The theology of Theodore of Mopsuestia, as is well known, has exerted a far-reaching influence upon the Church of the East.Footnote 1 Efforts to translate Theodore's writings into Syriac commenced soon after the bishop's death in 428, and a substantial portion of his extensive corpus became available in Syriac over the course of the fifth century.Footnote 2 The reception of Theodore among East Syriac Christians took place principally through four different channels: poetry and liturgy; canons and decrees; exegesis; and school theology. The metrical homilies of the great poet Narsai, though he is much indebted to Ephrem as well, operated within Theodorean parameters and transmitted key concepts into the liturgy, as W. F. Macomber has observed.Footnote 3 Official endorsement of Theodore's theology by various East Syriac synods constitutes the second mode of reception: the council convened by Mar Aba in 543/4 was the first explicitly to approve his views, and later synods reaffirmed Theodore's theology and thereby enshrined his normative role.Footnote 4 In exegetical literature Theodore's heritage can be traced well into the medieval period in the commentaries of eminent biblical scholars such as Theodore bar Koni, Ishoʿdad of Merv or the author of the so-called Diyarbarkir commentary, all of whom adopted both Theodore's historically attuned and philologically oriented exegetical principles and many particular interpretations.Footnote 5 This article will concentrate on what may be considered the fourth avenue of transmission, namely school theology, and in particular on the writings of Thomas of Edessa, a teacher at the illustrious School of Nisibis in the sixth century.Footnote 6 Thomas's considerable contribution to this transmission process lay in formulating an accessible synthesis of Theodore's thought that was able to reach large swathes of the educated elite.
The life and works of Thomas of Edessa
The few known details of Thomas's life are quickly recounted. As his epithet urhaya suggests, he hailed from Edessa, a major centre of Syriac Christianity then under Byzantine control, where he encountered the future catholicos Mar Aba (d. 552) around the year 520.Footnote 7 Aba, a native of Persia, had converted from Zoroastrianism and in consequence given up his successful career as a Sasanian government official to enrol at the School of Nisibis; after mastering the curriculum in record time, as his hagiographer marvels, Aba set out to tour the Mediterranean to visit the holy sites.Footnote 8 In Edessa he happened upon Thomas, a bilingual Christian intellectual who attached himself to the learned Persian and accompanied him on his travels to Alexandria, Athens and beyond.Footnote 9 In Alexandria they made the acquaintance of Cosmas Indicopleustes, who in his Christian topography extolled their erudition and confessed his own profound intellectual debt to Aba.Footnote 10 Having learned Greek, Aba offered expositions in this language in Alexandria.Footnote 11 Eventually, Thomas followed Aba into his Persian homeland where both took up teaching posts at the School of Nisibis. Thomas died some time prior to 540, while on a mission to Constantinople.Footnote 12
Precisely how Thomas trained in his youth is not known, but since he so readily embraced the teachings of an East Syriac theologian one might surmise that he was already predisposed toward this theological perspective, perhaps by being involved in some form of loosely organised study circle that probably will have persisted even after the official closure of the School of Edessa in 489.Footnote 13 This conjecture of a continuance of Theodoreanism in the city receives additional support from the fact that Thomas's compatriot Cyrus of Edessa should likewise become a notable teacher in Nisibis.Footnote 14 The Theodorean tradition had dominated the theological discourse in fifth-century Edessa, despite being fiercely opposed in the early decades of the century by Bishop Rabbula (411/12–435/36),Footnote 15 and had given rise to the large-scale project to translate Theodore's corpus, an endeavour spearheaded by Bishop Ibas of Edessa (d. 457) that extended well into the 560s.Footnote 16 Commitment to the Mopsuestian's theology probably continued in Edessa for at least another generation or two after Ibas had initiated it. Examining more broadly the phenomenon of Edessan Theodoreanism, which even influenced certain Miaphysite leaders who had trained in Edessa,Footnote 17 N. Kavvadas points to three principal contributing factors for the ready reception of Theodore amongst Syriac intellectuals, namely the exegetical and cultural affinity between Edessa and Antioch; the academic interest in Theodore's scientifically more up-to-date commentaries; and certain ecclesio-political factors.Footnote 18
Thomas applied himself as educator, translator and scholar. His works, of which ʿAbdishoʿ in his Catalogue lists Explanations of the Nativity and of Epiphany, an epistle on chants, disputations against heretics and an anti-astrological treatise,Footnote 19 had been presumed lost until in 1885 the priest Samuel Jamil discovered in Seert (today in eastern Turkey) a manuscript dating from the sixteenth century and containing thirteen previously unknown discourses on liturgical feasts, including Thomas's two Explanations.Footnote 20 This manuscript further contained six treatises by Cyrus of Edessa on the remaining dominical feasts, by and large reflecting sixth-century Nisibene school theology, and several other discourses on liturgical festivals.Footnote 21 Although the Seert manuscript (Chaldean Archiepiscopal Residence, ms 82) was lost – Macomber presumes that it was destroyed in 1915 together with the archbishop's domicileFootnote 22 – copies of it have survived and are now deposited in various Western libraries.Footnote 23
In the more than 130 years since Jamil's discovery most of these tractates have been published,Footnote 24 but the writings of Thomas, although they constitute the oldest part of the collection, have been unduly neglected and to this day are only partially edited and entirely lack a modern translation. Whereas On the Nativity was published with a Latin translation in 1898 by S. J. Carr,Footnote 25 Epiphany has languished in manuscript form – circumstances that might account for the relative paucity of scholarly engagement with these important documents.Footnote 26
The genre of Explanation (ʿelta in Syriac, pl. ʿellata)Footnote 27 will be familiar to many readers, but its main features may be briefly recalled here since this choice of literary form played no marginal role in the reception process of Theodore's thought. An Explanation was originally an oral discourse, presented on the very day of the festival to the assembled school community, that laid out the ‘causes’ of the particular feast day.Footnote 28 In their written form, each Explanation begins with a dedicatory preface, followed by a helpful overview of topics to be covered, intended as ‘sign-posts on the road’ as Thomas puts it.Footnote 29 After addressing the announced subjects in turn, an Explanation concludes with an admonition to good conduct, thus adding a homiletic touch.Footnote 30 These Explanations aimed to discuss not the liturgical rite per se but the feast's theological content, the mystery underlying the celebration.Footnote 31
The earliest author known to have delivered such Explanations was Mar Aba, Thomas's erstwhile travelling companion; yet these have not survived or, more likely, were never written down, so that the treatises of Thomas are the oldest extant texts in this literary genre.Footnote 32 In fact, the doubt with which Thomas in the preface regards his own ability to produce an adequate written version seems to go beyond a merely rhetorical, self-deprecating remark and supports the hypothesis that Aba's Explanations simply consisted of an oral exposition.Footnote 33 Although the genre of ‘explanation’ (which would become quite popular among later East and even West Syriac authors)Footnote 34 originated in the school setting and clearly was meant for instruction, Thomas's Syriac is not easy to read: the phrases are long and often convoluted, perhaps in imitation of Greek eloquence, a situation further complicated by the occasionally corrupt state of the received text.
Transmitting Theodore
Thomas's two Explanations show great internal coherence and do not exhibit any obvious signs of literal dependencies, be it on Ephrem, Narsai or Theodore. The relation between Thomas and Aba is difficult to ascertain, as very few of the latter's writings have come down to us. Overall, however – and this is a topic deserving further investigation – Aba's letters and canons contained in the Synodicon orientale seem to have quite a different thrust than do Thomas's Explanations.Footnote 35 Without appearing as mere paraphrases or summaries of Theodore, Thomas's Explanations reveal upon closer inspection a profound debt to the Interpreter. And this is precisely their great contribution: an independent synthesis of Theodore's theology, in this case applied to the liturgical feasts, presented in an accessible and didactically useful form and furnished with memorable illustrations.
An exhaustive analysis of how Thomas's Explanations served as a vehicle for the transmission of Theodore naturally exceeds the scope of this paper; discussion will therefore be limited to three distinct areas that each highlight broader features, namely, salvation history, exegetical technique and the idea of the human being as the ‘bond of creation’.
Salvation history
The ‘good gifts’
In his discourse on the Nativity, Thomas sets out with the seemingly superfluous question, Why do we observe this feast? To celebrate the birth of Christ, naturally; but not, he continues, on account of the novelty of the virgin birth, marvellous as it is, positing that the birth of Isaac, for instance, was more astonishing as he was born from a woman both barren and old; let alone the still more remarkable origin of Eve from a rib – and of a man at that – and of Adam from lifeless earth.Footnote 36 Rather, the Nativity is celebrated ‘because of the ineffable good gifts (
, ṭabata, literally ‘good things’) that have been conferred upon all creatures through Christ our hope’.Footnote 37 These good gifts, as the Nisibene teacher expounds at length, are the glory, peace and good hope announced by the angels to the shepherds near Bethlehem (Luke ii.14).Footnote 38
The student of Theodore will at once recall the centrality of the concept of ‘good things’ (
) in both the bishop's Catechetical homilies and his commentaries on the minor Pauline Epistles.Footnote 39 Already in paradise, he explains to the candidates for baptism, Adam could have obtained possession of these good gifts had he exercised his discernment.Footnote 40 In subsequent ages, the good gifts that are to come (
) were foreshadowed in the Law.Footnote 41 In baptism, then, the believer comes to participate symbolically in these ‘novel and grand good things’ (
) that took their beginning in Christ and that will fully be realised in the eschaton.Footnote 42 The Syriac version of the Catechetical homilies frequently employs the term ṭabata which no doubt must have corresponded to ἀγαθά, a term rendered as 
in the Peshitta (Romans iii.8; x.15),Footnote 43 and that in Theodore's Greek fragments as a rule refers to the goods revealed by Christ.Footnote 44 In the Commentary on Romans, however, the bishop conveys this idea of divine gifts with the word δωρεά,Footnote 45 thereby staying close to Pauline language.Footnote 46 The word δωρεά, however, is normally rendered as 
in Syriac (and is translated as such in the Peshitta version of these Pauline passages),Footnote 47 so that it appears unlikely that δωρεά would have been the Greek term underlying the Syriac word ṭabata, so prominent in the Catechetical homilies.Footnote 48
Thomas, as do the Catechetical homilies, clearly favours the expression ‘good things’ (
) over ‘gift’ (
): whereas ‘gift’ (
) occurs only four times in his two treatises (that in total extend to more than one hundred pages), he uses ‘good things’ (
) fifty times. Together with the evidence presented below, this suggests that Thomas was well familiar with Theodore's catechetical discourses.
God as pedagogue
The fifth chapter of the Explanation of the Nativity raises the disconcerting question, ‘Why have these good gifts not been revealed until now?’ Was God perhaps previously too weak, Thomas interjects, or did malice prevent God from granting these gifts to the people of former times?Footnote 49 In the course of his response Thomas launches a salvation-historical excursus, asserting that it was neither on account of God's prior ignorance, nor God's weakness or malice, that Christ's coming did not occur at an earlier time, but because humanity, still in a childlike state (
), was simply not yet ready.Footnote 50 Our author consistently advances the notion of God as a pedagogue who guides humanity through the process of growing up, and whose educational measures are appropriately suited to each developmental level of humankind at large.Footnote 51
It is important to note here that this pedagogical imagery was in itself not a novelty imposed upon Syriac tradition by an interaction with Greek theology, but was previously latently present in native Syriac authors such as Ephrem (d. 373), preparing, as it were, the soil in which such imagery could grow fruitfully. In his Commentary on Genesis Ephrem asserts that Moses ‘wrote about the natures that were created from nothing so that (the people) should know (
)’ that the elements are not self-existent beings, and that ‘he wrote about the true commandments that had been forgotten, while adding those that were useful for the infantile state of the people (
)’.Footnote 52 Although Thomas will use a different term for the childish state of humankind than does Ephrem, shabruta rather than yaluduta, the concepts are the same. While vocabulary specifically relating to school and teaching is less pronounced in Ephrem, he nevertheless regularly evokes God's pedagogical intentions when interpreting particular passages of Scripture. For instance, in his exposition of Genesis i.14–16 Ephrem makes some cosmological remarks intended to explain why the solar year is about eleven days longer than the sum of the lunar cycles. ‘From that year, the descendants of Adam learned (
) that henceforth to every year they should add eleven days.’Footnote 53 And in a remarkable passage in a Memra on faith the poet extols learning, hypostasising it and praising its many contributions to human life and society.Footnote 54 Ephrem's older contemporary Aphrahat, paraphrasing Galatians iii.23–4, describes the law as ‘guardian and educator (
)’ until the coming of Christ.Footnote 55 These texts illustrate that the idea of pedagogy was not alien to native Syriac theology, and Syriac readers of Theodore could readily build upon it. This process was facilitated by the broader affinities between Edessan and Antiochene theological thought that come to the fore, for instance, in the person and writings of the Edessan native Eusebius of Emesa, and that constituted the basis for the ready reception of Theodore's thought at the School of Edessa, as Lucas Van Rompay has observed.Footnote 56
While there are thus native Syriac antecedents for the metaphor of God as pedagogue, Thomas inherits his particular understanding of salvation history probably as a process of gradual improvement directly from Theodore's Commentary on Genesis.Footnote 57 Overall, however, Theodore does not emphasise this idea nearly as much nor as consistently as does Thomas, who gives it much greater prominence and some unique twists. Rather, not seldom does the bishop of Mopsuestia favour a more traditional understanding of salvation history according to which humanity increasingly became subject to sin until the coming of Christ. This latter view prevails in the extensive fragments of his Commentary on Romans, running to more than sixty pages in Staab's Greek edition. Yet elsewhere, such as in the commentary on the minor Epistles of Paul, Theodore on occasion advances a pedagogical view of salvation history. He inserts in the Commentary on Galatians a long exposition on the proper understanding of ‘righteousness based on faith’ versus ‘righteousness based on works’, in the course of which he elaborates the Law's function as an educational measure, designed to assist humans in their training of virtue.Footnote 58 The pedagogical model of salvation history, then, does not predominate in Theodore's extant corpus as it would later preponderate among Nisibene teachers. As Macomber has remarked, Theodore does not entirely resolve the tension between these two models. Competing views emerge in particular in regard to Adam's state before the Fall, and the Interpreter wavers somewhat between regarding it as a state of childlike innocence and understanding it as a situation of immortal bliss from which sin ejected the first humans.Footnote 59 Vestiges of this ambivalence can be found in the writings of Nisibene scholars, and Thomas can set side by side the idea that death entered through sin and the view that God designed humanity as passible and mortal at the beginning and would, after a process of education and development of rationality in this world, ‘make us partake in immortal and immutable life’.Footnote 60
In both of his discourses, Thomas fully embraces the pedagogical model of salvation history; yet rather than simply excerpting passages from Theodore or paraphrasing him, he presents his own synthesis, based on the bishop's commentaries and homilies, and applies it to the subject of the liturgical feasts. Thomas also advances the concept in a number of ways, for instance by mapping precisely the stages of salvation history (from Adam to Noah, Noah to Abraham, and so forth) onto the school curriculum: just as the pupil learns first the alphabet, then spelling and reading, next the Psalms, and finally studies commentary, thus also God taught the generations according to each developmental stage.Footnote 61 Moreover, Thomas furnishes charming illustrations, such as an amusing passage about a teacher and his assorted bunch of distracted pupils, in order to instantiate the crucial point that each generation will be judged on its own terms:
And it is just as, hypothetically, when a man has ten pupils who are all at one stage of learning, (namely) the alphabet; and one of them should neglect his learning and go out to play in the dirt, and another should begin to eat and drink, paying no attention to his reading; and another should lie down and sleep; and others again should indulge in vain talk and empty chatter together and pay no attention to the command of their [teacher]; while the rest are learning as they should and most importantly honouring the education that (comes) in learning according to the will of their master. At the time when they are required to recite, they (who misbehaved) are punished: not because they had not learned to read and understand the meaning of the Scriptures but because they did not recite the alphabet at the level, so to speak, of their fellows. Thus God too, the Lord of all, when he enters into judgment and into recompense for the actions of human beings, does not demand from the people of Adam's time why they did not circumcise, nor from those of Noah's time why they did not keep the Sabbath; but in short, in each generation he makes demands by the standard of those within it, requiting each according to his actions corresponding to the time in which he lived and the laws given by God in his days.Footnote 62
Pedagogical paradigms such as these, popularised by Thomas, exerted substantial influence upon later East Syriac authors such as the Nisibene teacher Barḥadbeshabba who in the early seventh century penned an Explanation of the foundation of schools that casts the entire history of humankind as a succession of schools;Footnote 63 or the well-known eighth-century systematiser of the mystic tradition, Joseph Ḥazzaya, who quite similarly consistently employs the paradigm of God as the divine educator in his treatise On providence.Footnote 64 Remarkably, Joseph even uses the very same illustration of the school curriculum as does Thomas, according to which the pupil advances from learning the alphabet, to reading, to studying Psalms, to writing out a volume and finally to interpreting Scripture.Footnote 65
Exegesis
Theodore is rightly renowned for his historically oriented, scholarly exegesis.Footnote 66 The Explanations of the feasts, to be sure, are not exegetical pieces, yet they often engage with Scripture and their debt to Theodore's biblical interpretation is tangible throughout.
That Thomas's exegesis stands firmly in the Theodorean tradition can be illustrated from Epiphany. In good scholarly fashion Thomas clarifies at the outset the terminology – why, anyhow, do we call this feast that commemorates Jesus’ baptism ‘epiphany’ (denḥa), a term that normally denotes the sunrise. He explains that just as the sun shines forth at dawn, so Christ, the ‘sun of righteousness’ (Malachi iv.2 (= iii.20 LXX)), appeared at the time of his baptism.Footnote 67 In order biblically to validate the name denḥa, Thomas then sets forth scriptural passages containing metaphors of morning, light and darkness, such as: ‘For the kingdom of heaven is like a man who went out in the morning to hire labourers for his vineyard’ (Matthew xx.1); or, ‘The light is shining in the darkness but the darkness does not overcome it’ (John i.5),Footnote 68 summing up as follows:
If, then, we call our Lord ‘sun’, and the knowledge of the proclamation of the gospel ‘light’, and the beginning of his gospel ‘morning’, then according to the affinity of these names we rightly call his manifestation at the beginning of his gospel the ‘shining forth’ (denḥa); this which occurred at his baptism by John. Therefore we name this feast – although in fact it is of a baptism – ‘of the Epiphany (denḥa)’, in accordance with (calling) the proclamation of the gospel ‘light’, and the beginning of his gospel ‘morning’, and Christ the ‘sun of righteousness’.Footnote 69
In a similar fashion, Theodore had commented on John i.4–5, expounded Ephesians v.8 and interpreted Romans xiii.12, describing the appearance of Christ with metaphors of dawn and light. The word ‘day’ in Romans xiii.12 (‘the night is far gone, the day is near’) he took as indication that the time of Christ's coming marks the end of ‘the time of ignorance’.Footnote 70
In the following chapter of Epiphany, Thomas concerns himself with the question, ‘Why did our Lord wait some thirty years from his birth until his baptism?’,Footnote 71 a topic allowing him once again to elaborate his understanding of salvation history and to furnish it with further details.Footnote 72 This chapter also reveals that his exegetical method is entirely Antiochene in character. After detailing the pedagogical intent in the creation narrative – ideas that will recur later in the writings of BarḥadbeshabbaFootnote 73 – he returns to the issue at hand: why baptism at the age of thirty? Granted that it was pedagogically useful to have Jesus grow up like an ordinary person, being born, nursed, wrapped in swaddling clothes and so on, lest Docetism should prevail – why should he not have been baptised as a fifteen-year old? This, Thomas asserts, citing Romans and Galatians in support, was to demonstrate Christ's complete obedience, perfect righteousness and fulfilment of all lawsFootnote 74 – biblical phrases and ideas resonating strongly in Theodore's commentaries as well.Footnote 75 Thomas acutely observes that the teenage years tend to be a time during which ‘the raging heat of youth is stirred up and drags (one) off to perform hateful acts’.Footnote 76 That Jesus lived through adolescence without yielding to any passions demonstrates beyond doubt ‘our Lord's obedience, righteousness, and victory over everything’.Footnote 77 In this section Thomas once again enhances his narrative with a vivid example taken from daily life: just as a pot of water situated over a hot fire is bound to bubble over unless the heat from below is assuaged by a cold fluid added to the vessel from above, so also the heat of youth will spill over into some sin ‘unless a perfect will should become for him the recipient of complete grace, so that thereby he might cool and quench the heat of desires in the time of his youth’.Footnote 78 A similar metaphor recurs in Barḥadbeshabba's Ecclesiastical history.Footnote 79
Thomas concludes this section by pointing out why thirty was a particularly apposite age, rather than, say, twenty-four, for it expressed appreciation for ‘the former (customs) among the Israelites’Footnote 80: in the Book of Numbers it was thirty-year old men who had carried the vessels of the tabernacle. This type of reflection, quite unlike how Ephrem in his symbolic theology relates the two testaments, is inspired by Theodore's commentaries that similarly characterise the coherence between the Hebrew Bible and the events related in the New Testament. Theodore stresses that the first covenant had the purpose of preparing the Israelites for the advent of the Messiah while simultaneously meeting contemporary needs, while highlighting the superiority of those latter events.Footnote 81 Generally keen to avoid any kind of allegory, Theodore considers the purpose of the astonishing life of the prophet Jonah ‘to prevent it being thought novel (καινόν)’ what would occur later with the coming of Christ.Footnote 82
The subsequent inquiry, into why Epiphany is celebrated twelve days after Christmas, offers Thomas opportunity for grammatical analysis of the biblical text. But first, in a remarkable passage, he curiously opposes what we might call the religious-historical hypothesis of the origin of Christmas: not possibly, he asserts, could the Church have adopted a previously pagan festival and transformed it into a Christian holiday.Footnote 83
As for the twelve days, he also dismisses the conjecture, apparently voiced by some, that Jesus must have been exactly thirty years and twelve days old at the time of his baptism. This rationale, which on the face of it should appeal to a historically-minded exegete, Thomas nevertheless refutes on biblical grounds by a close analysis of the word ‘about’ (
, rendering in the Peshitta the Greek ὡσεί) in Luke. He interprets Luke iii.23, Jesus was ‘about thirty years old’, by reference to the pericope of the transfiguration in Luke and Matthew. ‘For this (word) “about” is the same as he (Luke) used in another place: “About eight days after these words Jesus took Simon and James and John, and he went up to the mountain to pray” (Luke ix.28)’; whereas Matthew specifies that it was ‘after six days’ (Matt. xvii.1).Footnote 84 To reconcile the two gospel accounts, Thomas posits that Luke's ‘about eight days’ must have included the partial first and last day (i.e., when the words were spoken and when Jesus ascended the mountain) and thus means ‘less than’.Footnote 85 Ergo: Jesus must have been less than thirty years old at the time of baptism. This attention to philological argument Thomas inherits from Theodore. Although no commentary on these verses from the bishop's pen is known to this author, Theodore elsewhere engages in comparable grammatical commentary, for instance when he elucidates the use of the word ἵνα in Paul's Epistles.Footnote 86
And yet – why twelve days? Thomas once again has recourse to the customs of old and asserts that people were already positively disposed towards this number: twelve tribes of Israel, twelve Apostles and so forth.Footnote 87 Furthermore Theodore often linked the Old and New Testaments in such fashion. As would Thomas, Theodore posited that God had prepared the people for the designation ‘Son of God’ by calling some Old Testament heroes ‘sons of God’.Footnote 88
The most pronounced exegetical debt to Theodore, perhaps, emerges in the prolonged discussion of Jesus’ baptism. The principles already observed – close attention to language and to the accuracy of the historical narrative – once again prove decisive, but new dimensions appear as well. Thomas begins this segment by asserting that there are exactly three God-given baptisms: Jewish ritual washings, John's baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins (Luke iii.3), and Christian baptism.Footnote 89 Clearly, Jesus could not have been baptised with the first kind of baptism, he argues, because the Church considers not external matters but internal things as pure or impure.Footnote 90 Rather surprisingly, Thomas proceeds to cite Psalm xlv.13, ‘All the glory of the king's daughter is within’, with the clear intention of interpreting ‘the king's daughter’ as the Church. Yet this quotation does not mark a sudden embrace of allegorical exegesis; rather, Thomas again follows in the footsteps of Theodore of Mopsuestia for whom this Psalm was among the very few that he considered messianicFootnote 91 and who, as would Thomas, understood this verse as referencing the Church.Footnote 92
But neither, Thomas continues, could Jesus have received John's baptism, a position previously favoured by John Chrysostom in a homily on Epiphany, who asserted (against the biblical testimony of Mark i.4 and Luke iii.3) that John's baptism granted neither forgiveness of sin nor the Holy Spirit but simply served to admonish the people and effect their moral improvement.Footnote 93 Since Jesus needed no forgiveness of sins, Chrysostom preached, it was the Johannine baptism that he received.Footnote 94 More attuned in this regard to the biblical text than the eloquent bishop of Antioch, Thomas observes that John's baptism was for the forgiveness of sins. Yet Jesus had no need of this, Thomas insists, and offers as scriptural support 1 Peter ii.22 (‘He committed no sin’), further noting that ‘he who takes away the sin of the world’ (John i.29) required no assistance from John.Footnote 95 John's words to Jesus in Matt. iii.14, ‘I need to be baptized by you and do you come to me?’, further buttress his assertion that Jesus did not need John's baptism.Footnote 96 The underlying exegetical method, once again, is strictly historical: the text of Scripture establishes the narrative.
Not content with simply showing that if Jesus’ baptism was neither A nor B it must have been C, Thomas proceeds to give positive proof of why Jesus was baptised with Christian baptism, in the course of which discussion emerges a more complex exegetical technique. By Christian baptism, as Thomas elaborates, a person becomes partaker in the death and resurrection of Christ, receives the grace of the Holy Spirit and obtains intimacy (
, baytayuta) with the holy Trinity.Footnote 97 This naturally raises the question why Jesus should have been baptised at all, seeing that he already possessed all these qualities. Thomas marshals biblical passages to this effect: the angel's words at the Annunciation reveal that the Holy Spirit was with Jesus from the beginning (‘The Holy Spirit will come and the power of the Most High will overshadow you’: Luke i.35). Paul's statement, ‘He in whom dwells the entire fulness of Divinity bodily’ (Colossians ii. 9), signals that Jesus already had intimacy with the divine. And as far as death and resurrection are concerned, Thomas rhetorically queries, ‘Who died prior to him (Jesus) and rose to life immortal, so that he (Jesus) might be made a partaker (in it) when he was baptised in the likeness of the death and resurrection of that (former) one?’Footnote 98 Citing from Colossians and Isaiah he notes that Jesus is ‘the first-born of the dead’ (Col. i.18) and ‘the father of the world to come’ (
) (Isaiah ix.5(6) LXX).Footnote 99
After embarking upon yet another salvation-historical excursus,Footnote 100 Thomas resolves the apparent difficulty that the biblical testimony appears to contradict his theology by first positing that we have three births – bodily from a woman into this world, symbolically by baptism into the Church and spiritually from Sheol into the kingdom of heaven – and then linking these births in a kind of typology.Footnote 101 Jesus received baptism, Thomas continues, to confirm faith in us that there exists indeed an integral connection between baptism and resurrection. As these were connected in Jesus, so they will be for us.
This is not the kind of typological exegesis that Ephrem had relished.Footnote 102 For Thomas, as for Theodore, a typological reading is possible only under certain highly restricted conditions, requiring, as Frederick McLeod put it,
that … the type and its archetype must be explicitly acknowledged as being actual persons, places, or events whose relationship is historically verified in and by the Scriptures. This can be used as a reliable standard because God … has revealed these to be ‘organically’ bonded to each other as a seed is to its flowering plant.Footnote 103
A fine example of such typology is precisely Theodore's understanding of baptism, as articulated in the Catechetical homilies and elsewhere. In his address to the catechumens, the bishop of Mopsuestia explains that in baptism one receives the gift of immortality, and becomes with Christ the co-inheritor of good things to come (
)Footnote 104 and a citizen of heaven.Footnote 105 In baptism a person receives these gifts as a type (τύπος, 
) and they shall be fully realised in the world to come.Footnote 106 The baptised, Theodore explains, are inscribed (
) into heaven.Footnote 107 Theodore refers to this yet-to-be-fully realised gift as a ‘pledge’ (ἀρραβών, 
): ‘For if we received (as) a pledge of those good gifts to come the grace of the Holy Spirit, from which we now have received the use of these mysteries, we also expect to take delight in those future things to come.’Footnote 108 This participation in the good gifts to come is granted by means of sharing in the death and resurrection of Christ. To illustrate this as yet imperceptible transformation, Theodore points to how a human being in the womb gradually takes shape from an embryo; likewise in baptism the seed is planted, and the person acquires in potentiality immortality, incorruptibility and unchangeability, to be fully actualised later, yet nevertheless already now effecting a transformation.Footnote 109
This same rationale Thomas presents to his Nisibene students, taking up Theodore's typological understanding of baptism as well as the comparison with the development of an embryo; yet stressing more than did Theodore to his catechumens the link between the baptism of Jesus and that granted by the Church:
By the same logic we too, if baptism had begun with us, while there was no one (yet) who previously was first baptised and afterwards died and rose from the dead – just as he also rose up from the water after he was baptized – we would not be assured that the types which we depict in baptism will be accomplished in reality. But now that our Lord was baptized and rose up from the water, and after these events died and rose from the dead, as he had signified beforehand in his baptism, we believe without doubt that what happened to him will also be accomplished for us ourselves.Footnote 110
In his reading of Scripture, then, Thomas is thoroughly shaped by Antiochene exegesis: the precise meaning of the biblical word matters, the historical narrative counts, and typology and a messianic interpretation of the Psalms are employed only rarely and under special and restricted circumstances; there is no hint of allegory anywhere.
The human being as ‘bond of creation’
The final example here of how Thomas transmits Theodore's theology is the concept of the human being as the ‘bond of creation’. In his conspectus of salvation history presented in his Explanation of the Nativity, Thomas interposes, ‘Why did God not create us like angels?’ and observes first that angels, like humans, are subject to an inclination.Footnote 111 This ‘inclination’ (
, meṣṭalyanuta) is the ability of a rational being to experience certain desires and intents, and the freedom to act upon them or not to act upon them. The ‘inclination’ thus is at the outset morally neutral – it is the capability to act either righteously or to sin – but in effect the term acquires negative connotations since human beings after the Fall tended towards sin. The ‘inclination’ thus constitutes an integral part of rational and especially of human existence.Footnote 112 The concept of ‘inclination’, so central to the theology of Thomas, also features prominently in the commentaries of Theodore. In his exposition of Romans, Theodore normally employs the Greek word ῥοπή, but forms of the verb τρéπω, ‘to turn’, also occur although more often in the negative.Footnote 113 In the Syriac Catechetical homilies we usually find, as in Thomas, meṣṭalyanuta,Footnote 114 a word not contained in the Peshitta New Testament.Footnote 115
Thomas then proceeds with a fascinating didactic explanation: the human being is, unlike the angels, constituted ‘from the whole creation of things visible and invisible’Footnote 116 so as to teach both humankind and the angels that despite the manifoldness of creation there is only one God, the maker of everything visible and invisible. Whereas former revelations, suited to children, occurred through parts of creation such as fire or a cloud,
now, however, that [God] has wished to show forth complete salvation to the whole of creation, and it has been his intention to accomplish a teaching complete in everything, he has rightly taken the bond of all creation (
), a human being, complete in body and in soul. And in him all creatures, visible and invisible, are bound together.Footnote 117
Readers of Theodore will immediately perceive this idea of the ‘bond’ (σύνδεσμος) as a constitutive element of his theology. In the preface to his Commentary on Genesis, extant in a Syriac version as well as in Greek fragments, the bishop of Mopsuestia explains that
God assembled [the human being] from an invisible, rational and immortal soul and from a visible and mortal body. And the former has resemblance to invisible natures, but the latter relates to visible things. For in that God wished to gather all creation into one thing, therefore – although creation was established from separate natures, it should be gathered into one bond (
) – [God] created this creature who in its nature is related to all creation.Footnote 118
Theodore rehearses this idea throughout his corpus, such as in his Commentary on Romans where he designates the human being as ‘the common bond of creation’ as well as ‘the pledge of friendship’ to all things.Footnote 119 In the Commentary on Colossians, the Mopsuestian describes the human being as joined to all by kinship, uniting in himself all parts of creation, both visible and invisible.Footnote 120 For Theodore, as for Thomas, the coherence of all creation, visible and invisible, is of central soteriological significance, as has in particular been highlighted by McLeod, and it is realised in the human being.Footnote 121 Yet here, too, Thomas goes beyond Theodore in applying and illustrating the core ideas didactically.
One curious corollary to Thomas's discussion is his reflection on Christ encompassing all creation. For Theodore, the notion that Christ in assuming a human being also encompasses all creation is a key soteriological idea. And although Thomas does not in these treatises name Christ the ‘bond of creation’, this crucial notion underlies the argument. In particular, the Nisibene teacher clarifies that although Christ ‘was formed without sexual relations and born from the Virgin Mary’, he nevertheless shares in the nature of both men and women, and that ‘there is a part of each of them in him’ since Mary was constituted of both.Footnote 122
The idea that in the human being, as Thomas puts it, ‘all creatures, visible and invisible, are bound together’Footnote 123 is none other than understanding man as a microcosm, a subject that was met with keen interest at the School of Nisibis. Shortly after Thomas, a teacher named Michael dedicated an entire treatise to the topic of the human being as microcosm,Footnote 124 employing formulations reminiscent of Thomas when he described how the whole of creation, visible and invisible, is joined together in the human being, explaining that ‘all creatures were united in one vessel, the common human being. One is his creator; one is the house and one is its master-builder; one is the image and one is its fashioner’.Footnote 125
The instances featured above, to which others could easily be added,Footnote 126 demonstrate that Thomas draws extensively upon Theodore's large corpus, embracing his pedagogical model of salvation history, his exegetical principles and his concept of the human being as ‘bond of creation’. But Thomas does not slavishly follow the great interpreter; instead, he synthesises, expands and illustrates as he recasts Theodore's theology in the new genre of Explanation, rendering it easily accessible and thereby meeting a need felt by other teachers as well. Abraham of Bet Rabban, head of school in the mid-sixth century, for his part applied himself to condensing into a pedagogically suitable form Theodore's complicated commentaries, the Greek style of which the Constantinopolitan patriarch Photius would still find highly objectionable in the ninth century.Footnote 127
The Explanations by Thomas, Cyrus and others, alongside now lost works such as Abraham's epitome of Theodore's extensive biblical interpretations, constitute what contemporary sources designate ‘the tradition of the school’ (
, mashlmanuta d-eskole). This ‘tradition’ constituted the hallmark of Nisibene theological education, the core curriculum as it were that shaped generations of East Syriac scholars, bishops and monastic leaders. This ‘tradition of the school’ should not be envisioned as a static set of doctrines; rather it was an emerging and at times pluriform body of teaching.Footnote 128 Barḥadbeshabba, who wished to co-opt the fifth-century School of the Persians in Edessa as the precursor of the Nisibene academy,Footnote 129 used the expression also with respect to learning at the Edessan school, characterising its mashlmanuta as the orally transmitted teachings, to be distinguished from the ‘interpretation of the Interpreter’, that is Theodore.Footnote 130 The essence of this ‘tradition’, then, was exegesis, not Christological doctrine.Footnote 131 Thomas too alludes to this ‘tradition’ when in the final admonition in Nativity he exhorts his audience to heed his teachings and to conduct themselves virtuously:
And it is right for us … that our way of life should be more excellent and pure in devotion to God than (that of) other people, taking care for both the reading of the Scriptures and their interpretation and the teaching that is in the festivals and the reasons for them (on the one hand), and (on the other) virtuous conduct that is pleasing to Christ our Lord.Footnote 132
Remarkably, this passage instantiates that not only exegesis, but also the proper understanding of the liturgical feasts constituted the Nisibene mashlmanuta d-eskole.
Alongside liturgy, canons and commentaries, the school theology as it was taught in Nisibis and elsewhere played a vitally important role in transmitting Theodore's heritage to the East Syriac Church. Thomas's Explanations mark one of the earliest Syriac efforts systematically to apply the great Interpreter's theology to the subject of the liturgical feasts. The school context in which these treatises were situated, and the fact that they would be repeated annually on the day of the celebration, ensured their enduring impact.
)’ (Catalogue 90, Assemani edn, 166f.). While this identification is plausible enough, Elisha bar Quzbaye's directorship remains difficult to date as the sources do not agree on the details: Barḥadbeshabba, Ecclesiastical history 32 (Nau edn, 620) states that Elisha led the school for four years during Abraham's directorship. Moreover, as his discourses are no longer extant, it cannot be known if they conformed to the typical structure of the Explanations of the feasts. (The title ʿelta is attached also to other discourses that are clearly not Explanations in the sense considered here.)
), while truly he had their possession’: Catechetical homilies 12.8, in Les Homélies catéchetiques de Théodore de Mopsueste, ed. with French translation by R. Tonneau, in collaboration with R. Devreesse, Vatican City 1949, 332:25–324:1. A German translation by P. Bruns is to be found in Theodor von Mopsuestia, Katechetische Homilien, Freiburg im Br. 1994.
to translate τὸ ἀγαθόν (Gal. vi.10) as well as τὸ καλόν (2 Corinthians xiii.7).
) of the ‘adoption as children' (
): Theodori Mopsuesteni commentarius in Evangelium Johannis apostoli, ed. J.-M. Vosté, CSCO cxv/ Syr. lxii, Louvain 1940, 33:10–11; Greek fragments ed. Devreesse, in Essai, 305–419; Eng. trans. of the Syriac version in M. Conti, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Commentary on the Gospel of John, Downers Grove, 
for the Greek δωρεά in Romans v.15–17; but on occasion it also renders the word χάρισμα as 
, for example in Rom. i.11, and 1 Cor. vii.7.
. Alhough he does not use this word in the context under consideration here (Nativity 5.3), he often does so in similar discussions such as in Nativity 4.13 (
), 6.1 (
) or 7.10 (
).
ibid. 14.6 (Tonneau edn, 414:14–17; cf. 414:10–11 and passim); cf. Commentary on Ephesians i.10 (Swete edn, i. 127:18–128:5; 130:18–131:5); i.13–14 (Swete edn, i.133–4).
