Marianna Mazzola's recent monograph offers a literary study of a major Syriac chronicle, the Ecclesiastical History, composed by the famous thirteenth-century Syriac Orthodox bishop and polymath Bar ʿEbroyo. Over the course of five chapters, Mazzola sets the Ecclesiastical History into several comparative frameworks, including late-antique historiography, hagiography, and especially the Syriac chronicle traditions of Bar ʿEbroyo's medieval peers. While the Ecclesiastical History is too long for a single monograph to offer an exhaustive study, Mazzola succeeds admirably in her principal goals. The book offers a series of fine-grained, textually based arguments on Bar ʿEbroyo's working method that largely convince and that add up to a clear picture of the authorial program behind the Ecclesiastical History.
Bar ʿEbroyo (often Latinized as Bar Hebraeus) is a household name to scholars of Syriac literature but is perhaps less widely known in other fields. With a career spanning the tumultuous politics of the thirteenth-century Middle East, Bar ʿEbroyo was a monk and bishop of the Syriac Orthodox (also called West Syrian) Church famous for his encyclopedic Syriac compositions in nearly every field of knowledge current in his intellectual world. Among those works was a universal chronicle in two parts, one devoted to secular events and one to ecclesiastical history. The latter is the subject of Mazzola's monograph, the first “book-length study” to treat the entirety of Bar ʿEbroyo's Ecclesiastical History “in a holistic approach” (5).
Chapter 1 places Bar ʿEbroyo's work in the longue durée of ecclesiastical historiography. While the division between secular and ecclesiastical history that Eusebius established was abandoned by his late antique successors, Mazzola argues that Syriac Orthodox writers after the Arab conquests returned to that paradigm. Bar ʿEbroyo follows this pattern and also moves away from annalistic, descriptive history to explaining cause and effect as his major Syriac Orthodox influences had done. Indeed, Bar ʿEbroyo eschews the annalistic format altogether and structures his Ecclesiastical History instead around the succession of patriarchs of Antioch recognized by the Syriac Orthodox Church. Chapter 2 argues that Bar ʿEbroyo views the legitimacy of this lineage as stretching back to the Levitical priesthood, the Old Testament thus providing another world-historical framework for Bar ʿEbroyo's narrative.
Historiography and hagiography were closely related genres in Syriac literature, and chapter 3 takes up the question of whether Bar ʿEbroyo intended his accounts of the Syriac Orthodox patriarchs to be hagiographical models of emulation for his audience. Here, Mazzola's analysis runs contrary to Denise Aigle: while the patriarchal succession provides Bar ʿEbroyo's narrative backbone, Mazzola argues that he is more interested in explaining causation in the events of the Syriac Orthodox community than in crafting edificatory models of patriarchal lives.
Chapters 4 and 5 form, in my reading, the heart of the book as well as its most compelling sections. Here, Mazzola takes up the second part of the Ecclesiastical History, in which Bar ʿEbroyo moves away from the Antiochene patriarchs to recount the ecclesiastical history of Iraq. This required directly addressing the patriarchs of the Church of the East (the East Syrian or “Nestorian” church), the principal rival of the Syriac Orthodox. While Syriac Orthodox historians had previously tended to give the Church of the East short shrift, it was of great interest to Bar ʿEbroyo because he served for some two decades as the chief Syriac Orthodox bishop of Iraq. In this capacity, he occupied a special bishopric called the maphrianate, which sat squarely in predominantly Church of the East territory. In a compelling reading, Mazzola explains Bar ʿEbroyo's historiographical strategy of legitimating and glorifying his own see. He presents the maphrianate as the true heir of the apostolic line that evangelized the territories east of the Roman Empire, a claim that simultaneously challenged the legitimacy of the East Syrian patriarchal succession and put the maphrianate on a standing close to that of the Syriac Orthodox patriarch himself.
Chapter 5, the book's longest, places Bar ʿEbroyo in his contemporary literary context by examining the Ecclesiastical History's sources. Mazzola affirms the standard interpretation that the Syriac chronicle of Michael the Great was Bar ʿEbroyo's main source, but she offers newer arguments about the nature of his supplementary sources, including East Syrian and Armenian ones. The book closes by emphasizing the originality of Bar ʿEbroyo's method—although he drew the majority of his material directly from, and in some cases copied, established sources, he was not an unthinking compiler; Mazzola views him rather as an epitomizer who carefully abridged and arranged his raw materials to achieve desired ends.
While the breadth of treatment that Mazzola's monograph affords the Ecclesiastical History is admirable, it is not exhaustive, and a number of other frameworks of analysis that might have enriched this study suggest themselves. One is the Islamic context of Bar ʿEbroyo's intellectual world. Scholars have long known that he drew heavily from the works of Muslim writers in fields ranging from philosophy to law to ethics; did the rich tradition of Arabic historiography leave any mark on the content, form, or method of the Ecclesiastical History? The book leaves this question aside. I would also have liked to learn more of the manuscript tradition of Bar ʿEbroyo's universal chronicle and its formal arrangement on the page. How did Bar ʿEbroyo intend his complicated two-part ecclesiastical and secular history to appear before the reader, and how might its formal arrangement have conditioned the practice of reading it and the reception of its materials?
The author has begun to address these questions elsewhere (e.g., “The Textual Tradition of Bar ʿEbroyo's Chronicle,” Le Muséon 131, no. 1–2 [2018]: 73–100) and, we may hope, will continue to do so in future publications. For now, From High Priest to Patriarch remains a vital contribution to the literature on Christian historiography, Syriac Christianity in the Islamic world, and the so-called “Syriac Renaissance” of the later medieval period.
