This welcome volume makes available for the first time in any published form the full text of “one of the longest and most extensive hagiographies from antiquity” (1), the Life of the Syriac-speaking northern Mesopotamian ascetic and abbot Barsauma. Barsauma (c. 384–456) has long been familiar to students of church history thanks to a memorable episode in the acta of the Council of Chalcedon, where the assembled bishops denounced him as a rabblerouser and murderer; he also appears as the sole monastic signatory to the acta of Ephesus II. His subsequent negative reputation in the Chalcedonian tradition is mirrored by recognition as a saint in the anti-Chalcedonian, and his eponymous monastery (near modern Malatya, Turkey) enjoyed later prominence as the residence of the Syrian Orthodox patriarchs in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries.
The Life, which the tentative consensus of this volume dates to the mid- to late fifth century, has been known since François Nau's early-twentieth-century publication of excerpts from three incomplete British Library manuscripts. This volume includes the first published translation of the complete text, by Andrew Palmer (187–271); he translates the earliest complete manuscript, Syrian Orthodox Patriarchal Collection (Damascus) 12/17 of 1185/6. Despite its unusual length, the text is in many respects representative of the hagiography of Syrian asceticism and the rural late antique holy man, with a heavy emphasis on miracles of exorcism, healing, and cursing. It is distinguished, however, by its focus in the former half on a series of four pilgrimages undertaken by the saint to the Holy Land and in the latter half on his involvement with the Christological controversies of his day. In the former material, Barsauma is depicted as a violent opponent of the non-Christian communities of Roman Palestine, “demolish[ing] the Jewish Sabbath-houses, destroy[ing] the Samaritan synagogues, and burn[ing] down the pagan temples” (200). This activity culminates in the Life's longest episode (227–236), in which Barsauma and his monks foil a plan on the part of the empress Eudocia to allow the empire's Jews to return to Jerusalem and the Temple Mount.
This volume, the translation, and Palmer's critical edition (not yet published) were the work of a 2010–2013 Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft-funded project at the University of Münster. The balance of the volume is rounded out by seven papers deriving from a conference held in September 2013, accompanied by an introduction by Menze and conclusion by Hahn. Three contributions offer literary analyses of the text: Cornelia Horn and Daniel Caner examine its place in the literature of asceticism, the latter by way of a comparison with the Greek Life of Alexander the Sleepless; and Reuven Kiperwasser and Serge Ruzer give a stimulating reading of the text's highly polemical image of the Holy Land. The remaining contributions present inquiries into the historicity of the Life's anecdotes, coming to largely negative conclusions. Günter Stemberger demonstrates serious contradictions between the text and other literary and archaeological sources for the history of Roman Palestine. Jan Willem Drijvers convincingly shows that the story of Barsauma's dramatic confrontation with Eudocia and the Jews owes a debt to anti-Jewish paranoia and the memory of Julian's attempted restoration of the Temple, rather than to any real event. Simon Corcoran argues in turn that although Barsauma likely did meet Theodosius II in person, the Life's exaggerated picture of his relationship with the imperial court takes its inspiration from scripture and the acta of Ephesus II. Hahn offers a somewhat more sanguine perspective on the Life's awareness of Samaritanism and the local landscape of the city of Sebaste, which, although not entirely persuasive to this reader, was nevertheless thorough and stimulating.
It is regrettable that so much effort has had to be devoted to these positivist inquiries given the transparently literary character of the Life, but the editors and contributors clearly felt that corrective effort was called for in the view of past scholarship grounded in Nau's publications. Now that the problems of historicity have been so ably laid to rest, future scholarship on the Life can move toward illuminating its extraordinary qualities as a window onto fifth-century rural monastic ideology, where a local hero is reshaped in a Forrest-Gumpian fantasy of provincial wish-fulfillment, cleansing the Holy Land of the Jewish Other over the objections of pusillanimous government officials and humiliating the despised Chalcedonian imperial household.
The volume shows some signs of having been rushed to publication. Minor but frustrating infelicities spotted by this reader: an unexplained manuscript siglum L1 (51); “Mari of Qarrath” (66, 306), but “Mari of Qāra (?)” (247); a confusing suggestion that a Syriac author would have known Rufinus's Latin Church History (102); Neapolis described as “just 7 km from Jerusalem” (127); the use of multiple different Syriac transcription systems. More significant is the omission of any discussion of the manuscripts of the text; for this, one must consult Palmer's article “Editing a Syriac Hagiography: The Life of Barṣawmo the Northerner” (in Syrische Studien: Beiträge zum 8. Deutschen Syrologie-Symposium in Salzburg 2014, ed. Dietmar W. Winkler, Vienna: Lit, 2016, 89–108), which is not cited in this volume's bibliography.
It should be noted that Palmer's translation was also published independently in 2020, as volume 61 in the same series (The Life of the Syrian Saint Barsauma: Eulogy of a Hero of the Resistance to the Council of Chalcedon), with the same annotations but a different introduction by Palmer himself. Here he presents his own codicologically informed theory of the text's redaction—rather different from Menze's cautious proposal in the volume reviewed here (9–10). Presumably a laudable desire to make the translation available as an inexpensive paperback lies behind this decision, but it is unfortunate and somewhat confusing that neither volume contains any reference to the other (except in the series’ title lists included in their respective frontmatter).
These criticisms, however, should not be taken as diminishing the value of the volume's contribution as a whole, but rather as a rebuke to the institutional structures of academia that continue to prioritize quantity over quality in published research. The editors and contributors have together made a long-neglected text, of great interest to students of late antiquity, church history, and Jewish-Christian relations, available to a broad scholarly audience; they have done excellent work placing the Life of Barsauma in its Sitz im Leben and dispelling some of the false impressions created by past scholarship based on partial access to the text. They are to be commended for their efforts.
