ISHOʻYAHB III
East Syrian
ca. 650 C.E.
Ishoʻyahb III (d. 659) had an impeccable ecclesiastical lineage. Born to a noble family in Abiabene, he became a monk under the first abbot of the famous East Syrian monastery of Bēt ʻAbē, then progressed through the successively more prestigious offices of bishop, metropolitan, and catholicos, the head of the East Syrian church, which he became in the last decade of his life. During his ecclesiastical career, Ishoʻyahb wrote numerous epistles detailing the day-to-day operation of the Church of the East in the first decades of Islam. None of the 106 of his surviving letters focus solely on Islam. But three include passages that are particularly important for witnessing some of the earliest interactions between Christians and Muslims.
Letter 48B concentrates on intra-Christian rivalry between monks under Ishoʻyahb’s jurisdiction and Miaphysites (“those who attributed suffering and death to God”). Here Ishoʻyahb chastises the East Syrian monks for showing insufficient zeal. He argues that the Hagarene Arabs did not innately favor Miaphysites and, in any cases when they did, with a little effort could be persuaded to support the East Syrian cause instead. This letter presents the earliest example of a larger trend among Syriac writings. When Syriac Christians spoke of dealings with their conquerors, the authors’ main concern was rarely Christianity’s encounter with another religion. Instead, the discussion often focused on how to get their conquerors to support one branch of Christianity over another. This letter is also important because of its terminology. It includes the earliest surviving employment of the word Hagarenes (mhaggrāyē), which eventually became one of the most common that Syriac authors used to speak of Muslims. In this case Ishoʻyahb uses the word to specify that he is speaking not of Arabs in general but rather of those Arabs who are also Hagarenes. Some scholars have suggested that the passage’s progression of usages, from Arab to Hagarene Arabs to simply Hagarenes, reflects Ishoʻyahb’s attempt to introduce his audience to a relatively new term.
In Letter 14C Ishoʻyahb does not use the term Hagarene but rather speaks of “Arabs to whom at this time God has given control over the world.” The letter as a whole, however, does not focus on Muslims at all. Rather, Ishoʻyahb addressed his Letter 14C to Simeon, the metropolitan bishop of Rev Ardashir, who was attempting to secede from the catholicos’s authority. In response, Ishoʻyahb sent a sharp reprimand, including a lengthy list of the alleged shortcomings of Christians under Simeon’s jurisdiction. Of particular note are Ishoʻyahb’s allegations that most of Simeon’s congregations were apostatizing. Ishoʻyahb stresses that such apostasy is inexcusable. According to him, the Arabs were generally supportive of Christians and allowed them to keep their faith. Simeon’s congregants were deserting Christianinty simply to avoid the Arabs’ demand for half their possessions. Modern scholars have frequently cited this passage for diametrically opposed reasons. In general they emphasize either the beginning, to illustrate Muslim authorities’ general benevolence toward Christianity, or the conclusion, to illustrate Muslim discrimination against Christians, in this case a 50 percent poll tax (otherwise unattested) on non-Muslims. The often unacknowledged difficulty of either interpretation is Ishoʻyahb’s own agenda. The goal of his letter was not an accurate description of Christianity in the Persian Gulf (a topic about which he may have had at best indirect knowledge). Rather, he wanted to portray his subordinate bishop and personal nemesis in as negative a light as possible.
In Letter 15C Ishoʻyahb is again on the offensive, in this case writing against the bishops of Bēt Qaṭrayē, who were also questioning his authority. As one of his arguments for the necessity of centralized control, he presents himself as an important intercessor between Christians and their Arab rulers. In this context, he provides one of the earliest surviving references to Christians under Islam paying a poll tax.
Ishoʻyahb’s discussions of Muslims are brief and, given their polemical context, difficult to assess. Nevertheless, written less than two decades after the Islamic conquests, his Letters remain essential witnesses for how the first generation of Christians under Islamic rule were experiencing and interpreting its early days.
The oldest extant copy of Ishoʻyahb’s Letters appears in Vatican Syriac 157, which has been dated to the tenth century on paleographic grounds. The letters are also found in a number of more modern manuscripts, including Chaldean Patriarchate 112 (1696), Mardin 78 (1868), Leeds Syriac 4.1 (1888), Alqosh 172 (1894), Baghdad Chaldean Monastery Syriac 515 (1894), Baghdad Chaldean Monastery Syriac 516 (1901), Baghdad Chaldean Monastery Syriac 517 (1902), Paris Syriac 336 (1896), and Vatican Syriac 493 (1909). In 1905 Rubens Duval published an edition of the Letters based on Vatican Syriac 157 and Paris Syriac 336.
No one has contested the attribution of these letters to Ishoʻyahb III. Traditionally they have been divided into those written when Ishoʻyahb was the bishop of Nineveh-Mosul (628–ca. 637), when he was the metropolitan of Erbil (ca. 637–649), and when he was catholicos (649–659). The heading of Letter 48B claims that he wrote this epistle while bishop of Nineveh (and hence in the mid-to-late 630s). Most recent scholars, however, suggest that a later scribe misordered several of the letters, including 48B, which they say belongs to the period when Ishoʻyahb was a metropolitan or catholicos. As both their headings and their contents indicate, Ishoʻyahb clearly wrote Letters 14C and 15C in the last decade of his life, while he was catholicos.
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[Letter] Forty-Eight [B]
Ishoʻyahb, the stranger, who by God’s grace serves the holy church in Nineveh, to the fainthearted sons of the real believers and true Christians: Qāmishoʻ, Sania, Babusa, Hnanishoʻ, Isaac, Barsahde, and Dadiazd. [[93]] By God, the omnipotent, may peace multiply among you.
Poor men, the evil of faithlessness that you alone happen to now suffer before the rest of the lost [will] threatens the world’s fall and the destruction of men’s lives. By this, that which had been said by our Lord concerning the present times has already been fulfilled in you: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” [Lk 18:8] . . .
. . . . [[96]] I also think that at this time your action is in greater need of prayer than of a letter. Before God will visit you with the mercy of his grace, I, a sinner and a wretch, will also see you. I will make known how you are, how the good hope of your fathers’ faith has been kept by you (if it has been kept), and whether you have fully repented for what happened—in short, whether you have completely lost Christian goodness. Even if it seems differently to others, I want to test you in this. For, by our Lord’s word, you are not anywhere allowed to enter one of the churches and to partake in the divine mysteries until you bear the zeal of the faith of our Lord in your hearts, your tongues, and your hands, [until] you destroy those impure seals that, through a servant of his will, Satan placed upon the door of your church, and [until] you demonstrate righteous diligence for [the church]—to build it up, to increase it, to enrich it, to sanctify it—as is appropriate for the church of God.
And if [[97]] it should happen that, making false excuses, you should say (or that heretics should deceive you [into saying]) that what happened happened through the Arabs’ command, [know that this] is completely untrue. For the Arab Hagarenes do not help those who attribute suffering and death to God, the Lord of all. If it should happen and for whatever reason they have helped them, if you properly attend to this, you can inform the Hagarenes and persuade them concerning this matter. Thus, my brothers, do everything wisely. Give what is Casesar’s to Caesar and what is God’s to God. God most high, who is able to increase every benefit for those fearing him—he will perfect you with every good deed to always do his will all the days of your lives. Amen. [The letter] is finished.
[Letter] Fourteen [C]
To Simeon, the bishop of Rev Ardashir.
From Ishoʻyahb to our honored brother Mār Simeon, the metropolitan bishop of Rev Ardashir. Greetings in our Lord.
Our God-loving brother, at this time Your Holiness has bestowed upon us the meeting that appears in the spiritual law—even if, lover of good, in accord with your will’s desire, [it was bestowed] not by [you] coming in person, as the spiritual law demands, but by sending a fellow minister [as] a representative and by [sending] a letter of greeting. When I read what you had written and also heard what you had sent, I rejoiced and thanked our Lord. But I not only rejoiced in what you wrote and sent, but also needed to feel sorrow at the evil reports that a little while earlier had come to me from the edges of your diocese. Through the necessity of reconciling [your letter] with the report [of others], I simultaneously [experienced] a surging of joy along with sorrow, and laughter along with weeping. For a long time I had waited to be informed by you concerning the terrible things that have taken place in this region over which you were set as the guard of spiritual Israel. And behold, not until now (and [truly], not even now) has Your Holiness written me concerning the sort of things that have wickedly occurred in your region. . . .
. . . . I will not respond to Your Holiness in kind, [with] learned speech and falsely called elegy. Rather, in common mourning, in strong lamentation, I will ask Your Holiness: Where are your children, barren father? Where are your sanctuaries, weak priest? Where are the great people of Mrwnyʼ, who, seeing neither sword nor fire nor torture, like mad men became captivated by the love of half of their property? The Sheol of apostasy has suddenly swallowed them, and they have been destroyed forever. . . .
[[249]] . . . But unlike those who have hope in God’s church and the prayer of the holy ones, you have not even turned to God’s church to make known your ruin and to ask for the help of the prayer of our Lord’s holy ones. Rather, until now, without sense or feeling, you have awaited the ruin that has befallen you. Not even now, when you wrote me what you wrote, did you make known to me [even] one of these things. . . .
[[250]] . . . By the hands [of the holy ones], our Lord also performed various miracles as a demonstration of the greatness of their faith in him. And also among [the holy ones] are those who by God’s grace attain ecclesiastical ministry—I mean the bishopric, the metropolitanate, and the catholicate, as well as the other [ecclesiastical] authorities under them. Because of things like these, through God’s grace Christianity’s glory multiplies further day by day, the faith grows, the episcopate abounds, and God’s glory is increased.
You alone [[251]] of all the people of the earth have rejected all these things. Because of [your] estrangement from all of this, deceptive influence easily first took control of you, as [it also does] now. For this one, your seducer and the overthrower of your churches, had previously appeared to us in the land of Radan, a land with much more paganism than Christianity. But because of the glorious conduct of the Christians, not even those pagans were deceived by him. Rather, he was expelled from here as one despised. Not only did he fail to overthrow the churches, but he [himself] was overthrown. But in your Persia, pagans and Christians accepted him. Through the consent and obedience of pagans and the stupor and silence of Christians, he did with them as he wished.
For also these Arabs to whom at this time God has given control over the world, as you know, they are [also here] with us. Not only are they no enemy to Christianity, but they are even praisers of our faith, honorers of our Lord’s priests and holy ones, and supporters of churches and monasteries. Indeed, how did your people of Mrwnyʼ abandon their faith on pretext of [the Arabs’]? And this when, as even the people of Mrwnyʼ say, the Arabs did not force them to abandon their faith but only told them to abandon half of their possessions and to hold on to their faith. But they abandoned their faith, which is eternal, and held on to half of their possessions, which are ephemeral. The faith that all peoples have always bought with the peril of their lives and through which they inherit eternal life, your people of Mrwnyʼ did not even buy with half of their possessions. . . .
Letter 15 [C]
. . . . The insane neither know nor understand that they also are subject to this worldly authority that now rules everywhere . . . . [[269]] For the fools do not even discern that we are commanded to give every authority whatever we owe him: that is, to whomever [is owed] the poll tax, the poll tax; to whomever [is owed] tribute, tribute; to whomever [is owed] reverence, reverence; and to whomever [is owed] honor, honor.