Syriac saint, theologian and writer (c. 306 – 373)
Ephrem the Syrian (; c. 306 – 373), also known as Saint Ephrem, Saint Ephraim (), Ephrem of Edessa or Aprem of Nisibis, was a prominent Christian theologian and writer who is revered as one of the most notable hymnographers of Eastern Christianity. He was born in Nisibis, served as a deacon and later lived in Edessa.
Ephrem is venerated as a saint by all traditional Churches. He is especially revered in Syriac Christianity, both in East Syriac tradition and West Syriac tradition, and also counted as a Holy and Venerable Father (i.e., a sainted monk) in the Eastern Orthodox Church, especially in the Slovak tradition. He was declared a Doctor of the Church in the Roman Catholic Church in 1920. Ephrem is also credited as the founder of the School of Nisibis, which, in later centuries, was the centre of learning of the Church of the East.
Ephrem wrote a wide variety of hymns, poems, and sermons in verse, as well as prose exegesis. These were works of practical theology for the edification of the Church in troubled times. Some of these works have been examined by feminist scholars who have analyzed the incorporation of feminine imagery in his texts. They also examine the performance practice of all-women choirs singing his madrāšê, or his teaching hymns. Ephrem's works were so popular that, for centuries after his death, Christian authors wrote hundreds of pseudepigraphal works in his name. He has been called the most significant of all of the fathers of the Syriac-speaking church tradition. In Syriac Christian tradition, he is considered patron of the Syriac Aramaic people.
Life.
Ephrem was born around the year 306 in the city of Nisibis (modern Nusaybin, Turkey), in the Roman province of Mesopotamia, that was recently acquired by the Roman Empire. Internal evidence from Ephrem's hymnody suggests that both his parents were part of the growing Christian community in the city, although later hagiographers wrote that his father was a pagan priest. In those days, religious culture in the region of Nisibis included local polytheism, Judaism and several varieties of the Early Christianity. Most of the population spoke the Aramaic language, while Greek and Latin were languages of administration. The city had a complex ethnic composition, consisting of "Assyrians, Arabs, Greeks, Jews, Parthians, Romans, and Iranians".
Jacob, the second bishop of Nisibis, was appointed in 308, and Ephrem grew up under his leadership of the community. Jacob of Nisibis is recorded as a signatory at the First Council of Nicea in 325. Ephrem was baptized as a youth and almost certainly became a son of the covenant, an unusual form of Syriac proto-monasticism. Jacob appointed Ephrem as a teacher (Syriac "malp̄ānâ", a title that still carries great respect for Syriac Christians). He was ordained as a deacon either at his baptism or later. He began to compose hymns and write biblical commentaries as part of his educational office. In his hymns, he sometimes refers to himself as a "herdsman" (, "'allānâ"), to his bishop as the "shepherd" (, "rā'yâ"), and to his community as a 'fold' (, "dayrâ"). Ephrem is popularly credited as the founder of the School of Nisibis, which, in later centuries, was the centre of learning of the Church of the East.
In 337, Emperor Constantine I, who had legalised and promoted the practice of Christianity in the Roman Empire, died. Seizing on this opportunity, Shapur II of Persia began a series of attacks into Roman North Mesopotamia. Nisibis was besieged in 338, 346 and 350. During the first siege, Ephrem credits Bishop Jacob as defending the city with his prayers. In the third siege, of 350, Shapur rerouted the River Mygdonius to undermine the walls of Nisibis. The Nisibenes quickly repaired the walls while the Persian elephant cavalry became bogged down in the wet ground. Ephrem celebrated what he saw as the miraculous salvation of the city in a hymn that portrayed Nisibis as being like Noah's Ark, floating to safety on the flood.
One important physical link to Ephrem's lifetime is the baptistery of Nisibis. The inscription tells that it was constructed under Bishop Vologeses in 359. In that year, Shapur attacked again. The cities around Nisibis were destroyed one by one, and their citizens killed or deported. Constantius II was unable to respond; the campaign of Julian in 363 ended with his death in battle. His army elected Jovian as the new emperor, and to rescue his army, he was forced to surrender Nisibis to Persia (also in 363) and to permit the expulsion of the entire Christian population. Ephrem declined being ordained a bishop by feigning madness, because he regarded himself unworthy for it.
Ephrem, with the others, went first to Amida (Diyarbakır), eventually settling in Edessa (Urhay, in Aramaic) in 363. Ephrem, in his late fifties, applied himself to ministry in his new church and seems to have continued his work as a teacher, perhaps in the School of Edessa. Edessa had been an important center of the Aramaic-speaking world, and the birthplace of a specific Middle Aramaic dialect that came to be known as the Syriac language. The city was rich with rivaling philosophies and religions. Ephrem comments that orthodox Nicene Christians were simply called "Palutians" in Edessa, after a former bishop. Arians, Marcionites, Manichees, Bardaisanites and various gnostic sects proclaimed themselves as the true church. In this confusion, Ephrem wrote a great number of hymns defending Nicene orthodoxy. A later Syriac writer, Jacob of Serugh, wrote that Ephrem rehearsed all-female choirs to sing his hymns set to Syriac folk tunes in the forum of Edessa. In 370 he visited Basil the Great at Caesarea, and then journeyed to the monks of Egypt. As he preached a panegyric on St. Basil, who died in 379, his own death must be placed at a later date. After a ten-year residency in Edessa, in his sixties, Ephrem succumbed to the plague as he ministered to its victims. He died in 373.
Language.
Ephrem wrote exclusively in his native Aramaic language, using the local Edessan ("Urhaya") dialect, that later came to be known as the Classical Syriac. Ephrem's works contain several endonymic (native) references to his language ("Aramaic"), homeland ("Aram") and people ("Arameans"). He is therefore known as "the authentic voice of Aramaic Christianity".
In the early stages of modern scholarly studies, it was believed that some examples of the long-standing Greek practice of labeling Aramaic as "Syriac", that are found in the "Cave of Treasures", can be attributed to Ephrem, but later scholarly analyses have shown that the work in question was written much later (c. 600) by an unknown author, thus also showing that Ephrem's original works still belonged to the tradition unaffected by exonymic (foreign) labeling.
One of the early admirers of Ephrem's works, theologian Jacob of Serugh (d. 521), who already belonged to the generation that accepted the custom of a double naming of their language not only as Aramaic ("Ārāmāyā") but also as "Syriac" ("Suryāyā"), wrote a homily ("memrā") dedicated to Ephrem, praising him as the "crown" or "wreath" of the "Arameans" (), and the same praise was repeated in early liturgical texts. Only later, under the Greek influence already prevalent in the works of the middle fifth century author Theodoret of Cyrus, did it became customary to associate Ephrem with Syriac identity, and label him only as "the Syrian" (), thus blurring his Aramaic self-identification, attested by his own writings and works of other Aramaic-speaking writers, and also by examples from the earliest liturgical tradition.
Some of those problems persisted up to the recent times, even in scholarly literature, as a consequence of several methodological problems within the field of source editing. During the process of critical editing and translation of sources within Syriac studies, some scholars have practiced various forms of arbitrary (and often unexplained) interventions, including the occasional disregard for the importance of original terms, used as endonymic (native) designations for Arameans and their language (ārāmāyā). Such disregard was manifested primarily in translations and commentaries, by replacement of authentic terms with polysemic Syrian/Syriac labels. In previously mentioned "memrā", dedicated to Ephrem, one of the terms for "Aramean people" ( / Arameandom) was published correctly in original script of the source, but in the same time it was translated in English as "Syriac nation""," and then enlisted among quotations related to "Syrian/Syriac" identity, without any mention of Aramean-related terms in the source. Even when noticed and corrected by some scholars, such replacements of terms continue to create problems for others.
Several translations of his writings exist in Classical Armenian, Coptic, Old Georgian, Koine Greek and other languages. Some of his works are extant only in translation (particularly in Armenian).
Writings and authorship.
Manuscripts.
According to the Catalogues of Syriac Manuscripts in the British Library published by Forshall &amp; Rosen (1839) and Wright (1870–72), there are "ninety or so manuscripts which contain works by or attributed to Ephraem."
Hymns.
Over four hundred hymns attributed to Ephrem still exist. Granted that some have been lost, Ephrem's productivity is not in doubt. The church historian Sozomen credits Ephrem with having written three million verses. Ephrem combines in his writing a threefold heritage: he draws on the models and methods of early Rabbinic Judaism, he engages skillfully with Greek science and philosophy, and he delights in the Mesopotamian/Persian tradition of mystery symbolism.
The most important of his works are his lyric, teaching hymns (ܡܕܖ̈ܫܐ, "madrāšê"). These hymns are full of rich, poetic imagery drawn from biblical sources, folk tradition, and other religions and philosophies. The "madrāšê" are written in stanzas of syllabic verse and employ over fifty different metrical schemes. The form is defined by an antiphon, or congregational refrain (ܥܘܢܝܬܐ, "'ûnîṯâ"), between each independent strophe (or verse), and the refrain's melody mimics that of the opening half of the strophe. Each "madrāšâ" had its "qālâ" (ܩܠܐ), a traditional tune identified by its opening line. All of these "qālê" are now lost. It seems that Bardaisan and Mani composed "madrāšê", and Ephrem felt that the medium was a suitable tool to use against their claims.
The "madrāšê" are gathered into various hymn cycles. In the CSCO critical edition of Beck et al. (1955–1975), these have been given standardised names and abbreviations. By the year 2000, English translations had been published for the following:
Some of these titles do not do justice to the entirety of the collection (for instance, only the first half of the "Carmina Nisibena" is about Nisibis). Bates (2000) remarked: "[Various] collections of Ephrem's hymns [...] appear to be randomly assembled by later editors and named for the subject of the first hymn in the collection only".
Particularly influential were his "Hymns Against Heresies". Ephrem used these to warn his flock of the heresies that threatened to divide the early church. He lamented that the faithful were "tossed to and fro and carried around with every wind of doctrine, by the cunning of men, by their craftiness and deceitful wiles" (Eph 4:14). He devised hymns laden with doctrinal details to inoculate right-thinking Christians against heresies such as docetism. The "Hymns Against Heresies" employ colourful metaphors to describe the Incarnation of Christ as fully human and divine. Ephrem asserts that Christ's unity of humanity and divinity represents peace, perfection and salvation; in contrast, docetism and other heresies sought to divide or reduce Christ's nature and, in doing so, rend and devalue Christ's followers with their false teachings.
Authenticity of hymns "On the Nativity".
Some of these hymn cycles provide implicit insight into Ephrem's perceived level of comfort with incorporating feminine imagery into his writings. According to J. Barrington Bates (2000), the 28 hymns of the cycle "On the Nativity" centered around Mary and had the clearest pervasive theme of Ephrem's hymn cycles. An example of feminine imagery is found when Ephrem writes of the baby Jesus: "He was lofty but he sucked Mary's milk and from his blessings all creation sucks." However, Edmund Beck rejected their authenticity in 1956, adding that in the writings that can be reasonably attributed to Ephrem, he said very little about Mary as intercessor. Sebastian Brock similarly questioned their authenticity when he published English translations of a small group of them in 1984; when he published a full translation of these and other Syriac Marian hymns in 1994, he entirely rejected Ephrem's authorship, attributing them to the 5th and 6th centuries instead. Cornelia