Religious Violence in Late Antiquity: the unedited Life of Barsawmo

Type: 
Lecture
Audience: 
Open to the Public
Building: 
Nador u. 13
Room: 
001
Thursday, February 23, 2012 - 5:30pm
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Date: 
Thursday, February 23, 2012 - 5:30pm to 7:30pm

Under the pagan Roman emperors, Christian leaders pleaded for freedom of religion. As soon as they obtained this freedom, they began to lobby for the suppression of all religions except their own. From the late fourth century onwards emperors found it increasingly difficult to resist this pressure. Monks, in particular, took the law into their own hands and it proved impossible to punish them for attacks on places of pagan and Jewish worship and even for killing Jews who worshipped at the Weeping Wall. Barsawmo was one such monk who became so influential that the emperor Theodosius II allowed him to attend the Second Council of Ephesus in 449. The next emperor, however, did not admit him to the Council of Chalcedon in 451, where he was even accused of complicity in the murder of a bishop. There exists an unedited Syriac panegyric of this monk, which portrays him as coming into conflict with the bishops and the emperor himself. The text reads like a boastful res gestae and knows none of the gentler virtues. Its harshness towards the Other seems to reflect the harshness of such monks towards their own bodies, which was perhaps insufficiently compensated by a reputation for endurance. A new ending was composed for the panegyric in the middle of the sixth century, when it will have been read as disguised criticism of the reigning emperor, Justinian, who repressed opposition to Chalcedon.

Andrew Palmer is an independent researcher, presently employed on a research project under the direction of Johannes Hahn, Professor of Roman History at the University of Münster about religious violence in Late Antiquity; his task is to edit and translate the Life of Barsawmo (see above). His area of specialization is Syriac Christianity and its environment under East Roman, Persian and Muslim rule. He is the author of Monk and Mason on the Tigris Frontier: the early history of Tur ‘Abdin (Cambridge University Press 1990) and the translator of all the historical texts in The Seventh Century in the West-Syrian chronicles (Liverpool 1993). In 1997 he organized a conference on the influence of Saint Ephraim and edited the best papers in the early volumes of Hugoye. He was a contributor to two volumes in the series Études syriaques (Paris), one on Syriac historiography (2009), the other on Syriac monasticism (2010). For the Museum of Mardin he has edited the sixth-century Greek and the ninth-century Syriac inscriptions which have recently come to light at Dara. His proposals have been accepted for an edition of another Syriac saint’s Life and for books on Mount Izla, on interpolations in the poetic works of Ephraim of Nisibis and on the various contexts to which the legend of Abgar has been adapted.