The Trustworthy Facts Summed Up

The Life from which the account above is mainly drawn was plainly put into its present form by compilers many generations after Ephraim’s time, and no doubt it has been greatly enlarged by taking in exaggerated or invented details. Even so, in its main outlines it can be accepted as historically trustworthy. Not a few of its essential points are confirmed by his own writings; and many more, as was said earlier, by evidence of hardly later date. Above all there is the speech of praise by Gregory of Nyssa, who died in 395, and who assures us that he draws his account from Ephraim’s own written statements and from no other source. As the brother of Basil, with whom Ephraim was so closely linked in his later life, Gregory may well have known personally the man he wrote about; at the least he was in a position to gather the facts of his life and check them with discernment. Further, the general historical framework of the biography is shown to be correct well enough by the historians of the time who wrote of public affairs, non-Christian as well as Christian. This is notably so, as will appear later, in the matter of the siege of Nisibis, where the witness is the man Ephraim most abhorred, the emperor Julian. [a]

In short, the outside, independent evidence covers all the facts in the summary given at the opening of this part. It reaches further, to many incidents told in the Life: Sapor’s attempt to take Nisibis by turning the river against its walls; Ephraim’s meeting with the woman who met him as he entered Edessa, and her retort to his rebuke; his borrowing of the heretic’s music to make the orthodox teaching of his own hymns popular; his call to the office of bishop, and how he escaped it; the steady faith of the people of Edessa when the persecutor Valens threatened them; and the famine in the last year of his life, with the relief work Ephraim organized. It reaches also to a few of the details that belong to the supernatural or border on it: the dream of the vine shoot that foretold how fruitful he would be as a writer; the vision of the angel with the book, who appeared to his brother anchorite; and the vision of the dove, which he himself seemed to see, inspiring the sermons of Basil. In these facts, great and small together, we have enough to work out the main outlines of his life and the leading features of his character. [b]