Correcting the Vatican Text of the Life

If the Life had come down to us only in its Vatican form, one or two further errors would have needed correcting.

According to the Vatican Life, Ephraim was baptized at the age of twenty-eight, after Jovian surrendered Nisibis. The surrender was in 363, so the age given him would make 334 the earliest possible date for his birth: ten years after the Council of Nicaea, at which the Life records that he was present! The Paris Life corrects this absurdity and shows how the mistake arose. In this version of the story, the statement is that after leaving Nisibis “he withdrew to Beth-Garbaia, where he had received baptism at the age of eighteen.” By leaving out the helping verb “had,” which in Syriac, as in English, marks the past perfect, the Vatican scribe or editor brings in this blunder about the date of the baptism. Probably, without any clear knowledge of the date of the departure from Nisibis, he felt that Ephraim must have been older than eighteen at this point in the story, and tried to make the age fit better with the time needed for the events told, by changing eighteen into twenty-eight.

The putting of Julian’s name in place of that of Valens as the persecutor of Edessa has already been noted. That the story, with the incident of the martyr mother and her two sons, belongs to the time of Valens is established by the joint testimony of Socrates, Sozomen and Theodoret. In the Paris Life the whole history is clear and consistent, both in itself and with the chronology; whereas the Vatican version of it, by bringing Ephraim to Edessa in the reign of Julian, creates hopeless confusion. Note that the names Julianus and Valens, so distinct when written in Latin, differ only a little when spelled out in Syriac letters without the vowel marks.