handed down from the beginning through Christ, alluding to the words of Isaiah, “As the grape is found in the cluster, and one says, Do not destroy it” (Isaiah 65, verse 8). This treatise contains a discussion of chronology of some importance.

The discourses themselves give conclusive evidence of when they were written. At the end of section 5 of the fifth Demonstration, On Wars, the author counts the years from the era of Alexander, 311 before Christ, to the time of his writing as 648. So he wrote in the year 337, the year Constantine the Great died. The fourteenth Demonstration is formally dated in its last section, “in the month of Shebat, in the year 655,” that is, the year 344. At the close of the alphabetic series (twenty-second Demonstration, section 25) he tells us more fully that these dates apply to the two groups: the first ten were written in 337, the twelve that follow in 344. Finally, the supplementary discourse On the Grape was written, as it states (twenty-third Demonstration, section 69), in July of the year 345. So the whole work was completed within nine years, five years before the middle of the fourth century, and before the earliest work of Ephraim whose date can be fixed with certainty.

These Demonstrations fell far short of the boundless popularity that came to the countless hymns and homilies of Ephraim, but they seem to have won a recognized place in Syriac literature. It is true that the contrast is striking. Manuscripts holding portions of Ephraim’s works, great or small, turn up in overwhelming numbers in nearly every collection of Syriac writings. Of this series of twenty-three treatises, only one complete copy and two incomplete ones have come down to us, and extracts or quotations from them are very rare. Still, it is clear that writings thought worth translating into at least one foreign language at an early date must have had a considerable reputation in their home country. And we may presume that these two or three manuscripts, of the fifth and sixth centuries, are the survivors of a fairly large number, most of which have perished.

The Armenian translation is probably the earliest evidence now surviving that the Demonstrations circulated, though under a wrong attribution of authorship. It contains nineteen of them. Armenian scholars seem to agree that it was made in the fifth century, before the original had existed for more than a hundred years. An Ethiopic translation of the discourse On Wars survives, but there is no evidence that it was part of a translation covering all or any of the other twenty-two, and even its approximate date cannot be fixed.

The manuscript evidence does not reach back quite as far as the Armenian version. The oldest surviving manuscript of these discourses, Additional manuscript 17182 in the British Museum, contains the first ten and is dated 474. Bound up with it, under the same number, is a second, dated 512, containing the remaining thirteen. A third, Additional manuscript 14619, also of the sixth century, presents the whole series. A fourth, Oriental manuscript 1017, eight centuries more recent, will be mentioned further on. Of the three early manuscripts, the first calls the author merely “the Persian Sage,” and so does the third. The second puts his name at the head as “Mar Jacob the Persian Sage.”

Among Syriac authors, the first to show that he knew these treatises, at a date earlier than the oldest of these manuscripts, is Isaac of Antioch, known as “the Great,” whose writing career belongs to the first half of the fifth century. Passages have been pointed out in his works that are plainly borrowed, with slight changes, from the Demonstrations, especially from the one On Fasting and, less clearly, from the one On Faith. The borrowing, however, is silent. Isaac nowhere names the work, or its author, from which he took the illustrations, and even the expressions, that he uses on these subjects.

Before the end of the same century we find evidence that they were known, by reputation though apparently no further, to a Latin writer of western Europe: Gennadius of Marseilles, who continued Saint Jerome’s work On Illustrious Men and wrote about the year 495. He was mistaken, as will be shown shortly, about who wrote them, and wrongly informed about their number, which he supposes to be twenty-six. Yet Gennadius gives their titles so nearly correctly that there is no room to doubt that the discourses he describes are the ones we are discussing. He shows that he knows they are in Syriac, but gives no hint that he has ever seen them, or that he can read them.

In the seventh century, or at any rate early in the eighth, signs appear of a revival of interest in them. Georgius, “Bishop of the Arabs,” a Jacobite bishop, was asked by an anchorite named Joshua for information about the “Epistles,” as he calls them, of “the Persian Sage,” and about who wrote them. In the year 714 he wrote, in Syriac, a very full and careful reply. In it he quotes at length passages from several of them, including those mentioned above in which the dates of writing are stated precisely. From these dates he concludes that the author, whose name he confesses he does not know, wrote too early to be a disciple of Ephraim. We may safely agree with this conclusion, even though we hold that Ephraim wrote and taught earlier in the century than Georgius tries to place him. The point to notice is this. This learned and sharp-minded writer had made himself familiar with the Demonstrations by careful study, and yet he neither knows nor can guess the name of their author, nor can he report any tradition about who he was. He can tell only what he has learned from their contents: that they were written from 337 to 345 by a man who was a monk and a cleric, and that they were marked by certain peculiarities of doctrine.

So it appears that the series of discourses now known as the Demonstrations of Aphrahat was imitated, copied, and translated into Armenian, had its titles cited by a Latin biographer, and had its contents closely examined by an able critic, all within the four centuries after it was written. Yet through all that long period the name of Aphrahat had passed out of memory. Their author was usually known simply as “the Persian Sage,” or else with an added name that was ambiguous and misleading, “Jacob, the Persian Sage.” As we have seen, the scribes of two manuscripts, of the fifth and sixth centuries, and Georgius in the early eighth century, keep to the first of these. The scribe of the other sixth-century manuscript, thirty-eight years later than the earlier of the other two, uses the second. Misled by it, the Armenian translator, and Gennadius in his book of lives, fell into the error of identifying the Jacob who wrote the Demonstrations with a namesake: the earlier and more prominent Jacob of Nisibis, of whom we have had occasion to speak in dealing with the life of Ephraim. But no writings of this celebrated man are on record. Nor was he a Persian. He was a native of Nisibis, in his time a city of the Roman Empire, and he died in 338, seven years before the treatises in question were completed. Just as Jacob of Nisibis is too early to be their author, so on the other side Jacob of Sarug, whom Assemani suggested when he corrected the mistake of Gennadius, is too late, for he was not born until more than a century after the date of the last Demonstration.

Not until some years after the middle of the tenth century does “the Persian Sage” first appear under his own name. That name seems to have been forgotten in general among Syriac men of letters, but a tradition of it had survived. The Nestorian Bar Bahlul, about the year 963, writes this in his Syriac and Arabic dictionary: “Aphrahat, mentioned in the Book of Paradise, is the Persian Sage, as they record.” So too, in the eleventh century, Elias of Nisibis, also called Barsinaeus, who died in 1049, includes in his Chronography a table drawn from the twenty-third Demonstration, giving the reckoning of years from the Creation to the era of Alexander, 311 before Christ. He describes it as “The years of the house of Adam, according to the opinion of Aphrahat, the Persian Sage.” To the same effect, but with fuller information, the great light of the medieval Jacobite church, Gregory Barhebraeus, who died in 1286, lists the orthodox contemporaries of Athanasius in Part 1 of his Church Chronicle, and after Ephraim he names “the Persian Sage who wrote the Book of Demonstrations.” And again, in Part 2, he supplies his name in a slightly different form, as one who “was of note in the time of Papas the Catholicus”: “the Persian Sage, Pharhad by name, of whom there survive a book of admonition in Syriac, and twenty-two Epistles according to the letters of the alphabet.” Here we have not only the name and description of the man in question, but a fairly accurate account of his works, under the titles by which the manuscripts describe them, Epistles and Demonstrations. We also have a sufficient indication of his date, agreeing with the date the Demonstrations claim. For a man who began to write in 337 must have lived in the closing years of the life of Papas, who died in 334, and in the earlier years of the life of Ephraim. Yet again, a generation later, the learned Nestorian bishop Ebedjesu writes in his Catalogue of Syrian church writers: “Aphrahat, the Persian Sage, composed two volumes with Homilies that are according to the alphabet.” Here once more the name and description are given without hesitation, and the division of the discourses into two groups is correctly noted. But the closing words seem to distinguish these groups from the alphabetic Homilies. So either we must take the word translated “with” to mean “containing,” or we must conclude that Ebedjesu knew the work only at second hand, and inaccurately. Finally, in a very late manuscript, dated 1364, the first part of the twenty-third Demonstration, the chronological part, is found under this heading: “The Demonstration on the Grape, of the Sage Aphrahat, who is Jacob, Bishop of Mar Mathai.” Here, though the word “Persian” is missing, we have the author’s title of “Sage.” And the identification of the “Aphrahat” of the later authorities with the “Jacob” of the earlier ones is not merely implied but stated outright. Here, moreover, we have what seems to explain the double name. As author he is Aphrahat; as bishop he is Jacob, the second name having no doubt been taken when he was raised to the office of bishop. Such changes of name at consecration, which became customary in later ages of the Syrian church, were no doubt exceptional in the earlier period we are dealing with. But Aphrahat was a Persian name, given to him no doubt in childhood, when he was still outside the Christian fold, as will be shown shortly. It is a name thought to mean “Chief” or “Prefect,” and it may have seemed unsuited to the humility of the sacred office. That supplies a reason for putting in its place a name linked with sacred history, in both the Old and the New Testament. Here, finally, we have a direct statement of what Georgius had rightly inferred from the opening of the fourteenth Demonstration: that the writer was himself one of the clergy, and that in this Epistle he writes as a cleric to clerics.

We have now gathered together all the known authorities that give information about this collection of treatises and its author. It remains to set out in connected form the facts they testify to, and to point out what may be inferred from their notices and from the treatises themselves.

That the author was a Persian by nationality is a point on which all the witnesses agree, except the fourteenth-century scribe of Oriental manuscript 1017, and he is merely silent about it. The name Aphrahat, as has been said already, is Persian. That fact at once confirms the tradition that he belonged to Persia, and helps to explain what seems to be the reluctance of early writers to call him by that name. It was foreign and unfamiliar, it was unsuited to the station he later held in the church, and it had been replaced by one with sacred associations. As a Persian, he dates his writings by the years of the reign of the Persian king. The twenty-two were completed, he says, in the thirty-fifth year of the reign of Sapor, and the twenty-third in the thirty-sixth. Again, as a Persian of the early fourth century, he was presumably not a Christian to begin with. This seems to be confirmed by the evidence of his own writings. He speaks of himself as one of those “who have cast away idols, and call that a lie which our father handed down to us”; and again as one of those “who ought to worship Jesus, because he has turned our perverse minds away from all the superstitions of empty error, and taught us to worship one God, our Father and Maker.” But clearly he must have lived in a frontier region where Syriac was freely spoken, or else moved to a Syriac-speaking country at an early age. For the language and style of his writings are entirely pure. They show no trace of foreign idiom, nor even of the awkwardness that gives away a foreigner writing in a language that is not his mother tongue. It is clear too that, at whatever age and in whatever circumstances he embraced Christianity, he must have taken the Christian Scriptures and Christian theology into his inmost heart and understanding, as every page of his writings shows.

We have already seen that Georgius, in his study of the Demonstrations, noticed the signs that prove the writer was one of the clergy. He goes further and notes that the sixth, On Monks, was plainly written by a monk. He might have added what is more important still: that the fourteenth, which he rightly singles out as plainly written by a cleric, can hardly have been written by anyone below the rank of bishop. This discourse is a letter to the bishops, clergy and people of the church of Seleucia and Ctesiphon, and the translation of its opening sentence is disputed. The words “we, being gathered together, have taken counsel to write this letter to our brothers … the bishops, priests and deacons, and the whole church” (fourteenth Demonstration, section 1) can be read in two ways. The “bishops, priests,” and the rest may be either the “we” who write, or the “brothers” who are written to. Whichever reading is adopted, the fact remains that Aphrahat writes here on behalf of a body of men assembled in council, who through him admonished their “dear and beloved brothers.” Further on they describe these as “the bishops, priests and deacons … and all the people of God who are in Seleucia and Ctesiphon.” It is not conceivable that any body of men except a synod of bishops, with their clergy and people present and agreeing, would in that age of the church have taken it on itself to meet, consult, and address such a letter of admonition, and of implied rebuke, to that great see. It was the seat of the “Catholicus of the East,” the bishop who in the eastern hierarchy was lower in dignity than the patriarch of Antioch alone, and in authority almost his equal. And we may safely assume that the writer of the letter was one of the bishops in whose name it is written, probably the chief of them. Suppose we accept the statement of the scribe of Oriental manuscript 1017, mentioned above, which is late but probable on its own terms, that “the Persian Sage” was “Bishop of the monastery of Mar Mathai.” Then we arrive at a complete explanation of the circumstances in which this letter was written. For the bishop of Mar Mathai was metropolitan of Nineveh, and among the bishops of “the East” he ranked second only to the Catholicus. His province bordered on the one the Catholicus held under his own direct authority as metropolitan of Seleucia. So the bishop of Mar Mathai would properly preside over a synod of the eastern bishops meeting to consider the disorders and quarrels in Seleucia and the sees under it. That makes it understandable how a letter of such an official character has found a place in a series of discourses that are otherwise written simply as from one man to another. The writer addresses the bishops, clergy and people of Seleucia and Ctesiphon in the name of a synod over which he presided, a synod probably of the bishops under Nineveh, and perhaps of some neighboring sees as well. So the admonition comes officially from “Mar Jacob, Bishop of Mar Mathai,” but the thoughts, the language and the literary form are Aphrahat’s own work. Accordingly he includes it as the fourteenth in his alphabetic series of twenty-two treatises, where it is duly marked by its opening letter, nun, the fourteenth letter of the Semitic alphabet. It certainly breaks the sequence of subjects, coming between treatises about Judaism; but the alphabetic sequence requires it. This alphabetic arrangement was overlooked or ignored, it seems, by the Armenian translator. He left out four of the twenty-two, moved others, and placed the fourteenth apart from the rest. Yet in the twenty-second Demonstration, which is not, however, included in the Armenian version, the author lists all their titles in their order, and notes that it is the order of the alphabet. In the Syriac original there is no question that the fourteenth Demonstration is an integral part of the series. And we may rely with confidence on the evidence it gives in itself of the writer’s high rank in the church. That evidence is confirmed by, and in turn confirms, the statement of the fourteenth-century scribe who makes him bishop of the second see of the East.

To return to the question of Aphrahat’s Persian nationality: this monastery of Mar Mathai stood on the eastern side of the Tigris, that is, the Persian side, not far from what was once Nineveh and is now Mosul. It is on the steep mountain Elpheph, now called Maklob, where it still stands, though in ruins. It is known by the name of Sheikh Matta, and the Metran, or metropolitan, lives there with a few monks.

The remoteness of his see, and probably of the place he plainly came from and lived in, from the centers of religious thought and controversy is probably the reason these discourses are so notably silent about the great theological questions that had occupied, and in his time were absorbing, the leading minds of Christendom. He began to write within ten years after the Council of Nicaea, and the Arian controversy and the disputes that grew out of it were still in full force, and went on in plenty long afterward. The writings of Ephraim show how fiercely, in Aphrahat’s lifetime or perhaps a few years later, the theologians of Nisibis and of Edessa felt bound to contend for the faith against Arians, Anomoeans and Apollinarians, and no less against the surviving or revived heresy grown on their own soil, that of Bardaisan. But in Seleucia and Ctesiphon it is not heresy but strife, self-seeking and neglect of duty that the synod censures in the letter we know as the fourteenth Demonstration. And the errors that the bishop of Mar Mathai combats, for the good of those he addresses, are the errors of the Jews who rejected and resisted the creed and the customs of the church. In one place (third Demonstration, section 9) there is a passing reference to the founders of heresies in the second and third centuries, Valentinus, Mani and Marcion. But it amounts only to a brief statement in which the false teaching of each is summed up in a sentence, each followed by the question: can someone who holds such a doctrine find acceptance with God by his fasting? No later heresy is even mentioned.

These facts not only confirm the tradition that places him at Nineveh, but go far to explain the obscurity in which his name and his writings lay for so long. It was an age of heated controversy. These quiet discourses of exhortation were marked by no striking eloquence of style or subtlety of reasoning, and dealt with no burning question of the time, nor with any disputes more recent than those of the two previous centuries, or those between Jew and Christian. They would hardly reach more than a local circulation; and when they made their way to Edessa or other such centers of Syriac theological life, they would arouse only a faint interest. That they did make their way there is certain. Of the surviving manuscripts from which we take their text, one, the oldest, was written in Edessa in 474. And Isaac of Antioch, who knew and imitated them before that time, was a disciple of Zenobius of Edessa. But the scarcity of such manuscripts, and still more the forgetfulness that so long covered the name of Aphrahat, prove one of two things: either the work failed to become popular, or it stirred up some prejudice that led to its being suppressed in practice. It would be hard, however, to point to anything in it so seriously objectionable as to stand in the way of its acceptance. None of the errors that so keen a critic as Georgius found in its theology, even granting that his criticism is just, is such as to shock the orthodoxy of the fourth or fifth century.

Yet it is possible that theological prejudice indirectly brought about the disfavor, or at least the neglect, into which the Demonstrations fell. In Edessa there was an institution known as the “School of the Persians,” where, it seems, students from Persia went for theological instruction. From Ibas, bishop of Edessa from 435 to 457, who was tainted with Nestorianism, the Nestorian taint passed to Maris, a Persian, and through him to Persia in general, and also to Maro, a teacher in the school. After the death of Ibas, the Persian and others who had followed Ibas were driven out of Edessa by Nonnus, his orthodox opponent and successor. The school was finally closed by the next bishop, Cyrus, in the reign of Zeno, who died in 491. These facts may well be supposed to have raised a prejudice against all writings that came from a Persian source. The works of “the Persian Sage” are entirely free of any thought or phrase that could be taken as favoring, or leaning in, the direction that led to the errors of Nestorius. Even so, they may have fallen undeservedly under the ban that the orthodox zeal of Cyrus issued against the School of the Persians and everything connected with it. It is probable that his writings were read in that school, and that he himself may have studied them in early life. Once banned in Edessa, the center of Syriac theology, these discourses would have been effectively checked in their circulation in all the churches of Syriac-speaking Christendom that were opposed to Nestorianism.

How the book won and kept its footing in the Armenian church is perhaps harder to explain. It is not, indeed, the only case of an author who has lived on and been widely known in a translation, though none of his works survives in its original language. A notable example is Irenaeus. His great work Against Heresies is well known in its early Latin dress, but only a few fragments of the Greek have reached us, through quotations. There is no obvious church channel by which knowledge of Aphrahat’s writings can be supposed to have reached Armenia, unless by way of Edessa, before they fell into discredit in that city, as suggested above. But it must be kept in mind that from the end of the fourth century onward “greater, that is, eastern, Armenia was ruled as a dependency of Persia, by Persian kings.” Of these kings the earlier ones at least were Christians, and their policy led them to promote the Syriac language and literature among their people, as against the Greek. This went on until, under the Catholicus Isaac, who died in 441, the Armenian language was put into writing, in the letters then invented by Mesrop, and a beginning was made of an Armenian sacred literature by translating the Scriptures into Armenian from the Syriac. Translations of the works of Syriac theologians would naturally follow before long. That Ephraim’s commentaries were prominent among them we have already mentioned. It is unlikely that the works of a Syriac theologian of Persian nationality would be passed over, especially a theologian of such repute that he had won the honorable title of “the Persian Sage,” and who, as holder of a great Persian see, was also known as Jacob of Mar Mathai, metropolitan of Nineveh. We have already pointed out how readily his adopted name would lead to his being confused with his far better known namesake of Nisibis. And plainly that name, once given to him and accepted, would lend the book a borrowed popularity.

In later times the Armenian translator’s mistake became the means by which the work of Aphrahat, though not his name, first became known to European scholars. The Armenian version, containing nineteen of the Demonstrations, with the twentieth left out, was printed at Rome in 1756, edited with a Latin translation by Antonelli. Its text comes from a copy made in 1719 from an ancient manuscript in the Armenian monastery at Venice, by order of the abbot Peter Mechitar, who presented it to Pope Clement the Eleventh for the Vatican Library. In this edition, titled The Sermons of the Holy Father Jacob, Bishop of Nisibis, the discourses are not only credited to Jacob of Nisibis; the editor also puts forward the theory that the Armenian text is the original. It hardly needs pointing out that the alphabetic arrangement of the twenty-two discourses is enough by itself to show that this idea is impossible. That arrangement is not, and could not be, reproduced in Armenian, a language with an alphabet of thirty-eight letters.

The Syriac text, so long forgotten, was first discovered among the manuscripts of the great Nitrian collection in the British Museum by William Cureton, whose name is honorably known as that of a great Syriac scholar and editor of Syriac documents. He did not live, however, to carry out his wish of publishing it, but left that task to his still more eminent successor at the head of Syriac studies in England, the late William Wright. Wright was then assistant keeper of manuscripts in the British Museum, and afterward Professor of Arabic in the University of Cambridge. To him we owe the admirable first edition of the Syriac text of all twenty-three Demonstrations, from manuscripts 14617 and 17182, published in London in 1869. He did not, however, carry out his plan of adding to this work a second volume containing an English translation of the whole.

Since then another edition of the series of twenty-two has been published in Paris, by Firmin-Didot, in 1894, as the first volume of a Patrologia Syriaca, under the general editorship of René Graffin, lecturer in Syriac in the theological faculty of the Catholic Institute of Paris. This excellent work includes a Latin translation and is preceded by a learned and full introduction, in which every question about Aphrahat and his writings is thoroughly treated. Both are the work of Dom Parisot, a Benedictine priest and monk.

In placing Aphrahat first in their planned series of Syriac theologians, the learned editors follow the opinion that Syriac scholars have held ever since Wright published his edition: that Aphrahat is earlier in time than Ephraim. As pointed out above, this is undoubtedly true, but only in a limited sense. The Demonstrations are earlier by some years, the first ten by thirteen years and the rest by five or six, than the earliest of Ephraim’s writings that can be dated with certainty, namely the first Nisibene Hymn, which belongs to 350. It is then assumed that Ephraim was born in the reign of Constantine, and so not earlier than 306. It is assumed too that Aphrahat was a man of advanced age when he wrote, for which there is no proof whatever, and so must have been born before the end of the third century, perhaps as early as 280. But it has been shown earlier that, even if we accept the authority of the Syriac Life of Ephraim, we must regard its supposed statement that he was born in Constantine’s time as a mistranslation, or rather a distortion, of the text. So the argument for placing Ephraim’s birth as late as 306 disappears, while for placing Aphrahat’s birth no argument has been put forward, only guesswork. The result is that, so far as the evidence goes, the two may be regarded as contemporaries. It is true that Barhebraeus, in his Church History, counts Aphrahat as belonging to the time of Papas, who died in 335. But notice that in the very same passage he mentions that letters survived which claimed to be addressed by Jacob of Nisibis and by Ephraim to this same Papas. And though he admits that some doubted that these letters were genuine, he gives no hint that Ephraim was too young to have written them. In fact he could not do so. For in the earlier part of this History he had already named Ephraim as present at the Council of Nicaea in 325, and had placed his name before Aphrahat’s when he included both among the contemporaries of the great Athanasius.

On the canon and the text of the books of the Bible as Aphrahat used them, a subject hardly within the scope of this introduction, a few words must be enough.

In quoting the Old Testament, he shows that he knows nearly all the books of the Jewish canon, and some, but not all, of the deuterocanonical books commonly called the Apocrypha. He knows Tobit, Ecclesiasticus, perhaps Wisdom, and Maccabees, but not Judith, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, or Baruch. He follows the Peshitta rather than the Greek, but quite often departs from both, and he shows a knowledge of the Chaldee Paraphrase.

His New Testament canon is apparently that of the Peshitta. That is to say, he shows no sign of knowing the four shorter Catholic Epistles. As for the one quotation that seems to come from the Apocalypse, it has been shown that he is probably referring instead to the Targum of Onkelos on Deuteronomy 33, verse 6. But he also makes no reference to the longer Catholic Epistles, except First John. Of Saint Paul’s letters he also passes over Second Thessalonians, Titus and Philemon. As for the last, its shortness accounts for the omission. As for the other two, he can hardly have been unaware of them, since he knew First Thessalonians and First and Second Timothy. He calls the writer of Hebrews “the apostle,” probably meaning to credit it to Saint Paul.

In quoting the Gospels he sometimes seems to follow the Diatessaron, which, as we have said, was in the hands of his contemporary Ephraim, and which is known to have circulated widely in the East until well into the following century. Sometimes, however, his references seem to be to the separate Gospels as commonly read. It cannot be claimed that he always, or even usually, follows the Peshitta’s text. Nor does he consistently agree with the Curetonian, or with the probably earlier form of the Syriac Gospels recently discovered by Mrs. Lewis. With each of these last two, however, his text has many points in common. For the rest of the New Testament, we can say only that he must have had in front of him a text that quite often differed from the Peshitta.

Of the Demonstrations, eight have been chosen for this volume: the first, On Faith, with the letter of an inquirer placed before it; the fifth, On Wars; the sixth, On Monks; the eighth, On the Resurrection of the Dead; the tenth, On Pastors; the seventeenth, On Christ the Son of God; the twenty-first, On Persecution; and the twenty-second, On Death and the Latter Times. Of these, only one, the seventeenth, is controversial; it is directed against the Jews. It is painfully inadequate in its treatment of its great theme, so inadequate as to suggest the guess that doubts may have arisen about the writer’s orthodoxy, enough to discredit his works and to account for the neglect in which, as we have seen, they lay for centuries. But in all his writings his mastery of the Scriptures, especially of the Old Testament, stands out. And in many of them, especially those meant to exhort, there is great force of earnest persuasion, rising at times to eloquence.