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Christopher J. Bonura, "A Prophecy of Empire: The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius from Late Antique Mesopotamia to the Global Medieval Imagination" (U California Press, 2025)
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Hello and welcome to New Books in Late Antiquity, presented by Ancient Jew Review. I'm Mike Motilla and today we're talking with Christopher Benura about a prophecy of empire, Pseudo Methodius. From late antique Mesopotamia to the global medieval imagination, the Apocalypse of Pseudo Methodius was among the most influential texts from late antiquity. Listeners of this show probably know who Augustine was and likely know who Gregory of Nazianzus and John Christendom are. But they're probably less familiar with this apocalyptic vision that inspired Christians across the globe and throughout the medieval world. It was written in Syriac, in the Syriac language, but also in a Syriac culture that is, as early Christians like to say, it was kind of in, but not of those larger imperial powers of its day. And this apocalypse it presents Rome not as the big bad guy who has to get taken down before Christ returns, but as a positive part of the story of salvation. We'll let Chris get into the details of the story in a minute. But the text more broadly reminds us of just how multilingual this late ancient and medieval worlds were. It was translated into Greek and Latin and Coptic and Armenian and Old Church Slavonic. And by the early modern period readers could find it in German, Castilian, French, Russian, Ukrainian, Gez and English. Theologians read it, monks read it, even Christopher Columbus read it. And what they took from it is what Bunura calls a political eschatology, an account of the role and the meaning of empire in bringing about the end of history. So it's a text about the end of the world. But this text and its reception aren't just like, I don't know, data points for calculating the betting odds of the apocalypse based on history. They matter for us in understanding how people lived with a view towards the end. Like if we all live with these half conscious myths about the origins and the direction and the ends of the world, then studying how people theorized this end should help us understand the psychic and social lives of people who lived even back in late antiquity. Sometimes they thought that their empires that they were, they were in or they were next to were these kind of, you know, divinely appointed walls holding back evil. And other times they thought that the empire was that evil oppressive force that will one day be overthrown. But Bonera shows us how changes of empire or how those social, political, religious changes made possible different visions of the end. And he shows us how those visions shaped political and religious involvement in those empires. We are lucky to have him with us today. Christopher Bonera is visit assistant professor and distinguished lecturer at the University of Washington right now and he's an assistant professor of history at Mount St. Mary's in Maryland. So Chris, hi, welcome. Thanks for being here. Can you introduce yourself? Who are you and how'd you come to write this book?
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C
Yeah, thanks Mike, and thank you for having me. Thank you for the honor of inviting me on the podcast. So I'm a historian of the pre modern Mediterranean and its global connections. My training and background is in Byzantine studies, but I've sort of branched out a lot from there and I guess throughout my work I've been really interested in how pre modern people think about the end of time. Yeah, actually I'm pretty interested in how people generally think about the end, whether that's our individual ends or at our deaths or whatever. Comes next. And also how we think about the collective end, like the end of the world, the end of society, or even the end of the universe. And how these things influence how we view the world, how we go about the world. Right. So yeah, for that reason I've been interested in apocalyptic literature in general. And I really got interested in the apocalypse of Pseudo Methodius in grad school. I just kept finding it popping up in these random places. As you mentioned, the intro, Christopher Columbus refers to it. Apparently Dante was into influences the Ethiopian national epic. It influences medieval Russian chronicles and early modern Russian literature and has this enormous impact on Byzantine literature. And there are even poetic translations, Middle English from the 16th century floating around. So I just kept bumping into this apocalyptic text and I got fascinated with it. Right. And it's a really weird text too. So even now, having just finished writing a book about it, parts of it still baffle me. So yeah, I wanted to figure it out. Right. And specifically, really, why do medieval and early modern people keep going back to this text? Right. And what, why does it spread so far and wide? Why are people interested in it and why do they keep going back to it? So, yeah, I was originally going to write about it for my PhD dissertation. It ended up becoming kind of too complicated. I pivoted to a more general topic on late antique apocalyptic. But then I finished the dissertation. There was a chapter in there about pseudomethodius and I was trying to decide what to do next, how that dissertation could become a book, you know, these things that we deal with sort of post grad school. And I decided, you know what, like Pseudomethodius is something that still really interests me and I really want to crack it, I want to make better sense of it. Yeah. So I ended up expanding that dissertation chapter into a book. And so what I'm doing in this book is looking at Pseudomethodius context. Then I'm giving a close reading of its text and then finally an overview of its reception and its global impact. And then at the end, I have an appendix in which I provide a new translation of Pseudo Methodius. And hopefully that's gonna be valuable to scholars who wanna read and approach this apocalypse and maybe even to students and non scholars who are interested in medieval literature or apocalyptic texts.
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's really helpful just as you're reading to like have the actual translation right there. You can kind of read the translation and then go back and say like, oh yeah, okay, now I remember kind of where we are in the Story. We're gonna jump into the text in a second. But there's one term that I want you to kind of tell us about before we jump into the texts. And you're talking about political theology or really political eschatology. Can you give us a primer on that? And also, what does it help us see in kind of late ancient texts? I'm used to it from Carl Schmidt, but what are we doing with it in late ancient stuff?
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C
Yeah, yeah. As you said, it's popularized by Carl Schmitt. But the term political theology has been used differently by a lot of different scholars, has a lot of different meanings. So in the book, I'm using it more or less of the way Ernst Kantorowicz used it in his famous book the King's Two Bodies. Right. So it's this idea that the proper political order can be discerned from theology. Right. In the sense that God's will pervades all of history. And you could base how things should be on that. Right. So I look at the apocalypse of Pseudo Methodius through that frame of political theology or political eschatology, as you mentioned. Right. And so I noticed this apocalypse has a lot about empires in it. Right. The rise and fall of empires, the sequence of empires. And it's drawing pretty heavily from the Book of Daniel for that, which I'm sure we'll touch on in a bit. And then the role of empire in the end times. And central to all this is the Roman Empire. Right. It sometimes calls the Roman Empire the kingdom of the Greeks because to the author, the Romans and the Byzantines are the Greeks. Right. But it's talking about the Roman Empire here. And Pseudo Methodius keeps asserting that the Roman Empire will last to the end of time and that no kingdom can possibly contend with it. Right. The Roman Empire is central to history. It's even sacred in God's plan for history. Right. And you know, there are many texts obviously from late antiquity that attribute great importance to the Roman Empire and God's plan. But I argue in the book that Pseudo Methodius is one of the most important texts in sacralizing the empire in the end times in eschatology. Right. And sacralizing the office of emperor in the end times. Yeah, the first to do that. Right. So I talked about there's some precursors, specifically within the Syriac Christian tradition, which I'm sure we'll touch on. But Pseudo Methodius brought these ideas to a wider Christian mainstream. Right. As it's translated into new languages.
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Great. Yeah. So can you give us just Like a broad summary of. Just so we're kind of on the same page, what's going on in this text?
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C
Yeah, yeah. No, it's an extremely fun, though weird text, as I was saying. Right. So as we've been talking about, it's an apocalyptic text, right? But it's kind of different from what I think a lot of people imagine when they think of an apocalypse, Right? Because it's not just a vision of the end of time, but it's an account of all of history from Adam and Eve to the last days. Right? So it begins with Adam and Eve and the first generations and has the Flood and Noah's Ark, and then it discusses the histories of empire, as I was mentioning. Right. The Babylonians, the Medes, the Persians, and then it has a bit on Alexander the Great, who conquers the Persians, and then with God's help, he imprisons these savage peoples of Gog and Magog in the extremes of the earth. When Pseudo Methodius provides this complex and sort of crazy genealogy of Alexander's family in which his mom is an Ethiopian woman who then, after Philip of Macedon's death, marries the founder of Byzantium, and they have a daughter who marries Romulus, the founder of Rome. And, you know, so this all gets very fantastical, as you could tell. And it all culminates with the Roman conquest of Jerusalem in the time of Vespasian and Titus, which is sort of used as this claim that the Romans are God's chosen and invincible kingdom, right? That they're more beloved than the Jews and no kingdom can stand up to the Romans. And then there's the apocalyptic part, right? That's what gets us to this apocalyptic part. The Arabs come out of the desert and they oppress Christians, and Pseudo Methodius refers to the Arabs as the sons of Ishmael or the Ishmaelites. So it's alluding to this tradition that the Arabs are descended from Abraham's son Ishmael, Right? And though Pseudo Methodius never really talks about their beliefs, these are clearly the Muslim Arabs, Right? So this is an author pretending to make predictions, right? Pretending to make future predictions, because the author is pretending to be Methodius of Patara or Methodius of Amlanthus, this church father who is put to death in the early 4th century, right? But of course, this apocalypse is written later. And so it's pretty clear the author's talking about the Arab conquest, the Islamic conquests, okay? So just when everything seems hopeless for the Christians and these prophecies, right, then there's this ruler called the king of the Greeks, who shows up and he defeats the the sons of Ishmael. This figure is to be understood as a Byzantine emperor. Right. And you know, he's only in the text actually somewhat briefly, but he's like the star of the show. Right. So he shows up, he defeats the Ishmaelites, and then the people of Gog and Magog, whom Alexander imprisoned, they break out of their gate and overrun the earth, but they're defeated. The king of the Greeks survives all this, and he goes to Jerusalem. And there he'll go up on Golgotha, the place where Christ was crucified, and surrender his crown to God. Right. So he places his crown on the cross and these float up together to heaven. And at that moment, the Antichrist appears. He does all his bad stuff. It gets glossed over pretty quickly. And then finally you have the second coming of Christ and the Apocalypse ends there. Cool.
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Well, thank you. Okay, so that story is kind of going to go all over the world, Right. Christopher Columbus and Dante are gonna read it, but before it did, it was written, we think, in the seventh century as a Syriac text. And I don't know, sometimes you hear Syriac was this outsider language. It was a kind of resistance to Latin and Greek imperial power. But a big argument of the book is that this really was like a 7th century Syriac text and its roots are actually what make it so influential. So can you tell us kind of about this 7th century Syriac context and what makes it possible for it to be kind of a pro Roman text?
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Yeah, yeah. Like, one issue coming out of that that I just want to call attention to. Right. Is that scholarship on Pseudo Methodius really, for a long time has tended to interpret this text through the lens of, like, Byzantine political concerns, Byzantine religion. Right. So you'll often see attempts in secondary literature to tie its ideas, like, for example, to Eusebius of Caesarea and his writings. Right. Or to associate it with imperial concerns in the reign of Heraclius at the beginning of the seventh century. Yeah, but Pseudo Methodius is a Syriac text that was composed by a Christian living in the Islamic caliphate. Right. So, yeah. And very probably in a place in the caliphate that before the Arab conquests, had been part of the Sasanian Persian Empire. Right. So not even like previously Roman territory. So I show in the book also that there's no evidence that the author of Pseudo Methodius read Greek.
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Right.
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And the Apocalypse doesn't even reference even texts that were translated from Greek into Syriac that were popular with other Syriac authors. Right. Works like the chronicle of Eusebius or the writings of Josephus Pseuda. Methodius isn't referencing any of these. Right. So I think this text is pretty remote from the Byzantine world. And so what I try to do in the book is to recontextualize it as the work of a Syriac Christian living under Islamic rule. Right. Written in for other Syriac Christians trying to navigate life under Islamic rule and then dealing with how they see the Roman Empire from that position, from that context.
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B
Yeah, that's really helpful. It's kind of a given now. This is like a 7th century Christian text written under Islamic rule, but I don't know, for most of its reception history, people thought it was written by that 4th century author and martyr, Methodius. And then it went from Greek into Syriac. And I don't know, like that's usually the way the direction of these texts go. Like, it's wasn't a crazy idea that it would have gone that way. But can you tell us, like, who was Methodius? What is this text's actual relationship to him? And then how do we know that it actually went the other way? Like, that it went from Syriac into Greek and not the other way around?
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, excellent. So, yeah, as you said, the Apocalypse of Pseudo Methodius, it was long believed to have been written in Greek. Right. Actually, incidentally, as I was talking about, it's often treated in this Byzantine context through a Byzantine lens. For a long time everyone assumed that this was just the Byzantine text. Right. It was only in the 1930s that the Syriac origin was first sort of argued in detail. And then that was, I don't know, only really accepted in the 1980s or so universally. So that's a pretty relatively new insight. The idea that the text was written in Greek, this assumption that was written in Greek goes back just to the fact that it's attributed to Methodius of Patara, Methodius of Olympus, this church father who wrote in Greek. So if you believe that he wrote this text, it sort of naturally follows that the Apocalypse was written in Greek. So you asked who is Methodius? Who is the real Methodius? Right. So I've been calling him Methodius of Patara, Methodius of Olympus, because we don't know a lot about him. We don't even know what city he was the bishop of. But he was an important early Christian writer. He wrote Christian theological texts in Greek, mostly imitations of Platonic dialogues. And we know he was put to death by the Romans and the great persecution, probably around the year 311. Yeah, but by the 16th and 17th century, people began to realize that this apocalypse that's attributed to Methodius, he did not write it.
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Right.
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The simple reason is he, the historical Methodius lives centuries before the Arab conquests. But the apocalypse, the Sunna Methodius writing like it includes this prophecy about the Arab conquest, the Arab occupation of Christian lands. And so, you know, as scholars are developing source criticism and all that, right. They realize that if you don't assume that divine revelations are real, right. This guy couldn't have earned in this apocalypse. It had to have been written after the rise of Islam. And then the question becomes, who wrote it? Right? So for a while, the prevailing view is that actually the 9th century patriarch Methodius of Constantinople, the Patriarch who helped bring about the end of Iconoclasm, that he wrote it. Right. And that maybe the title Patriarch got mutated to Patara in the manuscripts or something. Right. And that makes some sense, right? This is a. So the Patriarch Methodius was imprisoned by the Iconoclasts before becoming patriarch. And many of the copies of Pseudo Methodius say that the revelations of Methodius were received in prison while Methodius was awaiting execution. So that fits. And you could kind of see the Apocalypse of Sue Methodius fitting well in the climate of Byzantium at the time when the empire is starting to recover after the end of Iconoclasm and going on the offensive again. Also, Patriarch Methodius was Sicilian, so presumably he knew Greek and Latin, and those were the two versions of Pseudo Methodius that people knew about. So people could imagine that he wrote it. These are all good reasons to assume that Patriarch Methodius wrote this apocalypse and it was a way of trying to find a real historical context for this text. Right? But that was wrong. Right. So then the theory of Syriac origins begins to take shape when people start to notice that a lot of the names of historical figures in Pseudo Methodius are kind of weird. And a lot of citations to Scripture don't make a lot of sense in context in the Greek or in the Latin. And so there's the scholar Michael Komosko. He's not the first to have this theory that Pseuda Methodius was written in Syriac. But what he does that's super important is he discovers a manuscript of the Syriac in the Vatican Library, and he presents this in the conference paper in 1930. And he shows that those names that are strange, they make sense in Syriac, and those citations from Scripture in Syriac, they're referring to the Syriac translation of the Bible, the peshitta, and those Citations make total sense when you have the peshitta wording of the Bible in mind. And he also shows that some of the sources that Pseudo Methodius is relying on are Syriac sources. So all this stuff starts to sort of converge on actually this text was written in Syriac. And I mean, there's still some skepticism for a while after this idea is presented because, you know, as you were saying, Syriac translations into Greek are rare. We're sort of more accustomed to seeing things go from Greek into Syriac. Right. And also this apocalypse is so pro Roman or pro Byzantine. Right. It's infused with Byzantine ideology. At least that's the claim. Right. So that people have a lot of trouble accepting it as coming from this other context, this other language. Right. But as scholars look at it, as they look at the text, they look at the sources and the biblical citation and the language. Right. It becomes pretty undeniable that it was written in Syriac.
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B
Yeah, that's really helpful. And it's just, you know, like, it's nice to get a little bit of the behind the scenes stuff in there. So you argue that. So it's written in the 7th century in Syriac and it's probably written in a place called Qardu. Can you tell us what was this? Where was this? Why does it matter that it was written there and not like Sinjar or what other people have argued it was? What does the place teach us about the text?
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C
Yeah, yeah, great. So I dispute the common assumption that this text was written at Mount Sinjar. That's something you find virtually all, like, modern scholarship. Right. This place in modern day Iraq and the idea that it was written there is based on one of the manuscripts. It's actually that manuscript from the Vatican that. That scholar Komosko I was talking about, he used that manuscript to demonstrate that Pseudo Methodius originated in Syriac. And that manuscript says in its title, in the title of Pseudo Methodius there, that is the revelation revealed to Methodius on Sinjar or. Or something like that. Right. Actually, the name of this place is kind of garbled in the manuscript, but we could go with Sinjar. So that's been the accepted wisdom. The problem is that manuscript was copied in the 1580s, so like 900 years after pseudo Methodius was originally composed. But for a while, that's the only Syriac manuscript available to scholars. Right. And we could go into why the Syriac manuscripts, they're much less abundant. But, but so people assume that all the Syriac manuscripts would say that, but then a few more Syriac manuscripts have been discovered and none of them mention Sinjar. Right. So that theory's like out the window as far as I'm concerned. So where was it composed? Right. I argue in the book that it's written a little bit to the northeast in the vicinity of Mount Cardu since this mountain, you know, it's on the intersection of the borders of modern day Turkey, Syria and Iraq. And it keeps, it keeps coming up in the Apocalypse, right. And not in some like throwaway line in the title. It's, you know, in these scenes that are kind of core to the text that's, that are found in every version, you know, in every translation. So, so the references to Cardu have to be there from the start. All right, so like, who cares, right? It's, it's actually these places are not that far from one another, you know, and why does it matter where it was written? What would this change? Well, Sinjar was a stronghold of the Syriac Orthodox Church, Right. A stronghold for Miaphysite Christianity. And so the idea that Pseudo Methodius was composed in Sinjar has been central to the claim that it was written by a West Syrian. Right. By a Miaphysite Cardu. On the other hand, that's in the heartland of East Syrian Christianity. Right. The, the so called Nestorians. Right. The Church of the East. And so that goes to a larger argument in my book that Pseudo Methodius was probably written by an East Syrian. Right. A member of the Church of the East, a so called Nestorian. And that's important because the Church of the east was the church of the old Sasanian Persian Empire. Right. It had far less connection to the Roman Empire historically. And if the author of Pseudo Methodist was from that church, he was, you know, even more truly an outsider to the Roman or Byzantine Empire. And yeah, and as I try to show in the book soon of a Thodius, I think fits into this larger moment for East Syrians, you know, sort of formerly Sassanian Christians who are trying to figure out like the meaning of recent history and looking to the Roman Empire sort of for leadership and idealizing it from afar. Right. In this sort of moment of chaos and upheaval.
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B
Yeah, great. Okay. So, you know, so we got like 7th century texts written around Cardu under Umayyad rule. And maybe this is a place we can kind of go, go wide. And you know, like so often empires and communities kind of, you know, they learn about what power looks like and how to resist power from those kind of broader, I don't know, like powerful forces out there. Can you give us a sense of what this was going to look like maybe the way to do it when you're talking about apocalyptic text is compare with the one that we maybe know better. So how does Pseudo Methodius compare to something like the Book of Revelation?
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C
Yeah, I mean, I think the comparison to the Book of Revelation is really useful. In general, apocalyptic texts are widely understood as functioning to reassure communities that are experiencing trauma or to contest the authority of oppressive empires. And I think that's what both the Book of Revelation and Pseudo Methodius are doing right now. The Book of Revelation is written by a community of Christians that's facing Roman persecution and imagines the reversal of that current order in which the persecuting Roman Empire is laid low and the Christians triumph. And the Apocalypse of Pseudo Methodius is similar in that it was written for a community of Syriac Christians facing hardship under the Umayyad Empire. Right. And it's imagining the reversal of the current order in which the Muslim Arab rulers are going to be laid low in the future and the Christians will triumph. Right. But there are some differences I think, that are also worth teasing out. For one, the Book of Revelation obviously becomes part of the New Testament, so it's part of the Christian canon, and it carries enormous importance to Christians to this day. Pseudo Methodius was never included in the canon of Scripture. Right. Even though it's, you know, its impact was vast. The fact that it never becomes part of a canon means that ultimately it gets overshadowed and largely forgotten over the centuries, although much, you know, much, much later, after over a thousand years. Yeah. Another important difference is that the Book of Revelation imagines the oppressive empire. Right. In that case, the Roman Empire being laid low by, like, the direct intervention of God by the angels, by God's heavenly power. But Pseudo Methodius imagines that God is going to use the Christian Roman Empire as his tool to destroy the Umayyad Empire. Right. It's not the kingdom of heaven or some heavenly power, but a real empire. So while Suna Methodius is denigrating one empire, Right, the Islamic Caliphate, it raises up another empire, the Christian Roman Empire, as central to God's plan. And with that, we get back to the subject of political theology that we're talking about at the beginning. Right. To this exalted role that it gives the Roman or Byzantine Empire.
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B
Yeah, yeah, great. So it's just helpful just to kind of remind us how apocalyptic literature works and kind of what people want from it. And like, I don't know, basically every Christian apocalyptic text, Pseudo Methodius is going to draw on the Book of Daniel so in Daniel there's these like four beasts, right? They have a vision of these four beasts and they each represent four kingdoms before the Son of Man comes back. But in the Latin tradition, you get people like Hippolytus and Jerome and they see Rome as like, I don't know, somewhere between like the last evil beast and a kingdom too weak to defend itself against that, that last evil beast. And there's a Syriac tradition in which Rome has kind of an opposite version of that. Like it has a positive role to play. So like, I'm sure it's more detailed than that, but like, can you tell us about Aphrat and his understanding of Daniel's prophecy? And then we'll go from Aphrat and we'll actually get into Methodius too. But what's this Syriac tradition like before Methodius?
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C
Yeah, actually before we get to the Syriac tradition, let me just mention something you had said. There's the Latin tradition, it's really Greek and Latin and most of the other non Syriac traditions of exegesis on Daniel is where I start in laying out the eschatological context of this text, right? That in Greek and Latin, and as I said a lot of other Christian literatures, the Roman Empire is understood as the fourth kingdom of Daniel, right? But that carries this very strong negative connotation. So just to rewind a little bit, just to give context, I'm sure most listeners know this already, but there are these prophecies in the Book of Daniel, right? So chapter two of the Book of Daniel, there's this vision of a statue made up of four medals that represent four different kingdoms. Kingdoms. And then, you know, I'm going very quickly here, but then in Daniel 7, Daniel has this vision of four beasts coming out of the sea, right? And again this is explained as representing four different kingdoms or empires. And the fourth one is the scary terrible beast, right? It represents the forces of evil. And that the Book of Daniel was probably composed or took shape during around the time of the Maccabean Revolt, right, When the Jews are revolting against the oppression of the Greeks, right, in the 160s or so BC and so probably in that context, the Greek Empire is the evil fourth kingdom. But then the Romans come along, they sack Jerusalem, they destroy the temple. And in the aftermath of all this, Jewish readers are reinterpreting the prophecies to mean that the Roman Empire is the evil fourth kingdom, right? And then that's the interpretation that Christians pick up as they're slowly emerging from, from their Jewish roots, right? Okay, so then we have early Christian commentaries on the book of Daniel. The earliest is attributed to Hippolytus of Rome. I actually think this may be our earliest biblical commentary period, or at least Christian one. And he's writing in Greek in the early third century in this time of Roman persecution of Christians. Right. And so his interpretation of the prophecies in Daniel is really anti Roman. Right. For Hippolytus, the world is divided into two opposed camps. You have the Christians who are the servants of God and then the Romans who are like the army of everyone who's opposed to God. And then he reads these prophecies in the book of Daniel with the book of Revelation and that's important for reasons I'll get to. So he reads these two biblical books of prophecy together and says that this provides like a prophetic blueprint for what's going to happen to Rome, that the, that the Roman Empire is going to be divided in a great Civil War into 10 parts because one of the beasts has 10 horns. And then, and then there'll be this 11th ruler who's represented by this little horn on the fourth beast in, in Daniel 7. And that's going to be the Antichrist. He's going to swoop in, he's going to defeat all these rivals, he's going to reconstitute the Roman Empire and he's going to use it to enact like a, a last great persecution. And this is the interpretation of Daniel's prophecies that gets picked up by later exegetes and commentators. In Greek. In Latin. Right. Even after the Christianization of the Roman Empire. Right. Later authors are going to tone down the anti Roman rhetoric. But the Roman Empire is still the fourth kingdom. Right. It's still a force of evil in, if not a force of evil, it's going to be taken over by the Antichrist in the end times. So the Antichrist is going to be the last ruler of Rome. Now things are a little different in the Syriac tradition. Part of what I argue is you don't get these ideas nearly as much in the Syriac tradition. Part of that is the Book of Revelation is excluded from the peshitta, the Syriac Bible. It's not canonical among Syriac Christians. And so you can't read Daniel and the Book of Revelation together in the same way if you're not including Revelation in the canon. Right. There's some other reasons too. But I want to get to your question about Aphorhat because he's a really key detail in my book. Right. Because I argue that Aphrat, this 4th century Syriac writer, is this crucial but overlooked key to understanding Pseudo Methodius. So Afrohat then is writing in the fourth century, he writes these instructional texts or homilies called the demonstrations. And in the fifth demonstration, it's called Demonstration on Wars. It's all about how the Romans are going to defeat the Persians in this upcoming war. And he develops this theory based on the succession of kingdoms in the book of Daniel. And he plays with the prophecies saying that the Greeks are the fourth kingdom, sort of going with the original interpretation, but also the Romans are a continuation of the fourth kingdom, that they're forces of good, right? And in fact they're God's representatives on earth. So there's this idea that Aphrat develops in this fifth demonstration that God was going to like reward the Jews with an eternal kingdom after they persevered over Greek persecution, after, you know, they survived Antiochus IV and all things he was doing. But then the Jews messed it up. They killed the Messiah. And so that made God angry. He lengthened history and he gave the fourth kingdom to the Romans. And not only that, he gave the Romans the kingship over the earth that he originally had entrusted to the Jews, right? So now the Romans rule the earth in God's name. And Aphrat says that like Christ deposited kingship with them until he comes again, right? So like the Romans are Christ's viceroys on earth, right? Christ is the emperor, he's out of town. So the Romans are ruling in his name. But there's an additional element to that, right? Like Christ is going to come again at the end of history. And just like when the emperor is out of town, you know, he comes back, the viceroy has to yield up power to the emperor. That's what's going to happen, right? The Romans are going to surrender their kingship over the earth back to God, right? So the point of all this is that the Christian Roman Empire can't be defeated by the Persians, that God is going to protect his earthly representatives, the Romans, because his empire has to survive to the end of time to fulfill its destiny of giving that kingship back to earth. And for Ephrath, the Roman Empire is Daniel's fourth kingdom still, right? But now after this transition, it's an entirely good fourth kingdom. He's emphasizing the strength and power of, of the fourth beast in Daniel's vision, not those negative qualities. And the interesting thing, one last interesting thing about Aphorhat is there's a lot of uncertainty about his identity. We don't know a lot about him, but he's probably not writing from the Roman Empire. He's writing in Syriac. He's probably a Persian Christian writing on the Sasanian saddest frontier. Right. So it's another figure who's idealizing the Roman Empire in the prophecies of Daniel, right. In the Syriac tradition. And these ideas from Aphrat, you see them in some other Syriac texts. But crucially, these are ideas that are only floating around in Syriac exegesis on Daniel, Syriac apocalypticism, until Pseudomethodius is going to disseminate that idea of this, like, positive reading of the fourth kingdom to a wider audience.
- [36:10]
B
Yeah, yeah, great. I mean, and I mean, you hear that some of the big themes that are going to keep popping up in the book like this, you know, the kind of positive vision of Rome, the creative working with that fourth beast, and like, kind of like what's going to happen to the fourth beast will tell you a lot about the kind of community that is talking about it. But I mean, you know, we've got 300 years between Aphrat and Pseudo Methodius. So like, how do we get from the 4th century to the 7th century? And like, what. What does he have to kind of change to fit those. Those new, new times?
- [36:40]
C
Yeah, I mean, the big change for Pseudo Methodius, right, is that it's the Arabs, right, who it calls the sons of Ishmael. They replace the Persians as the major antagonist. You know, Aphrat makes a big deal that the Romans are going to win in their confrontation with the Persians. And. And then Pseudo Methodius adapts that so that the Romans have to win against the Arabs. I also think that. Or what Part of what I argue is that what Pseudo Methodius does, what it innovates in, is adapting Aphrat's exegesis into a narrative apocalypse, right? And so, for example, it invents this figure of the king of the Greeks, right, that last emperor who's going to act out those ideas suggested by Aphrat, right? So first the last emperor is going to defeat the Arabs in battle because as Aphrad said, the fourth kingdom can't be conquered since it has to hold onto God's kingship until the end of time. And then the last emperor is going to act out Aphrat by personally surrendering the kingship to God, right? So that the king of the Greeks goes to Jerusalem, he puts his crown or his diadem on the cross, and then the diadem and the cross go up to heaven so that they could appear with Christ at his second coming. And in fact, Pseudo Methodius uses the same language, uses the same Syriac verb that Aphrat had used when he was talking about how the Romans will have to surrender back their kingship in advance of Christ's second coming. So Pseudo Methodius is using that specifically when the last emperor is surrendering his power, doing exactly what Aphrod said that the Romans will do. Yeah, so it's adapting those ideas from this exegetical context into a narrative apocalypse and inventing characters to act it out.
- [38:25]
B
Yeah, yeah, great. So. So there's, there's like two parts to this text, right? There. There's the kind of historical or backwards looking part. And, and you've kind of, you laid that out for us. We've got, you know, with, with the four kingdoms they prophesied in Daniel, the. What is it? Nimrod founds Babylon and then there's the Medeans and Persians. And then Alexander the Great makes, makes four. And, and then we get kind of in the next iteration we have Rome. Because what is it? After Alexander dies, then that empire splits into four parts, right? The Kushites, the Greeks, Macedonians and the Romans. And then there's the Greek speaking Romans or the Byzantium, whatever we're calling it, are now the kind of rightful heir to Nimrod's kinship. So can you tell us about like that last move where the fourth kingdom gets split into four different peoples?
- [39:11]
C
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So as you alluded to, Pseudo Methodius comes up with this, the strange idea, you know, taken from the book of Daniel where it says Alexander's kingdom was divided into four. Like it says it was divided among the four winds. And Pseudo Methodius, this doesn't refer to the division of his empire by his generals, but to the fact that the fourth kingdom, it says, is made up of Greeks, Macedonians, Romans and Kushites or Ethiopians. Right. So it's this idea that all these people are descended from Alexander the Great's African mother. Right. And so she's really the origin of this fourth kingdom. Part of that probably goes back to a way of making both the Greeks and the Romans the fourth kingdom. Sort of what Aphrat was doing, where Aphrat was saying it was, you know, transferred to one to the other. Soon Methodius is doing something similar, but by making both Greeks and Romans part of the same final kingdom. Right. But then the weird part that has baffled people for a while is what are the Cushites, the Ethiopians doing in there? And Soona Methodius keeps going back to this verse in Psalm 68 that says cush, or Ethiopia will stretch out his hands to God. And it's turning this into a prophecy about the last Roman emperor surrendering kingship to God. And I mean, that's super weird, right? What does Ethiopia stretching its hands to God have to do with surrender and kingship? So the thing is, in Syriac, the word stretch out hands can also mean to hand over, to surrender. So the line can mean Cush will surrender to God. And that's important because what I argue is happening is that Pseudo Methodius is building on Aphrat's theory that the Roman Empire would hand over kingship to God at the end of time. And one issue with that theory is that there's nothing in the Bible to suggest that there's going to be like a great ruler handing over his power at the end of time. So where I think Pseudo Methodius is bringing something new to the table is it's finding scriptural support for the idea of that surrender of power. So it's identified this line from the Bible attributed to a prophet, right? King David is the author of the Psalms to say that the Romans have to. The Romans will surrender their power to God because they're descended from Cush, they're descended from the Ethiopians, and therefore they'll fulfill this verse, right? So that Cush then in the line is just a prophetic code word for the Roman Empire. And that's why the Romans have to be descended from the Ethiopians. And that's why it comes up with this whole genealogy in which the Greeks and the Romans are all descended from Alexander's Ethiopian mother. They're all part of the fourth kingdom. And in fact, in the scene where the last emperor surrenders his crown to God and uses that, as I was saying, the same Syriac verb as Aparhat for surrendering power. That's also the same verb used in the Syriac version of that line from the psalm, right? So it's all neatly tied together. The Romans hold this kingship that has been passed down through the four kingdoms of Daniel that was taken by Alexander when he founded the fourth kingdom. And then that kingship was passed down within. Within the fourth kingdom through the lineage of Alexander's mother, until a Roman emperor from that lineage, right, descended from Alexander's Ethiopian mother, will surrender kingship to Christ and usher in the kingdom of heaven. And the moral of all this is that the Roman Empire has to survive whatever dangers it faces in order to make it to that point, to fulfill its end times. Destiny.
- [42:46]
B
Yeah. What a story. So much of the book ends up getting into the details of this and then the second half of the book, it shows us how you can almost tell the history of the medieval world through its reception of this text. And it makes its way into every language of the Roman Empire. But maybe we can start with the Syriac Syriac reception itself. A lot of groups kind of want to understand divine kingship and empire, but weirdly, this text seems much more influential for everyone except Syriac speakers who it seems like they kind of get used to Muslim rule and they place more value on church leadership than empire building. Correct me if that's wrong, but what happens to this text in Syriac kind of as it gets into the medieval time?
- [43:37]
C
Yeah, I mean, that's the fascinating thing about the Syriac context, right, Is that. But Syriac Christian tradition is not one with a great empire. Right, so what's the appeal in the Syriac context? Right. We do have a lot of evidence of Pseudo Methodius reception in the Syriac world, but interestingly, a lot of it is clustered in the late seventh to eighth century. Right. So pretty soon after the Apocalypse was composed mostly in East Syrian texts. So again, texts coming out of the Church of the east. And a lot of these texts are trying to make sense of the place of the Roman Empire in history. Right. So one text to engage with Pseudo Methodius is this East Syrian, again, Nestorian so called theological work from the 8th century. It's unpublished at this point, but Muriel Debillet is working on an edition in translation, I believe. And there's this one chapter, it's called the Instruction on the Diadem. It's all about how there's this kingship that originated with King Nimrod in Babylon, which is something Pseudo Methodius also claims, and that this kingship was passed down with like a physical diadem that had come to him from heaven. And that diadem now is in the hands of the Romans and therefore they have to survive to surrender the diadem to God at the end of time. And for all this, it cites the writings of Mar, or Lord Tiadius, the Bishop of Patara. So that's clearly a corruption of Methodius of Patara. Right. And so, yeah, we see this idea. There's no explicit reference to a last emperor figure, but this idea that the Roman Empire has to survive to the end of time to surrender its power. There's this other Syriac work that's called the Edessian Apocalypse. It only survives in a fragment, but from what we have, it clearly imitates A lot of Pseudo Methodius, incidentally. It's often called like a West Syrian apocalypse, but it's definitely East Syrian. And there's a line in there that in the surrender scene, like Pseudo Methodius, the king of the Greeks goes to Golgotha, he surrenders his diadem, and there it says that he'll surrender the diadem. It's often mistranslated or misinterpreted as the diadem of Emperor Jovian, but I show in the book it's probably saying he's going to surrender the diadem of King Ninos. Ninos is this ancient Assyrian king who's often conflated with Nimrod. So we keep getting these East Syrian Syriac texts that have the idea that the Romans have inherited ancient Mesopotamian kingship and that the empire has to survive to return that ancient Mesopotamian kingship to God. And again, I suggest in the book, this is coming from a moment of upheaval after the Sasanian Empire's fallen, when the Catholicos, the patriarch of the Church, is super weak. Eastern Christians are looking for some stability and order and they start looking to the Roman Empire. At least some of them do. Right. But. But also that this doesn't last, that you have the establishment of a more powerful church hierarchy in Baghdad eventually under the Abbasids. And that's true both for the Church of the east and the Syriac Orthodox Church. And both traditions had dealt with Pseudo Methodius to some degree, but. Right. The patriarchs now have close relations with the caliphs. And as you were sort of saying, the Syriac communities value church leadership and don't really need to go looking to a Christian empire. Right. So I think this is a reason that Pseuda Methodius fades a bit from the Syriac tradition. It doesn't go away. Right. Syriac authors are still reading it, but it doesn't have that same sort of colossal impact that it'll have elsewhere.
- [47:26]
B
Okay, so what about the Greek reception of this? I think it's like, only the Greek comes straight from Syriac. Everything else gets translated from Greek. Right. Yeah, but what do Greek readers want from Pseudo Methodius? You do trace this all the way through the Ottomans, you know, like after the Ottoman conquest. They'll make it about liberation from the Ottomans. But like, before that, like what, what did you know, Byzantine or Roman Greek readers want with this text?
- [47:55]
C
Yeah, yeah. So, right, I'll stay to the Byzantine period also, just because we could go on forever. But, yeah, the Pseudo Methodius has this enormous impact on especially Byzantine apocalyptic literature, not just Byzantine apocalyptic literature. Also you find it in Daniel exegesis. Right. So I found a passage in one of the earliest collections of Scholia on Daniel. So like the writings of the Church Fathers on Daniel that are collected together and here Pseudo Methodius is treated as the work of Methodius of Atara and almost like just another Daniel commentary. But in general you really see its influence on Byzantine apocalyptic texts. And these start repeating the ideas in Suna Methodius that were coming from that Syriac context. Repeating the idea that there'll be a last emperor figure who will defeat the enemies of the empire and surrender his kingship to God in Jerusalem. And I think one of the key things Byzantine readers want from Suna Methodius is the idea that the Empire is going to survive all its problems so that it can make it to the end of time to fulfill this destiny. Right. That Pseudo Methodius would have arrived in the Byzantine world at a really trying time. The empire is in bad shape. This is probably, it's probably getting there around the time of the big Arab siege of Constantinople in 717, the same time the Bulgars are moving into the Balkans. Right. Things look really uncertain. And I also want to point out that that Hippolytus interpretation of biblical prophecy I was talking about the very pessimistic understanding of the future of the empire was very influential in Byzantium. It remained the standard reading of the empire's future. So many Byzantine authors just accept the idea, for example, that the Antichrist is going to rule the empire, he's going to be the final emperor. So Pseudo Methodius provides this alternative that the empire not only is going to survive all these assaults by non Christian enemies, but that its rulers have this exalted this positive role to play in the end of history, that they're not going to be Antichrist, that they're going to save the empire and lead it to this glorious plan that God has for the empire in the end times.
- [50:18]
B
Yeah, yeah. So can I ask a total aside? I think I'm right in reading. You say that the Greek translator changes Greeks to Romans in this text. And so I don't want to push too hard on this, but there's this idea that is, I think kind of increasingly dominant in our world that everyone saw what we now call the Byzantine Empire as the Roman Empire. And I don't think anybody is really questioning that Greek speaking people in Constantinople in seventh centuries saw themselves as Romanoe or they lived in like Romania. But did Syriac speakers see them as a continuation of Rome too? I don't really care. I don't know. I don't have this dog fight of if we should be calling them Romans or whatever. It seems fine to call them Romans. It does make more sense. It helps me understand the story. But did people outside of the Eastern Roman Empire think of it as something different than Rome? Is that part of what I'm reading in these texts?
- [51:17]
C
Yeah, a little bit. Like, equally, I don't have a huge stake in this, as you can tell. I've been going back and forth between Byzantine and Roman. Certainly in the Syriac sources, they're usually calling the Byzantines Greeks, right? Yonai. But they use that going back, they'll talk about Augustus being the king of the Greeks, right? So the Greeks and the Romans are conflated. But this brings up an important point for the reception of Pseuda Methodius, that who are the Romans? Right. Becomes ambiguous, as you said. Yeah. The Byzantines definitely call themselves always the Romans. They're the Roman Empire. But Byzantium's Christian neighbors tend to call them Greeks, not Romans, for the most part. Right. The one exception is the Islamic world, because the exalted place of the Greeks in Islamic philosophy and science, right. It's important for them that the Byzantines, these enemies, are something besides Greek. So in Islamic sources, they're room, right? They're Romans. But like, okay, Syriac sources call them Greeks most of the time. Medieval Christian Slavic sources call the Byzantines Greeks, right? The Armenian sources call the Byzantines Greeks. The Western Latin literature tends to call them Greeks, right? And by the high Middle Ages, none of the other Christians outside the Byzantine Empire were buying that the Byzantines are Romans. And as I said, this is important for the reception of Pseudo Methodius, because you were alluding to. In the Greek version of Pseudo Methodius, the title of the last emperor changes, right? In the Syriac, he's called the king of the Greeks, the malka di yonai, right? And then in Greek, that becomes Veseliph's Todromeion, the King of the Romans or Emperor of the Romans, Right. The title of the Byzantine emperor, probably because the translator wants to make clear that this king of the Greeks is the Byzantine emperor, right? But then as the Apocalypse gets translated into new languages, this is the title that mostly sticks, right? So the last emperor is called the king of the Romans. In the Latin version, he's Rex Romanorum. You know, most translations, he's the King of the Romans. And then the big question becomes like, who is this figure if the Romans aren't the Byzantines in your language? Right. Who's this King of the Romans? And so we see a lot of sources that receive Pseudo Methodius trying to grapple with that. Right. Maybe he's going to be a crusader coming out of Roman Italy to liberate the Eastern Christians. Or maybe he'll be a Holy Roman Emperor. Right. The German Emperor. Maybe he'll even be like a French or Portuguese or Hungarian ruler who's going to be elected Holy Roman Emperor in some upset election in the early modern period. Right. So there are these endless possibilities of. Of how you interpret the King of the Romans.
- [54:08]
B
Yeah, yeah, thank you for indulging that. So, I mean, you trace the reception across a whole range of languages. We've got Coptic translation In the 8th century, there's an old church Slavonic in the 10th century. But I want to go to the Armenian one because that's where I think, where we can see this tension between kind of Rome as holy Christian empire and Rome as oppressive Babylonian force. Can you tell us about Pseudomethodius in Armenian literature? Like around the time of the Crusades?
- [54:40]
C
Yeah, yeah. So we have Armenian and Armenian Pseudo Methodius. It's an abridged version. There's probably a complete version that's lost, but we have this abridged version and it has just the apocalyptic, the end times part. And it's pretty clear that the last emperor figure there was intended by the translator to be a Byzantine Emperor. And then in some early Armenian apocalyptic literature based on Pseudo Methodius, there are adaptations of this. There's a Byzantine last emperor figure. Right. But something interesting happens in Armenian apocalyptic around the time of the First Crusade. In Armenian apocalyptic literature, the last emperor gets transformed into a Western Crusader. And part of what makes the Armenian tradition interesting, like the Byzantine tradition, like the Latin tradition, is that older idea that the empire is as the fourth Kingdom, that the Roman Empire has this negative fate, that the empire is going to be taken over by the Antichrist. Is there? Right. Hippolytus commentary on Daniel gets translated into Armenian. So it's in the air. And then Pseuda Methodius has this completely different understanding of the meaning of the fourth Kingdom. Right. And what starts happening in Armenian apocalyptic, I suggest, is that eventually all the bad qualities of the fourth kingdom get associated with the Byzantine Empire and all the good qualities, all the stuff coming from Pseudo Methodius gets associated with the Crusaders. Right. This is probably coming out of this moment of worsening relations with the Byzantines, very likely coming out of the Cilician Armenian kingdom. Right. This Armenian kingdom that breaks away from the Byzantine Empire and its elite ally and intermarry with the Crusaders. Right. And so in that case, the last emperor, the king of the Romans, is a crusader coming out of the West. I also look at this Armenian apocalypse, Pseudo Epiphanius, which was heavily influenced by Pseudo Methodius. What's interesting there is that you also get an idea in that text, the Byzantine ruler is still treated somewhat positively, although it's a little confusing whether this ruler is a Byzantine emperor or a Frankish ruler. It sort of goes back and forth on that. But you have this Western last emperor figure and then an Armenian king, and they're going to join forces in the end times and they're going to defeat the enemies of the faith together and they're going to surrender the kingship together. Right. So this future emperor will go to Jerusalem with his crown and the Armenian king is going to go with him. And one will put his crown on one arm of the cross, the other will put his crown on the other arm of the cross, and that cross will ascend to heaven. Right. So the Armenian king in this apocalypse plays this sort of helper role to the last emperor. And so you see the Armenian monarchy getting integrated into these prophecies coming out of that Syriac tradition.
- [57:57]
B
That's great. So you mentioned before that in some of the earlier versions, we were talking about that Ethiopian was like a code word for Roman. But what about Christians in Ethiopia? I'm guessing they did not see themselves as a code word for Rome. Can you talk about the role that soon Methodius plays in the Christian traditions in Ethiopia?
- [58:22]
C
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And just sort of building off of what I just said, Right. We have a similar idea going on with a sort of helper ruler in some, like, Coptic and Arabic apocalypses coming from Egypt. Right. So we have evidence that Pseudo Methodius was translated into Coptic, and then we have some later Coptic and Egyptian Arabic apocalypses that have a last emperor figure who's either a Byzantine or a crusader, and then an Ethiopian king who helps him out, either helps him defeat the enemies of the faith or actually just like converts him to Meathesite Christianity, because that's the true faith and he needs to become a meophysite in order to surrender power to God. But at the same time, as I mentioned towards the beginning, we see some influence of Pseuda Methodius on the Ethiopian national epic, the Kebra Nagast. Right. Scholars for a long time have noticed there's some pseudomethodious influence there. It's also possible one of the characters in The Keber Nagas, this wise bishop called Domitius or something that that might be a corruption of Methodius. What's fascinating in the Kebernagas is there's no last emperor figure. And it's not that the Roman or Byzantine Empire is going to survive to the end of time, but it's Ethiopia that will survive to the end of time. Right. And getting to what you said with that prophecy about Kush or Ethiopia, it does this sort of judo move in which it takes that line from Psalm 68, Ethiopia will surrender to God. Right. As we saw, Pseudo Methodius put a lot of work into trying to show that that's referring to the Roman Empire. That's a prophecy of the last emperor's surrender of power. And it had to do a lot of work establishing that in that line. Cush or Ethiopia, that refers to the Roman Empire. So what we see in Ethiopian texts like the Cabernet Gast is they just can get rid of all that. Right. Like, Kush isn't the Roman Empire, It's Kush. Right. Ethiopia is just Ethiopia. So it's Ethiopia, it's African Christian monarchy that has this central place in God's plan for history and that has to endure to the end of time. So it's this really sort of fascinating, skillful reversal that happens.
- [60:42]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, last reception question. But, like, what about the Latin reception? I mean, it starts with the Merovingians, and it kind of takes off during the Carolingian period. We got Dante reading it. But maybe to ask this, as we're kind of wrapping up here, how does Methodius help make the Holy Roman Empire holy? Eventually you say that it's overshadowed by Joachim Fiore, but can you kind of set up this contrast and give us a sense of why did this text lose out to the other vision?
- [61:15]
C
Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say that it loses out to Joachim. It's sort of more absorbed into this larger eschatological system that's associated with Joach Joachim. But, yeah, let's start with the Holy Roman Empire, since you brought that up. I mentioned Dante at the beginning. Right. As one of the supporters of the Holy Roman Empire. Right. Actually, Dante never explicitly references Pseudo Methodius, but he has a lot of ideas about the world historical importance of the Roman Empire. And his son Pietro writes this commentary on Dante's Divine Commentary. Sorry. He writes this commentary on Dante's Divine Comedy. And he points to passages in the Inferno, like the first Canto, and says that Dante is getting these ideas from the Revelations of Methodius. And yeah. So that got me interested in what are supporters of the Holy Roman Empire finding in this text. Right, right. In the politics of medieval Italy, which is divided between the supporters of the popes and the supporters of the Holy Roman empires, Dante squarely on the side of the emperors. Right. One of the things I argue in the book is that Pseudo Methodius is really useful to the Holy Roman Emperors in their showdowns with the papacy. You have conflict between the emperors and the popes going back to the investiture controversy in the 11th century when the issue was who had the right to invest Bishops.
- [62:43]
B
Right.
- [62:43]
C
The emperor, the pope. And this turns into an all out showdown over who's the preeminent figure in Christendom. And the popes and their supporters say it's the papacy. Right. And anyone who's going to trample on the rights of the papacy is an antichrist. The Roman emperors going back to Nero, they've all been persecutors of the Church, they've all been sort of Antichrists. And contemporary emperors like Frederick Barbarossa, they're antichrist. Right. Or at least they're precursors to the Antichrist. So you have this apocalyptic rhetoric and you have the same rhetoric again of calling emperors antichrists in later showdowns, like Pope Gregory IX equates Emperor Frederick Barbarossa with the Antichrist and the fourth beast in the Book of Daniel. This gets super heated in the reign of Emperor Frederick ii. So what I show in the book is that some supporters of the emperors, men with similar politics to Dante, use Pseudo Methodius to argue the opposite. Right. The Holy Roman Emperors are not antichrists. They're heroic figures. They have this important destiny in God's plan. Right. They have to go to Jerusalem, to Golgotha to surrender their crown and inaugurate the events of the last time. So we have, for example, this play from the reign of Frederick Barbarossa, the. The play of the Antichrist, and it acts out this exact scenario. So again, the emperors are not evil figures, but preeminent figures in Christendom with an important role in God's plan for history. All right, so you brought up Joachim then. So Joachim of Fiore is this extremely important 12th century mystic and biblical commentator who reshapes Christian ideas about eschatology. And now he doesn't seem to know anything about Pseudo Methodius. Oddly, he seems to have not. He just doesn't know the apocalypse of Pseudo Methodius. And he falls more into the emperors are persecutors camp. He's a little ambiguous on that point. But certainly after his death, his followers fall in line with the papacy against Emperor Frederick II in the conflict that breaks out between the popes and the emperor. And now Yale came up with this idea that history is made up of three partly overlapping ages, one for each part of the Trinity. And that the final age, the third status, it's called, is slowly coming into fullness. And when it does, empire's gonna disappear and there's gonna be this harmonious golden age, perhaps presided over by the popes. Right. And this becomes very important to end times. Visions of where Christendom is heading. But then as dissatisfaction grows towards the papacy. Right. The papacy is cracking down, for example, on the spiritual Franciscans saying that's heresy to deny that Christ owned property. All the while, you have the high clergy living large, and you have the Avignon papacy, which becomes known for corruption. And later you'll have the Borgia popes and all that. There's this disillusion with the popes. So some people get this idea that maybe the popes are going to at least need help in bringing about that golden age. They're going to need help from a last great emperor who gets identified with Pseudo Methodius as king of the Greeks or king of the Romans. And in some versions, it's not even teamwork. Maybe the emperor needs to march on Rome, go in, slaughter the pope, kill the cardinals, raise up his own guy as pope. And you have different versions of what's going to happen, but they're all tied to Joachim's idea of the third status, this golden age that's eventually going to reach its fullness, eventually under Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. In the first half of the 16th century, these things get really loudly trumpeted, in part because he seems to fulfill all these prophecies. He's this great emperor whose soldiers do march on Rome. He also goes on a sort of mini crusade against Tunis. So he seems to line up really well with the last emperor figure in Pseudo Methodius. And that brings about an intense interest in Pseudo Methodius by members of his court. Yeah. So at the end of the last chapter of my book, I look at a few early modern supporters of Charles V and other Habsburg emperors who claim that the third status is going to be presided over not by a pope, but by an emperor. Right. And that the emperor will go to Jerusalem, hand over his crown to Christ, and Christ will take over. Right. And so the global rule of that the emperor, will lead to Christ's global rule. So the empire and God's kingdom, right, the here and now and the, you know, the third status and all of eternity, these are all sort of blended together. And so you're left with a situation where Pseudo Methodius vision, you know, based on its Syriac sources, that a last emperor has to play the central role in bringing about the completion of history. That vision gets subsumed into Yoakaic thought, especially in the thought of these Yochite apologists for empire.
- [67:49]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's helpful. So stepping back, what do you hope readers take from a book like this?
- [67:59]
C
Yeah, a few things. First is the importance of eschatology and end times belief, especially for political thought, as I've been talking about. I think texts like apocalypses get treated sometimes as lesser sorts of literature and people think they're just about superstition and fear. But part of what makes them interesting is that they're imagining the future. They're imagining what's going to happen next and what's going to happen all the way up to the end of time in ways that are really revealing of how people think about their present world and their present concerns and also what they think the world ought to look like. Another thing that drew me to Pseuda Methodius is this amazing reception history we've been talking about, that it spread so far and wide. And I want people to take away the interconnectedness of the medieval world. We hear a lot about the global Middle Ages these days and I think this text embodies that really well. Right. That this period was not insular, it's not inward looking and all that. There's a lot of transmission of goods, of people and of texts and of ideas. And a third thing sort of coming out of that is the role of Syriac literature and the Christian communities of the Middle east in general, the role that they played in history. Right. That Christians in the Middle east are usually left out of the story, out of the big narratives we have, at least after the rise of Islam. Often I find my students just assume that after the rise of Islam, everyone in the Middle east is suddenly a Muslim. Everyone just converts overnight. But actually takes a long time for Islam to become the majority religion. There are Christian communities that are super important and they should be part of a bigger story. And Suna Methodiya shows how this text that was from a Syriac Christian living in the Caliphate, that this text and its ideas had a big impact on the rest of the Christian world, including how the Christian world thinks about empire, the historical role of empire. And right now, when those Christian communities in the Middle east are struggling. They're in danger of disappearing even. I think it's especially important to be aware of their history and the impact they've had.
- [70:13]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. All right, last question. What are you working on next?
- [70:18]
C
I mean, I'm sort of getting my bearings now that the book is out and done, but there are a few things I'm thinking about. I want to do something on other texts like Pseudo Methodius that travel widely in the Middle Ages. I also found a lot of cool stuff from early modern apocalypticism, especially the post Byzantine Greek tradition, which we didn't have time to get into, but is super cool, and how they're interacting with the Latin west, especially in reaction to the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople and trying to figure out what's going to happen next. And this material is really interesting to me because we could actually trace scribes and networks of transmission that we can't possibly do in Late Antiquity. So there's a lot of promise there for interesting stuff. But the next real big project I'm thinking about is a more social and cultural history of medieval end times belief. Yeah. One of the great transformations of Late Antiquity or the Middle Ages, Early Middle Ages that I think we're totally sleeping on is that the transition of the Mediterranean world from polytheism to monotheism, you know, the rise and dominance of the Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, that completely changes how people think about time and the course of history, where history is going. The end of the world. Right. In Classical Antiquity, the common view is that the universe is eternal, or at least goes through cycles of destruction and rebirth. Earth. But then the Abrahamic faiths, they believe in a final end or transformation, and not only that, they believe that this end is imminent. So I'm interested in doing a study in how this manifests and how people think about the world and how they go about the world. It's sort of coming out of this Pseuda Methodius project. I was hoping with Pseuda Methodius I could get at attitudes of everyday Christians in the Middle Ages because this text was so widespread, so widely read. But in the end, I found I was still dealing a lot with elites or at the very least, monks and churchmen. And so I think for the average believers, you have to look elsewhere to things like the liturgy, to liturgical poetry, to homilies, to things like that, material culture. So, yeah, I'm sort of conceptualizing this project of everyday eschatology in Late Antiquity or in the Middle Ages. Right, yeah, yeah. It's a great title and also coaching back with that title on this idea that you see a lot. That there's, like, fluctuations of concern about the end times. You see that a lot in scholarship.
- [72:58]
A
Right.
- [72:58]
C
You know, that there's a lot of fear leading up to supposedly the year 500 in the Byzantine world, or that the 7th century is this time of eschatological fervor, or that people are getting worked up about the year 1000. Right. I really want to push back against that. That belief in an imminent end is just like a basic part of Jewish, Christian, Muslim belief always. Right. And we shouldn't be surprised to find it in our sources. It's not signaling something strange that's going on. It's this. This constant sort of background drum beat. It's always there. It's in the creed that Christians are saying in the church every Sunday. It's all over the Quran. Right. It's. It's just a. It's a basic part of Jewish, Christian and Muslim belief.
- [73:38]
B
Yeah. No, that's great. Like, what is. Every historian is, you know, happy to learn that theirs is the transitional period, and theirs is the beginning of the middle class, and now theirs is the beginning. Or there's always an eschatology going on. Yeah.
- [73:51]
C
At the beginning of the.
- [73:52]
B
Yeah.
- [73:53]
C
Immigrant eschatology.
- [73:54]
B
Yeah. Perfect. All right, Chris, thank you. This was fun talking to you.
- [73:59]
C
Thank you so much for having me.
- [74:00]
B
All right, bye. Bye.