An updated life of John of Damascus

John of Damascus was born Cyrene ibn Manūr.Footnote ⁷ His birthdate is unknown, but he was probably born in Damascus around 655 and died sometime before 745. His father, Manūr ibn Sarjūn al-Rūmī, was a secretary (kātib) to the Umayyad caliphs and was an official in the caliphal court as well as mawlā' of Mu‘āwiya i (661–80), Yazīd (680–3), Mu‘āwiya ii (683) and ‘Abd al-Malik (686–705). He worked for the Umayyads until the end of ‘Abd al-Malik's reign (685–705).Footnote ⁸ John likely grew up at the Umayyad court and followed his father's profession until Manūr left the service of the Umayyads in 705.Footnote ⁹

In 705 John followed his associate, also named John, to Jerusalem where he became a priest at the Anastasis while the other John became John v, patriarch of Jerusalem. John of Damascus’ social influence and wealth likely aided the re-establishment of the patriarchate of Jerusalem after its sixty-seven-year hiatus.Footnote ¹⁰ It was between 705 and 742 that most of John's works were likely written. After the death of John v in 735, John of Damascus held a post in the patriarchate until the early 740s, but due to his hostility towards both Constantine v and Walīd ii, as well as possibly his iconophile treatises, he was slowly isolated and lost his good standing and reputation in Jerusalem. He himself said that he had been silenced.Footnote ¹¹ Sometime between 735 and 742 John was slandered by people from his community. Vassa Kontouma posits that these events, and his awareness of the decline of his reputation and position in the community, prompted him to leave Jerusalem and exile himself in a monastery or simple hermitage in the desert. During the final years of his life John began to revise his life's works, although he did not complete this task before his death, and some, especially the third of his Three treatises on the divine images, were edited by others.Footnote ¹²

John's Treatises represent the life-long reworking of a treatise originating between 726–30, after Leo iii destroyed the icon at the Chalke gate (726) and when Germanus, the patriarch of Constantinople (r. 715–30), abdicated.Footnote ¹³ The year 730 marked an increased imperial intolerance of iconophiles in Byzantine Christianity.Footnote ¹⁴ The second treatise was both a simplification of the first for the sake of his congregation, which John explicitly states,Footnote ¹⁵ and a response to Leo iii's iconophile actions, particularly the pressure which induced Germanus’ abdication between 730 and the beginning of Constantine v's reign in 741.Footnote ¹⁶

We can glean an understanding of to whom he was writing through letters relating to his fall from grace in the 740s, as well as through his claims from other works. John's surviving correspondence is to high-ranking clergy and lay dignitaries such as Cosmas of Maiuma in the prologue of the Dialectica. His treatise Against the Jacobites was written in the name of Peter, bishop of Damascus, and he claims in his Treatises that he is representing the patriarchate of Jerusalem.Footnote ¹⁷

However, the reason that he felt a need to bolster his religious community in its historical veneration of icons and the cross may not necessarily have been entirely an internal matter. John was writing at a time when images were being debated by all the Abrahamic faiths, a time when those faith groups themselves were experiencing instability following the changes brought by the Arab conquests and the early development of Islam as a religious tradition and ruling community. An example of this tension can be seen in the correspondence of the Patriarch Germanus, whose abdication in 730 inspired the first of John's Treatises. Germanus wrote to the bishops Constantine of Nakoleia in Phrygia and Thomas of Claudiopolis sometime before 726. His letters berated Constantine and Thomas for being iconoclastic and indirectly communicated the extent of the debates on images, saying that not only had Jews and Arabs accused Christians of idolatry because they venerated ‘hand-made’ things, but that ‘now whole towns and multitudes of people are in considerable agitation concerning this matter’.Footnote ¹⁸ Clearly this debate did not exist exclusively within Christian circles, and Germanus seems to have been aware that people in all walks of life were discussing religious art and how it should fit into monotheistic faith traditions. Daniel Reynolds has suggested that eighth-century iconoclastic destruction in Palestine might be understood as a type of local ‘idoloclasm’, that is Jewish, Christian and Muslim issues with all figural images and fear of performing idolatrous actions based on where these images are placed in sacred space (i.e. the wall or floor). Rather than having specific problems only with icons or the cross, these communities feared idolatrous behaviour more generally.Footnote ¹⁹

John's Treatises, their background and context

John and Jewish communities

John's argument concerning the tabernacle and mercy seat appears to be directed against a Jewish iconoclastic argument. It is an argument not directed against the narrower, Christian definition of icons, but against the larger human/animal figurative tradition that some Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities held in common – that of non-venerated mosaic and stone decoration of sacred space. When John writes about the decorations within the tabernacle, he is discussing decorative arrangements, not things which were specifically venerated in their own right. Thus, in his treatises, he is giving his Melkite Christian community an argument to use not only against iconoclasts who reject the idea of venerating images of saints or Jesus, but against those who were aniconic entirely and rejected the pictorial decorative tradition of Palestinian churches, mosques and synagogues.

He mentions Moses's directions for the tabernacle curtain and mercy seat early in the second treatise, directly after discussing God's command through Moses about not making ‘any carved image of any likeness’.Footnote ²⁸ He seems to be attempting to argue within Jewish tradition by claiming that Jews are being inconsistent in their interpretation of their Scripture, from which he proceeds to quote passages allowing for decoration containing images of cherubs (Exodus xxxiv.17; xxxvii.6–7; Deuteronomy iv.15 NRSV). He says, ‘What are you doing Moses? You say, “You shall not make for yourself a carved [image] or any likeness,” and you fashion the veil, “a woven work of cherubim” and “two cherubim out of pure gold?”’Footnote ²⁹ He then proceeds to elaborate on these two seemingly conflicting orders. Speaking for Moses he uses two verses from Deuteronomy to explain that there is a difference between ‘acting lawlessly’ and making idols – which one should not do – and making images of cherubim beside the mercy seat. Towards the end of this section he seems to be speaking for both Moses and either himself or the Christian community when he says

The messages of Moses and John himself merge in these last few sentences. He discusses people accusing Moses of promoting idol worship and defends him. It sounds as if he is also defending himself in the final two lines. This could be speaking indirectly to outside opinions that he felt were a threat to the iconophile Melkite Christian community. His defence of cherubs woven into curtains applied to a more general sense of sacred space decoration than it does to specifically venerating or worshipping a sacred object. This points to a knowledge of Palestinian Jewish objection to figurative images and also to the early Muslim debate about whether or not images were allowed on cloth, as discussed in the traditions about brocades and curtains in people's homes.Footnote ³¹

John used these same excerpts from Exodus to address the worshipping of sacred objects later in the second Treatise. However, in this section he uses the Tabernacle story in a Christian context. John directs this passage towards ideas of Christian iconoclasm, accusing proponents of them of being like Manicheans in their rejection of matter – a sacred creation of God endowed with holiness. There is a possibility that there were still Manichaeans in Palestine during John's lifetime, so this was not a simplistic slur, but one attached to a living community that his readers would have been aware of.Footnote ³² He focused on the materials within the tabernacle, eventually stating that some of these objects were venerated and asking, ‘What were the cherubim? Were they not right in front of the people? And the ark and the lampstand and the table and the golden jar and the rod, looking towards which the people bowed down in veneration?’Footnote ³³ This new argument seems to be directed towards an audience having issues with the veneration of icons rather than images used as decoration. John stresses the fact that these objects were venerated as an act of worship directed towards God. The implication here is that the veneration of these objects, condoned, if not directly ordered by God in the Old Testament, closely resembles the tradition of venerating icons within Christian tradition. He then lists objects that more moderate iconoclastic Christians thought could be venerated, such as the cross, the place of the skull, the holy tomb and the bread of life.Footnote ³⁴ John then moves on to accuse these Christians of being ‘Judaisers’, demanding that they either become full Christians accepting icon veneration, or that they become full Jews following the law. He says:

He creates a strong association here between true Christianity and icon veneration, and Judaising Christianity with a discomfort with regard to icon veneration. This use of the Exodus passages tends more towards accusing Christians, probably both local and Byzantine iconoclasts, of being Judaisers.

John's use of these same excerpts from Exodus both to argue for the figural decoration of sacred space and as a defence of icon veneration fits with the archaeological evidence. He recognises that some Jews, Christians and Muslims not only had an issue with the veneration of figurative images but also disapproved of figural images within sacred space in general. Simultaneously, he also acknowledges that some Christians were affected by non-religious (Byzantine imperial policy) or other-religious (Jewish, iconoclastic Christian and Muslim) pressure. He uses these passages to create a strong dichotomy between Judaising Christians, who, he claimed, should become Jews due to their lack of correct Christian practice, and true Christians, who accept figurative decoration of sacred space and venerate icons. John does this in order to maintain or perhaps create a clear Melkite, iconophile stance for his Palestinian Christian readers.

John would have had experiences with actual Jewish communities in Damascus before his life in Jerusalem. Damascus had at least two synagogues, signalling the existence of two Jewish communities. The larger of the two synagogues answered to Palestinian authority in Tiberias, and later Jerusalem, and the smaller of the two answered to Babylonian authority. We know this from a reference in a notebook found in the genizah of the small synagogue which referred to itself as belonging to ‘the small synagogue of the Babylonians’.Footnote ³⁶ In addition to having two distinctly separate Jewish communities, Damascus was a frequent stopping place for visitors going from Babylonia to Jerusalem; presumably many of these would have been Jews on their way to the holy city.Footnote ³⁷ John, growing up and working in such an environment, would certainly have had some idea of the larger inter-Jewish debates as well as their opinions on Christianity and Christian practices.

Either John or his parents would have witnessed a significant event in Damascus when some members of the Jewish community physically attacked crosses, a symbol that John seemed to associate with icons. The date is not certain; however, at some point between the Arab conquest of Damascus (635/6) and 705 ce, 'Amr b. Sa'd, the governor of the city, ordered that there should be no crosses on public display. Apparently, some of the Jews living in the city decided to act on behalf of the governor. They destroyed all the crosses, including those that were attached to buildings, notably in the church complex of St John the Baptist, where Muslims were also worshipping at the time.Footnote ³⁸ This event speaks to the size and outspokenness of the Jewish communities living in Damascus; one can imagine how the Christians in the city would have dwelled on this case of mob violence affecting previously uncontested sacred space. It would take several generations for Christians in Damascus to forget such an event, and even if John were not alive when it happened, it is likely that he heard of it from his elders.

Within the Treatises John often associates accusations of idolatry with the golden calf story, which he views as a punishable mistake that Jews made separate from Christian history. He implies that it is because of this historic action that Jews are not allowed to have images – they cannot be trusted with them. In ‘On Ishmaelites’, in the Heresies section of The font of knowledge, there is a similar pattern to his discussion of Muslim iconoclasm. When read together it is as if he thought that Jews and Muslims had a history separate from Christians. Both groups made mistakes involving ‘graven images’ and idolatry in their past, and as a result both have laws against images.

The story of the golden calf had most certainly made its way into oral Jewish, Christian and Islamic tradition at this point and would have been known to any member of the three Abrahamic religions regardless of literacy.Footnote ³⁹ John probably knew this story well from multiple sources; however, his use of it in the Treatises may be a response to either or both iconoclastic Christian and local Jewish familiarity with the text. This is, of course, in addition to its somewhat obvious function of calling Christian iconoclasts ‘Judaisers’. John's conclusion to the argument that he puts forward in association with this tale, that the Abrahamic god prohibited images because they will inevitably be used for idolatrous purposes, is that this idea applies to Jews but not Christians.

The second Treatise, more firmly directed at Leo iii although also intended to be read by local Palestinian Christians, has more mentions of Jews than the first. Once again, not all of these are supercessionist. John refers to local Jews while making them fit into the trope of ‘evil’ Judaism. It sounds as if he is talking about an immediate threat, contemporary Jews, and not about a people who began to fade away long ago. John says

Not only does John acknowledge, through his use of the present tense, that Jews are around and affecting Christianity, but he also mentions local current events. Were it not for the mention of the peace of the ‘Church of Christ’ which seems to be a recent phenomenon, and the mention of Christian oral tradition being undermined and used to ‘shake the hearts of the unstable’, this passage could be taken as part of the common Christian analogy of Jews with the devil. However, current events are mentioned, and should be examined.

The ‘Church of Christ’ was in a period of relative peace under the Umayyad empire at the time that John was writing. This second Treatise was written after 730 ce, not even a decade after the iconoclastic and anti-cross policies of Yazid ii.Footnote ⁴³ Umayyad citizens were still being ruled by his successor, the Caliph Hisham (r. 724–43), who was known to Christian historians as being benevolent towards People of the Book. During this period iconophile Christians would have remembered Yazid ii's iconoclastic policies as something that the Church had survived. It is certainly understandable that John would have seen the decade in which he was writing as a newfound era of peace for Christians under Umayyad rule. The Byzantine empire, on the other hand, was currently dealing with a mix of natural disasters and military defeats, cataclysmic events that cause many scholars to claim that Byzantine iconoclasm was a decision based on the idea that the empire was being divinely punished. Byzantium was not experiencing any kind of peace.Footnote ⁴⁴

John's reference to the destruction of a Christian oral tradition condoning icons, ‘true customs, handed down from the fathers’, is an important theme of the Treatises. Here he is implying that Jews and Judaising Christians were corrupting Orthodox Christian tradition. However, John's other mentions of Christian oral tradition appear to be directed mostly at Christians themselves, as if pointing out an intra-Christian debate on the issue, albeit a debate heavily affected by both Muslim and Jewish opinion. Its inclusion in an anti-Jewish section of the Treatises is certainly interesting, and hints that this statement about Jews is addressing a real, rather than an imaginary concern. Of course, it also functions in a way that makes iconoclastic Christians sound like Judaisers.

The next instance of John discussing Judaism is his explanation of how the Old and New Testaments of the Bible should be read. He claimed that God directs different parts of the Bible to different groups who are in different stages of religious maturity. Thus

Considering his frequent mention of Jews as being in a child-like stage of religious maturity, a stage which he often associates with idolatry, the children mentioned at the end of this passage are likely Jews, though he could easily be referring to Muslims as well. Here he admits that Jews are an extant group, albeit somewhat immature, hence his claim that they ‘are still infants’. The Jews in this passage are a living, breathing people who simply tend towards idolatry, and thus need the laws of the Old Testament against images. However, he thought that their ‘disease’ was still a danger to Christians. These Jews are real and contemporary to John, and the prohibitions against images in the Bible remain useful to them; however, he argued that these prohibitions are no longer useful to Christians. This is why he continually advised people to read the Scriptures very carefully, lest they begin to follow rules not created for them.

Later in the second Treatise there are moments where John quite obviously uses the trope of Judaism to call iconoclastic Christians ‘Judaisers’. He also falls back into the language of traditional supercessionism. However, his supercessionist arguments are not very effective when considered in the light of his obvious knowledge of a contemporary Judaism which he himself portrayed as a powerful threat to local Christianity. When calling iconoclastic Christians ‘Judaisers’, he claims that iconoclasts should follow Jewish law, which he proceeds to mock, twisting Jewish traditions to sound ridiculous despite his knowledge of contemporary practice.Footnote ⁴⁶

In his final attempt at supercessionism within the second Treatise, John tries to prove scripturally that Christianity was the new covenant with God. The implication is that Christianity replaces Judaism, but again this does not quite work. His simultaneous acceptance of a threatening contemporary Judaism makes his argument groundless. The reader already knows that John views Judaism and Christianity as two separate religious communities with distinct histories and specific places in the Bible allotted to their particular needs. However, he still makes an effort to cling to supercessionist tradition, saying

After this he goes on to quote from Hebrews concerning the new covenant. At this point in the text, with his concentration on creating a Christian identity that is very distinct from what he describes as a Jewish threat, it becomes apparent that traditional supercessionism does not work within the Umayyad empire. Yet, he still clings to the Adversus Judaeos form. In John's world of Umayyad Palestine Christians were coping with the fact that they were no longer the ruling authority in the area – they found themselves being called People of the Book and equated with Jews. John seems to be struggling with identity in these Treatises, wanting to be able to participate in traditional supercessionism, something that he could have done were he a Christian living in the Byzantine Empire. Being a Melkite Christian in Palestine he had other responsibilities. He both had to live within what he knew of the practices of Byzantine Christianity and maintain this specific Christian identity within a culturally diverse area. Thus, he was not quite able to be supercessionist due to the necessity, in his eyes, of separating Christian traditions from harmful contemporary Jewish practices.

Potential responses to Muslim societal pressure in the Treatises

While John never explicitly mentions Islam within the Treatises, he does address concerns which indicate knowledge of Muslim opinion and societal pressure. In the first of the Treatises, for example, he emphasises the unity of the Trinity, almost as if he had to identify himself as a monotheist:

This clarification of the Trinity was probably not meant to be seen by Muslims or Jews, but could have been intended to aid Melkite Christians in creating a statement to resist accusations that venerating an icon of Jesus was akin to polytheistic idolatry. In the following passages he addresses the issue of veneration of icons as worship of creation over the creator, an issue for Jewish, Christian and Muslim iconoclasts.

John also defended Christian oral tradition concerning icons, another aspect of his attempt to stabilise local Melkite belief in what he saw as traditional church doctrine regarding icons. This argument appears in all three Treatises, though in a slightly different form each time. In the first he says

When he asks why people are splitting hairs, it seems likely that he is discussing a local dispute, especially considering the lack of potency exhibited by Leo iii's iconoclastic policies at this point. We cannot be sure how much John has heard about Leo iii's 726 edict, as this Treatise was likely inspired by Patriarch Germanus’ ousting.Footnote ⁵⁰ Under the early Abbasids, Muslims were known to exert pressure on Christians regarding their lack of a religious concept of law. Muslims and some Jewish communities had orthopraxic religious laws governing daily life, but Christians did not share this concept. Later this prompted the developing Church of the East and Syriac Christian community leaders to write canon laws governing issues pertaining to a core sense of identity, such as marriage and family life, which both solidified intra-Christian communal boundaries and rose to the legal challenge of the Muslim and Jewish communities.Footnote ⁵¹ John's emphasis on the reliability of oral tradition as a type of precedent for icon veneration may be a defence against the very earliest stages of this pressure. Hence, this particular argument and the concept of splitting hairs would appear to point to local priests and lay people having arguments over this possibly either with Muslims, Jews or each other in the context of both a local debate about what constituted idolatry and a debate over whether or not Christians had a legitimate, religiously legal, defence for their veneration of icons and the cross within the context of the larger Abrahamic debate.

John mentioned this argument again in the second Treatise, which had much more to do with Byzantine imperial iconoclasm and presumably the effect that its escalation had had on the local situation. While claiming that he did not ‘accept’ Leo iii, John asserted that oral tradition had equal authority to the Gospels, and much more authority than any earthly ruler.Footnote ⁵² Once again, it sounds as if he was attempting to consolidate the beliefs of those around him – Melkite Christians who were probably putting up with an-iconic arguments from people quoting iconoclastic scripture when they had none to quote in their own defence.

John argues through Moses that images of cherubim were commanded to be placed on the tabernacle cloth in the second Treatise, when he paraphrases Exodus xxxvii.3, 6–7 and Deut. iv.15–16:

Although responding to the Islamic tradition is not John's main focus here, one cannot discount the possibility that he is aware of debates in the early Muslim and Jewish communities. His mention of the cloth immediately brings to mind the traditions about Muhammad prohibiting curtains with images.

When we keep firmly in mind the diversity in which John lived, and the debates current to his day amongst Jews, Christians and Muslims at a time when all three communities were (re)defining themselves, we can see the moments within John's Treatises where he referenced these larger Abrahamic debates. John likely began this work in an attempt to consolidate what he saw as the traditional Christian view of the decoration of sacred spaces and veneration of the icons and cross in opposition to the local idoloclastic trends surrounding him.

The Treatises discuss events within the Byzantine Empire, which would have been unavoidable for John, as a Melkite Christian who looked towards the Byzantine Church for guidance. However, as Sidney Griffith has argued, Melkite Christians under Umayyad rule existed in their own right, largely independent from Byzantine policies despite their respect for the Byzantine Church.Footnote ⁵⁴ They lived in a milieu in which People of the Book were a category of citizens, as opposed to Christians and Jews being routinely considered separate. Within this ongoing social re-categorisation John and John v were in the business of re-establishing what they considered to be an orthodox Christian community under Muslim rule. In a world before Rabbinic Judaism became the norm, and the many Christian communities of the Muslim world had yet to firmly establish their boundaries despite years of Christological bickering, strong statements of faith were required to combat what John considered risks of heresy amongst the local populations who would have mingled with Muslims and Jews in a manner that Byzantine Christians did not.