Iranianate and Syriac Christianity in Late Antiquity and the Early Islamic Period

In the Sasanian empire, the relation to power of the different strands of Christianity (East-Syrian Dyophysite, West-Syrian Miaphysite, Chalcedonian) or Christian-oriented groups, partly derived from the landmark movements of deportation and missions starting in the East Roman lands, remained unsettled during the whole dynastic period (from the 3rd to the 7th centuries), moving from integration to defensive relation. Therefore, the question of the conversion to Christianity is naturally correlated to the notion of identity affirmation on the one hand, within a minority context and an ethnic, cultural and religiously plural environment, and to that of political loyalty towards the Persian king on the other, seeing that adhesion to Christianity within the Iranian territory challenged the very unity of the political body incarnated by the Sovereign. Periods of persecution of religious minorities, and specifically Christian minorities, between the 4th century and the Arab period, led to a vast literary production that has fundamentally contributed to the shaping of identity in the Church of the East. Syriac sources present several types of accounts of conversion. The Acts of the Persian Martyrs often give priority to the conversion of great characters from the Mazdean society (from the 6th century onwards especially); some hagiographies in fact mention cases of collective and widespread conversion (over a whole region for instance). In these accounts, the Sasanian king appears as the defender of Mazdaism, the official religion of the Empire, who intervenes on different levels in the process of conversion through a contrasting political approach, sometimes coercive, and sometimes supporting towards religious movements. These ambiguities lead to questions regarding the underlying interests behind such royal behaviour, but also in parallel concerning the writing process leading Christians to rewrite the persecuting king into a Christianised Sovereign.

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The Sasanian Empire, quite from the beginning, developed a strong interrelation between the politics and religion. From the last quarter of the 3rd century onwards, politics and religion grew into a ʻsiblings statusʼ. Zoroastrian priests gained a dominant role in political decision making. Thus, scopes of actions of religious minorities – Christians and others – were gradually limited their influence on norms and ethics in society declined. For the paper, some questions of research should be investigated and (hopefully) answered: How dependent were Christians of norms and ethics of the Zoroastrian priests conflicting with their own religion norms? This question can be focused on a macro-, meso- and micro-level. (1) Conflicting norms and their impact on social action will be investigated on the macro-level: From the point of view of the dominating Zoroastrian policy, Christian norms and ethics were closely related to the East Roman Church and Empire. Opposite to this, Christians in the Sasanian Empire perceived themselves as part of the Empire. (2) On the meso-level, the situation grows even more complex. Scopes of agency of the Christian minorities that differed in local and temporal perspectives will be in the focus on this level. (3) Since the 5th century, individuals from Christian background were able to launch careers at the Sasanian court, while those Christians having converted from Zoroastrianism sometimes were severely persecuted. Thus intersections, contacts and dependency varied on a sliding scale.

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The emergence of strong identities within the different Christian currents in the Near and Middle East was a long process that stretched from the 5th century until the 7th or the 8th century, shaping specificities in the Syriac churches. As Michael G. Morony argues, memory was in this process a powerful factor of preservation. Christian religious minorities contributed to the blossoming of their christological position, and consequently forged their autonomy and its characteristics based on their own experience, perception of events and relationships with one another. Each of the competing Churches sought to construct an image of the primate, in a sort of “paternity proceedings”, and this process was one of the main elements which illustrates how these identity and memory have been preserved. The patriarch, in fact, alone represents his community of faith, whose cause and destiny he embodies in a way. Indeed, the great significance of his function, his crucial position within his Church, as well as his public role, explain that he has been at the core of a symbolic imagery, not only his person, but also his attributes and the places where he asserted his authority.

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The contribution, using historical-biographical sources, synodal acts and Christian and Zoroastrian canonical collections, aims to investigate the causes and consequences of the exile in Ādurbādagān of the catholicos of the Church of Persia, Mar Aba, which took place in 541 CE following a complex criminal proceeding brought against him by the highest offices of Zoroastrian Sasanian jurisprudence. We will then try to reconstruct the political-rhetorical characters of his stay in exile, his relationship with the non-Christian population, his management of the Justinian Pandemic, the organization of his residence and the use of his few aides as an instrument of remote government of the church. Finally, the main dossiers he took charge of during his exile will be studied, from the complicated division of Sakastān, to the reaffirmation of the prerogatives of the priestly hierarchy, to the difficult management of the political-ecclesiastical turmoil in Elam.

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The article is dedicated to the lost chronicle of the Julian’s war of 363 with Persia, written by a Mazdean priest in the second half of the 4th century. The text was used by Armenian historian Movsēs Ḥorenac’i who called its author by name Ḥoṛohbūt. He is called ‘secretary of Shahpuhr converted to Christianity’. However, Movsēs did not go into further details about the text, he only mentioned another Persian man, Rastohun, who also became a Christian. It is proposed in search for the remains of the ‘Chronicle’ in the Christian East to consider the last part of the s. c. ‘Julian Romance’, written in the 6th century in the Western Syrian milieu. In this text a Mazdean priest and secretary of Shahpuhr by name Arimihr is mentioned. He converted to Christianity and became a friend of the Christian Roman general Jovian (in the Romance he is called Yoḇı̄nyanōs). Arimihr could be the same figure as Ḥoṛohbūt. There in another echo of the ‘Chronicle’ in the Syriac tradition: in the ‘Chronicle of Siirt’, which used the ‘Romance’. Later al-Ṭabarı̄ and al-Nadı̄m also used the ‘Romance’ as a source for the story of Julian’s war in Persia. The following reconstruction is proposed: the mobed Arimihr converted to Christianity and returned with the Roman army to Asia Minor. There,after the death of his patron, emperor Jovian, Arimihr wrote his ‘Chronicle’,probably in Syriac. In the beginning of the 6th century it has been included into the hagiographic romance, one copy of which has been sent to Egypt, while another one remained in Mesopotamia and was used by the historian of Siirtand later by ibn al-Kalbı̄, source for al-Ṭabarı̄, before it has vanished. The text of the ‘Chronicle’ was brought to the Caucasian area before it has also disappeared. It is corroborated by its mention in the ‘Life’ of the Georgian king Vaḥtang Gorgasal.

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In my prior scholarship, I examined the social pathways and connected bodies that brought Christianity from the Roman Mediterranean to India. In this article, I focus in particular on Iranian Christianity’s movement from Sasanian Persian territory to south India and its establishment in the Kerala coast in the period preceding the 7th century. In the general absence of explicit, reliable evidence for this phenomenon, the article formulates how the standard dispositions of commercial networks in antiquity enabled Christianity to travel from the world of Iran and into the Indian Ocean. It also attributes the origins of Christianity in south India to the accelerated movement, and settlement in overseas locations, of Persian commercial players active in the Indian Ocean during the 5th and 6th centuries.

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The starting point is the thesis that in pre-Islamic times there was a trade with the Roman Empire as well as with Persia in South-India. With the trade different Christian communities were established. The Romans may be more associated with the tradition of Bartholomew, the Persians with the Thomas tradition. With the decline of Roman trade with southern India, Roman Christianity gradually disappeared, assimilating to Thomas Christians. The tradition of the Apostle Thomas, originally associated with northern India and Persia, was brought to southern India with the increased missionary activity of the Persian Church.

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What portrait of Sasanian Christians can be drawn from the study of their names? The most important prosopographical documentation of the Sasanian Empire (3rd–7th centuries) concerns the Christians. The question of name choice helps to illustrate the multicultural dimension of this empire. A very valuable collection of Iranian names has already been compiled by Ph. Gignoux, Ch. Jullien and F. Jullien based on Aramaic and Syriac sources. However, these Iranian names have yet to be compared with other Sasanian Christians’ names. By clearly specifying the limits of the onomastic method, such a study of names reveals both profound regional evolutions in the use of names, but also important linguistic influences and, where the persons concerned can be identified as Christian, a great porosity of cultural and religious practices. Thus, it contributes to the existing literature by deepening the understanding of cultural exchange and community interactions within Sasanian Mesopotamia.

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This contribution deals with patterns in language contact by listing and discussing the Iranian lexicon as attested in the Christian Old Uigur texts from Central Asia. In doing so, the present work fits into the more general framework of Iranian (Sogdo)-Turkic relations especially during the 9th and 10th centuries.

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The very important and recent publication of N.A. Pedersen (ed.), Biblia Manichaica I. The Old Testament in Manichaean Tradition (Turnhout 2017) claims for a renewed perspective concerning the Biblical tradition in Manichaeism and stressing the achievements of the deputed scholarship (A. Böhlig, J.P. Asmussen, W. Sundermann, H.J. Klimkeit) to elucidate the Old and New Testament components of this multifaceted religion, blending Zoroastrian and Buddhist aspects as well. Then, the Christian side of this tradition displays a remarkable set of narratives, embedded into a specifical genre of the Manichaean hymnology (the Parthian Crucifixion Hymns), or within an Apocryphal line of Gospels and into an apocalyptic stratum of texts and imageries. After a brief survey of a few samples dealing with this topic, responding to a consistent part of Mani’s cultural heritage within the Baptist community, I shall take into account a particular employ of Gospel quotations in Mani’s Šābuhragān. The Šābuhragān is a noteworthy piece of conceptual translation with a high missionary target, to render in a Zoroastrian mold a narrative related to Mani’s cultural background of his Jews-Christian and Gnostic formation. In the way of previous seminal studies, I shall try to confirm not only Mani’s cultural strategy of religious translation and adaptations, but also his main concern for sustaining and hospitality of his holy community, namely the Electi, charged with a pious task of ascetical behaviors for salvation.

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This article is a reexamination of three selected passages from the Syriac version of the legend of Saint George found in Turfan. By means of a line-by-line commentary, I also discuss parallel texts culled from various sources in and beyond Syriac (e.g. Greek, Latin, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopic, Chinese), and show how the parallels help us to read the Turfan fragments, and how the Turfan version adds to our knowledge of the transmission history of the legend. In particular, I argue that the Turfan version actually contains more elements of the original Greek text than the textus receptus, and that it records the earliest Syriac translation by far of the legend.

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A fragmentary Christian Sogdian version of the Six Books on the Dormition of Mary from Turfan has recently come to light, but the place of this narrative within the larger context of Eastern Christian Marian literature has not yet been studied in detail. One distinguishing trait of the Sogdian fragment is the topographic shift in the discovery story which prefaces most versions of the Six Books. Whereas according to the Syriac, Arabic and Ethiopic versions two monks from Sinai discover the “Book of Mary” at the tomb of St. John in Ephesus, the Sogdian text uniquely locates the book in the city of Constantinople. To explain this consequential change, this chapter will first reconstruct the historical and theological context of the earliest Syriac manuscripts containing the preface. These manuscripts date to the early 6th century and probably originate in an anti-Chalcedonian milieu in northern Syria. It will then be argued that the original Syriac version underwent a Melkite Syriac reworking in ca. 8th-century Syria or Palestine that involved a turn towards the Byzantine capital as the new symbolic center of Christian devotion to Mary. The last part of the study will discuss how this (now lost) Melkite Syriac narrative may have reached the Christian communities of Central Asia where it was translated into Sogdian.

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The aim of this paper is to investigate the narrative motif of prodigious trees and their association with holy figures, whether prophets, saints, religious founders or divine being, in areas of cross-cultural contact between Eastern-Christianity and Iran during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The theme is explored in its development and through the leading phenomenological patterns it took on, gathering evidence from different periods and traditions. This kind of comparative analysis appears crucial for an understanding of complex networks of socio-cultural dynamics in a context where culturally dominant religions (including Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Islam) came into contact with the local communities, re-shaping the sacred landscape, and eventually elaborating narrative motifs attuned to the native sensibility. This assimilation/adaptation process left traces in the literary output of the dominant traditions, while contributing to the formation of religious groups that developed in later centuries. Representative case studies will define the transversal and cross-cultural use of the “prodigious tree” motif. Indeed, on the strength of the evidence we will be able to appreciate the balance between rhetorical-narrative devices and socio-religious realities in the perspective of the fabrication of communal memories, awareness and sacred landscapes.

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The contemporary accusations against the Origenist movement during Justinian times usually associated this “heresy” with Manichaeism, altough the doctrines of these two schools present some radical differences. Despite the fact that some scholars have attempted to discover some points of reasonable contact between them, with questionable results, the possibility that some of the attacks were, in reality, directed not precisely against a genuine Manichaean sect, but toward a broader ambiance involving the active presence of the western branch of the Mazdakite diaspora, opens a new perspective. We know that some Mazdakites actually exercised a covert influence in Byzantium during late Antiquity. They attracted not only poor people, but even members from the highest strata of society. In the framework of this hypothesis, the virulence in the repression of the Origenists and the double Synodal excommunications under Justinian (543 and 553) might indicate not only a theological bias, but also a political fear of social vindications connected with and inspired by the Mazdakite movement, whose egalitarian protests had led to a dramatic situation in Sasanian Iran. The parallel (double) excommunication of Origen in Byzantium, and the progressive restriction of access to theological studies in Iran, marked a moment of serious difficulty for the official powers, in connection with the eruption of social protests. It is also probable that this situation favoured a larger circulation of new ideas, such as the hope for a universal paradise, which was certainly more suitable to the expectations of the humblest strata of Iranian society.

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