← New Books Network
New Books Network
Christine Shepardson, "A Memory of Violence: Syriac Christianity and the Radicalization of Religious Difference in Late Antiquity" (U California Press, 2025)
01:24:18
Loading summary
Transcript56 lines
- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome to New Books in Late Antiquity, presented by Ancient Jew Review. I'm Mike Motilla, and today we're speaking with Christine Shepherdson about a memory of violence, Syriac Christianity, and the radicalization of religious difference in late antiquity. Let me try to start broad, and I'm going to go a little longer than usual for an intro. I think there's still two paradigms that organize the big pictures of late antiquity. One is that it was a violent time of raids and riots with fracturing centers of power and barbarians at the gates, and religious zealots that team up with the military power as economic stability waned. And the other is that it was this time of religious innovation, with creations of canons and creeds and religions of the book, and the beginning of today's kind of cultural geography with Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Middle east, things like that. Now, very few people who really think hard about these paradigms have to choose one or the other. People are capable of holding in their head the idea that Augustine de Papo could call on the military and write the Confessions. Forming and policing boundaries of Christian communities happened with money and with might, and also with the shaping of collective memories, with symbols and myths and rituals and names and buzzwords and icons that reverberated in people's bodies and gave people a sense of belonging and purpose. So to say that religious violence organized the fifth and sixth centuries is not to say that religions were merely propaganda or just a tool for the powerful. And to say that late antiquity was a time of great religious innovation doesn't mean that it was always peaceful. Tina Shepperton has shown us that late Antiquity doesn't require us choosing between religion and violence, or religion and fracturing centers of power. Sometimes this violence happens in pretty obvious ways, like at the Council of Chalcedon, Aetius beats Amphiochus on the head in order to make him vote for the Council's creed. And there were bishops who faced exile. There were thousands, there were probably tens of thousands who were killed in spontaneous riots, or when emperors sent the army to kill groups of monks, or when Huns or Persians sacked a city. It was a violent time in terms of bloodshed. It was also a violent time in other ways, like buildings were getting destroyed all the time and families and church communities were breaking down. Plus there were droughts and famines and earthquakes and plagues too, which I know aren't violent the way, like a punch in the face is violent. But they were still painful. They still might make people think of suffering. Like a martyr. And there were also what we might call symbolic deaths, like the loss of an identity or roles or statuses. And all that violence kind of hovered over the imaginations of late ancient Christians. And it didn't just kind of like passively hover. Sometimes religious leaders would play it up. They would make a storm out of it, they would make it circulate and make it the center of Christian consciousness. And so sometimes it would look like resentment, sometimes it would look like resistance, sometimes it would look like radicalization, whatever it was. Part of a bishop's job was to prevent military strikes against the faithful, and. And part of a bishop's job was to tell stories about the persecutions that their communities were facing. And Shepherdson shows us how Miaphysite Christianity, the kind of Christianity that rejected the Council of Chalcedon in 451 and insisted that Christ had a united or a single nature, how that that group of Christians, they kind of developed their own set of genealogies, their own set of heroes and villains and friends and rivals, and they developed stories that showed themselves to have been the victims of state violence. So they told those kinds of stories and they developed eschatologies in which things would eventually be set right. And they established rituals that made those stories feel real. And they did all of that while living right next door to their Chalcedonian neighbors. So we're not talking about kind of two radically different groups in radically different parts of the world. We're talking about places like Palestine and Alexandria where under the emperor Anastasius I, Miaphysite bishops were appointed and Miaphysite monasteries were funded. And then Justinian I succeeds Anastasius. And all those same people are basically living in all those same places. But now the money and the military and the control of sacred spaces was now pretty different. Now a lot of this evidence ends up coming from Syriac. It shows us that Syriac Christianity wasn't kind of off in its own quarter, and that even when Miaphysite branches were out of power, that they were still very much participating in late ancient life. One way to see that is that non Chalcedonians like John of Ephesus were writing and working with Chalcedonian emperors in Constantinople, or that even Justinian, the kind of ultimate Calistonian orthodox emperor, was married to a Meophysite Theodora. And if he was being, you know, if he was married to Meophysite, then surely, you know, other Christians were marrying and befriending and working with people across that Chalcedon Divide. It just like wasn't obvious in this world what kind of a Christian anybody was. It wasn't like people were walking around with, you know, one person, two nature T shirts or something like that, or. Or if they were, it's because they were trying to make a statement because it wasn't obvious unless they wore, you know, the equivalent of a T shirt. But another strategy is that Syriac authors are trying to, you know, they're trying to shape the collective memory. And those collective memories are going to look a lot like anybody else's at this time. And so sometimes, you know, it's easier to see the big social trends in smaller, minoritized groups. And so by looking at what's happening in Syriac Christianity, we can see probably something that's happening much, much more widely. So in addition to, you know, doing Lord's work and translating a lot of Syriac, Shepherdson is bringing us a kind of religious studies sensibility to late antiquity. Her previous book demonstrated how a more nuanced understanding of space and place could aid us in understanding religious controversy, especially in Antioch. And here she turns towards the memory wars to show how collective memories took shape among the Christians, especially those who lost imperial support about a century before when it seemed secure. So they had it, they knew what it was like to have the money and the power and the prestige, and then they lost it and they had to tell stories about what kind of world they really lived in. And the way they tried to shape memory, it accelerated and it probably underpinned some of the radicalization of religious difference. We are lucky to have Tina with us today. So, Tina, hi, thank you for being here. Can you introduce yourself? Who are you and how did you come to write this book?
- [06:49]
B
Thank you so much, Mike, and thanks so much for the invitation to have this conversation with you today. I'm really looking forward to it. Your questions have been really wonderful to think about. My name is Tina Shepherdson. I'm a professor of Early Christianity at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. And I think in general, as I were going to summarize, looking back over the projects I've done, I think I see my work generally being focused on constructions of difference. And sometimes that's Christian, anti Jewish difference, sometimes that's heresy, Orthodoxy difference, sometimes it's from the Greek speaking side, sometimes it's from the Syriac speaking side. But those seem to be questions that I always find interesting. So, especially in the later Roman Empire, especially in the Eastern Mediterranean world of late antiquity. So my first two big projects, one of them were both on the 4th century. So one was looking at the Syriac speaking Christians and the next one was looking at the Greek speaking Christians slightly further west, but in the city, as you said, of Antioch in the province of Rome in Syria. So I think after those two 4th century projects, I was really interested in thinking about what happened next, sort of what were some of the next future conversations. And so I started to look into the 5th century Church councils and the controversy surrounding those. And I think maybe because the people who were on the losing side of the Next council in 431 at Ephesus ended up largely outside of the Roman Empire, that was my comfort zone. I think maybe for that reason I thought, you know, I'm just going to go 20 years ahead and see how those controversies continued to play out even in the next council, 451 Council of Chalcedon that you mentioned. And really this is a big timeline and the hundred years between it and the following council that confirmed it under Justinian, the Second Council of Constantinople in 553. So it meant that I had a whole lot of learning to do because I had spent my world sort of focused on the 4th century. But it, I think it also in the process of adding a lot of new reading, which was super exciting, and getting to know new early Christian authors better, getting to be more familiar with some of the historical sort of events of the second half of the fifth century, the first half of the sixth century. I think one of the advantages I didn't anticipate in doing that is that given that I was sort of not starting from complete scratch, but I was jumping into a field that I knew less about, I had the advantage of, you know, most of starting from the side that lost, of starting from the Miaphysite Christian side. So I think when we're trained in Western academia, we start usually with the Latin and Greek sources and the perspective of the Roman Empire. And so we learn about that history from that perspective. And then some of us go off and learn also about the other sides, the other material, the other cultures or church communities. And so I think if I had been in more coursework on the 6th century, that probably would have been something I would have been introduced to. But this way I could pick where to begin. And so I started by reading everything I could find that was surviving extant material from the 5th and 6th century Miaphysite traditions that went into the Syrian Orthodox communities by the 6th century had become part of that tradition. So I think in Syriac studies it's still more common to Do. There are significant recent exceptions, but it's more common still to do projects on a single figure, a single author, or a single text, or a single biblical interpretation question, or a single theological question. And I think part of what I really hoped that this book could contribute is a much broader picture that really tried to integrate those figures, especially with the centering of the Syrian Orthodox perspective. But the Syriac texts that survive, putting them at the center of this story and seeing what the story of that century looks like when you start with them at the center and then engage with the imperial sources.
- [11:18]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's great. So in addition to kind of moving ahead a century, kind of looking like going from the fourth century into the fifth and sixth centuries, kind of the other shift from your last book to this one is the last one was about space controlling contested spaces, and this one is about contesting memories. Can you talk about that shift kind of from space to memory?
- [11:38]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Well, you'll notice that the contesting is still happening, so. Absolutely. I seem to be drawn to the sort of construction of difference and the sort of points of tension between communities. But I think when I was looking at the 4th century material around Antioch and the Greek sources, that was the stuff that I was drawn to, was how they were talking about reconfiguring how people conceptualize the places of the city in order to. As a way into narratives of Christianization of the Roman Empire, which we. We try to nuance and not use that phrase as much, but as a different way of approaching that question. How did we go from having an empire that was less visibly Christian in its landscape to being more visibly Christian in the way people at least perceived the landscape. And so when I was reading these later 5th and 6th century Syriac sources, of course those ideas are still interesting to me. But as I read, those were not the things that were jumping out to me. And so as I read, I started taking notes on what some of the themes that I noticed as I was reading, I really think it turned out to be these genealogies that they were tracing the competition to claim the past. And I think because the communities that are at odds with each other in the argument that I'm looking at in this book, they share so much history in common. Right up through the 431 Council of Ephesus in the early 5th century, they agree on all of that doctrinal difference and all of the political history. They have the same heroes. And so it's really those most recent decades that they are trying to sort out. Who has the more accurate interpretation of how orthodoxy continues in those recent decades? So for that reason, I thought really looking more into memory study as a way of thinking about how you conceptualize the past as a way of justifying your legitimacy in the future and the way in which those justifications for your legitimacy now end up promoting a view of your future self. Right. It ends up giving you a legacy into the future and a way of imagining the way in which your church will continue into its future. And by doing that imagining, sometimes, like in this case, it also helps to make it so. So I found memory studies one of the threads that I was following and started reading around more theoretically.
- [14:13]
A
Yeah. Thank you. Okay. The other kind of big word in the subtitle is violence. It's one of those words that everybody knows, and yet kind of in academic world, we fight about what it means. So what do you mean by that?
- [14:28]
B
Yeah, that's absolutely true. So obviously, every listener will immediately think of. Well, not every listener, but we all know that violence gets used for physical harm. And so that's one of its more immediate meanings. And I think as I was reading these stories, there were examples of physical harm. But I started to pay attention to, in fact, the ways in which examples of suffering or discomfort, things that we might not immediately think of as violence in the same sense as physical aggression, were nevertheless supplementing the reader's views of how much a person was struggling or how much hardship the person had to overcome. And so I started to read more in sort of the theory of violence studies. And that language really gave me a much better sense of the wider scope of harm that it's useful to. To think of with violence. So rhetorical harms and social harms and the sort of broader ways in which it nuanced my thinking of violence. And I think the single. Maybe the single biggest takeaway from that reading that I did was to pay attention to the use of the term violence as giving a particular perspective on the thing that you're describing. And that, to me, was really helpful in reshaping how I was thinking about the material. Because in order to name something as violence, scholars have argued that you're already taking a position in saying it's somehow unjust, it's unjustified. So something might be seen as a legal act of justice by somebody, but the person who's being incarcerated might identify it as an act of physical violence when, say, the police force does not, for example. So in doing that, it helped me to think about the narrative aspect. And since what we have for these sources are narratives. It gave me a new entry point into thinking about how are these narratives that I'm reading to read about this violence actually themselves shaping events as being violent. When we look at the imperial perspective, that's opposite. They might be represented in quite different language. So, yeah, it was really the nuancing. These Syriac Christian texts see the imperial pressures against them as persecution, which then these leaders, it leads these leaders to compare themselves to the early martyrs of the Church, which in turn leads them to justify themselves as the true Christians in this period. So it all sort of said together in. In my thinking about the naming of things as violence and the role that that plays.
- [17:18]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's really helpful. Like, if it's making me think of like, you know, Mary Douglas and like. Like dirt is matter out of place, like violence is like hurting out of place or something along those lines where, like, you know, like, we could see it, but kind of once, once you call it violence, it's. It's. It's got its own kind of set of characters and stories that are going to pop into people's heads.
- [17:38]
B
Yeah. And my colleague Lewis Presser here in the sociology department, she has a short book called why We Harm. And. And it was helpful. I mean, talking to her over the years has been helpful in also helping me think about just naming something as harm. And how we experience it is not how everyone else will experience it. So just keeping in mind whose perspective you're seeing the story from and the way that. That shapes your understanding of what's going on.
- [18:04]
A
Yeah, yeah, no, thank you. Okay, so those are some of the kind of big conceptual things. Let's see if we can get ourselves into space and time here. So we're in the kind of 5th century and you identify a few kind of key hubs for understanding Syriac Mephisto Christianity. One is this kind of zone from Egypt to Palestine. And the second one is kind of the northern part of the Euphrates of places like Edessa and the major city of Antioch. Can you tell us about those zones and kind of what made them important and how were they able to resist that kind of broader form of imperial Christianity?
- [18:40]
B
Yeah, absolutely. This was actually another of the unexpected sort of side effects of doing the work. And I think probably related to. Probably related to the fact that I had written the earlier book on place. Right. This idea that once I had written the. Or started to read some of the sources, it occurred to me, like, well, I do want to map these people that I've now learned about and think about geographically where they're located. So I started sort of thinking, you know, putting their timelines and their, their lives and their writings onto a physical map in my head. And it was then that I realized that you have these really interesting nodes or zones as you say. And it helped make sense also linguistically because as you know, part of the dilemma in finding the parameters for this project was who exactly am I talking about? Because I'm not talking about all Syriac language texts, because that includes East Syriac texts who were diaphysized in the way that was Forbidden by the first council of, of Ephesus in 431, the so called Nestorian communities. And then there is the West Syrian community. But also the materials I'm looking at beginning, some of them began in Greek. And so it's not only a linguistic Syriac community, it's also the Miaphysite doctrine. Right, but the Miaphysite doctrine includes lots of communities. There are some Greeks, some Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopian. So trying to narrow the parameters was a part of my early challenge. But once I settled on the traditions that come to be part of the West Syriac Syrian Orthodox Church, that meant I was reading Greek texts, texts in Syriac that were originally Greek as well as originally Syriac. And when I realized that those were not randomly from around the world, but in fact that all of the people who were initially writing in Greek, who got preserved in Syriac that I was interested in from this period, they all shared this Gaza region in common. Right. So Zacharias was born there, John Rufus moved there to be in a monastic community. Severus of Antioch moved there to be in a monastic community at the same time that John Rufus was also there leading Peter the Iberian's monastery. So that's when I started to see that it's not just a random person here and there whose texts are preserved, but in fact some of these people knew each other personally, they reference each other in their stories. And the Greek speaking neophysite community is not one that survived in the same way as the Syriac speaking church survived. So they don't have their story told as much. And so I was really interested to see the connection around Gaza. I think the connections of the Syriac speakers in northern Mesopotamia is very well known, talked about, documented as a common part of our telling of this history. But Severus of Antioch became for me a really key, interesting figure in this way. He's a Greek speaker. He becomes the important patriarch of Antioch for six very important years before he's sent into exile and Continues of course, to be seen by some as the the legitimate patriarch of Antioch in exile. But the fact that he can connect these communities in that he's in Gaza for almost 18 years and we think of him as an Antiochene author usually we know he spent a few years in Constantinople, people talk about that. We know he spent an important six years as bishop in Antioch and wrote all these homilies while he was there, 125 homilies that we read. And so we think of him as settled in Antioch. And we know of course that he spent a long exile in Egypt. But the years in Gaza, even though scholars already know that that happened, I don't see many scholars thinking about the impact that those years in Gaza had on his thinking and also thinking about who else he might have known from being in those monastic settings in Gaza and Mayuma and the surrounding region. And I think the connection to John Rufus is an interesting one that will get more attention. And we already know that he knew Zacharias Rhetor. So anyway, I guess a very long answer is that I see Severus being able to take the Gaza monastic Greek speaking neophysite community, bring that experience and community and stories and theology to the Patriarchate in Antioch. But once he's in Antioch, and one reason he's there is thanks to one of the Syriac speaking heroes of my story, Philoxenus of Mabug. And Philoxenus helps to arrange Severus as the next Patriarch of Antioch. And so Severus becomes then as the patriarch who has control over this much larger region that includes a lot of Syriac speakers. He then becomes a hub that ties to the Gaza Greek Miaphysite community and also connects to the northern Mesopotamian Syriac speaking. And of course there are Greek and Syriac speakers in much broader regions, but just as the majority languages of those areas. So I really saw Antioch and Syras as a way of connecting these individual social network communities in ways that I think I hope that that's the kind of work that this project that had a much broader scope is able to contribute to future conversations as well. Sort of tying together some of the people we've tended to look at more on an individual basis. When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together, use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with N2 encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn more@WhatsApp.com this episode is brought to you by State Farm. Checking off the boxes on your to do list is a great feeling. And when it comes to checking off coverage, a State Farm agent can help you choose an option that's right for you. Whether you prefer talking in person on the phone or using the award winning app, it's nice knowing you have helped finding coverage that best fits your needs. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
- [25:30]
A
Mint is still $15 a month for premium wireless. And if you haven't made the switch yet, here are 15 reasons why you should 1 It's $15 a month.
- [25:40]
B
2.
- [25:40]
A
Seriously, it's $15 a month.
- [25:43]
B
3.
- [25:43]
A
No big contracts.
- [25:44]
B
4.
- [25:45]
A
I use it. 5. My mom uses it. Are you playing me off? That's what's happening, right? Okay, give it a try@mint mobile.com Switch.
- [25:53]
B
Upfront payment of $45 for three month plan, $15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra.
- [25:59]
A
See mint mobile.com yeah, and I mean one of the reasons why those, those kind of Gaza monastery years are so important is because like these monasteries are, this is your analogy. Like, like the Hollywood studios of their day. Like these are the like cultural production sites for a lot of Christians. They are like imaginative shapers. Can you talk about why these monasteries were so important for kind of creating the collective memories that you're analyzing here?
- [26:27]
B
Yeah, yeah, I think. Where to begin? Well, we inherit some earlier 20th century scholarship like Friend's book on what he called Monophysite Christianity that we call Miaphysite today. So he and a few other scholars were really pushing the role that the monasteries played. And I do think there's no doubt that monasteries played an important role in the preservation of Miaphysite Christianity, especially in the Syrian Orthodox tradition. But I also, I think his story was told the way Friend told the story was done without, without taking account as fully the imperial power that Miaphysite Christians did, did have in the very long reign of Emperor Anastasius, right, 27 years that he was in charge, that he allowed Miaphysite Christians often to be in charge of powerful bishoprics and even the Patriarch of Antioch as well as of course Alexandria. So I think monasteries played an increasingly important role maybe after anastasius died in 518, because then the next emperors, Justin I and Justinian and Justin ii, mean there was some give and take, especially under Justinian, but There was a growing hostility, or a sort of more pervasive hostility towards me, I should say Christianity. So in that case, when bishops are in exile, monasteries sometimes become the place where. Where the Church can continue the textual preservation, the narrative preservation. But I'll add one more thing to it, which is that even in cases where monasteries themselves are not the sole centers of miaphysite production and theology and preservation, I think from doing this project, that more than I did before, that narratives of asceticism, broadly speaking, actually play a really core role that I hadn't noticed as much. So I would say we shouldn't limit it to thinking about monasteries per se, although they play a really important role, especially after 518. I think that ascetic narratives in general play a really important role in preserving the Ephesite Christianity, in part because of some other things that we'll talk about in terms of the language of suffering that they play. But there's no doubt for sure, monasteries themselves, they are places that help to shape the theology. They preserve a narrative of the Miahchite Church's histories. They lead to the enduring resistance against pressures to conform to other versions of imperial orthodoxy. So I do see them. There's monasteries in northern Mesopotamia, like around Amida, where John Ephesus spends his early life. There's the Gaza monastery of Peter the Iberian. And then Severus opens his own monastery in the region. So there are just an enormous number of monasteries that play an important role in this tradition.
- [29:42]
A
Yeah, thank you. Okay, so we've got kind of time, space, some big concepts. I actually hate to do this to you, but I think before we go further, we need to know something about the Christological controversy and the Council of Chalcedon. So, you know, briefly, I know this is like an eternal question, but, like, what do people need to know about the Council of Chalcedon to how to understand the book.
- [30:08]
B
Yes, big question. I'm going to say. Fortunately, very little, in my view. So I think I was interested in how people draw. Draw opponents, draw senses of self. And I did not spend a whole lot of time attending to the very complex nuances of the controversy. But just as, I mean, somebody might be interested. So I will give the very briefest synopsis. So, certainly all of the Christians that we're talking about in this book agree with the outcome of the First Council of Ephesus in 431 that found Cyril of Alexandria to be correct in condemning Nestorius of Alexandria, sorry, of Constantinople. And the issue at the time was seen to be that Nestorius had bifurcated the Son of God into two parts instead of one part. So that was the problem they were working from. Now, the question came in the years following that being a little bit more specific about the parts. Right. So I'm using parts as a very vague term on purpose because they come to talk about, yeah, what are those parts and are they unified, or could there be some bifurcation in a unified being? And so there is, of course, the 451 Council of Chalcedon, which begins the sort of split that we're talking about in the Miaphysit versus the Chalcedonian Church. They basically disagree at that council about whether the specific language of the Son of God being one person in two natures, was is it, as the Chalcedonian Christians say, an orthodox middle ground, trying to find a compromise between the different factions, but still falls under orthodoxy because of the one person argument. Or the Miyaphites will say it's a heretical compromise because it reproduces the bifurcation that 20 years earlier had been condemned in the teachings of Nestorius. So ironically, both sides see Cyril of Alexandria as their hero. They also both condemn the teachings of Nestorius of Constantinople, but they disagree about the more specific and nuanced language. They also then continue to divide among themselves. Right. New compromises come out under Emperor Zeno and the Hanoticon. There's increasing number of points of conflict as they try to resolve or find a resolution, they end up creating more and more possibilities. So that's the big picture and fortunately the theology. Well, from my perspective, fortunately, I hope that you can follow the book itself without actually knowing a lot about the doctrinal positions.
- [33:11]
A
Great. Yeah. So, I mean, like, following Chalcedon, we see there's a schism and we have kind of socially recognizable different groups of Christians. And that's going to lead people to ask, like, okay, but what's the real version? Who should be in charge? And one way groups kind of legitimate themselves is by telling a story about their history. Like, both groups want to claim Cyril. And the way you do that is by telling a genealogy that gets Cyril on your side or, you know, pick your favorite hero. But so can you tell us about like these genealogies? Like, who, who are the heroes? What makes you a good guy in these kinds of stories?
- [33:46]
B
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that's exactly right. So the, the. Exactly. They both have the same early genealogies. Right. So they, both of these Chalcedonian and Miaphysite sides are writing narratives where they are claiming the biblical prophets, the apostles of Jesus, the martyrs of the early church, the 4th century saints and bishops like Athanasius of Alexandria, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, they are claiming those 4th century heroes as defenders of orthodoxy. And they use the model of the 4th century, which felt happily familiar to me after my earlier projects. I was so happy to see those names showing up again. They use that model of the heroes who fought the so called Arian controversy, the controversy around the teachings of Arius and as it came to be in later Eunomian controversy, Anomian controversy. They see Athanasius and the Cappadocians and John Chrysostom and others as the model for how to answer the heresies that they see in their own day. So they are, they are trying to trace in a, in a very scattered, actual complex history of Christianity that we as historians might, might trace. They're trying to draw a single thread up from the biblical prophets of the Hebrew Bible all the way up through the apostles, the martyrs, the saints, the 4th century through Cyril of Alexandria. And then of course, they disagree about where it goes next. And so they trace it through Dioscorus of Alexandria and the sort of Theodore of Jerusalem, Theodosius of Jerusalem, and they trace it up through the Miaphysite bishops who then ordain the new clergy for that tradition.
- [35:41]
A
Yeah, that's helpful. And yeah, that shift from kind of very familiar names to slightly less familiar names, it's part of the reading experience. But so, I mean, the genealogies of the heroes are kind of great. But I think it's a Hitchcock line that like, the bad guy makes the movie, or like the better the villain, the better the film. Something like that. Like, part of the way you do it is by building up heroes, but part of it is building up like anti heroes. And one thing that these neophysites and Caledonians, I'm sure will also do is kind of say you're actually like Nestorius or Arius or Marcian or Manny or the Jews. And like, part of that is just like name calling. But you show us that there's a logic to the way all of these heresies are kind of linked. I don't know. So can you kind of explain how something like the tome of Leo kind of gets linked into a broader genealogy of heresies? I don't know. I can hear myself saying that. And just imagine a conference paper coming and be like, you know, Manny and Mercion actually taught different things. And like, yes, of course they taught different things. But, like, part of your argument, I think, is that if your instinct is to nitpick, the rhetoric didn't work on you. The story they were telling didn't work. So how is it supposed to work? How are all these names that might not actually have anything to do with each other kind of coming together to be a story about the bad guys?
- [37:05]
B
Yeah, yeah, exactly. There are bishops, et cetera, who are concerned about the fine details about the current controversy in the 5th and 6th century, as well as about the early controversies. But their goal, I think, is exactly like you said, to string together a sort of chain of people that on the one hand make heroes and on the other hand are villains, in order that wherever you enter that chain, the rest all come out with it. Right? It's all sort of strung together. So if you can assume that your Christian audience knows that Judas is a traitor because of the Gospel stories, if you can assume that your audience knows that Simon Magus is a terrible opponent to the apostles because he gets attacked for trying to by the Holy Spirit in the Book of Acts, Acts of the apostles. So if you can assume that your readers, your audience, your hearers know some of those early New Testament sort of bad guys, then you can attach the more recent people to them. And so, yeah, what you're referencing is that I found really interesting. There are examples where the connections seem hard to find, where they just list every opponent to Christianity that they can think of all in one big list, and they seem to just be making them all lumped together. But the parts I found more interesting are the parts you were referencing where you see really clearly that they're trying to show all of these people I'm going to name, they all have the same wrong thing in common. That is, they all deny the full divinity of the Son of God. So that starts with Jews. That starts next with Jewish Christians and Ebionites. And you work your way up until you get to the Nestorians. And then once you've agreed with everybody on the Nestorians, then you. You say, aha. And they're just like the Chalcedonian Christians. So, ha, I win. Right? So, absolutely. We see sometimes it's the denying the full divinity, sometimes it's denying the full humanity. There's another set of accusations about phantasms and sort of the illusory body of Jesus. And so there are these different ways that they pull them back through the biblical narrative, through Christian history, back into the biblical narrative where the good guys and bad guys seem more both agreed upon and also a sharper dichotomy. So I think in this way they are able to benefit from the long tradition of pheresiology, but they're also benefiting, as you mentioned, from the long tradition of anti Judaism, which by this point has hundreds of years of history behind it and is a sort of typical fall guy, one of several, but atypical fall guy for Christian anti heretical language is to tie them to Judaism or to the Jews as they are represented, as if they are opposed to Jesus in the Gospel stories. So in that case, you see this messy present gets sort of mapped onto a much clearer polarized version of there is a right way and a wrong way, and all I need to know is what you're teaching and I'll be able to link you in to the correct genealogy of one of the heretics that leads you back to the pagans or to the Jews. So I do think that that is really one of the ways. I mean, and we might wonder like who's paying close enough attention to this in the random congregants who are coming to some of these sermons. But Severus of Antioch actually talks in some of his sermons about the anxiety that some of his. I mean, it's what he says, but he says to his congregation, I know some of you are really stressed about what are called the diptychs, right? The list of names of saints that are read in the church and whether somebody's added in a new one that shouldn't be there in his opinion, or taken one out of somebody who is, in his opinion, supposed to be there. And he says that this back and forth of the exiling of bishops and then the return of those bishops and then re. Exiling, right? The decades that follow the Council of Chalcedon have caused stable centered church congregations who don't themselves move a lot to have bishops come and go preaching different doctrines and different teachings. And so somebody will remove a name, somebody will come and then add the name. And so what you see in Severus's homilies is actually a reference to the anxiety. That's my word, of course, but that some of his congregants feel about. How can they know for sure? How can they feel secure that the Eucharist they're receiving, the rituals that they're participating in, the doctrine that they're taking in, in the church service is not polluted by the wrong name or missing a name. And so although we think of these sometimes as like high fluting theological Controversies, they have very real, like in the world consequences as they're interpreted by some of the congregations at least.
- [42:29]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's one of those things where like, as a historian it could be hard to figure out like another like list of names, but then if you were living through it, like, you would know the names and, and you could like feel when one was off and like, like, I, like when you, I mean, they wouldn't call it anxiety, but like, yeah, like you can, you can just like sense like, oh, like, ooh, why is that guy there? Yeah, it's great. So, I mean, so you've got kind of, you know, good guys, bad guys, like Gregory versus Nestorius. Um, but so much of this life is also built around the martyrs. Um, and these are, you know, other people whose names would be read out. Um, and I think, like, I don't know if you're not used to reading 5th, 6th century Syriac neophysite texts like you. The story that it gets told is like, well, by the 4th century, persecutions are over. And so, I don't know, you know, Gregory of Nyssa preaches on the 40 martyrs, but then he goes and preaches at the funeral of the emperor's daughter. And like, you know, this like asceticism is going to always be the new kind of martyrdom. And sometimes something like fasting or giving to the poor or kind of that ascetic life is what martyrdom means. But other times they're really talking about persecution from a misled, bloodthirsty, stubborn, dangerous emperor or something like that. And you show how kind of Christians. The stories Christians were telling would depend on who the emperor was and kind of what kind of relationship they had with the emperor. So maybe biggest shift happens between Emperor Anastasius, who is, you know, more supportive, much more supportive of meowsite Christians than someone like Justin or Justinian even. Can you tell us about that shift and kind of like what were the murder stories? Like when Anastasius is in charge and then what happens after him?
- [44:15]
B
Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's another thing I found interesting about the project is like the, like you said, we're used to thinking about, oh, you know, Emperor Constantine comes to power early 4th century, boom, boom, boom. Suddenly Christians are not persecuted anymore. And that's because in part because the 4th century Christian communities who lose the bid for imperial power in the 4th century don't survive today for the most part in modern day churches. And so we don't hear their side of the story. So the Donatist controversy is an exception to that and one that I found really helpful to think about in western North Africa or the Roman province of North Africa. But it's really the fifth century in the Eastern Mediterranean before you have groups like the Miaphysite Christians, but before them also the Church of the east as it comes to be in the earlier 431controversy, where you have today churches that survive from both sides of the controversy. And so that's something that I found really interesting in terms of the sense that imperial power is unstable in that period. Right. It's unstable in the 4th century in that it goes back and forth. And they finalize the 325Nicaea decision at the 381 Council of Constantinople. It's unstable in the later period because the Council of Chalcedon in 451 goes 100 years before it's finally reaffirmed in 553 at the Second Council of Constantinople under Justinian. So I was really interested. We tend to, I think in reading the scholarship before or older scholarship anyway, we tended to see Miaphysite Christians because we know they lost. We tend to look back and see them as the losing side throughout the 5th and 6th century. But I think that overlooks, as some others, like Folhamensa's book as well points out, like, it overlooks the period of Zeno followed by Anastasius, during which Mephistoids were in power for decades in many ways, in many places. And so then I started to think, well, if we aren't just telling the story of Miaphysites struggling, having lost the battle, what are they doing while they're in charge for a generation? Like, how is it that they go from being out of charge to in charge for a whole generation and then lose power again? And how do they navigate that loss of power that next time under Justin in 5:18 and following? So that's where I started to be able to look at especially the writings of Severus Vantioch that start in Greek into Syriac, and the writings of Philoxenus of Mabuh that start in Syriac, because we have writings from them from both of those periods when they are out of power and when they're in power. And so that's where I started to see what I thought were really interesting shifts in how they talked about the martyrs story. So when Severus is in Antioch as the bishop giving homilies on the, you know, commemorating the martyrs, he uses them very much to talk about suffering, but the suffering he's specifically talking about is you shouldn't go to so many banquets, you should stop going to the theaters, like you should. You should live with less luxury, you should live a more ascetic life, even as a layperson. You should give more to the Church to give to the poor, to those who are in need. And struggles were struggles against temptation in Philoxenus. They were struggles against the demons, they were struggles against luxury. And it really seemed to me an interesting difference to see how that language of struggle and suffering shifted into the period under Justin and then Justinian, where these same authors then are talking about themselves being in exile and being. They use the word persecution or pursuit, they're being pursued, they're being persecuted, they're exiled. And so that changes the language of what they're asking others to do. But in some ways, then we see both uses being used, because some of the pressures the empire puts on are not physical, like bloody violence. Some of them are and some of them aren't. So in that case, both types of suffering come up in the 6th century language of these authors. They both want wealthy people to be willing to lose some of their wealth in order to stay part of the Church, but they also want some of the bishops or some of the monks to be able to endure physical oppression or physical harm in order to not abandon the Miaphysite Church. So I think it showed me that we shouldn't. It was a good reminder that we want to be as nuanced as possible. We want to think about the exact when and where the texts are produced. And we don't want to just lump everybody together as, oh, they're Mephisto, they're not in charge. They were in charge for a long time. So what shifts in those different periods. And also the people who like ascetics are not the same as wealthy lay people who are not the same as bishops all the time. And so thinking about who is being addressed, who's doing the addressing, when and where they're talking about it. I hope it helped nuance that chapter on violence in the book, because certainly that's how I felt it was what I felt it was doing to my own thinking as I was working through it.
- [49:51]
A
Yeah, I mean, it was a really helpful just kind of way to think about how everybody has the martyrs in their head. Everybody is kind of participating in some kind of ritual, even where martyrs are being revered. And yet kind of what it's going to mean to imitate a martyr is going to really differ depending on how. How much like physical persecution you're facing. And so just kind of seeing and just like being able to actually trace like. Yep, that's actually how that played out. I don't know. I found that very clarifying. So I mean. Yeah, thanks. You know, the other thing that you show is that Christian leaders are kind of encouraging perseverance through talk of the afterlife. Kind of like, I don't know, keep your eyes on the prize, suffer now, suffer later, that kind of thing. And so these kind of anti Chalcedonians, they saw their own persecution as this sign of the soon coming Antichrist. And preachers, they're kind of happy to speculate on the eternal torture of heretics or the bliss of the faithful. Right. But John of Rufus, you show, kind of links the Chalcedonians with the Israelites who obeyed God. And so kind of like with the genealogies, you're. You see how they're putting these contemporary events into Bible stories. And what happens with that is you get kind of a, you know, blurry, confusing reality all of a sudden comes into like sharp contrast with good guys and bad guys. And you don't have like neighbors fighting, you have disobedient sinners and persevering saints. So can you tell us a little bit about John and prophecy and kind of like what kind of signs is he looking for and how does he like link scripture to the 6th century?
- [51:34]
B
Yeah, I loved the John Rufus text that I was using mostly was the Plerophoria, the Miscellanies. And it's a fascinating text. He's one of the Greek speakers who's writing from the region of Gaza in Greek originally that gets preserved in Syriac. And he like so many Romans, sees the world around him and takes messages from it. So he mentions sometimes the sky darkened unexpectedly during the day. He mentions there was a, a hailstorm that dropped stones in one case or I mean like rocks or there was. He just has. Well, okay, so those are natural world descriptions. But he also then tells a lot of stories claiming that they are from desert ascetics that he's familiar with in his region of southern Roman Palestine and the Gaza area. And they're just filled with other types of signs. So the others we might call portents more often or something. Right. A natural thing that you take to mean something that signals what's going to happen. John interprets them sometimes like the darkness. Often he reads as happening before the Council of Nicaea and was a sign of the obfuscation of Orthodoxy that was coming in the council or a sign that Emperor Marcion was going to be an evil emperor instead of a good emperor like Theodosius II had been. So he reads signs in that way. But the ascetics I find especially interesting, he says that some of them had visions of the afterlife, a good place and a bad place, a place of fiery torment. And then they visited another place and it was a place of sort of peaceful light with God and everybody was very happy. And so he actually, he plays with these visions and with the portents and signs in ways that he then can tie at the end of his long text into the historic events of the Roman Empire in his early 6th century world, having these fights on the eastern frontier, having lost territory in the west earlier, right? So he takes the historical examples of his world, puts them side by side with the natural portents, the signs that he hears about from the ascetics, and he turns that, he builds that all together into an argument that God is on the side of the Miaphysite Christians and that the end of the world might be nearer than you think. And so he really, um. One example where he has a, A, an as. He says that an ascetic in the desert wasn't sure about the right answer about Chalcedon when somebody asked him. And so a tone from heaven lowered itself, answering the question directly from heaven, right? Saying those of Chalcedon were apostates, they were transgressed. Woe to them and anathema, right? So if you weren't already clear, God Godself is like sending a message down in physical form that's legible to the saint who can read it out to the audience in front of. So he takes things that everyone can see, like a darkness, like an eclipse or something, and then he incorporates it into both the biblical narrative and the historical sort of events of his time and ties it all up into a story about. About how you tell orthodoxy from heresy. It's Pro Savings days at Lowe's. Get up to 35% off, select major.
- [55:19]
A
Appliances and save an additional $1,000 when you buy four select LG major appliances.
- [55:25]
B
Plus get a free Dewalt 20 volt.
- [55:27]
A
Max 5amp hour battery when you buy a select Dewalt 20 volt max tool.
- [55:31]
B
Get the job done for less at Lowes.
- [55:34]
A
We help you save. Valid through 926. Selection varies by location while supplies last. See associate@lowes.com for more details and qualifying items. Trip Planner by Expedia. You were made to outdo your holiday. You're hammocking and your pooling. We were made to help Organize the competition. Expedia made to travel. If you thought goldenly breaded McDonald's chicken couldn't get more golden, think Golder. Because new sweet and smoky special edition gold sauce is here made for your chicken favorites. And participate in McDonald's for a limited time. Yeah, so maybe I'm. This is like an overly simple question, but like. Like, listening to you, I can hear, like, I went to UCSB and Mark Jurgensmaier was there and he talked about radicalization as being like, there's like, these four things that tend to happen. There's religious drama, rituals. We'll come back to those. There's martyrdom that we've talked about. There's like a need for purity and then this kind of cosmic war. And the way you talk about that, it reminds me of kind of cosmic war. But, like, can you make the link from the kind of, like, Bible story that gets told to radicalization? Like, how does the telling of the story actually lead to the radicalization?
- [56:50]
B
Yeah, I think. Well, so in part, it's easy to make an argument that God's on your side when you're in charge of the empire, right? So the question is, how do you persuade people that God is on your side when you're not in charge of the empire? Especially when your Christian opponents are saying, see, we're in charge because God put us in charge. So that's the obvious answer. So I think Christians had a lot of possibilities to draw on. Certainly they had Hebrew Bible prophets that could be used to argue that God is punishing the good people in order to bring them back to God. They could also use the story of Job, which they sometimes do, to say, well, it's a trial, it's a. It's a challenge that God is giving you to see if you stay true to. To being in God's community. But a lot of what I was looking at in these stories and the Miaphysit texts of this period, they look to the future. And so they're using some of the New Testament texts to talk about those who suffer unjustly now will in the near future have a huge reward for doing so. So while there may be economic or social or legal pressures to incline the Ephesite Christians to accept the Chalcedonian Eucharist when the Chalcedonians are in charge of the empire, stories like these that have the threat of fiery torment and in the afterlife, the promise of the potential of eternal glory if you stay with the Mephioside Church, I see them in part as a way to Sort of balance the scales and persuade me, aphasite Christians, to try to endure some of the temporary discomfort in the near term in order to not suffer in the long term and to instead have a sort of bright afterlife in their potentially near future.
- [58:32]
A
Yeah, that's really helpful. And I think it gets to the other part of this. So we've been talking a lot about stories and how stories motivate people. And of course they do, but they also stick because they're reinforced. They get performed in rituals. And rituals were another way to delineate insiders and outsiders and kind of radicalize through that you have flashpoints. So if there is this kind of cosmic war and drama of religion, then it's kind of need for purity to say, okay, this is the real group. And all those other people, they're too dirty, they don't get to come in. And that is a nice story to tell, but on the ground this stuff was pretty messy. Me and physites and Caledonians were actually living right next to each other all the time. And so you have people like Chantella, like Jacob, Saru and Severus, who are. They're trying to create these pure communities in a world where the readers had to actually worry about. Can you go to the Caledonian church with. With your neighbor? Like, probably not or, but. Or like maybe no.
- [59:34]
B
The answer.
- [59:35]
A
Okay, so sorry, that was not.
- [59:36]
B
Do that, Mike. It was a bad example.
- [59:39]
A
But like, what if a Caledonian bishop blessed. Right. Yes, they did. But like, yeah, like if the Caledonian like blessed some kind of object. And like, what if it was expensive and you weren't gonna. Like, you don't really wanna throw it out. But like, is there a way we can keep it? And I don't know, like, unbless it or. So I, you know, like, like there was a kind of sanitation process that they were. They were going for. And that sanitation, we know, kind of leads to violence or at least it makes it easier. But one thing I really didn't know before reading this book, maybe I should have, but I just didn't, was how much of this kind of purity ritual material is being written by bishops in exile who were kind of trying to get their jobs back. So I don't know. And they're writing two people on the ground living in the mess of reality. But can you tell us about that dynamic of these kind of exiled authors writing to gogrigants and asking in increasingly loud ways for something that was kind of impossible to create this pure community?
- [60:40]
B
Yeah, no, I think it depends a lot. And I Thought of that a lot when I was working on this. And I think that individual authors have really different situations. So I'm just going to give a couple examples, but just to show the messiness of it. So, John of Tella, which is where your examples about suppose this thing comes from the Sasanian Empire and it's Christian, but we don't know what kind, what do we do with it? Is it okay in the church? Is it okay in my home? So these. John of Tella spends most of his episcopacy in exile, but he does it by wandering the countryside, the rural regions in the eastern border of the Roman Empire and the western border area of the Sasanian Empire. And I think that he is really writing. He writes to deacons, he writes a treatise to priests, and he is, I think, circulating instructions for the Miaphysite clergy who he is ordaining from exile, like in exile, as he wanders to sustain these rural and monastic communities. And so I would say he's not so much addressing directly the laity who find themselves in a church with a Chalcedonian bishop saying, like, don't listen to that guy. But he is in part writing to this sort of, I don't know, you want to call it shadow network of clergy who are Miaphysite, who are working in the margins of the empire, who are working on the borders of the rural regions around the major cities where the bishops are, like, housed in their big churches. So I see him as exceptional because he is working in this itinerant way, not so much interested in moving to Tella as bishop again, but in fact, making this network of Miapasite clergy across these political boundaries. But on the other hand, you have folks like Severus and Philoxenus who I think would be happy to go back to their cities where they're bishops. Philoxenus doesn't live terribly long after he lives a few years, but then he dies, incarcerated, in exile. And when he's in exile, a lot of his writings are too monastic Miaphysite communities, instead of to churches, like churches with laity who have their own Chalcedonian bishop. And Severus is different because he's living in Egypt, where it is a Miaphysite majority, and he has the protection of that community in. In Egypt. So he writes a lot of letters, he writes a lot of treatises from Egypt. But I think. I think it. It was also. I also struggled with this question, like, what do they think they're doing? They're not in Charge. But in fact, they each have different circumstances. And I think if we look at the circumstances, they're easier to explain individually than they would be as a big picture.
- [63:30]
A
Yeah, yeah, no, that's helpful. Okay, so the penultimate chapter ends up looking at John of Ephesus and his ecclesiastical history and the lives of the Eastern saints. Maybe can you tell us just like a little bit about him and his work? And then. And I'll ask a real question, but give a little intro to him just to make sure we're on the same page.
- [63:50]
B
Yeah, for sure. So he's actually where I started when I was reading, but then I found my way backwards to all of these other folks that I was less familiar with. So he's late 6th century for his writings, but he lives from the early 6th century. He's born when Anastasius is still emperor. So for the first years of his life, he grows up in a world where Miaphysite Christians have some power in the world. And then I think it's probably formative. So he's what, like maybe 11, 12ish, when the Imperial shift happens to Justin and the persecution starts, he is growing up in a monastery in Amida, or near Amida, which is northern Mesopotamia, near the Tigris River. And that monastery is sent into exile several times by Justin and the Miaphysite, sorry, the Chalcedonian clergy, who he is supporting. Abraham Barka Eli is the Chalcedonian sort of aggressive bishop in Amida. Ephraim is the Chalcedonian aggressive bishop in Antioch at this time. So he experiences these things firsthand. But as a young man, he also lives through the deaths of all my earlier generation folks that we talked about, Severus and Flixenus and John of Tella and all. And so he is in a new generation. He is under Justinian. He sees those shifts happen. And so when he is writing, it's actually even after the death of Justinian. It's just after Justinian dies in 565 that we have John of Ephesus surviving large ecclesiastical history, multi part, and also his lives of the Eastern Saints. And so what you find in his writings, I. I argue, I don't know if it's persuasive. I see in his writings, after the work that I did for this project, a sort of culmination of those earlier authors narrative strategies that they sort of worked out while Anastasius was in power and they had some space to sort of think. And then through the immediate years that followed, Andrew, Justin's more aggressive policies. I see those strategies continuing in John of Ephesus, but he also includes those very same people in his collection of saints lives. Right. So he has a story of John of Tella's life as a martyr. He has a story of Jacob Baradaeus life as a saint. So he is able to take the work that those other authors are doing and kind of consolidate it and continue it into the future. So it's his work that a lot of later Syrian Orthodox churches and also church historians use as the story of that earlier period. And I just felt lucky that we have also the primary sources from the late 5th and early 6th century that we can use, but we also have John's retroactive history of that period.
- [66:50]
A
Yeah, no, that's really helpful. I think you answered the question I was gonna ask you. I mean, just like you compare what he's doing to what Jews had to do after the destruction of the temple, I can explain why would God favorite people face such devastation? And you show how he's kind of using all of those tricks or the genealogies and the calls for ritual actions, all those things that we're used to seeing are all now condensed into two books that lots of other Christians will later read. Yeah, thank you.
- [67:26]
B
I do see, like, one thing that's different in his that I think I'll just comment on is the amount of language, of suffering that he includes. And I think that you could take issue with this claim, but I think still that the experience that he had of the plague, the Bubonic plague in the Justinianic period, as well as what scholars tended to call the Little Ice Age, Late Antique Little Ice Age, the sort of climate change, the cooling, the regional famines that happen, the wars on the Sasanian Roman border that are affecting his communities directly. Sometimes I think they sent him out, he wanders down to Egypt, up the coast, ends up in Constantinople. That's where he's writing from. So I think his own life's span going through those significant events, at least the plague, he writes about for himself as if it were a very significant event. And I think that that helps to draw out the language of suffering even more, even as he also is living in a world under Justin and Justinian, where the Church also is out of favor imperially. So he ties together those layers of suffering in ways that I think are much more substantive than we saw in the earlier 6th century material.
- [68:48]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you. So the conclusion of the book shows how the kinds of resistances that Syriac Christians learned how to throw up after Chalcedon became the source material for how they would then respond to when Islam came. And it kind of reminds us that the reason why we have so many of these texts is because people copied them. And you kind of show how these copyists, they probably felt historical analogies with the, you know, like it was different but like with the rise of Islam and like, I mean you don't be too broad with this, but like, you know, part of what you're also doing in this last part of the book is showing like how focusing on Syriac Christianity shows us the rise of Islam. Isn't this like radical break with the past that, I mean people know the idea of a holy war or will become jihad, like has its roots in the seventh century war with, you know, Romans and Persians and Roman Christians are like encouraging soldiers to go out into battle for their faith. And so, you know, Arabic speaking Muslims a few decades later are going to do the same kind of thing. But like this is, you know, kind of a recognizable late ancient thing here. So can you tell us like how these narrative strategies they were trying out in the fifth and sixth centuries kind of reappear in the seventh and eighth centuries with the rise of Islam?
- [70:04]
B
Yeah, yeah. That was actually something I hadn't anticipated, including when I started the project. But I realized as I looked back, like the first council, the 451 Council of Chalcedon, it takes 100 years till we get Justinian's confirmation of it. And the Miaphysite community as shown by John of Ephesus is still sort of surviving if not thriving in certain times and places in that period. And then I thought, you know what, it's only from the death of John of Ephesus, it's really only 50 more years until a lot of the major cities in that part of the world we're talking about are now under the control of Muhammad's followers after his death. Right. So by 641 you've got Antioch, Damascus, Jerusalem, Alexandria, all of them are under the control of Muhammad's followers. And by the time you get to the end of that decade, the six hundred nineties, you have the consolidation of the Umayyad caliphate under Abd Al Malik in Jerusalem in the 690s. And so as I started, just out of speculation and curiosity, influenced by my colleagues here who are medieval Latinists who are always talking about manuscript studies, which is super interesting, I was like, I am finally going to look at manuscripts, I am going to do it. And it was amazing. So what I learned from doing that is that some of the only surviving manuscripts of the people I had been studying for the Miaphysit controversy in fact survive from the very period of the 680s, the 690s, the 670s, the year 700. So that was really fascinating because I wouldn't want to push too hard on that. We don't know exactly where they were written sometimes we don't know exactly which communities were producing the other texts. But by looking at the Apocalypse of Pseudomethodius, which is a seventh century text responding in some way to this world shift as they're experiencing it in the Christian community of this new empire, the Caliphate, I thought, you know what, maybe it's not just that every Christian who faces an apocalypse is going to pull out the same threads. Maybe there's actually even more that you could say. Maybe the Miaphysite Christians who are writing those later apocalypses have already recently heard or read some of the earlier Meophysite stories that I spent my time thinking about. And so that's what I found interesting. You know, John of Ephesus's lives is copied in 688. The third part of his church history is copied by the same scribe. Severus of Antioch's homilies are recopied and translated around the year 700. His letters, Severus's letters are also from the late 7th century. There's a copy of them. So whatever. We can't prove, I can't prove who and how many people were reading them, but we know that they survive today in part because at the very period where this new transformation is happening on that landscape, somebody is copying these manuscripts from the earlier period. And so, yeah, I thought it was fun, at least for me, to think about ways in which these earlier texts might have, as I thought about it, helped prepare this community for what they might have seen as the next apocalypse. Right, the one that they were experiencing a hundred years later.
- [73:23]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you. So the last chapters kind of draw on Bruce Lakin's idea of Religions of resistance. Can you tell us about what, what is that and how do you see these Syriac Christians relating to that category?
- [73:38]
B
Yeah, I use it sort of. I use his work loosely, but it was really impactful when I was reading it, starting to think about the intersections of religion and violence in this period. I think the reason I found religions of Resistance really helpful as a tool for me to think about, he describes it as their refusal to accept the religion of the status quo, quo in part or in toto. And I thought that seems to me exactly what the Mphysites are trying to strive for is to encourage the perseverance in their audience in ways that resist the imperial Chalcedonian view. So that was helpful. But as I was thinking, he also has the language of religions of revolution. And so, as I was thinking about what I learned from this case study that might also be interesting and impactful for thinking about religious radicalization in our world today, that the religions of revolution seemed a helpful contrast. Right. So I want to make comparisons with the case study from antiquity in order to say, look, there are narrative strategies that help produce devoted followers who then will resist harm or endure harm in order to stay with the community, the religious community. But the. An important difference that is highlighted by Bruce Lincoln's language is that the Mia state Christians are most often a religion of resistance. They are just resisting the imperial pressures. Whereas the, you know, the sort of examples of white Christian nationalism today or of the sort of nine, 11 terrorist attacks, the sort of rise of forms of Islamism, those are what Bruce Lincoln calls religions of revolution that take direct action, quote, direct action against the dominant fractions, material control of society. And so that is something we see much less in the miaphysit world. And so I thought both the contrast and the comparisons helped me. I don't know, in the vocabulary I learned from my mentor, Liz Clark. They were useful to think with. Right. They were tools for helping me see the material in new ways that I found productive.
- [75:48]
A
Yeah, yeah, it's great. So, I don't know, are there other kind of books that shaped your thinking about kind of radicalization today? This is kind of going beyond the scope of the book, but you spend a lot of time thinking about this. How should we be thinking about radicalization today? What other things were useful for you to think with?
- [76:05]
B
Yeah, yeah, there's a couple of things. So I think doing the project made me pay more attention to the ways in which radicalization was showing up in conversations in our world recently. Of course. And in one sense, I. I think some of the work that I did that or that I read that emphasized the word. Well, it. It highlighted that the word radicalization is usually used in a negative context. Right. You're saying that person is too much this direction. They have become radicalized. And so I was interested to see it, what you could see in a different way if you used words like devotion instead of radicalization. Because the texts we're reading, they talk about being zealous, showing zeal for the faith. They think of themselves as devoted followers. And I thought maybe there's a way in which we can change the conversations or see things from a new perspective. If we look from the other side, if we think not, we think that they are too far that way, what do they think of themselves? They think that they are voted very devoted. And is there a way in which talking about religious devotion in an extreme maybe helps make what another person might call radicalization easier to intervene in? Because that is one of the goals I'm interested in. How do we intervene before religious radicalization, if we want to use that term, becomes violent? And if we think of it as a form of devotion, is there a different way we can access those devoted followers in a way that doesn't sound quite as if we're from the beginning already condemning them in a. In a negative sense. So I would say there were a lot of influences. Some of them made me think of violence in new ways. Right. Not just as physical violence, of course, but it made me less interested in. Is of the question, less interested in the question of is this an example of violence? And more interested in questions like who is experiencing this thing as violence? Right. So more the question of perspective. So things like, I don't know for sure, the. The fact that I was doing this In a post 911 world, like I finished my Grads Grad study right after 9 11. And so the intersections of religion and religious conflicts and violence have been percolating in my own thinking for years since then. But more recently, of course, the George Floyd's murder in 2020. I started this project in 2016 17, so I was already in the midst of it. But the things about whose history we tell, like whose history are we telling? What do we. How do we tell them against a sort of increasingly polarized political conversation, those things. There are books like Sarah Diffendorf's the Holy Inequality and Anxiety among white evangelicals from 2023 that I found really thought provoking. Sarah Riccardi Schwartz's Between Heaven and Religious Conversion. Sorry, yeah. Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia is a 2022 book that I found really interesting. And so I think, I hope, unfortunately, there's no shortage of examples about the intersections of religious devotion, polarization, various forms of harm. But it is my hope that this case study from antiquity might offer some, I don't know, some of the ways in which we can make more visible the strategies that both support and resist that form of devotion that might offer pathways for us in the future to maybe intervene in reducing the kind of violence that can result.
- [79:56]
A
Yeah. And I mean, that's a real takeaway from the book too. Yeah. Anything else you want readers to take away from the book, but also, what do you work on next?
- [80:09]
B
It's hard. I mean. Okay, so this project took a long time while I was also department head through the pandemic. It was a rough go for everybody for a bit there. The things that. That I'm coalescing around right now are. I'm thinking of it in terms of the phrase embodied truths with an S on the end. I'm interested in the way that early Christian perceptions of truth were impacted by their own individualized embodied experiences, whether shaped in all sorts of ways through gender, through experiences, through time, through place, through ability, through any number of possible things you can think of. So. But it hasn't yet coalesced. I keep getting pulled in a couple of different directions. So I've been re reading a lot of. And reading a lot of new primary sources to get the sort of get things started. I've done projects on the Apothecnoid Patra, which I hadn't worked on before. I've relooked at some of Jacob of Saroo's and some of Ephraim's language, looking at representations of the Council of Chalcedon as a sex worker, as a female sex worker. So that was a kind of conference paper project, a story that contra poems that contrasted the sexual theft, I called it, of Tamar and Judah, where Tamar was the proactive person expecting Judah to have sex with her so that she could have. So could give birth in the line as David and Abraham contrasted with the other Tamar story from 2 Samuel of the Amnon's rape and sexual assault of his sister Tamar. So looking at the ways in which male and female virginity are represented differently. So I don't know, that's a lot of interesting, different topics that I'm hoping soon will coalesce. But I'm not sure whether they'll coalesce around only gender. As a lens for analyzing this. I think at the moment that gender is going to be one, one chapter of several. But I am interested in thinking about the ways in which your own individual experience and your embodiment, the body that you have, shapes what you perceive as religious truth and taking that back into antiquity to get some good examples and then thinking about how that has an impact for today as well, of course. So I guess the short answer is stay tuned.
- [82:32]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's great. And like you know, it's, like, fun to read widely, to just kind of see what pops out, too. This is really great. Congrats on the book, and thanks for talking.
- [82:43]
B
Yeah. Thank you so much for the invitation. It's really, really nice to have a conversation with you. I appreciate.