In addition to the writings of Aphrahat, Dadisho Katraya, John of Apamea and Philoxenus, a number of other key sources underpin the development of a Syrian ascetic tradition. The Didache, Tatian’s Diatessaron, and apocryphal writings such as the Gospel and Acts of Thomas provide a fuller context. They were sources shared by writers throughout the literate world during the late antique era, and cover a wide range of genres. Those written primarily for monastic reception tend to be homilies, but hymns are common and, given the prevalence of the poet-theologian, dialogue poems and other liturgical texts abound.1 They may be written for liturgical performance and therefore focus on particular points in the liturgical year (many of the hymns referring to the Incarnation are denoted as hymns on the nativity or the epiphany); for private listening in a monastic setting, or as letters of advice to spiritual children.
Anonymity was common, as was writing pseudonymously, especially in the first three centuries. In addition, contested identity further enriches the mix. Sometimes a writer’s identity can be confirmed by the Christological stance they disclose; however, this always needs to be placed firmly within the contemporary context. What may be condemned as Nestorianism by the Western church, for example, is seen as an authentic expression of truth by Eastern Christian believers, and regional variations need to be understood.2 Abramowski cautions against overconfident conclusions about the literature by saying that ‘to draw a map of this world one has to be conscious that the blank spaces would take up most of it’.3
Beggianai’s deceptively slim volume is an invaluable source of relevant background here, and outlines some of the main constituents of Syrian asceticism in the first half millennium of the Christian era. Here we highlight briefly specific texts which in addition to being influential on other writers contribute particularly to the discussion of the place of the body in Christian asceticism, and the image of being clothed in the body.
The Didache presents a typical text from this milieu; probably written in West Syria around the beginning of the first century its Jewish overtones are allied with parallels to the Sermon on the Mount. It is a tripartite anonymous text, comprising sections on the ‘Way to life’ (and conversely the route towards death), teachings on church order and apocalyptic themes.4 Didache 1.1–6.2 suggest an unambiguous polarity between evil and righteous living, as so often insisted on in encratic circles. The suggestion of apostolic authorship effectively Christianised what presented as a Jewish book of moral instruction, an example of how Syrian ascetic texts frequently synthesised available traditions.5 The two ‘ways’ of life expounded in that text resemble teachings in fringe sects such as the Mandeans and Manicheans, with primitive examples of liturgical practices especially Baptism. In a period before much biblical material was in circulation with canonical approval, this type of Christian literature was influential, and helped form Syrian ascetic habits.
Given the very rich mix of cultures and traditions feeding into Syrian religious thought, it is significant one particular edition of the Bible provided a degree of coherence and unity. Tatian’s Diatessaron was the preferred Bible, until the fifth century.6 This is important for several reasons. First, apart from the Peshitta, it is the earliest literary work extant in Syriac7 and thus formed the basic source for interpretations of the gospel. Secondly, its influence on early Syrian asceticism was profound, especially because of its sub-current of dualism and spiritual elitism.8 Some commentators believe that Tatian’s enthusiasm for encratism derived from Jewish/Palestinian monotheistic roots, seen also in the Gospel of Thomas.9 This places Tatian on the cusp between orthodoxy and heresy; he refutes Marcion, ostensibly trying to stem the flow of Gnosticism into early Syriac Christianity, but his negatively dualistic approach to the material world actually allows some Gnostic ideas to permeate the mix. This is demonstrated most clearly by his exposition of the doctrine of Double Creation.10 The Syrians were well read in Pauline literature in addition to the gospels; both would have informed their anthropological vocabulary.11 This gospel ‘harmony’ of the four canonical gospels, mingled with extra-canonical material (some of it possibly by Tatian’s mentor, Justin Martyr) was widely disseminated,12 and in the absence of other readily available gospel material formed the basis of biblical reference and citation for Syriac writers. It should already be clear that the spectre of heresy is never far away from late antique Syria, and this is certainly an issue with this text. Orthodox writers such as Clement, Epiphanius, Hippolytus and Irenaeus all accuse Tatian of unorthodox teachings, Irenaeus even suggesting he has Valentinian leanings that smack of Gnosticism. A further accusation was a Marcionite-inspired encratic contamination of his text.13 Since the boundaries of heresy are so fluid at this period, especially with regard to ascetic practices, it is unsurprising that Tatian’s text was so formative. In particular he condemned explicitly marriage and procreation.14
Numerous apocryphal gospels enjoyed popularity, especially prior to the establishment of a biblical canon. The five main ones, attributed to Andrew, John, Paul, Peter and Thomas, were originally anonymous and are now believed to have separate authorship during the second and third centuries.15 Of particular interest to students of the Syrian ascetic tradition is that attributed to Thomas, the disciple who legend relates took Christianity to South India. The survival of the text demonstrates the existence of a non-Incarnation, early Christian tradition in Edessa, which was rooted in Palestinian Sectarianism.16 The original text is in Greek, but an important Coptic manuscript was included in the Nag Hammadi find of 1945–46.17 Many of the 114 ‘logia’ have a Gnostic flavour; it is noticeable that, while the sayings closely follow Jesus’ canonical sayings, the selection from His words made by this text focus on ascetic teachings. For example, number 75 glosses an identifiable ‘saying’ with a distinctly Syrian encratic empasis: ‘Jesus said: “Many are standing at the door but the solitary are the ones who will enter the bridal chamber”.’18 Links between the Diatessaron and the Gospel of Thomas have been extensively explored and reading the latter as encratic rather than Gnostic seems appropriate.19
As in the canonical New Testament there are accounts in the apocryphal gospels of the missionary activity of disciples or supposed disciples, whose putative apostolic identity confers a measure of authority to their writing, and makes them an attractive inspiration for encratic sects. Although belonging to New Testament Apocrypha, the Acts of Thomas also acts as a key inspiration to Syrian asceticism; their insistence on encratic values forms its raison d’être. Together with the other four apocryphal Acts mentioned above, they formed a collection much used by Manicheans up to the fourth century.20 Indeed, the Acts of Thomas are especially close to the margins of orthodoxy; while Epiphanius identifies their encratism, Augustine finds them Manichean and Turribus points out that they were adopted by Priscillianists.21
A recurring motif in the text is the repugnance expressed about sexual activity, expressed as an injunction to refrain from ‘filthy intercourse’22 since only ‘pure ones’ can be espoused to Jesus. The supposed apostle Thomas demonstrates his credentials specifically through saving people from the curse of ‘impure intercourse’ from which he is able (through the young man’s acceptance of the gospel) to ‘seal’ him.23
Although for the most part the extant Greek manuscripts are more reliable than the Syriac ones, this is not true of the Hymn of the Pearl (also known as the Hymn of the Soul), a particularly fertile source of images of being clothed in the body.24 Elliott confidently places them as being written in Edessa in the third century, making them the oldest non-biblical literature of the Syrian Church.25 Ferriera argues for Syriac anteriority on the basis of a fourth-century Syrian style26 and gives evidence to discredit the early twentieth-century belief that this was Christian midrash by asserting that this is primarily a Manichean text.27 A dominant feature in the Hymn is the image of clothing. The young man depicted in the final hymn disguises himself in similar clothes to his freeborn kinsman from the East, an allusion to Christ ‘disguising’ himself in the clothing of humanity, clothing himself in human form to appear one with humanity, recognisably of the same substance as the humanity he redeems.28 The garments referred to are luminous and more than just the wedding garment of the canonical gospels, to which allusion is made.29 In the young man’s dream he sees his garment reflected as in a mirror, suggestive of the need for continual ascetic endeavour; mirrors at this time were bronze and needed constant polishing in order to retain their reflective qualities, just as the spiritual athlete would need repeated efforts to stay in training.30 The mirror image shows the man his ‘whole self’, the unification of his image and his actuality. A parallel is implied to the unity between Christ and humanity through the sharing of human substance; ascetic endeavour, it is suggested, will bridge the gap between the fallen Adam and his prototype:
For though we originated from the one and the same we were partially divided, Then again we were one, with a single form.31
If we take the young man as representing Christ, this suggests that it is in the garb of humanity that Christ’s identity fully becomes realised. The alienation from God caused by man’s disobedience is healed by Christ’s willingness to be robed in flesh; the division between man and God is replaced by union with God just as the dual natures of Christ are united in the Incarnation.
The idea of singleness conveyed by the Syriac word ihiduthya is seen here through a series of unities; the unity of the reflection in the mirror with its original image, the bringing together of the two separate ‘beings’ who fetch the dreamer his robe as ‘a single form … One royal symbol constituting of two halves.’32 The dreamer is given a fine robe with jewels on it on which the ‘image of the King of Kings’ is ‘all over it’.33 The robe – Christ clothed in the human body – acquires a voice and speaks to the dreamer who then ‘covered myself completely with my royal robe’.34 Thus attired he is allowed to enter the kingdom.35 In transferring the power of speech from robe to wearer of the robe, the author creates coherence between the ‘inner and outer man’ of the imagined dreamer, suggestive of Christological unity. Christ’s eagerness to meet humanity halfway is suggested by the garment ‘hastening’ towards the dreamer as he goes to receive it.36
The encratic tone of the Acts of Thomas should not suggest a negative view of the human person; as Drjvers argues, it is ‘not inspired by pure and simple hate of the body but it is a means of salvation, of restoring man’s original state’.37 This is evident in this marvellously rich text, which combines dreams, eschatology, disguise, luminosity and kingship to suggest the redemptive journey of the ‘stranger’ towards the kingdom which is his inheritance. Regardless of any mythical inspiration, the text has clear Christological overtones. Reading it as ‘fable’, Hans-Josef Klauck argues, in fact discloses a theme of ‘precisely the uniting of the human soul with its heavenly counterpart’.38 In all cultures fables and myths represent an accessible expression of deeply held and widely shared beliefs, so as a genre they affirm the importance of the message they convey, even though they are fictitious.
Clothing metaphors are the central image in the Hymn of the Pearl; the detail about the fine robe relates to the spread of Manichaeism on the Silk Route from Christian/Gnostic Syria to Buddhist China.39 Ferreira argues that a Manichean label is more appropriate than a Christian or Gnostic one, and that the Hymn of the Pearl should properly be called the Hymn of the Garment because it is the garment rather than the pearl that symbolises the salvific experience of a son, who is also the narrator.40 The garment is removed before the journey and only fully restored at the end, which can be read as ‘both a realised and a futuristic eschatological experience’ in which the clothing metaphor symbolises enlightenment and salvation.41
An influential writer on the spiritual life from the first half of the fifth century is known variously as John of Apamea or John the Solitary.42 His treatise on prayer is primarily to do with methods of contemplation. It contains the image of ‘the Word going forth from Silence’ and ‘putting on the body as a word puts on the voice’,43 a phrase which recalls Ephrem’s Hymns on Paradise 11 (6–7) which contains phrases such as: ‘Grace clothed itself in his likeness / in order to bring him to the likeness of itself.’44 John of Apamea’s Dialogue on the Soul gives a highly technical definition of the relationship between the component parts of the human person and how they are used in worship. The taxonomy suggested closely resembles that later adopted by Isaac, who divides and subdivides the human soul based on Platonic models, affirming a hierarchy of body, soul and spirit. John acknowledges the varying merits of each aspect, but asserts that the physical and spiritual natures cannot be divided: they are different modes of being within a unified person. The physical and pneumatic natures are not mutually exclusive.45
In John of Apamea’s model, spiritual progress is a state of self-emptying.46 The same concept of spiritual kenosis is found also in the anonymous Book of Steps47 and the writings of an early sixth-century writer, Babai, who describes the withdrawal from the world and family connections as a joyful form of self-emptying, chosen for its potential for self-growth.48 Kenosis, with its suggestion of relinquishing in order to become replenished, closely connects to the Syrian idea of stripping off one self in order to be reclothed in a new, glorious body. This connection between kenosis and clothing is graphically made in an apocryphal text referred to by Charlesworth in his edition of the Odes of Solomon: ‘Having divested himself of these perishing rags, he [Jesus] clothed himself with the imperishability which none has power to take from him.’49
The Odes of Solomon makes extensive use of clothing metaphors. The popularity of this earliest Christian hymn book may be due in part to this.50 The author uses language reminiscent of the Prologue to the Fourth Gospel to refer to ‘putting off darkness’ in order to be reclothed in light51 and the lexis of the psalms is evoked in the idea of ‘putting on [the love of the Lord]’.52 An apparent separation of the component parts of the human person are suggested; both flesh and ‘garment’(taken to symbolise skin)53 are described as being in some way separate from a sense of self, as in:
Your flesh may not understand
that which I am about to say to you;
Nor your garment that which I am
about to show you.54
The ‘garment of skin’ as a signifier of humanity is to be removed in order to be replaced with a covering of the spirit.55 The Odes do not show any extended Christological treatment of clothing; they focus more on the human person and an internal coherence rather than humanity in relation to Christ. The connection between garments of skin and light is made in, for example, Ode 11 (11), suggesting a connection between giving up the flesh and becoming enlightened: ‘And the Lord renewed me with His garment, / And possessed me by His light.’56 This combination of images is much developed in the Syrian tradition, as we will see in Chapter 10.
The Liber Graduum, like the Didache, suggests that there is a division among Christians into the ‘Upright’ and the ‘Perfect’, an aspirational hierachary designed to entice believers from the lower state to the higher one.57 The ‘steps’ are divided into three sets of memra which facilitate this – an introduction, some chapters on advanced perfection and six final texts on ‘the Redemption of the Upright’.58 The text advocates following a particular ‘way’ in order to achieve salvation. The Liber Graduum expresses many similar themes and shares source references and even linguistic traits with much other Syrian literature. For example, it shares with Pseudo-Macarius the language of ‘mingling’ which we will see features in some of the more mainstream Christological heresies. Like Pseudo-Macarius, this text is also tainted to some extent by the Messalian controversy, because of the severely ascetic or encratic nature of its teaching.59 Exploring further, however, it is clear that the body is seen as a temple of God and therefore pure enough to be the locus of worship; this suggests that worldly contamination has not overwhelmed the ‘Perfect’ as a pure body is sufficiently innocent to be intrinsically good.60 The relationship of the Liber Graduum to the Gospel of Thomas is a contested one, but I would agree that (like the writings of Aphrahat61) this text is a ‘principal witness’ to the Syriac Diatessaron.62 In common with other Syrian texts, there is frequent use of bnay/bnat qyama.63 Links between this text and the Odes of Solomon are suggested by the common use of feminine imagery for God, such as the idea of the Father’s breasts flowing with milk.64
Other influential and typical Syriac writers include Philoxenus, whose understanding of a dual mode of existence owes more to the ‘way’ of the Didache or Liber Graduum than Platonic models, and he saw these as characterising both the person of Christ and all Christians. His particular take on this brought him into controversy at the Council of Chalcedon, where he was a vigorous opponent of those orthodox teachings which became the church’s doctrine.65 As we will see, the monophysite and other variant readings of Christology showed a clear division between the Antiochene and Greek understandings of the person of Christ and promoted much debate in the Ecumenical Councils.
1 Brock identifies some 50 contest/dialogue poems in Syriac. Sebastian Brock, ‘The Dispute Between the Soul and Body: An Example of a Long-lived Mesopotamian Literary Genre’, in ARAM, vol. 1, no. 1 (Winter 1989): pp. 53–65, at p. 53. The prevalence of soghyatha (dialogue poems) indicates a further link between Syriac and other oriental cultures. For fuller details of this, see Susan Ashbrook-Harvey ‘Why the Perfume Mattered: The Sinful Woman in Syriac Exegetical Tradition’, in Paul Blowers et al. (eds), In Dominico Eloquio – In Lordly Eloquence: Essays on Patristic Exegesis in Honor of Robert Louis Wilken (Grand Rapids, 2002), pp. 69–89, at p. 70.
2 See Sebastian Brock, The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life (Kalamazoo, 1987), p. xxxv, n. 3.
3 L. Ambramowski, ‘Review of Drijvers H.J.W. Studies in Early Syriac Christianity’, JTS, no. 38 (1987): pp. 218–19.
4 See Maxwell Staniforth (trans.), Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers (London, 1968), pp. 223–37.
5 Ralph P. Martin and Peter H. Daniels (eds), Dictionary of the Later New Testament and Its Developments (Chicago, 1997), p. 300.
6 Tatian’s Diatessaron was the earliest synthesis of the four gospels, which inspired Ephrem’s much-cited Commentary.
7 Robert Murray, ‘The Characteristics of the Earliest Syriac Christianity’, in Nina Garsoϊan (ed.), East of Byzantium: Syria and Armenia in the Formative Period (Washington, 1982), p. 3. The oldest non-biblical text used by the Syrian church is the apocryphal Acts of Judas Thomas, according to J. Keith Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in an English Translation (Oxford, 1993), p. 441.
8 Harvey goes so far as to argue that it ‘encouraged those who saw the Christian ideal of renunciation in terms of a dualist understanding; the material world and the physical body were inferior to those of the spiritual realm, if not outright channels for evil’. Asceticism and Society in Crisis: John of Ephesus and the Lives of the Eastern Saints (Berkeley, 1990), p. 5.
9 Gilles Quispel, ‘The Discussion of Judaic Christianity’, VC, 22 (1968): 81–93
10 Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 1.28.1. This is fully discussed by Giulia Gasparro, ‘Asceticism and Anthropology: Enkrateia and “Double Creation” in Early Christianity’, in Asceticism, pp. 127–46. See also Stuart Burns, ‘Charisma and Spirituality in the Early Church: A Study of Messalianism and Pseudo-Macarius’ (PhD thesis, University of Leeds, 1998), p. 128.
11 Baker sees this focus on Paul as a corrective to ‘the modern craze to relate Syriac literature to Judaeo-Christianity which we know at least to have been essentially anti-Pauline’. Dom A. Baker, ‘Early Syrian Asceticism’, DR, vol. 88 (1970): pp. 393–409, at pp. 396 and 405.
12 For a claim that it was available between China and Iceland, see William L. Petersen, Tatian’s Diatessaron: Its Creation, Dissemination, Significance and History in Scholarship (Leiden, 1994), p. 2.
13 Petersen, Tatian, pp. 76–9, gives a plausible defence against Irenaeus’ accusations, mooting that the flawed passages may have been ‘redacted by a hand sympathetic to Encratism’.
14 Sebastian P. Brock, ‘Early Syrian Asceticism’, Numen, vol. 20, no. 1, (April 1973): pp. 1–19, at p. 6.
15 Elliot, Apocryphal, p. 229.
16 Hans-Josef Klauck, The Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, trans. Brian MacNeil (Waco, TX, 2008), p. 3; see also Leslie W. Barnard ‘The Origins and Emergence of the Church in Edessa during the First Two Centuries AD’, VC, vol. 22, no. 3 (1968): pp. 161–75, at p. 175.
17 Elliott, Apocryphal, p. 123. Another useful edition of the text is in J.M. Robinson (ed.) and T.O. Lambdon (trans.), The Nag Hammâdi Library in English (Leiden, 1977).
18 Elliott, Apocryphal, p. 144.
19 Ibid., p. 124 refers to Gilles Quispel’s work on this area.
20 Klauck, Apocryphal, p. 3.
21 Elliott, Apocryphal, p. 439.
22 Acts 1, Elliott, Apocryphal, p. 459.
23 Acts IV, Elliott, Apocryphal, p. 489. The hostility to sexual activity even within marriage represents ‘an extreme encratism … which is well on the way to Manichaeism’, argues Murray, ‘Characteristics’, p. 3.
24 Elliott, Apocryphal, p. 440, corroborated by Klauck, Apocryphal, p. 165.
25 Elliott, Apocryphal, p. 441.
26 He notes that the sole Greek manuscript is eleventh-century whereas the sole Syriac manuscript is found in a codex dated 936 but with a much earlier literary style. Joahan Ferreira, The Hymn of the Pearl: The Syriac and Greek Texts (Sidney, 2002), pp. 4–5.
27 Ibid., pp. 20–21, where he agrees with Drijvers that the Gnostic tendencies are Manichean at root.
28 ‘I clothed myself in garments like theirs, so that I would not be see as a stranger / And as one who has come from abroad to take the pearl.’ Chapter 108 and 109, Elliott, Apocryphal, p. 489.
29 Chapter 111 (66): ‘the Royal Silken garment shone before my eyes’. Elliott, Apocryphal, p. 490.
30 Sebastian Brock, Sogiatha: Syriac Dialogue Hymns (Kottayam, 1987), pp. 47–8. The mirror as an image of the relationship between God and man is set out by Athanasius in Contra Gentes 8, where the soul is seen as ‘a mirror in which it can see the image of the Father’, and Contra Gentes 34, which emphasises the need to keep the image free of stains so that it can ‘contemplate as in a mirror the Word, the image of the Father’. A. Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition from Plato to Denys (Oxford, 1981), p. 79. Louth relates this to Platonic uses of mirror images in, for example, the Timeaus 46 A–C, to depict the divine, and links it to Gregory of Nyssa, too.
31 Acts, 112 (77), Elliott, Apocryphal, p. 490.
32 Acts, 112 (80), Elliott, Apocryphal, p. 490.
33 Acts, 112 (86), Elliott, Apocryphal, p. 490.
34 The image of the robe speaking is graphically reminiscent of the Anglo-Saxon Dream of the Rood, where the True Cross speaks of its experiences during the crucifixion. Much early English poetry features dreams, visions and personifications of this sort, and, like the shared territory between Pseudo–Dionysius and The Cloud of Unknowing, suggests migration of ideas from Eastern Christian to Western religious literature; parallels are particularly noticeable in the Celtic tradition.
35 Acts, 113 (91 and 97), Elliott, Apocryphal, p. 491.
36 Acts, 112 (94), Elliott, Apocryphal, p. 491.
37 Hans Drijvers, East of Antioch: Studies in Early Syriac Christianity (Aldershot, 1984), p. 10; see also his ‘Facts and Problems in Early Syriac-Speaking Christianinty’, TSC, vol. 2, no. 3 (Fall 1982): pp. 157–75, at p. 171.
38 Klauck, Apocryphal, p. 167.
39 The hymn was ‘certainly owned by the Maicheans’, according to Johan Ferreira, ‘A Comparison of the Clothing Metaphor in the Hymn of the Pearl and the Chinese Manichaean Hymnscroll’, in Ronald E. Emmerick, Werner Sundermann and Peter Zieme (eds), Studia Manichaica IV (1997), (Berlin, 2000): pp. 207–79, at p. 208.
40 Ibid., p. 209.
41 Ibid., p. 210. This compares to the Chinese text, in which the garment of glory which is lost at the beginning ‘is regained at the end in the World of Light’. Ibid., p. 216.
42 Brock, Fathers, p. 78. John of Apamea’s religious anthropology is closely mirrored by that of Isaac of Nineveh. See Hannah Hunt, ‘“Praying the Body”; Isaac of Nineveh and John of Apamea on Anthropological Integrity’, The Harp, vol. 11–12 (1998–99): pp. 153– 18, at pp. 154–5.
43 Sebastian Brock, ‘John the Solitary: On Prayer’, JTS, vol. 30 (1979): pp. 84–101, at p. 86.
44 Sebastian Brock, St Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise (Crestwood, 1990), p. 156.
45 Irénée Hausherr (trans.), Jean le Solitaire (Pseudo-Jean de Lycopolis), ‘Dialogue sur l’ame et les passions des hommes (Rome, 1939), p. 82.
46 Brock, Fathers, p. 79.
47 Discourse XII, Brock, Fathers, p. 45.
48 Letter to Cyriacus 59, Brock, Fathers, p. 156.
49 Charlesworth here cites K. Grobel, The Gospel of Truth (London 1960), pp. 66–9, esp. n. 10, in J.H. Charlesworth, The Odes of Solomon (Oxford, 1973), p. 105.
50 It is also known as the Pistis Sophia; see Charlesworth, Odes, p. 1. Vööbus believes them to of Syrian not Greek authorship and this is the accepted view. History of Asceticism in the Syrian Orient, vol. 1 (Louvain, 1958), pp. 62–4.
51 Ode 21 (3), Charlesworth, Odes, p. 88.
52 Ode 3 (1), Charlesworth, Odes, p. 19.
53 Ode 25 (8), Charlesworth, Odes, p. 43.
54 Ode 8 (9), Charlesworth, Odes, p. 41.
55 Ode 25 (8): ‘And I was covered with the covering of thy Spirit, / And I removed from me my garments of skin.’ Charlesworth, Odes, p. 102.
56 Charlesworth, Odes, p. 52.
57 Robert A Kitchen and Martien F.G. Parmentier, The Book of Steps: The Syriac Liber Graduum (Kalamazoo, 2004).
58 The Syriac author himself writes an extended preface, defending the author’s anonymity, and proclaiming the book to be a prophetic utterance. Although, for reasons stated above, this clearly belongs within a Syrian milieu, the references to Gregory of Nyssa, Basil and Evagrios demonstrate that the author was well versed in ascetic literature from elsewhere in the Christian world. Kitchen and Parmentier, Steps, pp. 3 and 4.
59 Ibid., pp. vii and xix. This is much debated by Vööbus, who takes issue with Hausherr’s affirmation of the position that prayer is not the only means to perfection for this sect, corroborating the view of Kmosko, the original Syriac editor of the text. See Vööbus, History, vol. 1, pp. 179 and 190–91. Brock engages with this debate, Fathers, pp. 42 and 102.
60 Vööbus, History, vol. 1, pp. 178–84.
61 In Aphrahat’s Demonstration 6, on the issue of the ‘bene Kiyama’, the author uses the terms betulata (virginity) and kadishuta (holiness) indiscriminately. Naomi Koltun-Fromm, ‘Sexuality and Holiness: Semitic Christian and Jewish Conceptualizations of Sexual Behavior’, VC, vol. 54, no. 4 (2000): pp. 375–95, at p. 376.
62 Baker, ‘Early’, pp. 402–3.
63 This terminology forms another link to the writings of Aphrahat, in whose Sixth Demonstration is found the fullest description of the term, according to Kitchen and Parmentier. Step, p. xvi.
64 Odes of Solomon, 19.4; 8.14, 14.2, 19.1–4, noted Kitchen and Parmantier Step, p. xviii.
65 Brock, Fathers, p. 102.