Author: Roger Pearse

Life of Mar Aba – chapter 19

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The negotiations proved fruitless.  Mar Aba felt that he had the backing of the king, and the magians suspected that this might be so.  They resolved to find out.

19.  A few days later, the King of Kings saw the blessed one on the road; he spoke to him and accepted the salutation which the godly one made him.  This excited the envy of the magians and they again brought him before their assembly.  When he appeared before them, one arose as prosecutor and said, “This one used to be a pagan and the son of a pagan, and later became a Christian.” 

Then they all clapped their hands and said, “This man is deserving of death.”  Then they drew up a document of the investigation and read it to each other. 

They showed him the piece of writing, which they had drawn up against him, and said, “If you do our will, and write and sign with us, that you do not forbid those who have married their stepmother, sisters and stepdaughters, as well as those others who (have contracted marriages) forbidden by your scripture, do not come before the court, do not bring any magians and pagans into Christianity, and do not forbid the Christians to eat the flesh left over from magian sacrifices, then we will leave you free and we will not throw you into prison.  Go into your house and manage your Catholicate.  But if you do not listen to us, then we will draw up an indictment (purschaschnâmag) against you and throw you in prison.”

The Catholicos said, “God, whom I serve, forbids me to transgress the true Christian faith, which I hold and teach, and to do you will in any of the above matters.  For anyone who does something like this denies Christ and is no Christian.”

After they heard this, they sealed the indictment and ordered that he be thrown into prison.

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Beware of “elevated vagueness”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Via Trevin Wax I encounter this post by John Piper, referring to Fred Sander’s post about Victorian liberal preacher F. W. Robertson:

There is a connection between skilled vagueness and concealed immorality. Why else would a man use great gifts to make things unclear unless he was afraid of clarity? And fear of clarity in preaching is a good sign that something besides doctrine is being concealed.

Indeed so.  The justification of evil is nothing new.  John Bunyan encountered those who attack Christianity from an self-chosen elevation, and pictured them as Mr High-mind in Pilgrims Progress.   Christian is arrested at Vanity Fair for preaching, and brought before the court.

Then went the Jury out, whose names were, Mr Blindman, Mr No-good, Mr Malice, Mr Love-lust, Mr Live-loose, Mr Heady, Mr High-mind, Mr Enmity, Mr Liar, Mr Cruelty, Mr Hate-light, and Mr Implacable; who every one gave in his private Verdict against him among themselves, and afterwards unanimously concluded to bring him in guilty before the Judge.

And first among themselves, Mr Blind-man the Foreman, said, “I see clearly that this man is an Heretick.”

Then said Mr Nogood, “Away with such a fellow from the earth”.

“Ay,” said Mr Malice, “for I hate the very looks of him.”

Then said Mr Love-lust, “I could never endure him.”

“Nor I,” said Mr Live-loose, “for he would always be condemning my way.”

“Hang him, hang him,” said Mr Heady.

“A sorry Scrub,” said Mr High-mind.

“My heart riseth against him,” said Mr Enmity.

“He is a Rogue,” said Mr Liar.

“Hanging is too good for him,” said Mr Cruelty.

“Let us dispatch him out of the way,” said Mr Hate-light.

Then said Mr Implacable, “Might I have all the world given me, I could not be reconciled to him; therefore let us forthwith bring him in guilty of death.”

And so they did;…

Mr High-mind may speak softly.  But he is just as much an enemy of truth as the others, and less honest than most.

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Life of Mar Aba – chapter 18

Posted on by Roger Pearse

18.  As the Mopetan Mopet and the magians recognised that they had been refuted by the blessed one with these words, they sought out another method to link the issue with the command of the king.  The Mopetan Mopet said, “If in your (holy) scriptures it says, ‘If you do this, you do rightly’ and if is it written in another text, that you should not do it because it is not right, and if the King of Kings says to you, that this, which you are commanded to do, you shall not do, and to do what it says not to do, will you obey the orders of the King of Kings and do his will, or will you transgress his command?”

The Catholicos said, “Far be it from the King of Kings that he, with respect to the good which is commanded of me, and the evil, which is forbidden to me, shall order me not to do good and to do evil.”

The Mopetan Mopet and the magians said, “But what if he does?”

The Catholicos said, “He does not.”

And as they pressured him so much, he said, “If he commands it, I will at that time answer, ‘God the Creator and Lord of all things must be obeyed rather than men.'”

They said nothing in reply.

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Online sources and the classroom

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Jona Lendering has written a thoughtful article here on the problem on online websites and the classroom.  As the author of the respectable Livius.org site, he isn’t theorising, and his words need to be listened to.

If students cannot check the information – if they cannot know how the facts* have been established and which explanatory model is used – students must avoid a website. That’s the first basic lesson.

This means that in the present situation, students must just avoid the internet and check their library. Books are a far better source of reliable information.

Note that I would prefer to use the word “statements” here, for the website probably is not giving facts. 

Now Jona is right.  You can use the web to gather lists of possible sources, as a first stab (only a first stab) at a reading list.  But it is entirely possible that the selection of sources presented online is itself misleading.  Manipulation of the reader by omission of reliable sources and inclusion of unreliable sources is, sadly, becoming commonplace.

Nor is this all.

There used to be a time, not so long ago, that the universities “sent out” information, which society “received”. This is the “sender-receiver model”. The internet now  offers society a possibility to talk back: the “debate model”.

Look at the Wikipedia, where activists can change articles to make them suit their own agendas. Or, if activists create a lot of noise, they can silence the voice of reasonable scholars.

I have experienced this myself, and I know others have had the same experience.  Yet Wikipedia is the first result in most Google searches.

He then goes on to a rather political question, where Jona perhaps does not make his point as clearly as he might.  But the point is a critical one.  So let me paraphrase.

A government minister in his country has referred in a non-condemning way to Intelligent Design.[1]  Scientists have attacked her.  Non-scientists have defended her.  But anyone doing a web search will only find the non-scientific stuff.  Why?  Because the scientific publications are all behind paywalls!  So … anyone who looks into this will only get one side; and it happens to be the non-scientist side. 

And worse yet, because only one side is heard:

You get the impression that she is the victim of a smear campaign by unthinking scientists.

Silencing one side, while the other occupies 100% of the public perception is an incredibly powerful a weapon to manufacture opinion.  It has been used for this purpose by the political left in our society since around 1980, as a way to advance and normalise crazy causes, with great success.  It is now being used to promote freakshow causes like “gay marriage”, and opposition — and everyone was opposed to this as recently as two years ago — is hardly heard.   It’s a very, very powerful way to control what people think.

So it is not a trivial matter to observe that, for practical purposes, a situation has been created where bad information is the only kind available.  Not at all.

The second basic lesson about online information is that, as long as there is no free access, bad information drives out good.

And to some fields of research, the damage is already done.

I hope that this verdict is overly negative.  But it is hard for those of us who remember a world before the internet to imagine how the generation thinks, that does not remember a time before Wikipedia.  Perhaps Jona is right here too.

Jona sums up:

To sum up: at this moment there is no good reason why students should use the internet. Let’s face it: the internet has failed.

As a tool for classroom learning, it most certainly has, although not for popularisation.

Paywalls are one of the reasons why.

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  1. [1]I have no opinion myself on Intelligent Design, since I don’t know anything about it, although I do know some of the politics around it.↩

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve received an email offering to translate the Life of Mar Aba into English from Syriac, rather than the retranslation of Oskar Braun’s BKV German translation which I have been doing this week.  The cost to do so is not prohibitive; but the translator has an eye on possible formal publication subsequently, so we need to find a way that allows me to give him a lot of money, while still allowing him to publish in a way that will do his CV good.

Meanwhile I have heard from my local library that Walter Bauer’s Orthodoxy and Heresy has arrived — I ordered a loan a couple of weeks ago.  So I shall trott along there at the weekend and pick it up, and read it.  The tiny bit that I have seen so far suggests that he refers to various patristic texts, so those should be fun to look up.  Whether he has anything to say, that any of us need pay any attention to, I do not yet know.

The Bauer thesis, apparently, is that Jesus never taught anything all that specific; that the apostles were just one group of his disciples, and that others teaching any old thing wandered around; that the heresies of the second century, such as Valentinians, Marcionites, etc, were all faithful ideological descendants of these putative early disciples; and that the apostolic church, therefore, has no unique claim to the moral authority of Jesus. 

This sounds like complete tosh to me, of course, improbable on so many levels.  Ideological movements get founded by ideologues, not people who can’t make coherent sense for a year or two.  The data certainly doesn’t support that, but says the opposite; and, as five minutes critical thinking reminds us, the Valentinians etc claimed that their teaching was “secret”, not known to the public.  That by itself tells us that, as far as public record went, their teaching was NOT known to be derived from Jesus himself, and everyone knew it. 

And indeed a look at the 2nd century heretics shows that their teaching derives directly from various flavours of pop philosophical paganism, and the “haereses” of this.  Tertullian listed the borrowings, and asked, pertinently, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem … away with this bastardised ‘Christianity’.”  If Valentinus’ disciples like Rhodon did not remain faithful to Valentinus, why do we suppose that Valentinus remained faithful to some earlier teacher?  But to ask the question is to answer it.

To me, all this sounds like the sort of theory that could arise only in a society in transition; in a society which has a historical attachment to Christianity, which the establishment find inconvenient, which wants to discard “thou shalt not commit adultery” etc, but still has an inherited and irrational reverence for Jesus himself.  In western society in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s, in short.

Never mind.  We’ll see.  I am told that WB himself is not nearly as bonkers as those who riff off him. 

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Life of Mar Aba – chapter 17

Posted on by Roger Pearse

17.  Because the blessed one had given himself over to the commandments of the Lord and the apostles, he warned the bishops and priests, their flock, all the time to warn all ranks (räy/ua) of the Christian community not to break the canons of the apostles and marry their stepmother, niece, wife of their uncle, or to approach two (sisters).  Anyone who did otherwise he expelled from the church with bindings and anathemas.  Then the rad and the mopet of Bet Aramaye arose and accused him also of this. 

The Mopetan Mopet said to the blessed one, “Those who, before you were Catholicos, married such men or women, allow them into the church because it did not happen in your time.” 

The Catholicos said, “I will not transgress the command of my Lord, and to those who do, whether they have transgressed or are transgressing, I will refuse entry to the church, so that they do not contaminate the people of the Lord.”

The chief Magian said, “Those who did so in your time should not enter.”

The Catholicos said, “Whether the devil entered someone before or during my Catholicate, should he leave him or not?”

The chief Magian said, “He should leave him.”

The Catholicos said, “In the same way should also those who have transgressed the divine commandment be freed, so that they are not delivered with Satan and the devils to eternal hell. “

We’re now squarely back in the realm of history rather than hagiography, and the Life is describing what must have been a real problem in the late 6th century in Persia. 

The magians have genuine concerns, not as fire-priests but rather as custodians of Persian culture and defenders of the customs of the ruling classes.  The tendency of Persians to marry close female relatives is mentioned by Tertullian, who tells us that, present at a performance of Oedipus, some Persians laughed at the depiction of marrying your mother as a horrible crime. 

Here we see that the rise of Christianity in Iran was causing real difficulties to some classes of Persian society.  Earlier Catholici had ducked the issue; but Mar Aba’s position was strong enough that he felt able to hold a hard line, even on those who had contracted such marriages before he became Catholicos.

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Life of Mar Aba – chapter 16

Posted on by Roger Pearse

We’re now starting to get some of the meat of the issues.  The magian clergy play, it seems, a judicial role.  They are finding that the Nestorian patriarchs are overruling their judgements, when it is a case between two members of their community. 

16.  After this the blessed one went daily into the assembly of the magians, who were negotiating with him and asking him about all sorts of things.  And the mopet of Bet Aramaje got up and said, “Often, when Christians bring a prosecution, and obtain a written (judgement) (buchtnamag) from the Mopetan Mopet, he sends for them, takes them out of the court house and tears up the written (judgement).  All the cases that come to us are actually decided by him, and we suffer much violence through him.” 

The Catholicos said, “If a Christian maliciously accuses his brother, I will not allow him to come into the church.”

Then a man from Samarra (?) named Dendad got up, who had put on the name of Christian, but in this, as in many other accusations, he had joined with the magians, and since he had exchanged God’s truth for a lie, after a few days his body was swollen up, by God’s punishment.  Then he stood up publicly before the magians and said, “I have  maliciously accused the Catholicos.”  But he died mid-sentence.

The man who calls himself a Christian but in fact acts as a pawn of the non-Christian world is still a familiar figure.

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Life of Mar Aba – chapter 15

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The fire-priests are finding it slow going, in their attacks on Mar Aba.  Nor is the Persian king as  helpful as he might be…

15.  At the meeting where they were negotiating with the blessed one was also a respected believer from Bet Ardashir, named Abrodak, a man who was very close to the king and his nobles.  When he heard the words of the Catholicos, he was filled with divine zeal and said to the Mopetan Mopet, “You too, you who are the chief magian, will agree with the Catholicos, if you listen to his teaching, and will desire to become a Christian, and we Christians will not push you out of the church.”  The Mopetan Mopet and the magians were very angry at this, but because the believer was an important man, they could do nothing to him.  However the chief magian and his companions arose and came in great anger to the king, and complained bitterly of these words, “A Christian has said to the Mopetan Mopet, ‘If you become a Christian, we will receive you with joy.'”  The King of Kings said, to appease their anger, “Why didn’t you prosecute him without delay?”  When they were gone from the king, they sought to catch him, but they did not find him, because he had gone at the king’s command on official business to the (capital) cities.  Thus he escaped the hands of the magians.

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A bronze plaque recording 4th century Olympic victors

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A correspondent has drawn my attention to an article discussing a recently (1994) discovered bronze plaque from Olympia, somewhat cropped, but still showing lists of olympic victors.[1]

The interest of the item is that it lists victors from the late 4th century, not that long before the games must have ceased.  The number of the olympiad is given, the name of the victor, the city from which they come, and the event.  The plate is ca. 75 x 40 cms in size.

Ebert notes:

Die Bronzeplatte ergänzt unser Wissen über die Geschichte der Olympischen Spiele in mehrfacher Hinsicht beträchtlich. 27 Vor allem aber wirft sie mit ihren Inschriften einer ganzen Reihe vordem unbekannter aus Griechenland und Kleinasien stammender Olympioniken des 4.Jh.s n.Chr. und mit den damit verbundenen Aufschlüssen über das Wettkampf programm auf diese bislang dunkle Spätphase der Olympischen Spiele neues Licht. Es zeigt sich (auch wenn wir über Ausgestaltung und Besucherzahlen der Feste jener Zeit nichts Näheres erfahren und gegenüber früheren Jahrhunderten gewiß mit geringerer Resonanz rechnen müssen), daß bei den Olympien noch bis in die letzten Jahrzehnte des 4.Jh.s n.Chr. Athleten aus weit entfernten Gegenden der griechisch-römischen Welt konkurrierten und daß die Olympien damals keineswegs den Charakter lokal begrenzter Spiele angenommen hatten. Und wenn uns die spätesten Eingravierungen der Bronzeplatte, diejenigen für Eukarpides und Zopyros aus Athen, lehren, daß neben den athletischen Wettkämpfen auch das Zeremoniell der Bekränzung weiter Bestand hatte, so zeugt dies beredt von der – trotz des stetig mächtiger werdenden Christentums – immer noch starken Lebenskraft der Olympischen Spiele auch als Zeusfest. 28

The bronze plate supplements our knowledge of the history of the olympic games considerably in many respects.  Above all its inscriptions give us a whole series of previously unknown olympians from Greece and Asia Minor from the 4th century A.D., and sheds new light through its data on the previously obscure late phase of the olympic games.  It turns out that (even if we have gained no more information on the design and visitor numbers of the festival compared to earlier centuries, although we might expect lower numbers) until the last decades of the 4th century athletes from distant parts of the Graeco-Roman world were still competing, and that the olympics had by no means assumed the character of a local event.  The latest engravings on the bronze plate, those of Eucarpides and Zopyrus of Athens, tell us that, in addition to the athletic contests, the ceremonial  of crowning had continued, so that it testifies eloquently — despite the  increasing dominance of Christianity — to the still strong vitality of the olympics as a festival of Zeus.

No photograph is given of the plaque itself, only a facsimile and transcription.  Unfortunately there is no clear, tabular representation of the data, nor translation, and the article presupposes good knowledge of both Greek and German. So I have found it rather hard to extract the key data from it.  But it is clearly a very important find.

The latest entries are of two brothers from Athens, named M. Aur. Eucarpides and M. Aur. Zopyrus, in Olympiads 290 (=381 AD) and 291 (=385 AD) in the pancration contest.  Laurel wreaths are depicted on the plaque.  Doubtless Athens was proud of them.

At some period after the games had ceased the plaque was pulled down, trimmed to size, and used to block a latrine channel.  Sic transit gloria mundi.

UPDATE: A nice photograph of the bottom of the plaque appears on p.115 of Vasileios Patrakos Great moments in Greek archaeology, and is visible in preview here.

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  1. [1]J. Ebert, Zur neuen Bronzeplatte mit Siegerinschriften aus Olympia (Inv.1148), Nikephoros vol. 10, 1997, p.217-233.↩

Life of Mar Aba – chapter 14

Posted on by Roger Pearse

14.  When the chief magian and his companions heard these words of the blessed one, they grew even more enraged.  They went to the King of Kings and complained to him, “This man, the leader of the Christians, must not live, because he is destroying the religion (dên) of Hormizd.”  Since they now pressured the King of Kings strongly, the latter allowed the blessed one to be taken to the PSNIK’ DRWSPN[1], to appear before the Mopetan Mopet, that PSNIK’, and to explain himself to the magians who were accusing him.

When the blessed one heard this message, he threw himself down, turned to the east, made the sign of the cross on his face, stood up boldly and said, “There is one God, the Creator, Lord and ruler of all, and he is in three persons without beginning and end.  To believe in and confess him is available for any man who of his own free will takes him as his Creator, and believes and confesses his Lordship.  No-one can use that belief in God, of which anyone who confesses Him is guilty, to say, “He is mine alone,” as other, pointless religions do.  And, like the air that we breathe, which all men have in common, and like the light of the sun, the moon, the stars, and millions more, Christianity is not just mine, but for all rational people, past, present and future, who want to believe it.  I say before men, what I learned from the holy scripture.  Anyone who listens, accepts and does, I commend, honour and praise, and I do not push him out of the church.  Because he knows his Creator, and believes in His Providence.  The holy scripture does not tell me to bind someone, beat them, or take something from them.  But we pray and implore God for those who err, that he will lead them to the knowledge of truth; but I would warn the Christians to guard against the uncleanness of sacrificial victims.”

Then the Mopetan Mopet, and all those present gave the verdict: He is worth of death.

The homily of MarAba is rather moving, isn’t it?

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  1. [1]According to J. Labourt, Le christianisme dans l’empireperse sous la dynastie Sassanide, Paris, 1904, p.181 n.3, this is the pasaniqarusphan, the director of prisons, although he doesn’t seem that sure about it.↩