Echoes of Eusebius in Syriac

Syriac scribes sometimes compared the practice of copying a manuscript to painting, highlighting the intensity of the creation process and the use of paint in many different colors.[1] With Eusebius the Evangelist, Professor Jeremiah Coogan offers a vivid and illuminating portrayal of the Eusebian apparatus and its manifold afterlives.

Over the course of his book, Coogan takes us from Eusebius’s innovative use of tables, a technical device initially used for astronomy and the organization of multilingual texts (Ch 2), to Eusebius’s participation in processes of gospel (re)writing (Ch 3), and the art of creating parallels (Ch 4). Chapter 5 is the most encompassing, containing a valuable overview of the languages in which the apparatus was received and a detailed study of the structural, liturgical, text critical and exegetical purposes for which Eusebius’s project was used. Coogan does not restrict his analysis to sources in Greek and Latin but widens his scope to discuss the lively use of Eusebius’s system by Christians writing in Syriac and Ge’ez, amongst other languages.

Coogan presents his book as an “invitation to reexamine encounters between textual artifacts and their users” (p. 177). Inspired by Coogan’s work, I would like to explore some of the ways in which gospel authorship and the parallels and differences between individual gospels were imagined and encountered by Syriac-using Christians in late ancient and early medieval times.

I will begin with Ishoʿdad of Merv, a bishop and scholar of the Church of the East from the ninth century who wrote an important corpus of biblical commentaries, drawing on Theodore of Mopsuestia and a great variety of other Greek and Syriac authors. Before Ishoʿdad interprets each gospel, he tells his audience about its author, and he does so with gusto, providing us with insight into his bibliographical imagination.

Ishoʿdad starts with Matthew. Jewish followers of Jesus in Judea asked Matthew, in light of his impending absence, to write down in a book all the things Jesus had said and done.[2] Followers of Jesus in Rome, meanwhile, asked Peter to “make available for them in a book the teaching of the gospel.”[3] Ishoʿdad states that Peter instructed Mark to write a brief account, so as not to give the impression that he disliked the Gospel of Matthew, to stress Peter’s betrayal of Jesus, and to emphasize Jesus’s humanity to combat views that he had not really taken on the body.[4] Regarding Luke, Ishoʿdad not only reports the tradition that he was a doctor, but presents him as a disciple of Galen, the famous physician of late antiquity and beyond. Out of professional interest, Luke became intrigued by stories about Jesus healing people without the use of roots of plants or medicines, wanted to learn more and ended up as a disciple.[5] John, finally, was approached by Jesus-believers in Ephesus, who, as a strategy to convince him to write his own gospel, asked him to read those of Matthew, Mark and Luke.[6] Ishoʿdad states that John praised the work of his colleagues, but also felt that more attention for Jesus’s miracles and divinity was needed and that events had to be told in their right order. Thus John set to work. He apparently felt that the best place to do so was outside, for Ishoʿdad recounts a lovely story in which it starts to rain and John cries out to the angel who ruled the air: “Do you not fear and are you not terrified? Do you at least not know that the gospel of your Lord is being written?”[7] Ishoʿdad notes that from that moment until the present day, no rain or even dew appears in the courtyard where John wrote his gospel.

Ishoʿdad thus presents gospel writing as something that happened by request. He also portrays it, at least in part, as a successive procedure in which Mark was familiar with Matthew’s account, and John read those of the previous three. Moreover, Ishoʿdad imagined the four gospels as having arisen out of a situation of great textual plurality:

“It is right for us to know that the church does not merely hold on to these four evangelists. Although there were seventy-two visions, in correspondence with the seventy-two disciples, and twelve (visions) according to the twelve apostles, but after the apostles died, the fathers took care and examined all of them and out of all of them they only found these four to be true, two from the twelve, and two from the seventy.”[8]

In Ishoʿdad’s view, out of the many visions or apocalypses written by the earliest followers of Jesus, four received the approval stamp of otherwise unidentified “fathers.” Ishoʿdad comments in similar fashion on Luke’s phrase that many have written before him. Here, the group of authors is enlarged even beyond the initial twelve and seventy. Ishoʿdad contrasts their texts to Luke’s own claim that he investigated matters properly:

“Concerning (the verse) that ‘many have wanted to write, etc.’.[9] He does not speak about Matthew and Mark, as he does not call two ‘many’, but about those who practiced the writing of the gospel without investigation because not only the twelve[10] and the seventy[11] wrote visions, but many others too.”[12]

It is likely that the stories Ishoʿdad shared about the circumstances in which the gospels were composed prepared readers for the idiosyncrasies and discrepancies they would be bound to encounter. In this way, readers would be better able to understand for example why John includes miracles they had not met elsewhere, or why it is Mark who describes Peter’s betrayal of Jesus quite so elaborately.[13] Ishoʿdad also knew of other ways of gospel writing and presented Tatian’s Diatesseron as a gospel:

“Tatian, a disciple of Justin the Philosopher and Martyr, selected from the four evangelists, mixed them, and composed a gospel. He called it the “Diatesseron,” that is, “of the mixed.” He did not write about the divinity of Christ. Mar Ephrem commented on this (i.e. the Diatesseron).”[14]

Two Syriac Orthodox authors who worked in the ninth and twelfth centuries, Moses bar Kepha and Dionysius bar Salibi, report similar views. Coogan mentions them for their descriptions of the Diatesseron and Eusebius’s canon tables (pp. 131; 177-178). Unlike Bar Kepha and Bar Salibi, however, Ishoʿdad does not explicitly discuss the Eusebian apparatus. Nonetheless, questions of gospel authorship, parallels, and differences informed his commentary project.

Encounters with and commentaries on the gospels in Syriac were frequently shaped by introductory texts and paratexts. Those who consulted an eleventh-century New Testament manuscript from the Church of the East, for example, were immediately treated to a series of discussions of the differences between the genealogies offered by Matthew and Luke.[15] This Syriac text covers questions similar to those discussed by Eusebius centuries before.[16] The same manuscript also contains a diagram in the shape of a double oval which maps out the genealogies of Joseph according to Matthew and Luke.[17] An accompanying interpretation attributed to Theodore of Mopsuestia explains, again in terms similar to Eusebius, that the two gospels trace Joseph’s lineage “by nature” and “by law” and thus do not contradict one another. Furthermore, the individual gospels in the manuscript have closing rubrics which record the name, language, and location of each evangelist (“Matthew who spoke in Hebrew in Palestine,” “Mark who spoke in Latin in Rome,” “Luke who spoke in Greek in Alexandria,” and “John who spoke in Greek in Ephesus”).

Another example is found in the eighth-century commentary on the Gospel of Matthew attributed to the Syriac Orthodox patriarch George of Beʿeltan.[18] George provides a wealth of knowledge for his readers, including a brief dialogue between a Christian and a Jew on the trustworthiness of the gospels, and discussions of the genealogies, in which he regularly invokes Eusebius. George also gives an outline of the content of Matthew’s gospel by enumerating how many signs, parables, and testimonies it contains.[19] Moreover, he not only mentions of how many chapters (kephalaia) the gospel consists, but also counts its canons, reflecting knowledge of Eusebius’s system.[20]

In the ninth century, a Syriac Orthodox writer and active reader named Simeon copied and annotated a collection of biblical commentaries. In this “Collection of Simeon,” the interpretation of the New Testament is to a large extent based on the homilies of John Chrysostom, which are made available in an abbreviated, and therefore more manageable, form.[21] In his interpretation of Matthew, Chrysostom frequently adds details from similar stories in other gospels or explains discrepancies. Chrysostom also reads parts of different gospels together that appear as parallels in Eusebius’s apparatus. In Eusebius the Evangelist, Coogan convincingly shows that parallels are not self-evidently there, but are created and involve choice. As an example of one such ‘creative juxtaposition’ by Eusebius, Coogan mentions the healing of a centurion’s slave in Matthew 8:5-10 and Luke 7:1-9 and the healing of the child of an official in John 4:46b-54 (p. 107).[22] It is striking that Chrysostom references all three stories together in his interpretation of Matthew 8, an interpretative move which may perhaps have been influenced by a Eusebian parallel.[23] In any case, Chrysostom’s interpretation of Matthew offers more than Matthew alone.

In the Syriac Collection of Simeon, readers would also have encountered Eusebius in a different way while leafing through abridged gospel interpretations from Chrysostom. A reader eager to study would have noticed many comments on the margins of the codex framed in red or green ink. These marginal notes frequently are extracts from Eusebius in Syriac translation in which gospel parallels and differences are discussed, such as the omnipresent genealogies. What is more, these notes themselves are evidence for acts of reading – “traces of reading persist in subsequent acts of writing,” (p. 137) as Coogan aptly puts it for users of Eusebius’s work. In sum, late ancient and medieval Syriac writers were avid gospel readers and Eusebius’s presence was often felt, even if not always directly.

In his book, Coogan does not uphold a firm separation between the composition of New Testament materials, often restricted to the first or early second century CE, and their subsequent study by late ancient interpreters. Instead, he argues for “beginning the story somewhere else,” (p.90) situating Eusebius’s system on a continuum that starts with the composition of the Gospel of Mark. Coogan observes that “Eusebius not only repeats existing Gospel material, but also continues – repeats – existing dynamics of Gospel writing. Eusebius’s fourth-century project is still Gospel writing” (p. 89). He adds: “To sever the Eusebian apparatus from earlier Gospel writing is to misunderstand both the production and the reception of Eusebius’ Gospel” (p. 89).

I would like to close with a few brief enquiries into these dynamics of writing and the context of production for Eusebius’ project, some of which might perhaps play a role in future discussions:

• Allowing the reader to look for “similar things” in the gospels, starting at any place, moving in any direction, there is perhaps a sense in which users of the canon tables can choose their own adventure: the more parallels the merrier. What does it say about Eusebius’s own conception of his project and his intended audience that he was seemingly unconcerned with what users of his system would find? Who would Eusebius’s ideal users of the mapped fourfold gospel have been?

• Coogan describes how Eusebius focused his project on the gospels that have become part of the New Testament in its current form (p. 86). Eusebius hasn’t included Acts, apocryphal texts, or Septuagint parallels, in contrast to some of his other works in which he uses the library he had at his disposal to its widest extent. If we approach the canon tables as a continuation of gospel writing, how does this help us better understand what Eusebius aimed to accomplish with his project? If Eusebius positioned himself as a gospel (re)writer, does that in part explain his focus on the four gospels to the exclusion of other possible parallels? Or should Eusebius only be seen as ‘among the evangelists’ from the perspective of reception, looking backwards?

• Eusebius the Evangelist advances scholarship in important ways, both in how we think of writing practices in Late Antiquity and in how we study them (pp. 62-66; 137). The book also invites further reflection, for example on the material circumstances of creating and using anthologizing texts and tools for reading. For instance, Coogan points to the communal working environment in which Eusebius and his predecessors were active as well as to Eusebius’s probable dependence on the labor of enslaved people (pp. 44-46). Ways of delimiting texts might also be studied further in light of Coogan’s book, for example by considering ways in which existing forms of textual segmentation might have influenced the creation and adoption of Eusebius’s divisions.

Finally, I would like to thank Jeremiah Coogan for his wonderful and exciting book, from which I have learnt so much. Eusebius the Evangelist will no doubt inspire scholarship on the Eusebian apparatus and on active encounters between users and texts more broadly for years to come.

[1] E.g. BL Add. 12144 fol. 233v.

[2] Margaret Dunlop Gibson (ed. and tr.), The Commentaries of Isho’dad of Merv, Bishop of Hadatha (c. 850 A.D.). In Syriac and English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), ed. comm. Mt., 9 l. 23 - 10 l. 3.

[3] Gibson, ed. comm. Mk., 206 l.20-22.

[4] Gibson, ed. comm. Mk., 206 l. 23- 207 l. 6.

[5] Gibson, ed. comm. Lk., 1 l. 4-11.

[6] Johan D. Hofstra (ed.), Ishodad of Merv. Commentary on the Gospel of John (CSCO 671, Syr 259, Leuven: Peeters, 2019), 3 l. 10-17.

[7] Hofstra, ed. comm. Jn., 4 l. 9-15.

[8] Gibson, ed. comm. Mk., 208 l. 4-9.

[9] Lk. 1:1.

[10] I.e. the apostles.

[11] I.e. the broader group of the earliest Jesus-followers.

[12] Gibson, ed. comm. Lk., 1 l. 13-2 l. 1.

[13] Ishoʿdad even reports the view that Mark was Peter’s son. Gibson, ed. comm. Mk., 204 l.7-8.

[14] Gibson, ed. comm. Mk., 204 l. 4-7.

[15] https://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.sir.510.

[16] It also partly overlaps with interpretations Ishoʿdad included in his gospel commentaries.

[17] Vat. Syr. 510 fol. 4v.

[18] https://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.sir.154.pt.1.

[19] Coogan, Eusebius the Evangelist, 34 n. 21 mentions such lists in Greek as an alternative way of mapping the gospels.

[20] Vat. Syr. 154 fol. 3r. George appears to mention 360 canons, a number which diverges from both the Greek and Peshitta systems, but agrees with a Syriac manuscript Coogan mentions in Eusebius the Evangelist, 147 n. 89. However, further, physical examination of the manuscript is required as the watermark on the digital image overlaps with the canon number.

[21] https://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.sir.103.pt.3.

[22] Even though the healing stories are set in different locations and involve different protagonists, similar terminology might have contributed to Eusebius’s perception of a parallel, especially regarding the occurrence of παῖς (Mt 8:5,8, Lk 1:7, Jn 4:51, as well as παιδίον in Jn 4:49), with its possible connotations of both child and enslaved person. For Chrysostom, another connecting factor between the stories may have been that both protagonists are described as being in a position of authority, as centurion and as a more general official. 

[23]  Hom. Matt. PG 57 336-337.

Marion Pragt is a postdoctoral fellow of the FWO Research Foundation Flanders at KU Leuven, Belgium. She works on biblical reception and marginal annotation in Syriac.