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Bar Hebraeus The Ecclesiastical Chronicle
Gorgias Eastern Christian Studies
40
Series Editors
George Anton Kiraz
István Perczel
Lorenzo Perrone
Samuel Rubenson
Gorgias Eastern Christian Studies brings to the scholarly world the

underrepresented field of Eastern Christianity. This series consists of monographs,
edited collections, texts and translations of the documents of Eastern Christianity, as
well as studies of topics relevant to the world of historic Orthodoxy and early
Christianity.
Bar Hebraeus The Ecclesiastical Chronicle
An English Translation
Translated by
David Wilmshurst
9
34 2016
Gorgias Press LLC, 954 River Road, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA
www.gorgiaspress.com
Copyright © 2016 by Gorgias Press LLC
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part
of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or
otherwise without the prior written permission of Gorgias Press LLC.
2016 ‫ܒ‬
9
ISBN 978-1-4632-0535-5 ISSN 1539-1507
Syriac Text and Bilingual Edition Copyright © by Gorgias Press LLC.
English Translation, Maps, and Introduction Copyright © by David Wilmshurst.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bar Hebraeus, 1226-1286, author.

The ecclesiastical chronicle / Bar Hebraeus ; translated
by David Wilmshurst.
pages cm. -- (Gorgias Eastern Christian studies,
ISSN 1539-1507 ; 40)
In Syriac; with translation, introductions, and notes in
English.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4632-0535-5
1. Syrian Orthodox Church--History--Early works to 1800.
2. Church of the East--History--Early works to 1800. 3.
Church history--Early works to 1800. I. Wilmshurst, David.
II. Bar Hebraeus, 1226-1286. Ktaba d-’Eqlísiyastíqí. III.
Bar Hebraeus, 1226-1286. Ktaba d-’Eqlísiyastíqí. English IV.
Title.
BX172.B37 2015
281’.63--dc23
2015025977
Printed in the United States of America
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Table of Contents ................................................................................................................... v

Introduction ........................................................................................................................... vii
Preliminary remarks ..................................................................................................... vii
The career of Bar Hebraeus ........................................................................................ ix
The Literary Achievement of Bar Hebraeus............................................................ xii
Encyclopaedic and philosophical works ........................................................... xiii
Medical and mathematical works ....................................................................... xiii
Other scientific works .......................................................................................... xiv
Theological works ................................................................................................. xiv
Canon Law .............................................................................................................. xv
Biblical exegesis ...................................................................................................... xv
Grammatical works............................................................................................... xvi
Miscellaneous works ............................................................................................. xvi
The Chronicle of Bar Hebraeus................................................................................... xvi
The Ecclesiastical Chronicle as Literature ..................................................................... xix
The Ecclesiastical Chronicle as History ...................................................................... xxvii
Text and Translation .............................................................................................................. 1
Bar Hebraeus, Ecclesiastical Chronicle: Section One ............................................................. 2
Bar Hebraeus, Ecclesiastical Chronicle: Section Two ......................................................... 310
The Jacobite Patriarchs of Antioch to 1292 ..........................................................508

Appendix One: The Patriarchs and Maphrians of the Jacobite Church ................... 507
Counter-patriarchs to 1293 ................................................................................ 508

The Mardin Patriarchs, 1293–1493 ......................................................................... 508
The Sis Patriarchs, 1292–1445 ................................................................................. 509
The Tur ʿAbdin Patriarchs, 1364–1494.................................................................. 509
The Jacobite Metropolitans of Tagrit, 559–1059 ............................................ 509
The Jacobite Maphrians, 1075–1507 ................................................................509
The Bishops of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, c.280–399 .................................................... 512

Appendix Two: The Patriarchs of the Church of the East .......................................... 511
The Metropolitans of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, 399–421 ............................................ 512

The Catholici of the East, 421–1382 ...................................................................... 512
Select Bibliography ............................................................................................................. 515
Books ...........................................................................................................................515
Articles ......................................................................................................................... 516
v
vi BAR HEBRAEUS, ECCLESIASTICAL CHRONICLE
Abbreviations of Periodical Titles ........................................................................... 518

Index ..................................................................................................................................... 519
Maps ...................................................................................................................................... 549
INTRODUCTION
PRELIMINARY REMARKS
The Jacobite maphrian Gregory II Abuʾlfaraj bar Ahron (1226–86), better known as
Bar Hebraeus, was one of the most interesting and prolific authors writing in Syriac
in the second half of the 13th century. He was a polymath, and his many and varied
interests included the study of history. His Chronicle (maktbanuth zabne), an important
historical work written in Syriac, is organised into two parts, a secular history (the
Syriac Chronicle or Chronicon Syriacum) and an ecclesiastical history (the Ecclesiastical
Chronicle or Chronicon Ecclesiasticum), both of which take their narrative up to the
closing decades of the 13th century. The two parts of the Chronicle are an important
source for the history of the Middle East up to the period of the Crusades, and the
Ecclesiastical Chronicle is of particular interest for its portrayal of the life of the
was writing during the Muslim revanche which followed the Mongol defeat at ʿAin
indigenous Christian communities of the region under Muslim rule. Bar Hebraeus
Jalut in 1260, on the cusp of the catastrophic decline in the fortunes of Christianity
ʿAbdishoʿ bar Brikha of Nisibis were the last great representatives of a Syriac literary
in the Middle East in the 14th century. Bar Hebraeus and his Nestorian counterpart
tradition that spanned a millennium, and it is not without reason that William
Wright ended his influential study of Syriac literature with these two men. Although
Syriac literature continued to be cultivated, albeit on a reduced scale, during the 14th
and subsequent centuries, its glory had departed.
The aim of this book is to make the contents of the Ecclesiastical Chronicle of Bar
Hebraeus accessible to a wide circle of readers. The Ecclesiastical Chronicle has been
translated into Arabic, and became widely available to European and American
scholars in the Latin translation made by Abbeloos and Lamy between 1872 and
1877. Although its value as a historical source was almost immediately recognised by
Western historians, only scattered sections have been translated into English. This
may not have mattered too much half a century ago, when nearly all scholars read
Latin fluently, but Classics is no longer taught in most European and American
schools, and fewer and fewer scholars are comfortable reading Latin. As interest in
the Byzantine Empire, Eastern Christianity and Islam continues to grow, so does
the need for an English translation of the whole of this key text. I hope to meet this
need in this book.
I have based my translation on the Syriac text of the Ecclesiastical Chronicle
published by Abbeloos and Lamy. This text, with its accompanying Latin
translation, has been the standard text for nearly a century and a half. Several Syriac
vii
viii BAR HEBRAEUS, ECCLESIASTICAL CHRONICLE
manuscripts of the Ecclesiastical Chronicle exist, and I understand that a critical edition
of the text is being planned. Such an edition, especially if it is accompanied by an
analysis of the sources used by Bar Hebraeus and his indebtedness to them, and by a
detailed commentary which sets his narrative in its proper historical context, will be
welcomed gratefully by all scholars in the field. All the same, any corrections
necessary to the established text are unlikely to undermine the integrity of the
present translation to a significant degree. A collation of the different manuscript
readings may well produce hundreds of slight variations from the classic text of
Abbeloos and Lamy, particularly as far as the spelling of proper names is concerned,
but few if any of these variations will affect the meaning of the text. Given the
uncertainty of funding for such projects, it may well be several years before a critical
edition becomes available. I have therefore decided to publish my translation now,
rather than waiting for its appearance. If necessary, the translation can easily be
corrected and reissued at a later date.
The two Eastern Churches which are the subject of the Ecclesiastical Chronicle
have for most of their history been known as the Jacobite and Nestorian Churches.
Some modern scholars are uncomfortable with these names, arguing that they carry
the stigma of heresy. The Jacobite Church was named after its energetic 6th-century
spokesman Yaʿqob Baradaeus (†578), associated by his enemies with the
monophysite heresy, while the Nestorian Church was named after the patriarch
Nestorius of Constantinople (428–31), condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431
for the dyophysite heresy that bears his name. Partly as a result of such concerns,
the Jacobite Church is now more often known as the Syrian Orthodox, Syriac
Orthodox or West Syriac Church, while the Nestorian Church is known as the
Church of the East or East Syriac Church.
Such concerns are understandable, as recent scholarly research indicates that
the views of both Churches were caricatured by their opponents, and that they both
held orthodox christological positions. 1 All the same, it should also be recognised
that for most of their history the Syrian Orthodox Church and the Church of the
East themselves accepted the labels ‘Jacobite’ and ‘Nestorian’. These labels are used
by Bar Hebraeus throughout his ecclesiastical history. The term ‘Jacobite’ occurs 30
times in the Ecclesiastical Chronicle, while the word ‘Nestorian’ or its derivative
‘Nestorianism’ occurs 90 times. On occasion these labels are used disparagingly, but
in the vast majority of cases they serve merely as convenient descriptive terms. I
have followed the pragmatic approach of Bar Hebraeus throughout this book,
mainly for convenience but partly also in service to historical truth. Dropping the
names ‘Jacobite’ and ‘Nestorian’ in favour of their preferred modern equivalents
risks taking sensitivity too far, by reading back into previous centuries attitudes
which did not then exist. For most of its history the Nestorian Church championed
the memory of the martyred Nestorius, unjustly (in its eyes) victimised by the
1 Brock, ‘The “Nestorian Church”: A Lamentable Misnomer’, BJRL, 78, 3 (1996), 23–
35.
INTRODUCTION ix
Greeks. Similarly, the Jacobite Church venerated the memory of the patriarch
Dioscorus I of Alexandria (444–51), the controversial successor of Cyril of
Alexandria (412–44). Pretending that they did not results in a sanitised, and
therefore false, reading of history.
THE CAREER OF BAR HEBRAEUS

Bar Hebraeus was born near Melitene (modern Malatya in Turkey) in 1226, and died
at Maragha in Persia in 1286. According to the inscription on his tomb in the
Jacobite monastery of Mar Mattai near Mosul, his baptismal name was Yohannan,
and he was also named Abuʾlfaraj. His father was a physician of Melitene named
Ahron. Ahron is the Syriac form of the Jewish name Aaron, and until recently it was
Christianity, and that his Syriac nickname Bar ʿEbraya meant ‘son of the Hebrew’. 2
widely assumed that Ahron was a Jew, that Bar Hebraeus was a convert to
from birth. The nickname Bar ʿEbraya is now thought to refer to the Christian
It now seems far more likely that Bar Hebraeus and his father were both Christians
village of ʿEbra in the district of Gubos near Melitene, probably where Bar
Hebraeus was born, and means ‘son of the man from ʿEbra’. 3 ʿEbra, a qastra or
fortified village, is mentioned twice in the Ecclesiastical Chronicle, and also features in
other Syriac sources.
Gregory II Abuʾlfaraj bar Ahron has for several centuries been known to
ʿEbraya. This name has been hallowed by long usage. Most readers in the English-
Western scholars by the name Bar Hebraeus, the latinised form of the name Bar
speaking world who have made the acquaintance of Bar Hebraeus will have first
done so in the pages of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or Runciman’s
History of the Crusades; and so long as these classic histories continue to be read both
for pleasure and instruction, this name will survive. In recent years some writers,
form Bar ʿEbroyo, from the West Syrian pronunciation of Bar ʿEbraya. It is
particularly members of the Syriac-speaking Churches, have preferred to use the
possible that the form Bar ʿEbroyo will eventually supplant Bar Hebraeus, at least in
academic circles, but that time has not come yet; and as most readers of an English
translation of the Ecclesiastical Chronicle will be more familiar with the traditional
form, I have thought it better to retain it.
While still a young man, Bar Hebraeus studied medicine and other branches of
knowledge at Antioch and Tripoli, and a thirst for knowledge remained with him
until his death. In 1246 he was consecrated bishop of his native district of Gubos by
the Jacobite patriarch Ignatius III David (1222–52), taking the name Gregory, and in
the following year was transferred to the nearby diocese of Laqabin. 4 During the
power struggle that followed the death of Ignatius III David, he supported the
2Duval, La littérature syriaque, 409; Wright, A Short History of Syriac Literature, 265–66.
3Fathi-Chelhod, ‘L’origine de nom Bar ‘Ebroyo: une vieille histoire d’homonyms’,
Hugoye, 4, 1 (2001), 7–43.
4 Bar Hebraeus, Ecclesiastical Chronicle, i. 669 and 685.
x BAR HEBRAEUS, ECCLESIASTICAL CHRONICLE
patriarch Dionysius ‘Angur (1252–61) against his rival Yohannan XII bar Maʿdani
(1252–63), and was transferred by Dionysius in 1253 to the important diocese of
Aleppo. 5 He was shortly afterwards deposed by Ignatius IV Saliba (1253–58), the
‘maphrian’ or head of the Eastern branch of the Jacobite Church. Ignatius IV Saliba
sided with the patriarch Yohannan bar Maʿdani, and took refuge with Dionysius in
the monastery of Mar Barsawma near Melitene; but in 1258 Dionysius gained the
upper hand, and Bar Hebraeus was restored to his diocese. 6 In 1260, when Aleppo
fell to the Mongols, he interceded with the Mongol commander for the lives of the
city’s Christians. After the death of Yohannan XII bar Maʿdani in 1263, Bar
Hebraeus backed the candidacy of the patriarch Ignatius IV Ishoʿ (1264–82) against
his rival Theodore of Kuphlida, and was instrumental in securing his election and
confirmation. The devious part he played in these intrigues is described in detail in
the Ecclesiastical Chronicle. 7 Bar Hebraeus had earlier been chosen as maphrian by
Yohannan XII bar Maʿdani, with the consent of the Eastern bishops, and Ignatius
immediately confirmed this appointment. 8 Bar Hebraeus was consecrated by the
newly-appointed patriarch on Sunday 16 January 1264 in the Jacobite church of the
Mother of God in Sis, in the presence of the Armenian king Hayton I (1226–70)
and several Armenian notables and bishops. 9
Bar Hebraeus was maphrian for 22 years, from 1264 until his death in 1286.
Compared with the excitements of the Mongol conquest of Mesopotamia and Syria
in 1259 and 1260, his term of office was relatively peaceful. He himself contrasted
the peaceful conditions in northern Iraq and Persia at this period with the ruinous
state of the Jacobite congregations in the West. 10 The account of his maphrianate in
the Ecclesiastical Chronicle, written partly by Bar Hebraeus himself and partly by his
younger brother Barsawma, suggests that he performed his duties conscientiously
and, on the whole, honestly. For most of his maphrianate he had merely to
discharge the normal duties of a church leader. He is known to have consecrated
twelve bishops between 1265 and 1285, all but one of them for various Eastern
dioceses under his jurisdiction (Adarbaigan, Balad, Beth Ramman, Beth Nuhadra,
Baghdad, Gazarta, Nineveh and Tabriz). 11 He also built at least three ‘monasteries’,
more probably large churches, during his term of office, for the Jacobite
communities of Bartallah, Tabriz and Maragha. The slight element of the miraculous
contained in the account of the construction of the monastery of Mar Yohannan bar
Naggare in Bartallah does not unduly strain the reader’s credulity. 12
5 Ibid., i. 721.
6 Ibid., i. 721 and 727.
7 Ibid., i. 747–49.
8 Ibid., i. 749.
9 Ibid., i. 749–51 and ii. 431–33.
10 Ibid., ii. 455–59.
11 Ibid., ii. 433–39, 443–47, 461 and 465.
12 Ibid., ii. 461–65.
INTRODUCTION xi
The most troublesome matter Bar Hebraeus had to deal with during his
maphrianate was the controversial succession of the patriarch Philoxenus Nemrud
(1283–92), the nephew of the influential priests Yaʿqob and Shemʿon of Qalʿah
Rumaita. 13 An unsuccessful attempt had been made a few years earlier to consecrate
Philoxenus metropolitan of Melitene while he was still a young boy. 14 In 1273,
under pressure from Yaʿqob and Shemʿon, Bar Hebraeus was forced to consecrate
Nemrud metropolitan of Melitene. 15 Ten years later, shortly after the death of his
uncle Ignatius IV Ishoʿ in the monastery of Mar Barsawma on 2 February 1283,
Philoxenus was elected patriarch. The consecration was performed by three of his
suffragan bishops, whose dioceses had been ravaged and who were dependent upon
their metropolitan for a living. The election was illegitimate, as the Easterners had
not been consulted, but Philoxenus and his supporters immediately sent a
messenger to inform the Mongol il-khan Abagha, who recognised the appointment.
No doubt an appropriate bribe was paid. Armed with the support of the civil
authorities, Philoxenus had little trouble in crushing opposition from a rival bishop,
Yaʿqob of Caesarea, and in securing the acquiescence of the Western bishops in his
elevation. 16 Bar Hebraeus, on behalf of the Easterners, initially refused to recognize
his election, but eventually buckled under pressure and made his submission. All the
same, he had the last word. In a dignified letter, part of which is quoted in the
Ecclesiastical Chronicle, he disclaimed any personal ambition of his own, claimed that
he was merely upholding the canons, and scolded the patriarch for his ‘disgraceful
and reprehensible’ behaviour. 17 Philoxenus does not seem to have held a grudge on
this account. After the death of Bar Hebraeus in 1286 he welcomed the candidacy
of his old friend Barsawma, the late maphrian’s younger brother, and consecrated
him maphrian in 1288. 18
One of the more pleasing features of Bar Hebraeus’s maphrianate was his
friendship with the Nestorian patriarch Yahballaha III (1281–1317). Yahballaha was
an Ongut by birth, and was known both by contemporaries and by later generations
of Nestorian Christians as ‘Yahballaha the Turk’. Recognising that the prosperity
which the Eastern Churches were presently enjoying under Mongol protection was
precarious, he had little patience with conservatives in his own Church who
continued to indulge their traditional dislike of the Jacobites, and believed that
Latin, Armenian, Greek, Jacobite and Nestorian Christians must overcome their
mutual jealousies and work together. From the earliest days of his patriarchate he
sought to conciliate the Jacobites, and Bar Hebraeus, a man of equal flexibility,
responded readily to his overtures. Bar Hebraeus might call the Nestorians ‘children
13 Takahashi, ‘Simeon of Qal’a Rumaita, Patriarch Philoxenos Nemrod and Bar

‘Ebroyo’, Hugoye, 4:1 (2001), 45–91.
14 Bar Hebraeus, Ecclesiastical Chronicle, i. 761.
15 Ibid., i. 769–71.
16 Ibid., i. 777–82.
17 Ibid., ii. 455–59.
18 Ibid., ii. 489–91.
xii BAR HEBRAEUS, ECCLESIASTICAL CHRONICLE
of the ancient Chaldeans’, implying that they were no better than pagan sorcerers, or
pretend that their slightly old-fashioned Syriac dialect was incomprehensible to a
Jacobite, but he did so affectionately. Like Yahballaha, he believed that Christians
had better things to do than fight one another. These two remarkable men liked and
respected one another, and Yahballaha’s generosity towards the Jacobites, which
contrasted sharply with the selfishness of some of his predecessors, was gratefully
acknowledged in the Ecclesiastical Chronicle. 19
Bar Hebraeus, who had been seriously ill for some months, died on 30 July
1286 during a visit to Maragha. His death was described by Barsawma in one of the
more moving passages in the Ecclesiastical Chronicle. Barsawma, who despite his
modest denials was at least as good a prose stylist as his elder brother, concluded his
description with a fine rhetorical stroke:
Then he went out like a candle; or rather, not like a candle, but like a glorious and
brilliant beacon, and a great pillar of the small and feeble Jacobite nation. 20
The Nestorian patriarch Yahballaha III happened to be in Maragha at the time. As
Maragha had a relatively small Jacobite community, he took charge of the funeral
arrangements himself. He asked the city’s Christians to close their shops as a sign of
respect, and assembled around 200 Nestorians, Greeks and Armenians at the funeral
service. To ensure that his old friend was sent off in style, he also instructed several
of his own bishops to attend his obsequies. It was a courtesy that none of his
predecessors had extended to the head of a rival Church. 21
THE LITERARY ACHIEVEMENT OF BAR HEBRAEUS
has been aptly compared to his contemporary ʿAbdishoʿ bar Brikha (†1318), the
Bar Hebraeus cultivated nearly every branch of knowledge in vogue in his time, and
Nestorian metropolitan of Nisibis and Armenia. Both men wrote widely, and were
the last important representatives respectively of the West and East Syriac literary
traditions before their eclipse in the 14th century during the disorders that attended
the decay of the Mongol Empire. 22 Bar Hebraeus was determined both to invigorate
the West Syrian literary tradition, while also making available to the Eastern
Christians part of the learning of the Muslims. He is known to have written at least
31 books, whose names are mentioned in a famous list in the continuation of the
Ecclesiastical Chronicle by his brother Barsawma. 23 They include works on philosophy,
medicine and other natural sciences, grammar, theology, biblical exegesis, sacred and
profane history and other miscellaneous topics.
19 Ibid., ii. 453.

20 Ibid., ii. 473.
21 Ibid., ii. 473–75.
22 Wright, A Short History of Syriac Literature, 1.
23 Bar Hebraeus, Ecclesiastical Chronicle, ii. 475–81.
INTRODUCTION xiii
Encyclopaedic and philosophical works

Bar Hebraeus wrote a large encyclopedia in three parts, the Book of the Cream of
Knowledge (ktaba d’hewath hekhmtha), which summarised almost all the traditional
branches of human knowledge. The structure and contents of the Cream of Knowledge
derive ultimately from Aristotle, through Arabic translations and commentaries. The
first part reproduces Aristotle’s thoughts on philosophy, rhetoric and poetry. The
second part contains eight Aristotelian treatises on the various branches of physics.
The third part is devoted to metaphysics, theology, ethics, economics and politics. 24
Bar Hebraeus may have thought that the Cream of Knowledge was too long for most
readers, as his Book of the Commerce of Commerces (ktaba d’tgrath tgratha), covers almost
the same ground, but more briefly. 25 His Book of the Pupils of the Eyes (ktaba
d’babhatha) is devoted to the art of logic. It contains an introduction explaining the
utility of logic and seven chapters that recapitulate the major works of Aristotle. 26
The Book of the Speech of Wisdom (ktaba d’swad sophia) is a compendium of dialectics,
physics, and metaphysics or theology. 27 Bar Hebraeus also translated Ibn Sina’s Kitab
al-isharat waʾt-tanbihat into Syriac, under the title The Book of Indications and
Prognostications (ktaba d’remze wa mʿiranwatha), and another work of the same class,
ʿOmar al-Abhari (†1262). 28

entitled the Book of the Cream of Secrets (zubdat al-asrar), by Athir al-Din Mufaddal ibn
Medical and mathematical works

Bar Hebraeus had such a high reputation as a physician that in 1263, while still
bishop of Aleppo, he was consulted by the Mongol khan Mongke. He wrote several
books on medicine. His lengthy Book of Dioscorides (ktaba d’Diosqoridis) was a Syriac
translation of the classic Greek pharmacopeia De materia medica by the first-century
Roman physician Pedianus Dioscorides of Anazarbus, which described the
properties and medical uses of hundreds of herbs. He also wrote an abridgement of
this work, the Syriac name of which was not recorded by Barsawma. 29 He also wrote
a commentary on the Aphorisms of Hippocrates in Arabic, and on the Quaestiones
Medicae of the celebrated 9th-century Nestorian doctor Hunain ibn Ishaq in Syriac,
together with an abridged Syriac translation. He is also said to have written
commentaries in Arabic on Galen’s treatises De Elementis and De Temperamentis. He
made an abridged version in Arabic of al-Ghafiki’s ‘Book of Simples’, and left an
unfinished Syriac translation of the Canon of Ibn Sina. A large medical treatise of his
own composition in Syriac is mentioned, but no special title is given.
24 Duval, La littérature syriaque, 257; Wright, A Short History of Syriac Literature, 269–70.
25 Duval, Ibid., 257; Wright, Ibid., 270.
28 Wright, Ibid., 270–71.
29 Duval, La littérature syriaque, 274; Wright, Ibid., 272.
xiv BAR HEBRAEUS, ECCLESIASTICAL CHRONICLE
Other scientific works

Bar Hebraeus was also interested in the study of mathematics. In 1268 he lectured
on Euclid in the new convent at Maragha, and in 1272 on Ptolemy. He also drew up
an almanac for the use of beginners. Like most of his contemporaries, Bar Hebraeus
believed in oneiromancy and astrology, but probably not in alchemy. One of his
earliest works, written while he was a young man, was his Book of the Interpretation of
Dreams (ktaba d’pushshaq helme). 30 Long before Freud claimed to find psychological
significance in the patterns revealed by the unconscious mind during sleep, Greeks
and Romans knew that dreams could be revelatory. Later Christians agreed,
remembering the famous dream sent to Pontius Pilate’s wife (Matthew 27:19),
declaring Jesus to be innocent. Bar Hebraeus also believed in divination through the
stars, and in 1279 wrote a treatise containing a characteristic mix of astronomy and
astrology, the Book of the Ascent of the Mind (ktaba d’sulaqa hawnanaya). 31 Both books
had practical applications. Like alchemists, who promised to turn base metal into
gold, astrologers and interpreters of dreams could make a comfortable living by
predicting the future for credulous patrons or by reassuring them that the disturbing
content of their nightly fantasies was significant. Several examples of astrological
divination are given in the Ecclesiastical Chronicle, and Bar Hebraeus predicted the year
of his own death from an inauspicious conjunction of the planets Saturn and
Jupiter. 32 He is not known to have written any works on chemistry or alchemy, but
the Ecclesiastical Chronicle contains the cautionary tale of the illegitimate Jacobite
patriarch Isaac (755–56), a charlatan who claimed to be able to manufacture gold
from lead. Isaac wormed his way into the confidence of the caliph al-Mansur by
promising to make him rich, but was later executed for failing to deliver the goods. 33
Theological works
In theology Bar Hebraeus was a miaphysite, holding, against the Chalcedonians and
the Nestorians, that Christ was incarnate out of one nature. In the 6th century the
disputes between miaphysites, Chalcedonians and dyophysites had torn the Church
in the Eastern Roman Empire apart, but by the 13th century the Jacobite, Greek
Orthodox and Nestorian Churches were prepared to acknowledge each other’s
existence. Relations between the Jacobite and Nestorian Churches in northern Iraq
and Persia, both of which had lived under Muslim rule since the 7th century, were as
good as they had ever been, though the leaders of both Churches tended to stand
on their dignity if they thought that their prerogatives were being threatened. Bar
Hebraeus got on well with his Nestorian counterparts, the patriarchs Denha I
(1265–81) and Yahballaha III (1281–1318), and his religious writings focus far more
on the basic beliefs that united all Christians than on the theological positions that

33 Ibid., i. 315–17.
INTRODUCTION xv
divided them. His Book of the Lamp of the Sanctuary (ktaba d’mnarath qudshe) was a
treatise on the basic principles on which the Church was established. The Book of
Rays (ktaba d’zalge) was an abridgement of the Book of the Lamp. 34
Bar Hebraeus also provided practical moral advice in his Book of the Dove (ktaba
d’yawna), a guide for solitaries living without access to a spiritual director, and in his
Book of Ethics (ktaba d’ithiqon), a work ‘on the regulation of morals and customs and
the arts of politics and economics’ completed in 1279 at Maragha. Like the
Florentine administrator Niccolò Machiavelli two centuries later, Bar Hebraeus
thought it useful to share with others the experience he had gained of the ways of
the world in his official capacity. He also wrote a Commentary on Hierotheus (ktaba
d’pushaqa d’Irateos), in which he excerpted, arranged and commented upon selections
from the work On the Hidden Mysteries of the House of God, a pseudonymous 6th-
century treatise possibly written by Stephen bar Sudaili. This work was little more
than a competent abridgement of the detailed commentary made in the 9th century
by the Jacobite patriarch Theodosius (887‒96). 35
Canon Law
Bar Hebraeus also codified the juridical texts of the Jacobites, in a collection called
the Book of Directions (ktaba d’huddaye), ‘which contains canons and laws covering all
(kunnasha d’kanone) of the Nestorian metropolitan ʿAbdishoʿ bar Brikha of Nisibis,

human behaviour’. This book has been aptly compared with the Nomocanon
which assembled a similar body of canon law, both secular and ecclesiastical, for use
by the Church of the East. 36
Biblical exegesis
In the opinion of many scholars, the most important work of Bar Hebraeus is his
Book of the Storehouse of Secrets (ktaba d’awsar raze), a doctrinal and critical commentary
on the entire Bible. Bar Hebraeus based his commentary on the Syriac Peshitta text,
but was careful to compare it with other Syriac versions and with Hebrew, Greek,
Armenian and Coptic versions, and frequently privileged their readings over those
of the Peshitta. His work was of prime importance for the recovery of these
versions, and particularly for the recovery of the Hexapla of Origen, as he
sometimes adopted readings from the so-called ‘Syro-Hexapla’, a Syriac translation
of this work by Paul of Tella. His exegesis and doctrinal observations were mainly
taken from the Greek Fathers and from earlier Jacobite theologians. No complete
edition of the work has yet been issued, but many individual books have been
published at different times. 37
34 Duval, La littérature syriaque, 245; Wright, A Short History of Syriac Literature, 274–76.
35 Duval, Ibid., 232–33 and 357–58; Wright, Ibid., 276–77.
36 Duval, Ibid., 167–68; Wright, Ibid., 277–78.
37 Duval, Ibid., 69–70; Wright, Ibid., 274.
xvi BAR HEBRAEUS, ECCLESIASTICAL CHRONICLE
Grammatical works
Bar Hebraeus wrote three valuable works of grammar, in which he made use of the
work of previous grammarians, especially the Jacobite scholar Yaʿqob of Edessa, to
provide a convincing sketch of the Syriac language, with many valuable observations
as to dialectic differences. His larger grammar is entitled the Book of Splendours (ktaba
d’semhe). He also wrote a smaller metrical grammar, the Book of Grammar (ktaba
d’grammatiqi), and an even smaller grammar, the Book of the Spark (ktaba d’belsusitha),
which was left unfinished at his death. The Book of Splendours and the Book of the
Spark were edited in 1872 by Martin (Oeuvres grammaticales de Aboul Faradj dit
Barhebraeus (2 vols, Paris). 38
Miscellaneous works
Bar Hebraeus also wrote several poems, at least one of which (a poem on the
Socratic theme of the superiority of philosophy to law) was held in some esteem by
his contemporaries. 39 In his later years, he made a collection of entertaining and
sometimes obscene stories in Syriac, entitled the Book of Laughable Stories (ktaba
d’tunnaye maghkane). 40 This book has been translated into English by E. A. Wallis
Budge, under the title The Laughable Stories of Bar Hebraeus. Finally, a letter of Bar
Hebraeus to the patriarch Denha I (1265–81) has survived, in which the Jacobite
maphrian addresses his Nestorian counterpart with extravagant compliments that
surely surpass the dictates of formal politeness. 41
THE C H RONICLE OF BAR HEBRAEUS

For historians, the most important of the surviving works of Bar Hebraeus is his
Chronicle (maktbanuth zabne), a historical work written in Syriac. The Chronicle, as has
been already mentioned, is organised into two parts, a secular history (the Syriac
Chronicle) and an ecclesiastical history (the Ecclesiastical Chronicle). The Syriac Chronicle
focuses on events in the Jacobite areas of settlement and only occasionally mentions
Nestorian bishops and notables. Bar Hebraeus stated that his intention was to bring
the Chronicle of Michael the Syrian down to his own day by covering the eight
decades that had elapsed since its publication, and up to the end of the 12th century
his work is little more than an abridgement of Michael’s own text. The Syriac
Chronicle only acquires an independent value as a historical source when it reaches
the 13th century. An unsatisfactory edition of the Syriac Chronicle, with a Latin
translation, was published in Leipzig in 1789 by P. I. Bruns and G. G. Kirsch. This
was replaced in 1890 by a much better edition by the Lazarist scholar Paul Bedjan
(Gregorii Barhebraei Chronicon Syriacum). A clotted English translation was published in

41 Chabot, J. B, ‘Une lettre de Bar Hébréus au catholicos Denha Ier’, JA, 11 (1898), 75–
129.
INTRODUCTION xvii
1932 by E. A. Wallis Budge (The Chronography of Gregory Abuʾl Faraj), which has not
yet been replaced by anything better.
The Ecclesiastical Chronicle, the subject of this book, is divided into two sections.
The first section is set mainly in the territories of the Byzantine Empire, and covers
the early history of the Church in the Eastern Roman Empire and the subsequent
history of the Jacobite patriarchs of Antioch, who governed the western half of the
Jacobite Church. The second section, moving beyond the borders of the Byzantine
Empire into Iraq and Persia, covers the history of the Jacobite maphrians, who were
responsible for the eastern half of the Jacobite Church, and the patriarchs of the
Church of the East, who received almost as much space as their Jacobite rivals. In
this section, Bar Hebraeus was far less dependant on Michael the Syrian. Most of his
information on the Jacobite maphrians probably came from the records of the
maphrian’s cell and from local knowledge and tradition, and for his biographies of
the Nestorian patriarchs he used the 12th-century Arabic history of Mari ibn
Sulaiman. His abridgements were reasonably competent, but seldom added anything
of value to the sources on which they were based.
Like the Syriac Chronicle, the principal value of the Ecclesiastical Chronicle for the
modern historian lies in its detailed coverage of events in the 13th century, for
which Bar Hebraeus was often an eye witness, and in its slightly fuller treatment of
events in the East. As a maphrian himself, Bar Hebraeus was particularly interested
in the affairs of the Easterners, and occasionally supplies information on the
Jacobite communities of Iraq and Persia that was overlooked or suppressed by
Michael. He provides evidence, for example, that the ‘rebel’ maphrian Dionysius bar
Maseah (1189–90), who was at loggerheads with Michael the Syrian for most of his
reign and who is given a predictably poor press in the Chronicle, enjoyed considerably
more support in the East than Michael would have us believe. From a purely literary
point of view, the Ecclesiastical Chronicle benefits from its tight structure, and is far
more entertaining than the turgid chronicles of Mari and Michael the Syrian, which
have rarely been read for pleasure. The edition of Jean Baptiste Abbeloos and
Thomas Joseph Lamy (Bar Hebraeus Chronicon Ecclesiasticum), published in three parts
between 1872 and 1877, contains a Latin translation alongside the original Syriac
text. 42 Remarkably, the Ecclesiastical Chronicle has remained without an English
translation until now.
Both the Syriac Chronicle and the Ecclesiastical Chronicle of Bar Hebraeus have
been brought down almost to the end of the 15th century by one or more
anonymous hands. There are three separate continuations to the Syriac Chronicle,
appended to a manuscript preserved in the Bodleian Library. 43 The first, The
Expedition of the Huns, Persians and Mongols in the Province of Diyarbakir, covers the years
1394 to 1402. The second, The Ravages of Timur Khan in Tur ʿAbdin, covers roughly
42 Wright, A Short History of Syriac Literature, 278–81; Duval, La littérature syriaque, 198–
200.
43 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Huntingdon 52.
xviii BAR HEBRAEUS, ECCLESIASTICAL CHRONICLE
the same period, from 1395 to 1403, and is an important testimony to the
bloodstained career of Timur Leng. The third, and by far the longest, continuation is
a narrative covering the century from 1394 to 1493. The author of these
continuations cannot be identified with certainty, but a likely candidate is the priest
Addai of Beth Sbirina, who made an eventful pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1492 and
1493 which is described in considerable detail in the third continuation. Bruns and
Kirsch, who produced the first edition of the Syriac Chronicle in 1789, also edited
these continuations. They are also included in an Appendix to The Chronography of
Gregory Abuʾl Faraj, the English translation of the Syriac Chronicle made by Wallis
Budge in 1932.
The second part of the Ecclesiastical Chronicle, a history of the Jacobite
maphrians and the Nestorian patriarchs up to 1285, was continued to 1288 by the
maphrian Gregory III Barsawma (1288–1308), the brother of Bar Hebraeus, in
service to his brother’s memory. Barsawma was an accomplished prose stylist, and
his brief continuation contains some memorable vignettes, including a moving
account of the death of Bar Hebraeus in 1286. As with the Syriac Chronicle, an
anonymous continuator brought both parts of the Ecclesiastical Chronicle down to
final decades of the 15th century. His narrative breaks off in each case in 1496, with
abdication of the Tur ʿAbdin patriarch Ignatius Masʿud (1492–94). Although the
the triumph of the Mardin patriarchate Ignatius Nuh (1494–1509) in the wake of the
narrative breaks off abruptly, the decision to end in 1496 was probably deliberate, as
this year marked the (temporary) reunion of the Jacobite Church after two centuries
of schism. There are good grounds for believing that the priest Addai of Beth
Sbirina, the likely author of the third continuation to the Syriac Chronicle, was
responsible for both continuations to the Ecclesiastical Chronicle.
Unlike Bar Hebraeus, the anonymous continuator was not interested in
providing biographies of the Nestorian patriarchs alongside those of their Jacobite
counterparts, and his narrative sheds little light on two exceedingly obscure
centuries in the history of the Church of the East. He mentioned the Nestorian
patriarch Denha II (1337–82), who sat in the village of Karamlish in the Mosul
district, but only because he became involved in a Jacobite power struggle in the
1360s. He wrote artlessly, but with occasional memorable passages. Both
continuations are included in Abbeloos and Lamy’s 1875 edition of the Ecclesiastical
Chronicle. If, as seems likely, they were written by the priest Addai of Beth Sbirina, he
performed an important service to historians. For all their literary shortcomings, his
continuations are almost the only narrative sources for two important centuries in
the history of the Jacobite Church, and are of considerable historical value. 44
44 Wright, A Short History of Syriac Literature, 278–79; Duval, La littérature syriaque, 199–
200.
INTRODUCTION xix
THE E CCLESIASTICAL C H RONICLE AS LITERATURE

More than a century ago, the English scholar William Wright, in his introduction to
his classic article ‘Syriac Literature’, published in Volume 22 of the 1887 edition of
the Encyclopaedia Britannica, damned with faint praise the literature to which he had
devoted many years of his life:
We must own—and it is as well to make the confession at the outset—that the
literature of Syria is, on the whole, not an attractive one. As Renan said long ago,
the characteristic of the Syrians is a certain mediocrity. They shone neither in war,
nor in the arts, nor in science. They altogether lacked the poetic fire of the
older—we purposely emphasize the word—the older Hebrews and of the Arabs.
But they were apt enough as pupils of the Greeks; they assimilated and
reproduced, adding little or nothing of their own. There was no al-Farabi, no Ibn
Sina, no Ibn Rushd, in the cloisters of Edessa, Qenneshre or Nisibis. Yet to the
Syrians belongs the merit of having passed on the lore of ancient Greece to the
Arabs, and therefore, as a matter of history, their literature must always possess a
certain amount of interest in the eyes of the modern student. The Syrian Church
never produced men who rose to the level of a Eusebius, a Gregory Nazianzen, a
Basil, and a Chrystostom; but we may still be thankful to the plodding diligence
which has preserved for us in fairly good translations many valuable works of
Greek fathers which would otherwise have been lost. And even Syria’s humble
chroniclers, such as John of Ephesus, Dionysius of Tel Mahre and Bar Hebraeus,
deserve their meed of praise, seeing that, without their guidance, we should have
known far less than we now know about the history of two important branches
of the Eastern Church, besides losing much interesting information as to the
political events of the periods with which their annals are occupied. 45
Such robust value judgements are out of fashion nowadays, but most scholars
would probably allow that there is a good deal of truth in Wright’s assessment.
Certainly, the structure of the Ecclesiastical Chronicle is illogical, even on Bar
Hebraeus’s own showing. His basic approach was perfectly reasonable. Unlike
Michael the Syrian, who concentrated on the history of the Jacobite Church in the
West, focusing on its patriarchs and mentioning Eastern affairs only when they
impinged upon Western politics, Bar Hebraeus wanted to exploit his perspective as
maphrian to write a history of the Jacobite Church both in the West and in the East,
giving equal weight to both its halves. There were two ways in which he could do
this. He could either start his narrative in the 1st century, presenting the Jacobite
Church as the legitimate continuation of the Chalcedonian patriarchate of Antioch
in the Roman Empire and the Nestorian Church in Sassanian Persia; or he could
omit the early history and start in the 6th century, when the Jacobites separated
from the Chalcedonian and Nestorian Churches. Hardly surprisingly, he chose the
first approach. The Jacobites believed that the Chalcedonian patriarchs of Antioch
45 Wright, Ibid., 1–3.

xx BAR HEBRAEUS, ECCLESIASTICAL CHRONICLE
had forfeited their legitimacy by accepting the definition of faith agreed at the
Council of Chalcedon in 451, and that their Church had preserved the orthodox
faith and the legitimate patriarchal succession of Antioch. They also believed that
the Church of the East had abandoned its orthodoxy at the end of the 5th century
and adopted Nestorianism, and that the Jacobite metropolitans in Persia had
preserved the legitimate succession of the catholici of the East.
Given this approach, Bar Hebraeus could reasonably have ignored the history
of the Chalcedonian and Nestorian Churches after the 6th century. In Section One
of the Ecclesiastical Chronicle he does just that, tracing the history of the Greek
patriarchs of Antioch up to the 6th century and thereafter listing only the Jacobite
patriarchs. In this respect he replicated the approach of his main source, Michael the
Syrian. He was also making a virtue out of necessity. The Arab Conquest had put an
end to most contacts between the Jacobite and Greek Orthodox Churches, and
neither Michael the Syrian nor Bar Hebraeus possessed the information necessary to
continue their history of the Chalcedonian patriarchate of Antioch, even had they
wanted to do so. Michael the Syrian quotes an important passage from the preface
to the 9th-century Chronicle of Dionysius I of Tel Mahre, which emphasises the
scantiness of the information at the disposal of Jacobite historians after the Arab
Conquest:
Up to now I have been able to discover in our own books the names of the
archbishops who occupied the four traditional thrones (Rome, Alexandria,
Constantinople and Antioch), back to the earliest days and in Greek, the language
of the Romans, even though these men were Chalcedonians after the period of
the Council of Chalcedon. From here on, however, I do not find anywhere in our
Syriac books the names of the Chalcedonian patriarchs who governed at Rome
and Constantinople; and only the names of the Orthodox patriarchs for the two
thrones of Antioch and Alexandria, chosen from among our people and from
among the Egyptians. This seems to have happened for two reasons: firstly,
because our writers had no longer the occasion nor the need to inform
themselves about these Chalcedonians, the enemies and persecutors of the
Orthodox, because Syria and Egypt, where our people and the Egyptians lived,
had been occupied by the Arabs and were now part of their empire; and secondly,
because the Chalcedonians, as we have shown already and will show again, had
become more and more perverted by the heresies that were springing up in their
midst. 46
In Section Two of the Ecclesiastical Chronicle, however, Bar Hebraeus departs from
this approach. He duly gives biographies of all the Jacobite metropolitans of Tagrit
from the 6th century onwards, relating his accounts where appropriate to
developments in the West, but his approach to the Church of the East is very
different from his treatment of the Chalcedonian patriarchate of Antioch. Logically,
46 Michael the Syrian, Chronicle, ii. 486.

INTRODUCTION xxi
he should have given biographies of the catholici of the Church of the East up to
the end of the 5th century, when in Jacobite eyes the Church betrayed its calling by
adopting Nestorianism, and then restricted his narrative to the Jacobite
metropolitans and maphrians, who preserved the orthodox faith in the East in much
the same way as the Jacobite patriarchs preserved it in the West. Instead, he took the
history of both the Jacobite and Nestorian Churches down to the 13th century,
moving backwards and forwards between the Jacobite maphrians and the Nestorian
catholici.
We can plausibly infer his reasons for doing so. His main source for the history
of the Church of the East, Mari ibn Sulaiman, took his narrative down to the 12th
century, and Bar Hebraeus may well have been reluctant to let so much interesting
historical material go to waste. His biographies of the 13th-century Nestorian
patriarchs also show evidence of personal enquiry on his part. He probably got
much of his material directly from the patriarchs Denha I (1265–81) and Yahballaha
III (1281–1317), with both of whom was on good terms, and he may well have
decided to cover the history of the Nestorian catholici down to his own days
because he did not wish to give gratuitous offence.
Bar Hebraeus passed a harsh judgement upon the Nestorian metropolitan
Barsawma of Nisibis (†491), whom he blamed for entrenching the Nestorian heresy
in the Church of the East at the end of the 5th century. Unlike Michael the Syrian,
the main source for his account of Barsawma’s career, he sometimes refers to him
by the contemptuous nickname ‘Bar Sula’, ‘son of the shoe’. 47 All the same, Bar
Hebraeus used far ruder language about the Chalcedonian Church than he did about
the contemporary Church of the East. He seems to have felt that the Jacobite and
Nestorian Churches in the East should present a common front in the face of
growing Muslim oppression, and relations between the two Churches were
noticeably warmer in the second half of the 13th century than they had been in
previous centuries. The Nestorian patriarch Denha I had given practical help to the
Jacobite Church, allowing Jacobite refugees from the Mosul plain to resettle in Erbil,
and his successor Yahballaha III, according to the testimony of Bar Hebraeus’s
brother Barsawma, was ‘well-disposed’ towards the Jacobites. It is therefore easy to
understand why Bar Hebraeus decided to give such extensive coverage to the
Church of the East. No modern historian will regret his decision, as he provides
information not always found in the other surviving histories of the Nestorian
patriarchs. All the same, in structural terms the decision was illogical, and the flow
of the narrative in Section Two suffers accordingly.
Many modern readers might also wish that Bar Hebraeus had omitted the list
of the Jewish high priests which opens the first section of the Ecclesiastical Chronicle.
In purely literary terms, it is, to say the least, an unpromising beginning. Since Bar
Hebraeus started Section Two of the Chronicon Ecclesiaticum with the Apostle
Thomas, he might reasonably have started Section One in the Christian era also,

xxii BAR HEBRAEUS, ECCLESIASTICAL CHRONICLE
either with the Apostle Peter or with Evodius, the first bishop of Antioch. But Bar
Hebraeus was a theologian as well as a historian, and he wanted to demonstrate the
legitimacy of the patriarchate of Antioch by showing that the line of its patriarchs
could be traced back in an unbroken succession to Aaron, the first Jewish high
priest. To be fair, Bar Hebraeus did what he could with the intractable material he
felt bound to use. Michael the Syrian devoted an inordinate amount of space to
events in the Old Testament and the two Books of Macchabees, because one of his
concerns was to correlate the history of the Jews with that of the Greeks and
Romans. Bar Hebraeus wisely abandoned this schema, and confined his own
account strictly to the Jewish priestly succession. It must have taken him some time
and trouble to extract the various references scattered across the first five books of
Michael’s Chronicle, and it is not entirely surprising that, like Michael, he lists several
high priests twice.
One reason, though of course not the only one, why Church leaders like
Michael the Syrian and Bar Hebraeus wrote ecclesiastical history was to settle scores
with their enemies and to portray their own actions in the best possible light. Bar
Hebraeus kept his biographies of the Jacobite patriarchs and Nestorian catholici
within reasonable bounds up to the end of the 12th century, but he described the
history of the Jacobite Church in the 13th century at far greater length, and with a
profusion of detail which can be wearisome even to ecclesiastical historians. He was
evidently concerned to justify his role in the patriarchal elections of the second half
of the century, both as bishop of Aleppo and later as maphrian, against charges of
opportunism. Again, it would be churlish for a historian to complain at this self-
serving generosity, as Bar Hebraeus supplies information lacking in the only other
important Jacobite narrative source for this century, the Chronicle of 1234. From a
literary point of view, however, the focus on 13th-century history seriously
unbalances Bar Hebraeus’s narrative. He might have done better to have written a
separate ecclesiastical history devoted entirely to the 13th century, contenting
himself in the Ecclesiastical Chronicle merely with bringing Michael the Syrian and Mari
up to date with brief biographies of the 13th-century patriarchs and maphrians.
Bar Hebraeus cannot, of course, be blamed for the structural indignities
inflicted upon the text of the Ecclesiastical Chronicle after his death. His first
continuator, the maphrian Gregory III Barsawma (1288–1308), wrote a tendentious
and unbalanced narrative, which he excused by parading his devotion to his
brother’s memory. His contribution to the Ecclesiastical Chronicle was (a) to write
about the maphrianate of Bar Hebraeus at excessive length; and (b) to justify his
own less than heroic record as maphrian. Unlike previous maphrians, who had been
asked merely to confirm the patriarch chosen by the Westerners, Barsawma had to
make an unwelcome choice between the Mardin patriarch Ignatius V bar Wahib
(1294–1333) and the Sis patriarch Ignatius Mikhaʾil I (1293–1312). He initially
recognised Ignatius Mikhaʾil I, who had been consecrated slightly earlier than his
Mardin rival, and then withdrew for five years to Maragha and Tabriz, to escape the
importunities of the offended Ignatius V bar Wahib. Bar Wahib bribed the Muslim
governor of Mardin to recognise his appointment, and then set about the task of
winning over the maphrian, still in seclusion in Maragha. According to his own
account in the Ecclesiastical Chronicle, Barsawma initially rejected the ‘gifts befitting
INTRODUCTION xxiii
the fathers’ he was offered by Bar Wahib’s envoys, and spurned the rescript from
the governor of Mardin. He then changed his mind, claiming that he wished to
prevent a schism between the Westerners and the Easterners, and returned to
Mosul, where he was more accessible to feelers from the West. Ignatius V took the
hint, and his envoys paid Barsawma a second visit. This time the maphrian accepted
their gifts, and in 1299 graciously recognised the validity of the Mardin patriarch’s
consecration. 48
The second continuator, writing at the end of the 15th century, had only the
most vestigial sense of narrative structure and literary propriety. Admittedly, he did
not have an easy job. After the death of the patriarch Philoxenus Nemrud (1283–
Sis, Mardin and Tur ʿAbdin. The tangled interactions of these three antagonistic
92), the Jacobite Church split into three separate patriarchates, based respectively in
factions and their relations with the maphrians of the East are, although not
impossible, certainly difficult to present coherently and attractively. Unfortunately,
the continuator was overwhelmed by the challenges he faced. His narrative is poorly
constructed and extremely hard to follow. The reader has constantly to flick
backwards and forwards between the first and second sections of the Ecclesiastical
Chronicle to make sense of what was going on. Fortunately for the ecclesiastical
historian, the continuations of the Syriac Chronicle supply further details of the history
of the Jacobite Church in the 14th and 15th centuries. A comparison of these two
narratives, eked out by scattered references in manuscript colophons and other
sources, provides enough information for a plausible reconstruction of the
ecclesiastical history of this period, at least as far as the Jacobite Church is
concerned. Had both continuators preserved the original plan of the Ecclesiastical
Chronicle by covering the history of the Church of the East as well, they would have
done much to atone for their other deficiencies; but they both lacked the larger
vision of Bar Hebraeus.
The structural defects of the Ecclesiastical Chronicle are, however, to a large
extent redeemed by its literary quality. Bar Hebraeus lived in a culture where
declamation was still an admired art, and many of the more entertaining passages in
the Ecclesiastical Chronicle are written with an engaging informality that suggests that
they may have been conceived initially for oral delivery. Bar Hebraeus often used
vivid passages of direct speech to create an effect, where a more staid writer would
have omitted them. A typical example of this technique is the way in which he
presented the deliberations of the Muslim elites of Tagrit in 1218, who had just been
given carte blanche by the caliph al-Nasir (1180–1225) to fleece the city’s Christians:
When the decree reached Tagrit, the nobles took counsel among themselves,
saying: ‘If we start plundering them, they will hide all their gold from us. But if we
48 Ibid., i. 781–89 and ii. 487–93.

xxiv BAR HEBRAEUS, ECCLESIASTICAL CHRONICLE
torture them, we will get into a lot of trouble. Our best course of action would be
to cut a deal with them, so that we get at least some of their money.’ 49
Perhaps the finest example of Bar Hebraeus’s skill in characterisation is the angry
speech which he put into the mouth of a Frankish abbot in Crusader Jerusalem,
scandalised at the duplicity of the Jacobite patriarch Ignatius III David (1222–52).
Bar Hebraeus would certainly have met Frankish civil and ecclesiastical officials in
Armenian Cilicia or in Jerusalem, and he caught perfectly the tone of voice of an
exasperated European dealing with wily Orientals:
Then the superior of the learned brothers rounded on the patriarch. ‘Who on
earth do you think you are? You live here, in a city which you neither bought with
your own money nor conquered with your own sword. You came here as our
guest, and we, in obedience to Christ’s command, welcomed you with love and
treated you with honour. You then asked us whether you should commit an
illegal act, and we told you not to. But you boldly went ahead and did it anyway,
treating our advice as though it was worthless. You have insulted us! Tell us now,
without shilly-shallying, what you intend to do and how you intend to set about
it!’ The patriarch shrank from them in terror. His face grew pale and his lips grew
white, and he could not bring out a word. Nor, indeed, did he know how to
answer them. 50
It is permissible, I think, to imagine Bar Hebraeus sitting in the shade of a tree in the
grounds of his beloved monastery in Maragha, surrounded by a circle of admiring
young monks, reading aloud drafts of favourite passages in the Ecclesiastical Chronicle.
It is instructive to compare Bar Hebraeus’s abridgements with the original
material preserved in the texts of Michael the Syrian or Mari ibn Sulaiman.
Stylistically, Bar Hebraeus’s taut biographies are a considerable improvement on
those of his predecessors, not only because they are pithier but also because Bar
Hebraeus sometimes reshaped their material and developed it to great rhetorical
effect. A particularly enjoyable example is his account of the attempt by the caliph
eventual winner, Yohannan bar ʿIsa, was opposed by Yohannan bar Bokhtishoʿ, a
al-Muʿtadid to resolve a deadlocked Nestorian patriarchal election in 900. The
rich, colourful and influential metropolitan of Mosul. Mari’s account of the heated
debate that took place in the presence of the grand eunuch Badr, though it contains
some amusing touches, is excessively long, and poorly constructed:
Then Bar Bokhtishoʿ won the favour of the sultan, who wrote and informed the
caliph of the state of affairs. The caliph owed him a favour for his outstanding
services, and instructed Badr to deal with the matter. As Badr was a trustworthy
man, he delegated the deliberation of this affair to his scribe Malek ibn al-Walid
and to the two sons of his doctor Aslam. The crowd assembled on the seventh
49 Ibid., ii. 391.

50 Ibid., i. 659–61.
INTRODUCTION xxv
Sunday of the hebdomad of the Apostles. Yohannan bar ʿIsa was there,
accompanied by the metropolitans, the bishops and the faithful, and there were
Yohannan bar ʿIsa arrived, he was permitted to enter Badr’s presence with his
also present the men of the faction of Yohannan bar Bokhtishoʿ. When
supporters, who expressed their good wishes for both the caliph and himself.
Badr explained to them what had been done about their cause, and they said: ‘We
they replied: ‘We have given our votes to Yohannan bar ʿIsa, but Bar Bokhtishoʿ
are the servants of this realm’. When he asked them what the dispute was about,
is trying to sow evil and discord.’ They begged for Badr’s help against him.
And so Badr began to rebuke Yohannan bar Bokhtishoʿ for this, saying: ‘You are
a rich man and a nobleman, and ought to keep a careful watch over your religion
rather than see it corrupted. Such conduct would not only be more pleasing to
God, but also to the sultan and myself.’ In response to this accusation, he replied:
‘According to our Christian law, everybody should attend the elections, But my
companions and myself were not present when the votes were cast, and so his
election is void, as it contravenes the canons.’ To this Yohannan’s backers
responded with a long tirade, to the effect that the election had been properly
held. Then Badr pointed out that the metropolitan of Jundishapur, the most
senior metropolitan, had not been present. Yohannan’s backers replied: ‘The
election belongs to the metropolitans, and the bishops perform the consecration.
So long as three bishops are present, the election is legal. It does not matter
whether the metropolitan of Jundishapur is there or not. Besides, we knew that
he had been detained by Bar Bokhtishoʿ.’ Bar Bokhtishoʿ denied this.
Then the nephew of the metropolitan Joseph of Bardaʿa stood up in the middle
of the meeting and related how his uncle had been detained by Bar Bokhtishoʿ,
and how he had taken no food, even though he was oppressed by old age, and
had not touched even the slightest sop; no doubt hoping that this praise of his
uncle might secure his election as patriarch. Then the metropolitans of Merv and
Jundishapur stood up, and a long debate took place. Meanwhile Badr advised Bar
Yohannan. Qasim ibn ʿUbaidallah stepped forward and asked Bar Bokhtishoʿ:
Bokhtishoʿ to cut his speech short, as the crowd was obviously behind
‘What qualities should the patriarch possess?’ He replied: ‘He should be a learned
man.’ Then Malek ibn Walid and David bar Aslam said: ‘But he is more learned
bishop Ishoʿzkha of ʿUkbara shouted: ‘Besides, it would be disgraceful if we got a

than you.’ At this he fell silent, as he recognised the truth of the remark. Then the
patriarch who amuses himself with dogs and monkeys.’ Then he told Badr how
the names were first written down on lots, and how the name of Yohannan had
been drawn. Then Badr said to them: ‘It looks to me as though you will not
willingly obey Bar Bokhtishoʿ.’ They replied: ‘We are the servants of the sultan,
but he should not change our laws to our injury.’ Then he said: ‘What is it that
you do not like about him?’ They said that he was the bastard son of a concubine,
Then Qasim ibn ʿUbaidallah said to them: ‘But did you not entrust him with the
and that such fellows were not usually given charge of prayers and offerings.
throne of Mosul?’ They replied: ‘Ah, but the people of Mosul did not know what
he was like when they elected him. As soon as they knew him better, they realised
xxvi BAR HEBRAEUS, ECCLESIASTICAL CHRONICLE
that they had made a mistake.’ Then Bar Bokhtishoʿ said to Badr: ‘I am forced to
listen to these things only because they are sitting in your presence. If they were
anywhere else, I would soon send them packing.’ ‘But they are the scribes and
doctors of the caliph,’ he said, ‘and your brothers besides. If they are telling the
truth, even some of the caliphs are descended from maidservants, so it is no
reflection on you. But even if they have lied and treated you unjustly, we should
still allow them to apply their own laws.’ 51
Bar Hebraeus took the basic material for his own version of events from Mari, but
shortened and tightened up Mari’s rambling narrative. He also subtly reshaped it,
with the aim of making fun of the Nestorians. In his portrayal, the Nestorians are
incapable of conducting a civilised debate or formulating a rational argument:
The caliph therefore ordered the grand eunuch Badr to interview the disputants
and get to the bottom of the matter. When they arrived Badr said to them, ‘His
Majesty orders you to banish anger and rancour from your midst and tell me the
truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’ Then one of the bishops
replied, saying ‘May the Commander of the Faithful live for ever! It is his to
command, and we are merely his most humble servants. If he decrees that a
certain man shall be advanced, who shall object? But if he leaves the election to
have chosen Yohannan bar ʿIsa to be our catholicus, because we believe he is

us, and allows us to conduct it according to our law, then he should know that we
worthy of the office. As for that metropolitan of Mosul who will stop at nothing
to seize the leadership for himself, we did not choose him, nor will we willingly
accept him.’ Badr turned to Yohannan bar Bokhtishoʿ. ‘What do you say to that?’
Yohannan said, ‘It is our Christian law that all the bishops should meet together
to elect a catholicus. This one was chosen only by those two fellows there, so we
cannot accept him. In any case, he is not up to the job.’ Then the doctor David
bar Dailam rounded on him angrily and said, ‘The election belongs to us, the
people of Baghdad. It is our right to choose whom we wish. The bishops are
merely the icing on the cake.’ After a bitter wrangle Badr tried to persuade them
to accept Yohannan bar Bokhtishoʿ. But his opponents replied: ‘We will never
accept as the head of our Church a man who sports with hunting dogs and
monkeys!’ Badr answered that Yohannan had only adopted this lifestyle when he
was first summoned to court, and was hardly likely to go back to such vanities.
Finally, his adversaries were driven into a corner. ‘We said right from the start
that he was unsuitable; and since we belong to a race that does not like to wash
its dirty linen in public, we did not want to tell you everything. But you now force
us to reveal that he is a bastard, the son of his father’s concubine, and so
unworthy of any office whatsoever in the Church. True, the last two catholici
honoured him, but only because of threats and intimidation.’ Seeing that they
would not agree, Badr said to Yohannan bar Bokhtishoʿ: ‘It is beneath your
51 Mari, 86–87 (Arabic); 76–77 (Latin).

INTRODUCTION xxvii
dignity to compete for a prize that is beyond your grasp. Even if they had begged
you to accept, you would have been better advised to show your magnanimity by
refusing. All the more reason for you to refuse now, since they do not want
you.’ 52
ʿAbbasid caliphs is undoubtedly malicious, it is also very funny. It is also, at bottom,

Although this characterisation of the leaders of the Nestorian Church under the
affectionate. Bar Hebraeus was wise in the ways of the world, and was often, though
not always, tolerant of the failings of those who sought worldly office. Such disputes
were bound to happen, in his view, and although they were regrettable, they also
made excellent stories. Bar Hebraeus had a warm and engaging sense of humour,
and enjoyed making other people laugh. We should not forget that he was also the
author of the Laughable Stories, a collection of humorous anecdotes whose occasional
earthiness troubled the Victorian consciences of their first European readers.
Finally, as his brother Barsawma reminds us, Bar Hebraeus spent the last hours of
his life telling amusing stories to the disciples gathered around his deathbed. 53 This
aspect of his character is crucial to a correct understanding of the spirit in which he
wrote the Ecclesiastical Chronicle.
THE E CCLESIASTICAL C H RONICLE AS HISTORY

On the whole, the Ecclesiastical Chronicle is a reliable historical source, except for its
forays into Old Testament history and its account of the earliest centuries of the
Christian era. Little time need be wasted on the list of Jewish chief priests which
opens the first section of the Ecclesiastical Chronicle, as it is compounded of a
hopelessly confused mixture of fact, legend and fiction. Bar Hebraeus claimed,
disingenuously, that he had used the list of high priests compiled by the 8th-century
Jacobite metropolitan Yaʿqob of Edessa because it was more accurate than that of
the 6th-century chronographer Andronicus. 54 It is far more likely that he shrank
from the task of comparing both lists and producing an authoritative synthesis.
Having once tried and failed to reconcile them myself, I am not inclined to cast the
first stone. Indeed, I look back now with a shudder at the weeks I spent poring over
the seemingly circumstantial detail provided by Michael the Syrian. Michael also
chased after this particular will o’ the wisp before giving up in despair, and I suspect
that Bar Hebraeus would have seconded his predecessor’s artless disclaimer in the
preface to the Chronicle:
Scholars should not waste their energy in trying to calculate dates to a greater or
lesser degree of accuracy. As the Saviour truly said: ‘The Father has kept for
himself the knowledge of times and dates.’ 55

53 Ibid., ii. 473.
54 Ibid., i. 3–5.
55 Michael the Syrian, Chronicle, i. 2.
xxviii BAR HEBRAEUS, ECCLESIASTICAL CHRONICLE
This disconcerting abdication of one of the historian’s most important duties does
not inspire confidence, but we should not take this statement too literally. Both
Michael the Syrian and Bar Hebraeus were scrupulous about dates when they were
dealing with history rather than myth.
The account given by Bar Hebraeus of events in the Eastern Roman Empire
during the first four centuries of the Christian era is wholly derivative. It contains no
surprises for any reader familiar with the Greek sources which underpin the
narrative of Michael the Syrian. The two principal sources used by Michael the
Syrian for this period were the classic 4th-century Church History of Eusebius of
Caesarea, and the Church History of the 5th-century writer Socrates Scholasticus,
which took the story down to the Council of Ephesus in 431.
The history of the Church in the Eastern Roman Empire during the 5th and
6th centuries was dominated by the struggle between the Chalcedonians, who
defended the settlement won at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and their
miaphysite and dyophysite opponents. The dyophysites, whose champion Nestorius
had been defeated at the Council of Ephesus in 431, were marginalised within the
Roman Empire, but fled across the border into Persia and won control of the
Church of the East at the end of the 5th century. Henceforth, the Church of the
East was known both to its Chalcedonian and Jacobite enemies and to its own
members as the Nestorian Church. The miaphysites, who had a stronger power base
than the dyophysites, struggled against the Chalcedonians for nearly a century.
Initially, they tried to win within the existing system, by imposing miaphysite
candidates on the patriarchal thrones of Constantinople, Antioch and Alexandria
and attacking the Chalcedonian settlement directly. Sometimes, under emperors
sympathetic to their views, they succeeded, but the Chalcedonian reaction was
ultimately too strong.
The Chalcedonian emperor Justin I (518–27) deposed the miaphysite patriarch
Severus of Antioch (512–38) and forced more than 50 miaphysite bishops to flee
from their dioceses. Matters came to a head in the reign of his successor Justinian I
(527–65), who deposed the miaphysite patriarchs Anthimus of Constantinople
(525–36) and Theodosius I of Alexandria (535–67) and replaced them with
Chalcedonian bishops. Their miaphysite congregations refused to recognise their
deposition, and shortly afterwards broke away from the ‘imperial’ Church and
established their own miaphysite Churches: the Jacobite Church in Syria and the
Coptic Church in Egypt. Both Churches claimed to be the rightful heirs of the
traditional patriarchates of Antioch and Alexandria, and backed up their claims by
creating a parallel hierarchy of metropolitans and bishops. Although there were
undeniably important theological differences at stake, underlying tensions between
Greeks, Copts and Syrians also helped to precipitate the schism. The final decades
before the 7th-century Arab Conquest were characterised by a series of clashes
which pitted the Chalcedonian authorities against their resentful Syrian and Coptic
subjects and weakened imperial authority throughout the Roman East. One of the
reasons for the speed and completeness of the Arab victory in the 630s and 640s
was because many miaphysite Christians in Egypt and Syria preferred to be ruled by
the Muslims than remain in subjection to oppressive Chalcedonian governors.
INTRODUCTION xxix
Like his account of the earlier Christian centuries, Bar Hebraeus’s description
of events in the 5th and 6th centuries is also firmly based on Michael’s narrative.
Like Michael, Bar Hebraeus wrote from a miaphysite viewpoint. Modern readers
unfamiliar with the history of the Jacobite and Nestorian Churches may be puzzled
to find that the notorious ‘Robber Council’ of 449 is warmly commended by Bar
Hebraeus, while the Council of Chalcedon in 451, that touchstone of Christian
orthodoxy in the eyes of the Western Churches, is dismissed with contempt. 56 They
should also bear in mind that whenever Bar Hebraeus uses the word ‘orthodox’ in
contexts after 451, he means ‘miaphysite’. Similarly, whenever he calls the Greek
Orthodox Church ‘Chalcedonian’, he means ‘heretical’. Readers accustomed to the
standard Greek sources for the ecclesiastical history of the Eastern Roman Empire
will soon get used to the doublethink necessary to view the world through Jacobite
eyes.
As with his earlier narrative, Bar Hebraeus tells us nothing about the
ecclesiastical history of the 5th and 6th centuries that had not been anticipated by
Michael the Syrian. He deserves our respect, however, for competently abridging a
notoriously complex story and presenting its highlights in an attractive, readable
manner. Occasionally, Bar Hebraeus seems to have been slightly embarrassed at his
evident dependence upon a single source. In a paragraph on the 6th-century
Borborite heresy, he claimed to have found his facts ‘in the book of Abu Rahian, the
wise Persian of Bairunia, whom our ecclesiastical writers have mentioned.’ 57 In fact,
he cribbed the entire paragraph from Michael the Syrian. 58
Thucydides, the greatest historian of the classical world, wrote his celebrated
History of the Peloponnesian War, which he characterised as a ‘possession for all time’,
so that intelligent readers could learn from past events and avoid making the same
mistakes twice. For those who like to read history as a guide to policy, the
Ecclesiastical Chronicle may also contain lessons for our own time. Judging from the
newspapers, the two main threats to global stability today are Chinese expansionism
and radical Islam. Bar Hebraeus has little to say about China, which had recently
been conquered by the Mongols and was chafing under foreign rule in his day,
although he does briefly mention the Nestorian presence in China towards the end
of the 13th century, and could probably have told us more about it had he wanted
to. 59 He has a great deal to say, however, about the constant petty harassment,
punctuated by occasional episodes of outright persecution, that Christians have for
centuries had to suffer under Muslim rule.
The Ecclesiastical Chronicle charts the decline of Christianity in the Muslim lands
in the first six centuries after the Arab Conquest. For many modern readers,
whether or not they believe in a ‘clash of civilisations’, this theme will be of
56 Bar Hebraeus, Ecclesiastical Chronicle, i. 161–77.

57 Ibid., i. 219–21.
58 Michael the Syrian, Chronicle, ii. 248.
xxx BAR HEBRAEUS, ECCLESIASTICAL CHRONICLE
particular interest. Muslim oppression forms the essential background to most of

the anecdotes recounted by Bar Hebraeus, though it is rarely given particular
emphasis. Like war, plague, pillage and high taxes, Muslim spite was a disagreeable
fact of life, but there was little point in complaining about it. The stories told by Bar
Hebraeus are not always unfavourable to the Muslims, but for every example of just
dealing on the part of a Muslim ruler, a counter-example can readily be cited. Some
others were capricious tyrants. The early 11th-century ʿAbbasid caliph al-Qadir
of the Muslim caliphs who feature in Bar Hebraeus’s narrative were honest men:
(991–1031), for example, is portrayed by Bar Hebraeus as a fair and reasonable ruler,
who personally intervened in 1002 after an outbreak of mob violence in Baghdad to
ensure that his Christian subjects received justice. 60 But at the same time, further to
the west, the deranged Fatimid caliph al-Hakim (996–1021) launched a decade-long
persecution against the Jews and Christians of Egypt, Palestine and Syria, which was
only ended after thousands of Christians had either converted to Islam or fled for
their lives into Byzantine territory. 61
Bar Hebraeus gives a convincing, because nuanced, account of life under
Muslim rule. Many Muslim governors were corrupt, but not all were, and Bar
Hebraeus does not tar them all with the same brush. All the same, we should
recognise that the dice were loaded from the start against the Christians of the
caliphate, and that their lot gradually became worse as the Muslims consolidated
their rule. Because they were ‘people of the book’, whose prophet Jesus had been a
forerunner of Muhammad, the Christians were in theory treated by the conquerors
as a ‘protected community’ (dhimmi). The caliphs, like the Persian kings before them,
dealt directly with the Nestorian patriarchs and the Jacobite maphrians, and most
internal affairs were dealt with by the Christians’ own representatives. In practice,
however, things were not so simple. Jews and Christians were required to pay an
oppressive poll tax (jizyah) which was substantially heavier than the charitable
contributions (zakat) levied on Muslims. Conversion to Islam offered both social
and financial advantages, and many worldly Jacobite and Nestorian Christians
abandoned their faith and became Muslims. Those who continued to profess the
Christian faith were treated by the Muslims as second-class citizens. Christians were
forbidden to preach their faith to Muslims, and apostasy from Islam to Christianity
was sometimes punished by death.
The Ecclesiastical Chronicle gives numerous examples of Muslim antagonism
towards their Christian dhimmis, including the destruction of churches, the
imprisonment of patriarchs and bishops, and (particularly in the later centuries of
Muslim rule) increasingly alarming episodes of mob violence. Above all, Muslim
spite towards the ‘people of the book’ was expressed by frequent threats of
harassment by the civil authorities, followed by the cynical extraction of bribes to
win forbearance. Over time, Muslim discrimination first slowed, then halted, then
60 Ibid., i. 261–75.
61 Mari, 114–15 (Arabic); 101–2 (Latin).
INTRODUCTION xxxi
reversed the growth that the Nestorian and Jacobite Churches had experienced
during the final decades of Sasanian rule. The process of decline was slow and
undramatic, and continues to this day.
Perhaps it would be fairer to say that the dice were loaded against the poorer
Christians of the caliphate. The Christian elites led far more agreeable lives. In 9th-
century Baghdad, high-minded Muslim and Christian intellectuals debated theology
with one another with commendable courtesy, within the framework of a set of
Aristotelian premises accepted as common ground by all the disputants. 62 The
Nestorian patriarch Timothy I (780–825) was on intimate terms with the caliph
Harun al-Rashid and his wife Zubaida. 63 Two centuries later, the Jacobite maphrian
Ignatius bar Qiqi (991–1016), a star lecturer, was caressed by fashionable Muslims
and Christians alike, much to the annoyance of the Nestorian patriarch Yohannan V
(1000–11), who managed to procure his expulsion from Baghdad. 64 In 13th-century
Maragha, Bar Hebraeus was honoured by the city’s Muslim nobles, who pressed him
to translate the Syriac Chronicle into Arabic so that they could read his secular history
of the Middle East in their own language. 65
On a less elevated plane, Jacobite and Nestorian patriarchs and bishops
connived shamelessly with the Muslim civil authorities to win and retain office. The
elites of both Churches operated within a pervasive culture of corruption, amply
documented by Bar Hebraeus. There was eager competition for the highest offices
in both Churches, as they brought their holders wealth and patronage. Most
elections for the offices of patriarch and maphrian were vigorously contested, and
the contenders nearly always resorted to bribery to win the support of the caliph,
the sultan or the local governor for their candidature, and to sway the votes of
bishops who held the balance of power. Many patriarchs and maphrians, having
incurred enormous debts to get elected, recouped their losses by taking bribes for
the appointment of bishops. Simony, the selling of ecclesiastical posts, was so
commonplace that the few Church leaders who remained honest were singled out
for praise. There was an accepted scale of fees for such transactions, and the
Nestorian writer Mari ibn Sulaiman roundly criticised the patriarch Abraham III
(906–37), who auctioned the archdiocese of Nisibis three times in a row to the
highest bidder, as ‘going beyond the usual rate in selling the priesthood for
money’. 66 The metropolitans in both Churches followed the example of their
superiors, by selling on the dioceses of their province. Patriarchs, maphrians,
metropolitans and suffragan bishops all made money from the contributions of the
faithful. The Nestorian metropolitan Yohannan bar Bokhtishoʿ, who scandalised
and delighted the faithful of Mosul with his retinue of silk-clad Greek and Nubian
62 Griffith, The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque, ii. 106–28.

63 Mari, 75 (Arabic); 66 (Latin).
65 Ibid., ii. 467–69.
xxxii BAR HEBRAEUS, ECCLESIASTICAL CHRONICLE
servants and his flamboyant baggage train of laden camels and mules, may have
been exceptional in the lengths to which he took his extravagance; but he was
certainly not the only bishop who believed that modest understatement was for
losers. 67
One aspect of ecclesiastical corruption that particularly annoyed Bar Hebraeus
was the transmission of ecclesiastical offices from uncle to nephew, in defiance of
canon law. The practice of hereditary succession to episcopal office, a thinly-
disguised form of simony, was deplored by the more honest and enlightened leaders
of the Jacobite Church. The patriarch Quriaqos of Tagrit (793–817), for example,
insisted that dioceses could not be handed down like an inheritance. 68 He seems to
have been in an honourable minority, however, as Bar Hebraeus supplies plenty of
examples of such behaviour in the Ecclesiastical Chronicle. Hereditary succession was
widespread in both the Jacobite and Armenian Churches in the 13th century, and in
the 15th century it was also adopted by the Church of the East, leading to a
permanent schism in 1552 and the establishment of a separate uniate Chaldean
Church.
If life under Muslim rule was nearly always disagreeable and often oppressive,
conditions were not necessarily better for the Eastern Christians who lived under
non-Muslim rulers. In the 9th century, the Greek emperor Nicephorus II Phocas
(963–69) encouraged an influx of Jacobite Christians into Cappadocia and Cilicia,
two ravaged and depopulated regions that had recently been reconquered from the
Arabs. The Jacobites were promised freedom from religious persecution by
Nicephorus, but the rapid growth of the Jacobite Church in Melitene and its
environs eventually alarmed the Chalcedonian authorities. 69 Bar Hebraeus mentions
three occasions in the 11th century, in 1029, 1035 and 1064 respectively, where the
Chalcedonians tried to intimidate the reigning Jacobite patriarch and his bishops
into accepting the Council of Chalcedon. 70 The inquisition of 1029 was particularly
ʿAbdon (1004–30), the stoning to death of the elderly metropolitan Eliya of

severe, resulting in the deportation of the Jacobite patriarch Yohannan VII bar
Symnadu and the imprisonment of two other Jacobite bishops. Life was a little
better for the Eastern Christians under the first decades of Mongol rule in the
second half of the 13th century, as the Mongol il-khans were indifferent to the
religious beliefs of their subjects. By then, however, Christians were in a minority in
Syria, Iraq and Persia, and by the end of the 13th century the il-khans had to tailor
their policies to the wishes of the Muslim majority.
Life seems to have been most tolerable for Eastern Christians who lived in the
Christian kingdom of Cilician Armenia or in the Crusader kingdoms of Jerusalem
and Acre. The Crusader victories at the end of the 11th century placed the Jacobite

68 Ibid., i. 337.
69 Ibid., i. 411–13.
70 Ibid., i. 423–43.
INTRODUCTION xxxiii
Church in a novel position. The Chalcedonian Greeks were temporarily sidelined,

and most of the Jacobites outside the Seljuq dominions now lived under Armenian
or Frankish rule. Michael the Syrian gave an interesting analysis of the condition of
the various Christian factions in the Middle East at this period. In his view, the
Crusader triumphs had brought great benefits to the Jacobite Church. The odious
Greeks had fallen from power, and the Franks treated the Syrians at least as kindly
as the Muslims did. Nevertheless, Michael warned that the Jacobites should remain
on their guard against both the Chalcedonians and the Nestorians:
Although the wicked Greeks were no longer able to maltreat the Orthodox
directly, as they had formerly done, they did not abate their cruelty. They
established patriarchs for their people at Antioch and in Egypt, in the territories
of the Muslims, and they busied themselves in making trouble for the Syrians, the
Egyptians and the Armenians, like a snake which continues to thrash its tail even
though its head has been cut off. At this period, in Armenia, Syria, Palestine and
Egypt, there were not only the patriarch and bishops of our own nation and of
our brothers the Egyptians and the Armenians, but there were also the bishops of
the Chalcedonian Greeks. The Greeks troubled these three Orthodox nations as
much as they could, and whenever they got the chance they harassed the Nubians
and the Abyssinians too. As for ourselves, we Orthodox had to contend not only
against the Chalcedonians but also against their brothers, the Nestorians of Persia
and Assyria. But except at Jerusalem and Antioch, where the malicious Greeks
constantly stirred up the Frankish patriarchs against the Orthodox, our three
nations lived on the whole in peace, and the Orthodox were everywhere exempt
from the vexations of the Chalcedonians, just as they were in the empire of the
Turks. 71
Although Bar Hebraeus describes the relations between the Eastern Christians and
the Franks in far greater detail in the Syriac Chronicle, he also touches on them in the
Ecclesiastical Chronicle. A century ago, the Crusaders were portrayed by many Western
scholars as doughty warriors of Christ, fighting to liberate the Holy Places from
Muslim defilement. Nowadays, they are more likely to be denounced, at least in
progressive circles, as a gang of murderous thugs. The truth, of course, lies
somewhere in between. Just as there were good and bad Muslim caliphs, there were
good and bad Frankish rulers. The behaviour of Count Joscelin I of Edessa (1119–
31), whose territories contained a large Jacobite population, was a deplorable
advertisement for Frankish rule. Joscelin pillaged the wealthy Jacobite monastery of
Mar Barsawma and confiscated its founder’s mummified right arm, reputed by the
monks to be endowed with miraculous powers. With the aid of this precious relic,
he later won an important victory over the Turks. Ascribing his victory to divine
intervention, he then made restitution for his former misdeeds. 72 Joscelin, to be
71 Michael the Syrian, Chronicle, iii. 225–26.

72 Bar Hebraeus, Ecclesiastical Chronicle, i. 503–11.
xxxiv BAR HEBRAEUS, ECCLESIASTICAL CHRONICLE
sure, is a recognisable specimen of his period and class, but not all Frankish
potentates were brutal, capricious and credulous. Bar Hebraeus, following Michael
the Syrian, vividly describes how the shifty Jacobite patriarch Athanasius VI bar
Khamara (1090–1129) was severely admonished by the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem
for taking bribes. 73 The Franks seem to have been genuinely shocked at the
corruption that they encountered in their dealings with the Eastern Churches.
In the second section of the Ecclesiastical Chronicle, Bar Hebraeus was largely
dependent on the 12th-century Nestorian chronicler Mari ibn Sulaiman for his
biographies of the Nestorian patriarchs. Some of the information he supplies about
the Jacobite maphrians was also known to Michael the Syrian and to other Jacobite
chroniclers (e.g. the author of the Chronicle of 1234), but most of it probably derived
ultimately from the records preserved by the clerks of the maphrian’s cell or from
oral tradition in the dioceses of the East. As in the first section, Bar Hebraeus broke
new ground in his coverage of developments in the 13th century.
Mari’s History of the Eastern Patriarchs, written in the 12th century, forms a small
part of The Book of the Tower (Kitab al-majdal), a tedious exposition of Christian beliefs
and ritual practices in seven excessively long chapters, dedicated respectively to the
foundations, columns, interior candlelight, ramparts and gardens of the medieval
fortress of the book’s title. The History of the Eastern Patriarchs, an incongruous insert
in the fifth chapter, is written in a more attractive style than the rest of the Book of
the Tower, and was probably originally conceived as a separate, self-contained work.
Mari ibn Sulaiman has traditionally been credited with the authorship of the entire
Book of the Tower, but this attribution has recently been questioned. 74 There now
written not in the 12th century but in the 11th century, perhaps by ʿAmr ibn Mattai,
appear to be good grounds for believing that the bulk of the Book of the Tower was
a Nestorian writer who may have been wrongly dated to the 14th century. All the
same, Mari ibn Sulaiman’s authorship of the History of the Eastern Patriarchs remains
unchallenged. Quite apart from any other considerations, Mari twice names himself
with the reign of the patriarch ʿAbdishoʿ III (1139–48). He also quotes a number of
in its text as its author. 75 He was probably writing around 1150, as his narrative ends
eyewitnesses for events in the 11th and 12th centuries, including individuals present
at the election of the Nestorian patriarch Barsawma (1134–36). 76 Bar Hebraeus
probably worked from a text of Mari very similar to that which we ourselves
possess.
Mari was a conscientious chronicler of the history of the Church of the East
from the 5th century onwards, but an unreliable source for its early history, and the
biographies given by Bar Hebraeus of the first nine ‘patriarchs’ of the Church of the
East are fictitious. I have discussed the falsification of the early history of the
73 Ibid., ii. 471–75.

74 Holmberg, ‘A Reconsideration of the Kitab al-Majdal’, PO, 18 (1993), 255–73.
75 Mari, 146 and 156 (Arabic); 125 and 132 (Latin).
INTRODUCTION xxxv
Church of the East in my book The Martyred Church, and readers who are interested
in the process by which writers of the Nestorian Church invented its early history
are referred to the relevant sections of this book. 77 There were two main stages in
this process. In the 6th century, the Nestorians developed the legend of Saint
Thomas, who certainly existed but who never went to India, and ascribed the
evangelisation of the East to the legendary apostles Mari, Addai and Aggai. In the
9th century they filled in several more inconvenient gaps in the historical record by
inventing the patriarchs Abris (121–37), Abraham (159–71) and Yaʿqob (190), and
by retrospectively promoting Aha d’Abuh (204–20) and Shahlufa (220–24), two
historical third-century bishops of Erbil who had played a noteworthy part in the
affairs of the Church of Seleucia-Ctesiphon. These five phantom patriarchs are first
mentioned by the 9th-century historian Eliya of Damascus, and were eagerly
appropriated by all later historians of the Church of the East, including Mari.
Given his limited knowledge of the history of the Church of the East, Bar
Hebraeus can hardly be blamed for reproducing Mari’s fictitious account of its
origins. Indeed, he may well have believed that the legends of Thomas, Mari and
Addai were true. Even if he suspected their falsity, he would probably have refrained
from saying so, as the Jacobites had as much an interest as the Nestorians in
glorifying the origins of the Persian Church. He can, however, occasionally be
faulted for not reading Mari attentively enough. He confused the catholicus Maʿna
(420) with a metropolitan named Maʿna who flourished in the 470s and 480s and
was one of the supporters of Barsawma of Nisibis, with devastating consequences
for the chronology of his narrative at this point. 78 He also omitted the reign of the
Nestorian patriarch Eliya II (1111–32), placing the patriarch Barsawma (1134–36) in
direct succession to Makkikha I (1092–1110), even though Mari devoted two pages
to Eliya’s patriarchate. 79
Bar Hebraeus followed Mari’s biographies of the Nestorian patriarchs fairly
faithfully, with one striking exception. He ignored the account given by Mari of the
controversial career of Barsawma of Nisibis, preferring instead to use a hostile
Jacobite version written by the monks of the monastery of Mar Mattai near Mosul
and quoted in full in the Chronicle of Michael the Syrian. 80 This is one of the few
occasions where he was faced with a clash of sources. Unsurprisingly, he preferred
the tendentious Jacobite version to its more sympathetic and more accurate
Nestorian counterpart.
As far as his treatment of the Jacobite Church in Persia was concerned, Bar
Hebraeus introduced some mild and, given his background, understandable bias. He
almost invariably refers to the Jacobite metropolitan of Tagrit, the head of the
77Wilmshurst, The Martyred Church, 9–11, 86–91 and 182–83.

78Bar Hebraeus, Ecclesiastical Chronicle, ii. 53–63.
79 Mari, 152–53 (Arabic); 129–30 (Latin); Bar Hebraeus, Ecclesiastical Chronicle, ii. 327.
80 Mari, 41–46 (Arabic); 35–40 (Latin); Michael the Syrian, Chronicle, ii. 433–40; Bar
Hebraeus, Ecclesiastical Chronicle, ii. 61–77.

xxxvi BAR HEBRAEUS, ECCLESIASTICAL CHRONICLE
Jacobite Church in Iraq and Persia, as the ‘maphrian’. In fact, the term ‘maphrian’
(roughly equivalent to the English word ‘fertiliser’, and referring to the
metropolitan’s role in nurturing the life of the Eastern Churches) was only adopted
as an official title in the middle of the 11th century, and its application by Bar
Hebraeus to the 6th-century metropolitans of Tagrit was a conscious anachronism.
Relations between the Eastern and Western branches of the Jacobite Church—to
say nothing of relations between the metropolitans of Tagrit and Nineveh—were
often strained, and Bar Hebraeus could not resist the temptation to use terminology
that asserted the dignity of the throne of Tagrit.
Where he drew on the traditions of the Easterners for the history of the
Jacobite metropolitans of Tagrit, Bar Hebraeus was sometimes at the mercy of his
sources, which were not always reliable. His list of metropolitans for the penultimate
decade of the 7th century, for example, presents formidable chronological problems.
The death of the metropolitan Barishoʿ in 683 and the accession of Yohannan I in
686 are certain, but the intervening sequence of events is confused and, as presented
by Bar Hebraeus, chronologically impossible. Three metropolitans of Tagrit have to
be fitted into a mere four years: David (c.684); his alleged successor Abraham (c.684–
c.686); and a third, unnamed metropolitan of Tagrit who briefly held the post before
the appointment of Yohannan I in 686. 81 There are also other considerations.
Before he became metropolitan of Tagrit in 686, Yohannan convened a synod at
Rishʿaina in 684 which resolved a schism in the Western Church that had broken
out during the reign of Severus bar Mashqe (668–80) and had dragged on since his
death. 82 Since Yohannan was metropolitan of Nineveh in 684, not metropolitan of
Tagrit, his involvement in Western affairs is significant, and suggests that, far from
being filled by three nonentities, the throne of Tagrit was in fact vacant between 684
and 686. It is not clear whether Bar Hebraeus noticed the serious problems posed
by his narrative at this point; and even if he was aware of them, he probably did not
have the information necessary to resolve them.
On matters of more general interest, the testimony of the Ecclesiastical Chronicle
casts doubt on claims for the antiquity of the modern Assyrian identity. This
identity, which was constructed in the 19th century, postdates the discovery of the
ruins of Nineveh in the 1840s by the British archaeologist Austen Henry Layard. In
recent decades, however, scattered references in the Chronicle of Michael the Syrian
and the Ecclesiastical Chronicle of Bar Hebraeus have been cited by Assyrian
nationalists as evidence that an Assyrian identity existed as early as the 12th century.
In fact, if read fairly, both chronicles provide excellent evidence that no such
identity existed.
81 Bar Hebraeus, Ecclesiastical Chronicle, ii. 133 and 141–45.

82 Michael the Syrian, Chronicle, ii. 458–68; Bar Hebraeus, Ecclesiastical Chronicle, i. 285–
87.
INTRODUCTION xxxvii
Both Michael the Syrian and Bar Hebraeus thought of themselves as Syrians in
ethnic contexts (as opposed to the Greeks and Armenians), or as Jacobites in
religious contexts (as opposed to the Chalcedonians and the Nestorians). In a key
passage in his Chronicle, Michael declared that no memory of the biblical kingdoms
of Assyria and Chaldea had survived among the Christians of the Middle East.
Perhaps, he said, the relevant books had been burned when these peoples converted
to Christianity (an unsupported inference from an incident recorded at Acts 19:19,
when converting pagans burned their books at the feet of the Apostles). 83 This
passage demonstrates beyond doubt that 12th-century Jacobite and Nestorian
Christians did not think of themselves as Assyrians. Of course, they knew that they
were living in lands which had once belonged to the Assyrian Empire, because the
Bible told them so. 84 But they would have been horrified if anyone had tried to
claim them as the heirs of the ancient Assyrians. The Assyrians of the Old
Testament were the sworn enemies of Israel. Their king, Sennacherib, was humbled
before the walls of Jerusalem, and his mighty army was destroyed by night by the
Angel of the Lord. By the 12th century, their savagery had become proverbial. The
brutality of the Turks who massacred the Christian inhabitants of Edessa in 1144,
for example, was compared by Michael the Syrian to that of the ‘Assyrian boar’. 85 It
is scarcely conceivable that the pious Christians of 12th- and 13th-century Iraq
would have associated themselves with such dreadful role models.
The ethnic term ‘Syrian’ was regularly used both by Michael the Syrian in the
12th century, by Bar Hebraeus in the 13th century, and by the continuators of the
Ecclesiastical Chronicle in the 14th and 15th centuries. In the parts of the Ecclesiastical
Chronicle dependent on Michael’s Chronicle, Bar Hebraeus took over Michael’s
terminology without alteration. The patriarch Athanasius VI bar Khamara (1090–
1129), angered by the treatment he had received at the hands of the Greek governor
Gabriel of Melitene, is said by Michael the Syrian to have refused Gabriel’s request
for a blessing with the words: ‘You are a Greek! We are Syrians!’ 86 Exactly the same
phraseology is used by Bar Hebraeus. 87 Bar Hebraeus also regularly spoke of
‘Syrians’ and the ‘Syrian Church’ when describing events that took place in his own
lifetime. In his account of the reign of the repulsive Jacobite patriarch Ignatius III
David (1222–52), he mentioned that the Armenian king Hayton II ‘wrote angrily to
the patriarch when he heard that the Syrians were denying the Armenians a place for
prayer.’ 88 His 15th-century continuator also used the same terminology. The
Jacobite patriarch Behnam of Hadla, who reunited the Mardin and Sis patriarchates
83 Michael the Syrian, Chronicle, iii. 442–47.

84 Joseph, J., ‘The Bible and the Assyrians: It Kept Their Memory Alive’, JAAS, 12, 1
(1998), 70–76.
85 Michael the Syrian, Chronicle, iii. 261.
86 Ibid., iii. 181.
87 Bar Hebraeus, Ecclesiastical Chronicle, i. 461.
88 Ibid., i. 689.
xxxviii BAR HEBRAEUS, ECCLESIASTICAL CHRONICLE
in 1445, is made to say: ‘Let there be one patriarch for the Syrians!’ 89 As for the use
of the term ‘Jacobite’, two classic examples are provided by Barsawma, the younger
brother of Bar Hebraeus. Recounting his elder brother’s death, he describes him as
‘a great pillar of the small and feeble Jacobite nation’. 90 He goes on to say: ‘Who will
not weep over the noble nation of the Jacobites, seeing them bereft of such a
paragon, such an outstanding and admirable sage?’ 91
Finally, the Ecclesiastical Chronicle provides testimony to a world in which the
modern Muslim states of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Turkey were part of a
Christian Roman Empire, and where Jacobite and Nestorian Christians were spread
widely throughout eastern Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Kurdistan, Persia, Central Asia
and China. Most traces of this vanished Christian world have long been
extinguished, and the fate of the last remaining outcrops hangs in the balance.
Modern Assyrian Christians are likely to be particularly interested in the local details
given by Bar Hebraeus of the many villages in northern Iraq and eastern Turkey that
were once Christian. His accounts of parochial Christian squabbles in Beth
Khudaida, Bartallah, Karamlish and a score of other Jacobite and Nestorian villages
to the north and east of Mosul may not always be edifying, but they have a poignant
resonance in the light of the tragic events that have taken place in Syria and Iraq in
the past few years.
At the time of writing, most of the surviving Christian villages in the Mosul
plain have fallen into the hands of the fanatical terrorists of Islamic State. Their
inhabitants, facing the choice between conversion to Islam or the payment of an
oppressive poll tax, have fled, abandoning their centuries-old monasteries and
churches. The beautiful old monasteries of Mar Behnam and Mar Eliya near Mosul,
mentioned several times in the Ecclesiastical Chronicle, have already been either
destroyed or badly damaged, and other monasteries and churches are in danger. If
these Christian sites are ever recovered by their owners, they will most probably be
in ruins. The Ecclesiastical Chronicle bears witness to the affairs of a vibrant Christian
community in northern Iraq and western Iran that can trace its history back to the
earliest decades of Christianity. This Christian culture is now in mortal peril. Sadly, it
may never be possible to restore the historic monasteries and villages of the East
and West Syrian Churches in Iraq physically; but I hope that this translation will
help to arouse interest in the plight of these two Churches and, even if only
metaphorically, ‘put them back on the map’.
I am grateful for the encouragement and helpful suggestions I have received
from several fellow enthusiasts while I was making this translation. Thanks are due
in particular to Andrew Palmer and Marianna Mazzola, who corrected me on a
number of points of fact and interpretation; Mark Dickens, for general
encouragement and stimulus; Thomas Carlson, who drew my attention to Bo
89 Ibid., i. 821.
90 Ibid., ii. 473.
91 Ibid., ii. 475.
INTRODUCTION xxxix
Holmberg’s interesting article on Mari ibn Sulaiman; Dayroyo Joseph Bali, who
typed the Syriac text which accompanies this translation; George Kiraz, who
personally corrected the Syriac text; and Melonie Schmierer-Lee, who supervised the
book’s production by Gorgias Press and caught a number of errors at the
typesetting stage. I am also grateful to Mike Arnold, who drew the excellent maps at
the end of the book and helped me, with the aid of the wealth of cartographical
information now available on the internet, to localise several recalcitrant Jacobite
dioceses in eastern Turkey.
The page numbers in square brackets in my translation and the accompanying
Syriac text are those of Abbelos and Lamy’s edition, and have been used since 1877
for citations from the Ecclesiastical Chronicle. This edition is now easily accessible
online, and in order to keep this book within reasonable bounds, I have not
reproduced its notes and references. Bar Hebraeus and his audience probably knew
their Bibles better than most modern Christians do, and the Ecclesiastical History is
studded with biblical quotations, all of which have been identified by Abbeloos and
Lamy. Most of them present few difficulties to the modern reader, but one
reference perhaps needs to be elucidated here. Following Michael the Syrian, who
was himself following the narrative of the 9th-century patriarch Dionysius I of Tel
Mahre (818–45), Bar Hebraeus once refers to the counter-patriarch Abraham of
Qartmin (808–37) as ‘Abiram’. 92 Abiram, a minor figure mentioned in the Old
Testament, led a wicked and unsuccessful rebellion against Moses. For Dionysius I,
whose patriarchate was blighted by the opposition of Abraham and his powerful
supporters, the allusion was irresistible.
I have also omitted Abbeloos and Lamy’s apparatus criticus, which lists the
textual variants in the limited selection of manuscripts they consulted. On several
occasions, I have preferred a variant reading. At Ecclesiastical Chronicle, ii. 3 (page
311), for example, where Bar Hebraeus lists the peoples to whom Saint Thomas
preached, Abbeloos and Lamy printed the unlikely reading Qarbayu instead of the
correct reading Karmanu (‘the Karamanians’). In such cases, I have imported the
correct reading into the Syriac text. Occasionally, all the manuscripts consulted by
Abbeloos and Lamy give the same reading, but that reading is plainly wrong. In such
cases I have not amended the Syriac text, but I have indicated the correct reading in
my translation. I have done this wherever dates (especially prone to corruption) can
be confidently amended by reference to Michael the Syrian or Mari. Two particularly
striking errors (pages 406 and 430) are worth noting here. The Nestorian patriarch
Sabrishoʿ III Zanbur (1064–72), as we know both from Mari and the 14th-century
Nestorian author Sliba ibn Yuhanna, was previously metropolitan of Jundishapur,
Mari, 122–24 (Arabic), 108–9 (Latin); Sliba, 100–101 (Arabic), 58 (Latin); Bar
92
Hebraeus, Ecclesiastical Chronicle, ii. 301.

xl BAR HEBRAEUS, ECCLESIASTICAL CHRONICLE
not Nishapur. 93 In 1171, as we learn from Michael the Syrian, the Kurds destroyed 9
David Wilmshurst
Nestorian villages in Beth Dasen, not 400. 94
Hong Kong, February 2016

94 Michael the Syrian, Chronicle, iii. 342; Bar Hebraeus, Ecclesiastical Chronicle, ii. 367.
TEXT AND TRANSLATION
1
2 BAR HEBRAEUS, ECCLESIASTICAL CHRONICLE
BAR HEBRAEUS, E CCLESIASTICAL C H RONICLE :

SECTION ONE
[1] With the help of God, we write down this first part of the Ecclesiastical Chronicle
composed by our holy father the blessed and illustrious Mar Gregory, maphrian of
the East, also known as Abuʾlfaraj, the son of Ahron, a physician of Melitene. May
God look kindly upon us through his prayers, Amen.
[3] Preface. Since I have already, to the best of my ability, written a history of secular
affairs down to my own days, drawing on various books and ancient traditions, it is
now time for me, with God’s help, to tackle the second part of my work, which
deals with ecclesiastical affairs. In this first section I begin with Aaron, the first high
priest of the old dispensation. Although some writers class as priests all men who
made the same offering or sacrifice to the Lord as he did, and even go so far as to
say that the priesthood originated with our first parent Adam, citing the verse ‘since
you have formed me and placed your hand over me,’ they seem to me to be mixing
up their terms, since the very name of priest was not yet in use, nor had the
functions and office of the priesthood yet been sanctified by law. None of the
authors of the catalogues except for Andronicus and the abbot [5] Mar Yaʿqob of
Edessa have given any written account of the priests of the Hebrews, and these two
men disagree sharply not only over the dates that they have assigned to these priests,
but also over their very names. In this book I have decided to accept the
reconstruction of the most pious Yaʿqob, who excelled his peers in his knowledge
of the Hebrew, Greek and Syriac tongues, and compared the relevant manuscripts in
these three languages with the utmost diligence.
[7] First Section of the Ecclesiastical Chronicle. The priesthood in the West.
AARON, the first chief priest, was placed over the people of Israel in the 87th year
of Moses. After Moses was deemed worthy to speak with God, he received the
stone tablets that had been written by the finger of God, and learned the laws,
judgements and commands, and also taught them to his brother, together with the
ritual of sacrifice and the procedures for making the sacred offerings. Aaron died
after performing the sacrifices and oblations of his priestly office for 38 years.
‫)‪TEXT AND TRANSLATION (SECTION ONE‬‬ ‫‪3‬‬
‫ܒܪ ܥܒܪܝܐ‬
‫ܡܐܡܪܐ ܩܕܡܝܐ ܕܟܬܒܐ ܕܐܩܠܣܝܣܛܝܩܝ‬
‫]‪ [1‬ܒܝܕ �ܗܐ ݁ܟܬܒܝܢܢ ܟܬܒܐ ܕܐܩܠܣܝܣܛܝܩܝ ܐܘܟܝܬ ܦܠܓܘܬܐ ܕܬܪܬܝܢ ܕܡܟܬܒܢܘܬ ̈ܙܒܢܐ‪.‬‬
‫ܕܣܝܡ ܠܩܕܝܫܐ ܐܒܘܢ ܛܘܒܬܢܐ ܘܢܨܝܚܐ ܡܪܝ ܓܪܝܓܘܪܝܘܣ ܡܦܪܝܢܐ ܕܡܕܢܚܐ ܼܕܗܘ ܐܒܘ‬
‫�ܦܪܓ ܒܪ ܐܗܪܘܢ ܐܣܝܐ ܡܠܝܛܝܢܝܐ‪� .‬ܗܐ ܢܚܣܐ ܠܢ ܒܨ�ܘ̈ܬܗ ܐܡܝܢ‪.‬‬
‫ܦܬܝ ̈ܟܬܐ ܘܡ ̈ܫܠܡܢܘܬܐ ܣܒܝܢܬܐ‬
‫̈‬ ‫ܡܟܬܒܢܘܬܐ ݂‬ ‫̈‬ ‫̈‬
‫ܥܠܡܢܝܐ ܡܢ‬ ‫]‪ [3‬ܩܕܡܝܬ ܥܘܬܕܐ ܠܣܘܥ�ܢܐ ܡܢ‬
‫ܡܟܐ ܒܝܕ �ܗܐ ܠܘܬ ܦܠܓܘܬܐ ܕܬܪܬܝܢ‬ ‫݂‬ ‫ܗܐ‬ ‫ܡܢ‬ ‫ܝܒܠܬ‪.‬‬ ‫ܡܬܝ‬ ‫ܟܕ ܐܝܟ ܕܐܬܡܨܝܬ ܥܕܡܐ ̈‬
‫ܠܝܘ‬
‫ܥܕܬܢܝܐ ܩܪܒ ܐܢܐ܆ ܘܒܡܐܡܪܐ ܩܕܡܝܐ ܕܥܠ ܪܝܫܘܬ ܟܗܢܘܬܐ ܡܥܪܒܝܬܐ ܡܢ ܐܗܪܘܢ‬ ‫ܕܫ�ܒܐ ̈‬
‫ܐܢܫܝܢ ܠܟܠܗܘܢ ̇ܗܢܘܢ ܕܐܝܟܢ ܼܕܗܘ ܩܘܪܒܢܐ‬ ‫ܪܝܫܟܗܢܐ ܩܕܡܝܐ ܕܕܝܐܬܝܩܝ ܥܬܝܩܬܐ ܡܫܪܐ ܐܢܐ܆ ܘܐܦܢ ̈‬ ‫̈‬
‫ܕܐܢܫܐ ܫܪܝܬ ܟܗܢܘܬܐ‬ ‫̈‬
‫ܕܒܚܐ ܠܡܪܝܐ ܩܪܒܘ ܐܘ ܕܒܚܘ ܒܟܗܢܐ ݂ܡܢܘ‪ .‬ܘܕܡܢܗ ܕܐܕܡ ݂ܒܘܟ�ܐ ̈‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܐܘ ݂‬
‫ܘܣܡܬ ܥܠܝ ݂ܐܝܕܟ ܠܣܗܕܘ ܡܝܬܝܢ‪ .‬ܒܪܡ ܓܠܝܐ ܕܒܗܘܪܐ‬ ‫ܓܒܠܬܢܝ ݂‬ ‫ܿ‬
‫ܒܐܢܫܘܬܐ ܐܡܪܝܢ‪ .‬ܘܠܗܝ ܕ ݂‬
‫ܣܘܥܪܢܗ ܒܢܡܘܣܐ‬ ‫̇‬ ‫ܗܘܐ ܼܗܘ ܙܢܐ ܗܝܕܝܟ ܘܪܡܙܢܝܐ‪ .‬ܒܕ� ܫܡ ܟܗܢܘܬܐ ܥܕܟܝ�ܬܬܩܪܚ ܗܘܐ‪ .‬ܐܦ�‬
‫ܕܫܡܗܬܐ ܐܢܕܪܘܢܝܩܘܣ ܘܐܒܐܣ ܡܪܝ ]‪[5‬‬ ‫̈‬ ‫̈‬
‫ܡܟܬܒܢܐ‬ ‫ܕܦܐܐ ܠܗ ܐܬܬܒܪܚ ܗܘܐ‪ .‬ܘܡܛܠ ܕܡܢ‬
‫̈‬
‫ܐܟܬܒܘ ܥܠ �ܝܫܝ ܟܗܢܐ ܕܥܒ�ܝܐ‪ .‬ܘ� ܫܠܡܘܬܐ � ܡܡܫܚܬܐ‬ ‫݂‬ ‫ܝܥܩܘܒ ܕܐܘܪܗܝ ܒܠܚܘܕ‬
‫̈‬ ‫̈‬
‫ܒܡܠܝܗܘܢ‪ .‬ܠܘ ܒܠܚܘܕ ܒܫܢܝ ܩܝܘܡܐ ܐ� ܘܒܗܘܢ ܒܩܢܘܡܝܗܘܢ‪ .‬ܠܢܘܠ ܚܣܝܐ‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܡܫܬܟܚܐ ̈‬ ‫݂‬
‫ܘܝܘܢܝܐ ܘܣܘ�ܝܝܐ‪.‬‬ ‫ܨܚܚܐ ܥܒ�ܝܐ ̈‬ ‫ܐܬܒܛܠ ܥܠ ܦܘܚܡ ̈‬ ‫݂‬ ‫ܝܬܝܪ‬ ‫ܠܗ‬ ‫ܟܕ‬ ‫ܙܩܘܪܝ‪.‬‬ ‫ܐܢܐ‬ ‫ܡܠܘܬ‬
‫ܒܚܝܪ ܗܘܐ ܘܚܕܢܝ ܒܕܪܗ‪.‬‬ ‫ܒܬܠܬܝ̈ܗܘܢ ܓܝܪ ݂‬
‫]‪ [7‬ܡܐܡܪܐ ܩܕܡܝܐ ܕܐܩܠܣܝܣܛܝܩܝ ܥܠ ܪܝܫܘܬ ܟܗܢܘܬܐ ܡܥܪܒܝܬܐ‪.‬‬
‫ܘܗܘ‬
‫ܪܝܫܟܗܢܐ ܩܕܡܝܐ ܩܡ ܠܥܡܐ ܐܝܣܪܠܝܐ‪ .‬ܒܫܢܬ ܬܡܢܝܢ ܘܫܒܥ ܕܡܘܫܐ‪݂ .‬‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܩܕܡܝܬ ܐܗܪܘܢ‬
‫ܐܬܟܬܒܝ ܩܒܠ‪.‬‬‫̈‬ ‫̈‬ ‫̈‬
‫ܐܫܬܘܝ‪ .‬ܘܠܘܚܐ ܟܐܦܝܬܐ ܕܒܨܒܥܐ �ܗܝܬܐ ݂‬ ‫݂‬ ‫ܡܘܫܐ ܟܕ ܠܥܢܝܢܐ �ܗܝܐ‬
‫ܐܚܘܗܝ �ܦ‪ .‬ܐܝܟܢܘܬܐ ܟܝܬ ̈‬
‫ܕܕܒܚܐ‬ ‫݂‬ ‫ܘ�ܗܪܘܢ‬ ‫ܦ܆‬ ‫ܝܠ‬
‫݂‬ ‫ܝܐ‬ ‫�ܗ‬‫̈‬ ‫̈‬
‫ܘܦܘܩܕܢܐ‬ ‫ܘܢܡܘܣܐ ̈‬
‫ܘܕܝܢܐ‬ ‫̈‬
‫ܫܢܝܐ ܬܠܬܝܢ‬ ‫ܕܕܒܚܐ ܘܩܘ�ܒܢܐ ̈‬ ‫ܛ�ܢܝܐ‪ .‬ܫܡܫ ܕܝܢ ܐܗܪܘܢ ܪܝܫܘܬ ܟܗܢܘܬܐ ̈‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܘܢܡܘܣܝܘܬܐ ܕܩܘ�ܒܢܐ‬
‫ܘܬܡܢܐ ܘܡܝܬ‪.‬‬ ‫̈‬
4 BAR HEBRAEUS, ECCLESIASTICAL CHRONICLE
[9] After Aaron, his son ELEAZAR. This man obtained the chief priesthood of the
people by heavenly decree. For Nadab and Abihu, the other sons of Aaron, were
rejected by the hidden and inscrutable decrees of the Lord, because they offered
unholy fire. Eleazar married the daughter of Amminadab, from whom Christ is
descended, and sired Phinehas from her. This shows that there was a blood
connection between the two tribes of Judah and Levi, both under the kings and
under the priests. In this way, Our Saviour Christ arose in the flesh from his
progeny. Eleazar fulfilled the priestly office for around 56 years, up to the 7th year
of Othoniel.
After Eleazar, his son PHINEHAS. This man, inflamed by righteous zeal, killed Zimri
and the harlot Cozbi, thereby quenching his wrath for justice. He died after fulfilling
his priestly office for 80 years. After Phinehas, ABISHUA, for 57 years. After
Abishua, BUKKI, for 70 years, who flourished at the time of Deborah and Barak.
[11] After Bukki, UZZI, for 42 years.
After Uzzi, ZERAHIAH, for 52 years. He lived in the time of Tola, Jair and Jephthah
of Gilead, and the judges Hesebon and Ibzan.
After Zerahiah, MERAIOTH, for 40 years.
After Meraioth, AMARIAH, for 32 years. After Amariah, AHITUB, for 20 years.
Andronicus says that PHINEHAS, the son of Meraioth, was high priest after
Amariah, for 41 years, and that Phinehas was succeeded by his son Meraioth, and by
Eli and his sons, for 40 years, and that Ahitub came afterwards.
After Ahitub, ZADOK, for 60 years. After Zadok, AHIMAAZ, for 8 years. After
Ahimaaz, AZARIAH, for 22 years. After Azariah, AMARIAH, for 60 years. After
Amariah, AHIMELECH, for 22 years.
[13] After Ahimelech, JEHOIADA, for 3 years. Andronicus places ABIATHAR after
this Ahimelech, who is mentioned in the sacred text of the Bible. He was killed by
Saul along with 150 priests, because he had given counsel to David. The most pious
Yaʿqob, however, does not number Abiathar among the priests, nor does he reckon
Eli and his sons as members of the order of priests.
After Jehoiada, AZARIAH, for an unknown number of years. After Azariah,
SHALLUM, for an unknown number of years. After Shallum, AMASIAS, for an
unknown number of years. After Amasias, HILKIAH, for an unknown number of
years. After Hilkiah, AZARIAH, for an unknown number of years. After Azariah,
SERAIAH, for an unknown number of years. After Seraiah, ZADOK, for an unknown
number of years.
‫)‪TEXT AND TRANSLATION (SECTION ONE‬‬ ‫‪5‬‬
‫]‪ [9‬ܒܬܪ ܐܗܪܘܢ܆ �ܥܙܪ ܒܪܗ‪.‬‬

‫̈‬
‫ܗܢܐ ܡܢ ܟܕ ܠܪܝܫܘܬ ܟܗܢܘܬܐ ܕܥܡܐ ܒܝܕ ܦܣܩܐ ܕܡܢ ܠܥܠ ܩܒܠ‪ .‬ܘܢܕܒ ܘܐܒܝܗܘ ܒܢܝܐ‬
‫ܓܢܝܙܐ ܘ� ܡܬܕ�ܟܢܐ ܕܡܪܝܐ‪.‬‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܐܣܬܠܝܘ‪̈ .‬‬
‫ܒܕܝܢܐ‬ ‫݂‬ ‫ܐܚ�ܢܐ ܕܐܗܪܘܢ܆ ܡܛܠ ܕܢܘܪܐ ܢܘܟܪܝܬܐ ܐܥܛܪܗ‬
‫ܘܐܘܠܕ ̇‬
‫ܡܢܗ‬ ‫݂‬ ‫ܚܐ‪.‬‬‫݂‬ ‫ܝ‬‫ܡܫ‬ ‫ܡܬܝܒܠ‬ ‫ܕܡܢܗ‬ ‫ܘ‬‫̇‬ ‫ܗ‬ ‫ܕܥܡܝܢܕܒ‬ ‫ܫܩܠ ܕܝܢ �ܝܥܙܪ ܐܢܬܬܐ‪ :‬ܠܒܪܬܗ‬ ‫݂‬
‫̈‬
‫ܠܦܝܢܚܣ‪ .‬ܘܗܪܟܐ ܡܬܚܙܝܐ ܕܗܘܬ ܐܚܝܢܘܬܐ ܠܗܠܝܢ ܬܪܝܢ ܫܒܛܐ‪ .‬ܕܝܗܘܕܐ ܘܕܠܘܝ‪ .‬ܐܘܟܝܬ‬
‫ܡܠܟܘܬܐ ܘܟܗܢܘܬܐ‪ .‬ܒܝܘܒ� ܗ̇ܘ ܕܡܢܗ ܕ ݂ܢܚ ܒܒܣܪ ܡܚܝܢܢ ܡܫܝ݂ܚܐ‪� .‬ܝܥܙܪ ܕܝܢ ܫܡܫ ܪܝܫܘܬ‬
‫ܫܢܝܢ ܥܕܡܐ ܠܫܢܬܐ ܕܫܒܥ ܕܥܬܢܐܝܠ‪.‬‬ ‫ܟܗܢܘܬܐ ܐܝܟ ܘܥܕܐ ܕܚܡܫܝܢ ݂ܘܫܬ ̈‬
‫ܒܬܪ �ܝܥܙܪ ܦܝܢܚܣ ܒܪܗ‪.‬‬
‫ܗܢܐ �ܢ ܛܢܢܐ ܡܩܠܣܐ‪ .‬ܘ ݂ܩܛܠ ܠܙܡܪܝ ܘܠܟܘܣܒܝ ܙܢܝܬܐ‪ .‬ܘܐܢܝ݂ܚ ܠܚܡܬܐ ܕܟܐܢܘܬܐ‪ .‬ܫܡܫ‬
‫ܫܢܝܐ ܬܡܢܝܢ ܘܡܝܬ‪.‬‬ ‫ܕܝܢ ܪܝܫܘܬ ܟܗܢܘܬܐ ̈‬
‫ܫܢܝܐ ܢܙ̄܆‬ ‫ܒܬܪ ܦܝܢܚܣ ܐܒܝܫܘܥ‪̈ .‬‬
‫ܫܢܝܐ ܫܬܝܢ‪.‬‬ ‫ܒܬܪ ܐܒܝܫܘܥ ܐܒܝـܩܪ‪̈ .‬‬
‫ܗܢܐ ܒܙܒܢܐ ܕܕܒܘܪܐ ܘܒܪܩ ܐܝܬܘܗܝ ܗܘܐ‪.‬‬
‫ܫܢܝܐ ܐܪܒܥܝܢ ܘܬܪܬܝܢ‪.‬‬ ‫]‪ [11‬ܒܬܪ ܐܒܝܩܪ ܥܙܪܝ‪̈ .‬‬
‫ܫܢܝܐ ܚܡܫܝܢ ܘܬܪܬܝܢ‪ .‬ܗܢܐ ܐܝܬܘܗܝ ܗܘܐ ܒܙܒܢܐ ܕܬܘܠ ܘܕܝܐܝܪ ܘܕܢܦܬܚ‬ ‫ܒܬܪ ܥܙܪܝ‪ .‬ܙܪܚܝܐ‪̈ .‬‬
‫ܓܠܥܕܝܐ‪ .‬ܘܕܚܫܒܘܢ ܘܐܒܝ� ܕܝܢܐ‪̈.‬‬
‫ܫܢܝܐ ܐܪܒܥܝܢ‪.‬‬ ‫ܒܬܪ ܙܪܚܝܐ‪ .‬ܡܪܘ ̈‬
‫ܫܢܝܐ ܬܠܬܝܢ ܘܬܪܬܝܢ‪:‬‬ ‫ܒܬܪ ܡܪܘ‪ .‬ܐܡܪܝܐ ̈‬
‫ܫܢܝܐ ܥܣܪܝܢ‪ .‬ܐܢܕܪܘܢܝܩܘܣ ܐܡܪ‪ .‬ܕܒܬܪ ܐܡܪܝܐ ܦܝܢܚܣ ܒܪ ܡܪܘ ݂ܩܡ‬ ‫ܒܬܪ ܐܡܪܝܐ ܐܚܝܛܘܒ ̈‬
‫ܫܢܝܐ ܐܪܒܥܝܢ‪ .‬ܘܟܢ ܐܚܝܛܘܒ‪.‬‬ ‫ܘܒܢܘܗܝ ̈‬ ‫ܫܢܝܐ ܐܪܒܥܝܢ ܘܚܕܐ‪ .‬ܘܒܬܪ ܦܝܢܚܣ ܒܪ ܡܪܘ ܥܝܠܝ ̈‬ ‫̈‬
‫̈‬
‫ܒܬܪ ܐܚܝܛܘܒ‪ .‬ܨ ܕܘܩ‪ .‬ܫܢܝܐ ܫܬܝܢ‪.‬‬
‫ܫܢܝܐ ̈‬
‫ܬܡܢܐ‪.‬‬ ‫ܒܬܪ ܨ ܕܘܩ‪ .‬ܐܚܝܡܥܨ‪̈ .‬‬
‫ܫܢܝܐ ܥܣܪܝܢ ܬܪܬܝܢ‪.‬‬ ‫ܒܬܪ ܐܚܝܡܥܨ‪ .‬ܥܙܪܝܐ ̈‬
‫ܫܢܝܐ ܫܬܝܢ‪.‬‬ ‫ܒܬܪ ܥܙܪܝܐ‪ .‬ܐܡܪܝܐ ̈‬
‫̈‬
‫ܒܬܪ ܐܡܪܝܐ‪ .‬ܐܚܝܡܠܟ‪ .‬ܫܢܝܐ ܥܣܪܝܢ ܘܬܪܬܝܢ‪.‬‬
‫ܕܐܬܩܛܠ‬‫݂‬ ‫ܗܢܐ‬ ‫ܡܠܟ‬ ‫ܝ‬‫ܐܚ‬ ‫ܒܬܪ‬ ‫ܕܝܢ܆‬ ‫ܐܢܕܪܘܢܝܩܘܣ‬ ‫ܫܢܝܐ ܬܠܬܐ‪.‬‬ ‫]‪ [13‬ܒܬܪ ܐܚܝܡܠܟ‪ .‬ܝܘܝܕܥ ̈‬
‫ܕܗܘܐ ܒܥ�ܪܙܐ ܠܕܘܝܕ‪� .‬ܒܝܬܪ ܗܘ ܕܐܦ ݁ܟܬܒܐ‬ ‫ܟܗܢܐ‪ .‬ܡܛܠ ݂‬ ‫ܡܢ ܫܐܘܠ܆ ܥܡ ܡܐܐ ܘܚܡܫܝܢ ̈‬
‫̈‬
‫ܒ�ܝܫܟܗܢܐ‪ .‬ܐܦ�‬ ‫ܩܕܝܫܐ ܕܐܘܢܓܠܝܘܢ ܡܬܥܗܕ ܠܗ‪ .‬ܚܣܝܐ ܕܝܢ ܝܥܩܘܒ � ܡܢܐ ܠܗ �ܒܝܬܪ‬
‫ܘܠܒܢܘܗܝ ܡܬܥܗܕ ܒܛܟܣܐ ܕ�ܝܫܝ ̈‬
‫ܟܗܢܐ‪.‬‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܠܥܝܠܝ‬
‫݂‬
‫̈‬ ‫̈‬
‫ܒܬܪ ܝܘܝܕܥ‪ .‬ܥܙܪܝܐ‪ .‬ܫܢܝܐ ܕ� ܝܕܝܥܝܢ‪.‬‬
‫ܝܕܝܥܝܢ‪.‬‬ ‫ܫܢܝܐ ܕ� ̈‬ ‫ܒܬܪ ܥܙܪܝܐ‪ :‬ܫܠܘܡ‪̈ .‬‬
‫ܝܕܝܥܝܢ‪.‬‬ ‫ܫܢܝܐ ܕ� ̈‬ ‫ܒܬܪ ܫܠܘܡ‪ .‬ܐܡܨܝܐ‪̈ .‬‬
‫ܫܢܝܐ ܕ� ܝܕܝܥܝܢ‪.‬‬ ‫ܒܬܪ ܐܡܨܝܐ‪ .‬ܚܠܩܝܐ ̈‬
‫ܫܢܝܐ ܕ� ܝܕܝܥܝܢ‬ ‫ܒܬܪ ܚܠܩܝܐ‪ .‬ܥܙܪܝܐ ̈‬
‫ܫܢܝܐ ܕ� ܝܕܝܥܝܢ‬ ‫ܒܬܪ ܥܙܪܝܐ‪ .‬ܣܝܪܝܐ ̈‬
‫ܫܢܝܐ ܕ� ܝܕܝܥܝܢ‬ ‫ܒܬܪ ܣܝܪܝܐ‪ .‬ܨ ܕܘܩ ̈‬
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“Stepping-stones of obstacles! that is well enough for Mr. Harlan; but
I’ll tell you what, Howe, money is the stepping-stone in this country.
Give me that, and I don’t care a picayune for any thing else.”
“The one that knows most usually succeeds best; knowledge wins
money.”
“Pshaw! nonsense! that’s not so. Why, the richest man in this county
can hardly write his name.”
“That may be; he may prove an exception; but that in no wise does
away with the rule.”
“Well, my cigar is out. All I can say is, that we are going to have a
capital time to-night; you had better come along. You wont tell, any
way; Lovell never did: we could always trust him;” and the door
closed.
Why was it that I could not study? Why was it that I should strive
and struggle between my inclination to live easily, as Farden did, and
my desire to do right? “No right effort is ever lost,” sounded out
strong, clear, distinct, almost as though some one spoke it aloud;
and so forcibly did it take possession of me, and so much strength
sprung up out of each little word, there was no more murmuring,
and my morning’s lesson did not suffer from the ungovernable
feeling of the evening previous.
A few days after the above conversation Farden came in after his
skates, and Harry Gilmore with him. Tapping me on the shoulder,
Harry said, “Put up that book; you are looking like a scarecrow.
Come.”
“Where?” I asked.
“First to the ice, and then,” looking up archly, “where we have no
stupid books, but plenty of fun and frolic. Why not go? What if you
do fail in the next lesson? Some of the boys fail every day.”
“You will never be thought less of,” said Richard Farden. “I do not
look at my translation till I go in to recite. It comes to me just as I
want to say it.”
“It does not come to me without study,” I answered.
“That is because your brains are so knotted up poring over it all the
while,” persisted Harry. “Clear them out occasionally with a good
jolly spree, and you’ll be all right. Come along.”
“What will Mr. Harlan say?”
“Mr. Harlan will never know. He thinks we are all in bed by ten
o’clock.”
“And so we are,” said Richard; “they don’t seem to think we can get
up again.”
“Do what you do well”—I seemed to hear Mr. Kirby’s voice urging me
to do right, while Jennie’s sweetly pleading eyes looked
reproachingly.
“No, I will not go,” I said determinedly. “I came here to study, and I
will do it. You know your parents could not approve of your course;
you know Mr. Harlan would not; you know your own conscience does
not. I will not go with you, and I advise you to stay at home
yourself.”
“Lovell all over; isn’t it, Harry?” and my room-mate examined his
skates carefully.
“I do wish you would come, Howe;” and he spoke half reproachfully.
“I came here for a purpose, and I shall follow it.”
The door closed with a slam. I crossed the room and leaned my
head on the mantel; school life was so different from what I had
expected. I had supposed that everybody appreciated study, that
everybody longed for an education, and that only opportunity was
wanted to make good scholars. I had learned differently. Nominal
students were not actual learners; neither were those who applied
themselves the most diligently, in all cases the most appreciated.
Then I remembered again Mr. Kirby’s words: “Doing right is the only
safe course, and although slow and wearisome at first, is sure to
succeed. Other paths may look as if they would lead into shaded
nooks and flowery dells; but ruin lurks in secret, and despair has a
lodge there. The only safety is in keeping clear of them, having
nothing to do with them; while the onward road, narrow and rough
though it be, will in the end lead to the desired result.”
X.
In so large a school as that in Rockdale, of course there were various
cliques, and each clique with its leader. Frank Clavers was at the
head of the Senior class, and round him gathered good scholars and
studious boys; while Richard Farden and Harry Gilmore, by virtue of
wealth, good looks, and an easy, good-natured manner, took the
lead in all sports and amusements; and Robert Lovell was looked up
to and followed by all who had a thought of the future. Few enough
there were of these; and to this clique I had attached myself. Hence
the goodness that my room-mate was constantly reproaching me
with, when I refused to join in their stolen revels.
“I am sure I should be on the ice half the time, if I could skate as
you do,” said Harry Gilmore once as I joined the skaters during
recess.
“So should I perhaps, had I nothing else to do,” I answered,
skimming over the smooth surface with all the freedom of a bird on
the wing. “It is a good deal of self-denial for me to stay at home,
Harry. I own there are times when an hour on the ice would please
me much better than sawing wood or making paths through the
snow.”
“Why don’t you do it then? we have to beg you ever so long. I had
no idea you could skate so beautifully.”
“I cannot afford the time,” I answered frankly. “I came here to
study; and you know I nearly pay my board with what I can do
during the hours that you have for recreation.”
“And your father don’t give you a cent?”
“My father and mother are both dead, Harry. I have the dearest little
sister in the world; but as for money, I earn all I have with my own
hands.”
“This is why you work and study then,” said he, linking his arm in
mine and flashing across the pond. “It makes me ashamed of myself
every time I hear you refuse to go with Richard; but I didn’t know
that—”
“That I was so poor?”
“That your parents were dead, and you trying to educate yourself.”
“How is this?” shouted Richard Farden as soon as he turned the
bend and came to shore—“how is it that you have got Howe on his
skates? What arguments have you used, what inducements held
out?”
“Golden ones, I’ll be bound,” shouted Charles Eaton, while the boys
laughed uproariously.
“I have no influence over Marston Howe,” said Harry, calling me by
my first name. “He has an influence over me, however, and I am
resolved each day more and more to follow it.”
“How now? what’s the matter?” cried several voices as we
unstrapped our skates.
I saw by the look of the sun that my time was up, and without
another word I hurried up the hill and across the field to the
academy.
Before the study bell rang, Harry Gilmore came to my room. “Have
you a moment to spare, Marston?”
“Yes, a moment for you,” I answered.
“And you will not call it so much lost time?” drawing his chair to the
table, and placing his feet on the fender. “To tell the truth, I am
ashamed of the life I am leading this winter; the deception we
practise is outrageous.”
“You do not deceive any one, Harry. Mr. Harlan may not know all of
your nightly wanderings; but he knows who studies and who does
not, and so do all the teachers.”
“Then why don’t they scold us as we deserve, send us home, or
expel us?”
“Perhaps you would not do any better at home. They do all they
can, both by precept and example; and they hope that time and
your own good sense will at length compel you to do better.”
“And I am determined that I will. I have been led by Richard long
enough. I am resolved to study for the rest of the term; and if I do,
will you be my friend?” and he looked at me earnestly.
“You forget how poor I am. I pay my board by waiting on the
household.”
“So much the more honor for you. My father was once a poor man.
He’s rich now; worth half a million, I suppose. But that only makes
me think meaner of myself. Only think of the money I spend every
week, flinging it away, and you have none. You say you have a
sister; so have I; and such good letters she writes me, telling me to
use my time profitably, and not to be led away by ease-loving,
indolent companions. I am going to try now, and you must help me.”
His look and tone touched me, and my words leaped out, “As far as I
can I will help you to do right, Harry.”
“I shall be a better boy if you will let me come here sometimes and
see you study. Say that you will, Marston. There goes the bell. Say
that I may come.”
“As often as you like.”
“If my lessons are good to-morrow, you may take the credit of it;”
and the door closed.
Presently Richard came in, flung down his cap and gloves, and
hastily tore the envelope from a letter.
“I declare it’s too bad; not a cent of money. Father has no idea of
the little things that draw upon the purse.”
“It cannot be that you have used the last he sent,” I exclaimed,
seeing his look of distress.
“Yes, but I have though, and had to borrow besides. You see every
thing is so high; our suppers have cost enormously; and now the
lectures are coming on, and I have not a dime.”
“I have several tickets; that need not trouble you.”
“The lectures would be dull enough if it was not for something
afterwards: and the sleigh-rides; I’ve promised ever so many I’d
treat them to a ride. It’s just the time now; and the old fellow don’t
seem to appreciate it at all.”
“He appreciates study more, perhaps.”
“I know it, Howe, as well as you do. I don’t study. I feel ashamed of
it, and still I cannot do better. I mean to in the spring. I’ll turn over a
new leaf, as Gilmore says.”
“Why not begin now?” I ventured to ask.
“Because I can’t; I’ve got out of the way of study, and to go back is
not so readily done. I would not have father know how I spend my
time; and my sister is always writing me to make good use of my
opportunities. Poor mother, I am all the boy she has got, and I know
how anxious she is about me. I don’t mean to be wild, but I’m afraid
that I am.”
The last words, mournfully spoken, touched my heart. Besides, the
idea of his trifling with a mother’s love moved me to speak.
“Why not try now to do what you feel to be right? You might easily
be the first in your class.”
“I meant to be when I came here; but when I saw how some of the
others managed, by degrees I fell into the same ways.”
“It is not too late to commence. Mr. Harlan told us that when we
become conscious of an error, we should turn from it immediately. It
is easy for us to do wrong; and to turn as soon as we become
conscious of it, is the only true wisdom.”
“I don’t believe I can here; the boys all know me, and they will
expect me to do just as I have done.”
A little tap at the door. Charles Eaton entered, and conversation took
a more general tone.
A few evenings after this, in passing out of the supper-room, Mrs.
Harlan handed me several papers, magazines, etc. Looking them
over, I found a notice of the death of Charles Brisbane, my first
teacher. My eyes grew dim as I gazed upon the record, which spoke
of early promise, rare graces of mind, and the deep religious
element underlying a character devoted to the elevation of the
human race. I cannot describe the effect produced by the perusal of
that short obituary. Mr. Brisbane’s words had roused me to action,
and taught me my duty to myself and to my Maker; but his death
gave to his well-remembered utterances all the force and power of a
voice from heaven. Thenceforth I cherished his image still more, as
one of my choicest treasures; and the desire of my heart was
deepened to acquire knowledge and discipline, and to be, like him, a
good and useful man.
And still, with all my resolves, I was conscious I failed in the most
important, point. Did I love the Saviour as he did? Did I as closely
follow Him?
Winter passed, and spring blossomed into beauty. Robert Lovell was
again with us. There was more study; examination was coming, and
all were anxious to make a good appearance. My room-mate was
more studious, and Harry Gilmore was trying to redeem time. Out of
school my time was taken up with gardening; and much pleasanter
it was than making paths in the ice and snow. True, I had never
done any thing of this before; but although a little awkward at first,
it soon came easy. Besides, it brought me in continual contact with
Mr. and Mrs. Harlan; and their remarks were not only pleasant, but
profitable. In the room of feeling despondent, as I had now and then
done during the winter, I was cheerful and happy; and without
enjoying my books the less, I did enjoy my labors more.
“It is strange how quickly the weeds grow,” I said to Mrs. Harlan as I
was thinning out the early vegetables.
“I never look at the weeds without thinking of my own heart,” she
answered. “Goodness, patience, humility, and faith are here to be
cultivated with constant care; while selfishness and passion spring
up almost imperceptibly, and their seeds are, like the thistle-down,
borne on the lightest breeze.”
“There is one comfort with the weeds,” I answered; “we can cut
them up by the roots; but the evil in our hearts, the foolish and
wicked desires that so often strive for the mastery, are not so easily
managed.”
“Not by ourselves, Marston; but there is One that can help us in this.
Like the careful gardener, that lops off and prunes the vine till it
seems, as it did to you the other day, that it would die cut down so
closely, so God deals with us according to the condition in which we
are placed, lopping off a branch here and there, taking away a
support, replanting according to our needs and necessities, and all
to improve the growth and life, that the fruit may be more abundant.
You remember in January, when the shade-trees were trimmed, you
thought they were ruined, and exclaimed against it.”
“Yes, I thought they were cut too closely, the last year’s growth
almost entirely cut away, leaving little but the bare trunk.”
“And you see now how they are putting forth new and vigorous
branches. They had branches and leaves last year, but no beauty;
and there was too much top for the roots; hence the necessity of
cutting them closely: watch them, and you will see how much more
beautiful and fruitful they will be for such severe pruning.”
“If we could always keep this in mind,” I answered; “but it is so easy
to grow despondent when we cannot understand the why and
wherefore of our trials.”
“The plants do not ask why and wherefore, but put forth all their
energy in the direction to which they are guided,” was the reply.
“It is their nature; but with us it is not so easy and natural,” I said.
“How so? it is our privilege to be guided and supported. The Saviour
is often represented under the figure of a gardener, his garden the
world, and the plants in it the human beings for whom he died. If
we are his servants, the afflictions and privations we are called upon
to endure are only prunings from his hand. Neither should we ask
why; but turning our gaze in the direction specified, seek to fulfil his
purpose.”
“And if we try, does he see and notice our effort?”
“Yes, Marston, the fall of a sparrow is noted by him; and there is
nothing connected with our well-being but interests him. He is
moved with a feeling of compassion when he looks upon our
suffering; and so great is his love, that if he could spare us the least
pang he would do so.”
By this time I had finished the asparagus-bed, while the rows of
lettuce stood neatly defined, and the delicate tendrils of the pea-
vines began twisting themselves about for the support I had placed
within their reach. Mr. Harlan suggested that one walk needed to be
widened, and another to be gravelled. It was Saturday, and I took
the wheelbarrow and crossed the pasture to the brook.
While shovelling gravel, with my coat off and sleeves rolled up, I
heard shouts and voices. A light wagon, drawn by two spirited
horses, and filled by half a dozen boys, was coming down the road
from Terryville. Richard Farden was driving, and when opposite me,
he stopped.
“We are going down to see Frank Clavers, and then on a fishing
excursion up the river. There is room enough for one more; put
down your sleeves and jump in; we’ve plenty of hooks and lines.”
“A grand treat it will be,” cried several from the back seat; “you had
better come.”
“We shall have a splendid supper,” added Richard, “and then home
by moonlight. Such a chance you don’t get every day. Come on.”
I longed to avail myself of the privilege. I had not had a ride, save
on horseback, for a long time. And then it was to see Frank; and
perhaps I could stop for a moment at Miss Grimshaw’s, and see
Jennie. Still I had no time. Mrs. Harlan was expecting me back, and
there stood the wheelbarrow half-full of gravel. “No,” I answered, “I
cannot go. I have not the time; drive on;” and I took my shovel, not
daring to look up till the handsome turnout was out of sight.
The next half hour was one of mingled feelings. Why was my lot so
hard, and that of others so easy? “He deals with us according to our
needs,” Mrs. Harlan had said; and I tried hard to work cheerfully,
though saying to myself now and then, “It is Saturday, and no more
than fair had I gone home. How much good it would have done
me;” and plunging my shovel into the yielding bank, I started my
wheelbarrow.
“Do not work so hard, Marston; you look heated;” and Mrs. Harlan
looked up approvingly.
“What a difference it makes,” said she as I scattered the gravel in
heaps, and then spread it evenly.
“It will require two or three loads more,” I answered; and on I went,
feeling that any thing was better than to stand still.
Again had I reached the gravelled shore, and was shovelling away
smartly, when Harry Gilmore leaped down the bank with his merry
laugh and cheerful voice.
“If I was to envy anybody at Rockdale, it would be you,” he said,
after a few words about the fishing party.
“Me!” and I pointed to my bare arms and my face dripping with
perspiration.
“Yes, I believe you have more real comfort than any one of us who
have rich fathers. You prize every hour in school, because it costs
you self-denial; while we have never learned to value privileges that
cost us nothing. Now let me help you,” he said, taking off his coat,
“for I am to have a drive in the evening, and I want you should get
through in time to join me.”
“A drive! where?”
“Anywhere you please; to Claverton, if you will.”
“Oh, that will be so good. Are you really to go?”
“Certainly I am to go, and you are to go with me. Now give me that
shovel.”
“There’s nothing more to do with it just now.”
“What a pity there are not two wheelbarrows. I will go back with you
and get another.”
“You forget your clothes,” I said, looking at his neat suit of
broadcloth.
“Gravel is clean; it will all brush off;” and we started, each grasping
a handle of the wheelbarrow and keeping step over the green
sward.
With an amused look, Mrs. Harlan eyed us as we came up.
“Two boys work faster than one,” she said, as Harry scattered the
gravel and I smoothed it.
“Two more loads will be enough, wont they, Mrs. Harlan?” asked
Harry; and being answered in the affirmative, away he went to the
wood-shed, and returned with a heavier wheelbarrow for himself.
“Not that, Harry; you are not accustomed to it. If you insist on
going, you must take this.” With a few playful words we exchanged
wheelbarrows, while Mrs. Harlan looked after us as we trundled
down the path at a brisk pace.
“How stupid. I forgot that we had but one shovel,” said Harry with a
light laugh.
“I will fill both,” I answered.
“No, I came to help you. I will sit still while you fill yours; then you
shall rest till mine is ready, and we can start even.”
There seemed to be no other way, and I assented.
“There, old fellow,” said he as the gravel lay piled in my barrow,
“now it’s my turn.”
“Oh, Harry, it will tire you out; let me,” I persisted.
“My back is no better than yours; go and sit down.”
Overcome by his kindness, I went and sat on the bank, hardly
conscious of my own identity. I had felt so bitterly in the morning,
thinking my lot so hard; and now to find that Harry had stayed at
home to take me out for the evening, and then, fearing I should not
finish in time, helping me himself—the boy that never had waited on
himself doing this heavy work, and all for me.
“There, I am done,” leaving the shovel standing upright in the
middle of his load.
“You will find it heavy; you had better tip out some,” I suggested.
“My arms are strong; have no fear,” he answered, and struck into the
path ahead of me.
“Pretty warm,” said Harry, after a few moments. “I reckon I’ll tip off
my vest instead of the gravel;” and I saw that his collar was limp
and the linen on his shoulders wet through and through.
“This will be sufficient,” said Mrs. Harlan as we finished smoothing
the walk. “You have worked so well, Marston, the rest of the day
may be your own.”
“Mrs. Harlan,” and Harry stood with his cap in his hand, “I am to go
to Claverton this evening, for the ride merely, and I would like to
take Marston with me, if you have no objection.”
“To Claverton this evening! You will see Miss Grimshaw and Jennie,”
turning to me.
“If I go, I shall hope to see them.”
“I will see;” and she crossed the veranda into her husband’s study.
“Yes, Mr. Harlan is willing you should go,” she said. “I hope the ride
will be pleasant. Let me see you before you go, Marston.”
“All ready,” shouted Harry as he drove up in a pretty open buggy
drawn by a high-spirited black horse, that pawed the ground just a
little, to show his impatience.
“In a minute, Harry.” I had not yet seen Mrs. Harlan, and I flew
down stairs and across the hall to the parlor.
“Not there, Marston,” and Mrs. Harlan called me to her own room.
“Here are a few things that I intended for you before examination. It
will be a good time to wear them this evening, however, and you
may try them on at once; I am impatient to see if they fit.”
My hand trembled as I took them, and my voice still more.
“Do not be afraid to wear them, you have fairly earned them. Mr.
Harlan told me that he owed them to you.”
They were a nice spring suit of light grey cloth. I could not stop to
half thank her, but hastened into my own room, and slipping into
them, gave one look into the little mirror, and then down stairs,
under Mrs. Harlan’s kindly review, and then out to Harry.
“Why, Marston, what’s the matter? You are actually crying.”
“It was all so unexpected,” I murmured, dropping into my seat.
“They are not a bit too good for you; I was with her when she
ordered them. The tailor measured me instead of you; that’s the
reason they fit so nicely. I told Mrs. Harlan you could wear my
clothes. But come, cheer up; don’t let a nice suit of clothes spoil
your eyes. We shall have lots to see.”
Impatient as I was to see Jennie, the ride seemed short; and when
we drove up to Miss Grimshaw’s little white gate, I thought I had
never seen a picture half so beautiful. It was a soft spring day, the
parlor windows open, and the white muslin curtains fluttering in the
breeze. The breath of the lilacs perfumed the air, and the tulips were
budding into beauty. Miss Grimshaw had moved her shop to a larger
building, and we walked up the yard and were looking through the
half-open door, when grandma spied us, and came forward, leaning
on her staff.
“Why, Marston, is that you? I am so glad to see you. How you have
grown, child.”
“And this is Harry Gilmore,” I answered, till then forgetting to
introduce my companion.
“Sit down; Jennie will be in presently.”
“Where is she, grandma?”
“In the strawberry bed at the back of the house. I will call her.”
“No, grandma, let us go for her: and may we pick some
strawberries?”
“As many as you wish.”
By this time Jennie had seen the buggy, and surmising who had
come, started to meet us. One glad cry of surprise, and her arms
were round my neck.
“Oh, brother, I am so glad to see you. I began to fear you would
never come again;” then turning to Harry, as I named him, she held
out her little dimpled hand. “I am glad you came to-day, the
strawberries are so fine. This is the first day we have had them in
abundance. Will you take some of mine?” holding up a bowl she had
picked quite full, the red stain still on her fingers.
“Grandma said we might help ourselves.”
An hour passed deliciously, and then Jennie ran in, smoothed out
her sunny curls, and put on a fresh pretty gingham, looking
handsomer than I had ever seen her before. Miss Grimshaw came in
for tea, and the nice white rolls were enjoyed by us with a peculiar
zest, while the strawberries and cream were, as Harry said, beyond
all praise. After tea we strolled out to the river, gathered violets, and
talked of our studies.
“It looks natural, and still every thing wears a brighter hue,” I said to
Jennie as we stood on the door-step. “I have never seen the spring
half so beautiful.”
“Perhaps it is in ourselves,” Jennie said. “You have not forgotten
what Mr. Kirby said: ‘If we think good and happy thoughts, we shall
look through such a medium that every thing about us will wear the
same hue.’”
“I like to hear you repeat what Mr. Kirby said,” I continued.
“Sometimes I am afraid that I am forgetting him.”
“We both owe Mr. Kirby more than anybody else in the world. We
must never forget him.”
Harry had been walking round the flower beds with grandma. They
stopped near us, and she said, “You have grown tall, Marston, and I
hear people say that you are getting to be a fine scholar. I do not
know much of books, but I have picked up a verse that I want you
to think of: ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.’”
“And you too,” she continued, addressing Harry. “You will both make
better men for heeding it.”
“So my mother says,” was Harry’s reply.
We did not see Frank Clavers, neither hear any thing of the
excursionists. At parting Jennie gave us a basket of strawberries for
Mrs. Harlan, and stood with cheeks flushed and eyes misty with
tears, the gold brown curls waving over her white shoulders.
“The prettiest picture that I have ever seen,” said Harry as we drove
away. “You may well be proud of your sister, Marston.”
“And so I am,” I replied. “The best of all, she is as good as she is
beautiful.”
For some reason we talked quite soberly during our ride back to
Rockdale, going over the incidents of the past, and the changes that
our short lives had witnessed. Then we talked of the future, which
we robed in bright hues like the blossoms of that lovely spring time.
True, Harry was the principal talker. My heart was full. Still I knew
that I must scale steep heights, tread rugged paths, press on when
footsore and weary, perchance to meet little earthly success. Ah,
how mysterious a thing human life would be, could we not discern in
it the threshold of a higher, purer existence.
XI.
By rigid economy, by laboring in vacation, and performing various
little offices in term time, I managed to continue at Rockdale two
years. Latin was no longer a trouble to me, and Greek was becoming
easy; but my purse was nearly empty. I was in need of several new
books. And I began to turn in my mind what I could do towards
defraying new expenses.
At this juncture the president of the board of trustees visited the
school, where he remained the entire day, examining the classes,
and inspecting the monthly reports. I had no suspicion of his
purpose, and consequently gave my whole attention to my
recitations. Although not as quick as many, I had been thorough,
understood the principles of almost every thing that I had been over,
and thus obtained correct answers. Greek and Latin were read
easily, and the president was evidently satisfied with our progress.
That evening Mr. Harlan sent for me to his study. The time and the
occasion were new to me, and I went with some trepidation. Mr.
Harlan was not there, but in his place the visitor, Mr. Stovill.
“Mr. Harlan tells me that you intend to go through college, if your
hands and your brains can take you there,” was his somewhat
abrupt greeting.
“I am hoping to go. Others have done the same without more
means.”
“What will you do to obtain the money? it will require a good deal
for that.”
“I shall work for it.”
“Would you haul wood, build a stone Wall, or break stones on the
street?”
“Any thing, sir, that offered me an equivalent.”
“Then you do not think that work will degrade you?”
“On the contrary, I think that labor will ennoble me. But as I wish to
study, I should like to do that which would bring me the most for the
least number of hours.”
He was silent, while I sat in suspense as to his purpose. What did he
mean by all these questions?
“I believe you will do,” he said at length. “Young men are apt to
think that work will degrade them. They forget that oaks spring from
acorns, and little efforts lead to great results. The boy that will work
to improve himself, will pretty surely merge into the man that will
work for the good of others.”
In a few words he made known his plan. Robert Lovell was going to
college; some one else must supply his place as under-tutor.
Mr. Harlan had suggested the names of two, Silas June and myself.
Silas was very quick, and priding himself on this, he did not study. To
be brilliant was his desire, and yet he might have been a thorough
scholar had he studied. His quickness ruined him.
This situation, in consideration of my standing in class, was offered
me, with sufficient remuneration to defray all my expenses.
I could hardly keep back the tears. This ray of light stealing through
the darkness, was a reproof for all my faint-heartedness and
despondency. “No right effort is ever lost.” There was a sun behind
the clouds, though I had doubted it.
“I might have had that chance,” said June. “It was all my own
foolishness. If I had only known the day Mr. Stovill was coming, I
would have had my lessons; there would have been no trouble. My
reports were against me.”
I could say nothing to comfort him, and the hour passed without
words.
“If I could only begin again, I would not lean so much on my
quickness. It is the same old story—the hare and the tortoise. You
will get there quicker than I shall.”
“It is not too late for you,” said I; “try it.”
“I cannot do three years’ work in one. Besides, it is easier to fall into
bad habits than to get rid of them. After all, I may get along just as
well; but mother expected me to fill Lovell’s place. She wrote me in
her last letter, that if I could not help myself a little, she should have
to take my sister from school; she could not afford the expense of
both. Poor mother.”
“Poor mother,” I echoed, and thought of what I should do, had I only
a mother to write me letters full of loving words, and a sister that
must be taken from school unless I could help myself in a measure.
I was roused by his voice.
“We can never be young but once. I want my share of pleasure.”
“Do you find it?”
“Not yet; but I am hoping every day for something better.”
“Which you will never find, I am afraid. Judging from your own
words, you are making your mother unhappy, and yourself
miserable.”
“It is so; but what can I do?”
“Break off your idle habits; say good-by to your fun-loving
companions, and begin to work right earnestly. This is the way
others have done.”
“I ought to do it; but it is too late.”
“And you will oblige your mother to take that little sister from
school?”
“Oh, I hope not; she is not so poor as she thinks. True, I have been
spending a good deal this winter. Gilmore has a rich father, and I
could not bear to be shabby in the suppers.”
This was my last year at Rockdale; and if the service was pleasanter,
it was not less arduous. I had very little time for myself, a half hour’s
stroll at twilight being my only recreation. Still I believed that I was
improving, both intellectually and morally; and this sufficed me.
Jennie was also climbing the hill of science rapidly. Frank Clavers’
sister had returned the year previous from boarding-school; and
being pleased with Jennie, and learning that she could sing, she had
offered to give her lessons in music. Seeing her fondness for books,
Miss Clavers soon kindly offered to help her here also. This called for
additional gratitude on my part; I had felt so troubled about this
little sister, whom my mother left in my charge. Doing for myself, I
hardly felt it to be right not to aid her personally more than my
duties would allow. Now she had the benefit of example, and also
the instruction of a young lady who was said to be a finished scholar.
Thus easily I slipped into Robert Lovell’s place as tutor, and also into
his class in Sabbath-school. Teaching others is one of the best
means of self-culture; and I was in this way sent to my Bible, if not
more frequently, at least with a more intense desire to understand
its teachings. Thinking, studying, meditating, I drew nearer the cross
each day; each day began to realize more perfectly the beauty of His
words who spake as never man spake, the glory of his countenance
beaming with untold love; the terrible agony he suffered on the
cross; his willingness to forgive sin; and above all, the
encouragement in coming to him freely, as to a friend loved and
confided in. Oh, why had I not seen this before? I had hopes that I
did love him—that I did trust him—that I did follow him; but Oh, it
was so far off. Had I been near, I should never have doubted as I
had done; I should never have gone through all these months with
my heart heavy, the waters going over my soul, striving to do only
because I knew it to be right, and only half trusting the divine
promise, “I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.” Oh, blind and
foolish heart, thus to grope in darkness when He was waiting with
outstretched arms to receive thee.
How bright and beautiful my pathway now opened before me. Not
that barriers were all removed, obstacles all cleared away; but I no
longer felt troubled with a weak, half trust. I knew His promises
were sure; that he would not leave me; that he would be in reality
not a personal friend merely, but one closer than a brother. A long
time had I been learning the lesson of his love, a long time
discovering the depth of his tenderness; now, satisfied to rest on
him, I found it joy unutterable.
XII.
My first vacation after leaving Rockdale was spent with Mr. Wyman.
Four years since I had left him, poor and ignorant. Now, I certainly
was not any richer. Still I had advanced in knowledge of books and
in mental discipline; and although my longing after an education was
not in the least abated, I had learned there is nothing really
desirable in comparison with the fear of God and true holiness. I did
not care now to choose in what part of his vineyard I should work. I
only wished to labor for him; and to do this effectually, I must not
falter in my purpose of an education.
With this intent I went into the hay-field with as much ardor as
before into the school-room. Money, Mr. Stovill said, was desirable to
go through college with, and I knew the worth of it.
“I see that you have not forgotten how to work,” said Mr. Wyman,
coming into the meadow one sunny afternoon.
“Not forgetting, but still more accustomed to it, Mr. Wyman. I have
been hard at it ever since I was here.”
“There is a difference between head work and hand work,” said the
farmer with a quiet smile.
“I have been doing both,” I replied; “turning book leaves has not
bleached my hands.”
“While I have to confess to the doing of only one. The young folks of
this day have much better advantages than were common when I
was a boy. We had no such schools then as Rockdale.”
“I think you do yourself injustice, Mr. Wyman, when you say that you
have only been working with your hands. Had it not been for you, I
could not have gone to Rockdale when I did, if ever. In word and
deed, your labor has budded, blossomed, and brought forth fruit.
We sometimes study quite as effectually out of books as in them.”
“True; but if I could live my life over again, I should think more of a
book education. Those that know the most have the means of doing
the most good.”
“There is one comforting truth,” said I, turning the hay vigorously:
“God directs all our steps. He appoints our place; he gives us our
work. I used to think there was in labor a great choice, and although
I was willing to do any thing because I felt it to be right, still there
was also a consciousness that, could I choose, such would not be
my employment. I remember the morning I came here for the first
time; I rebelled not a little against it. Still it was a means, a
stepping-stone to the desired good.”
“And is it not the same now?”
“No; I am willing to be directed. I like to be led by Him, and feel safe
in following. Then I feared continually lest I should make a mistake,
and through weakness or ignorance fail to use the means to the
greatest advantage. Now I try to exercise human wisdom and a
prudent forethought, and still rest contented, whatever the result.
The Lord knows all, and he knows whether this or that shall prosper.
To do right, and to do my best, is all that he requires of me; events
are with him, and success is given wheresoever he pleases.”
Saturday evening at length came. We had worked hard through the
week, but the hay was not all in. Nine o’clock, and there still
remained several loads. A consultation was called.
“It looks like rain,” said Mr. Wyman. “But you are all tired, and the
oxen have done enough for one day; perhaps we had better let it
rest. It will not rain to-night; and if it does to-morrow, it wont take
long to put in three loads.”
“But to-morrow will be Sunday, Mr. Wyman.”
“I know; but it would not be right to let the hay spoil.”
“I do not understand that; the command is positive: ‘Six days shalt
thou labor, and do all thy work: but the seventh day is the Sabbath
of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy
son, nor thy daughter, thy man-servant, nor thy maid-servant, nor
thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates.’ Nothing can be
more explicit.”
“It is also equally incumbent upon us not to waste our substance,”
said Mr Wyman. “If you read the New Testament rightly, you will find
that it is lawful to do works of mercy and necessity.”
“True; but would the getting in hay be counted such a work, when
God expressly bids us keep his Sabbath even in harvest time?”
“Yes, if the hay was to be spoiled by the neglect, it ought to be got
in.”
There was no more said. It was late, and the men dispersed. I went
directly to my room, not a little disconcerted about what I might be
called upon to do. Mr. Wyman was an old man, and had been very
kind to me; it was not for me to speak to him as an equal. He felt it
to be right; I felt it to be a direct act of disobedience. We must each
act according to our conscience; and with this thought I went to
sleep.
The next morning the sun peeped through a dull, hazy atmosphere,
looked, and was gone, showing occasional glimpses of his face till
nearly church time, when the clouds began to gather and roll
themselves into inky blackness, and rain seemed inevitable.
“Put the oxen to the cart,” said Mr. Wyman; “that hay will be ruined.”
“But, pa, it is Sunday,” said Mrs. Wyman.
“Well, what if it is? You are ready to go to church, and the wagon is
at the door; go on, I shall stop for the hay. It is just as much a duty
to save our property as to do any thing else. We are told to be
diligent in business;” and the farmer exchanged his Sunday coat for
his work-day one, and went out.
“Marston,” he said as he passed through the back porch, “you load
faster than any of the others. If we hurry, we can get it in and then
go to church.”
“I cannot do that kind of work on the Sabbath, Mr. Wyman. I regard
it as an open violation of His law.”
“If you cannot work for me to-day, you certainly cannot to-morrow.”
I did not stop to question; there was but one course for me. My
head bowed over my hands. To lose Mr. Wyman’s friendship was
more than I could bear.
“What is that to thee? follow thou me,” floated through my brain and
comforted me. Presently a light hand was on my shoulder, and a
kind voice said,
“Marston, will you drive us to church? I do not think it will rain at
all.”
“If you desire it, Mrs. Wyman.”
We started, Mrs. Wyman with Emma and Alice. As we passed the
meadow, Mr. Wyman was busily pitching on the hay, Anderson and
Gregory each having a cart. The oxen stood with their great patient
eyes rolling about, as if not quite sure of the right of breaking in
upon their day of rest. Nothing was said, however.
We reached the church door just in time to escape a few quiet
drops; but these were soon gone; the clouds unrolled and dispersed
their dark folds, and before noon all was bright again.
“Oh, father, you should have heard the sermon this morning,” said
Alice Wyman, a sweet, blooming girl, tripping into the parlor as
though nothing had happened. The farmer sat in his straight-backed
chair, the hay was all in, and he was reading the Bible.
“What was the text, child?” he at length said.
“‘Trust in the Lord, and do good; so shalt thou dwell in the land, and
verily thou shalt be fed.’ Mr. Gordon spoke so beautifully of the
implicit trust we are privileged to have, it seemed to me I never felt
so forcibly before how far short we come of realizing all that might
be ours, the contentment that would fill our hearts, would we put
aside self and lean more perfectly upon Him.”
“But there is something for us to do,” said her father. “We are not to
sit still; we are to act, and that diligently.”
“Yes,” answered Mrs. Wyman, “Mr. Gordon said there was something
for us to do. The first act was obedience; the second was love and
trust.”
By this time dinner was on the table. The farmer was evidently in no
talkative mood, and few words were spoken.
In the afternoon I walked with Alice to the Sabbath-school, and
returned comforted. Perhaps Mr. Wyman would turn me off; it was
more than probable he would. I had displeased him. Still, having
done what I thought to be right, I would trust it all to God.
The next morning as we finished breakfast, and before we arose
from the table, Mr. Wyman said,
“I owe you for two weeks’ work, Marston: I am sorry for what
happened yesterday; still I must have the direction of what shall be
done on my own farm. I shall fill your place with some one who will
do what I ask of him.”
“Had it been any other than a plain, positive command, I should
have gone with you, Mr. Wyman; but so positive is the decree with
regard to the Sabbath, there could be no question with me
concerning my duty.”
Mrs. Wyman and Alice followed me down the walk, and begged me
not to cherish unkind feelings towards Mr. Wyman.
“No fear of that,” I answered. “He has always been my friend, and I
shall not think unkindly of him for this. He is too good a man not to
be sorry when he thinks of it with his accustomed coolness.”
I had nothing to do but to walk back to Claverton, and tell Jennie
what had befallen me.
“I am sorry, Marston; but I should have been still sorrier had you
acted otherwise;” and she pressed her red lips to mine. “An entire
obedience is necessary. Do not be troubled; some good will come of
it.”
We walked down to the little gate, where stood a messenger from
Mr. Willett.
“Mr. Willett would like to see Marston,” as Jennie took the message.
“He has not been well for several weeks, and has inquired for you
continually,” she said, as she held the gate for me to pass.
Mr. Willett was pillowed up in his easy-chair, and seemed delighted
to see me.
“I am glad that you are free,” he said at length. “I have been sick,
and the doctor forbids all kinds of exertion. Every thing is going to
ruin in the store. If you will just go in, I shall consider it a great
favor, and will give you more than you can get doing any thing else.”
How soon the black cloud had showed a silver lining. I had felt so
unwilling to leave Mr. Wyman, so sad and desponding, that I could
not think of any thing else as I walked back to the village. With all
my waywardness, God was not unmindful. Could I ever despond
again? I felt at the time that it would be impossible.
“I told you something good would come of it,” said Jennie as I
crossed the street and once more entered the parlor. “‘A right effort
is never lost.’ This should teach us both to trust more perfectly.”
Mr. Willett recovered rapidly; and by the time vacation was over, I
was appointed a regular teacher in the Rockdale academy.
“This will delay your college course, but it will be better for you in
the end,” said Mr. Harlan. “You are still young enough to wait next
year, and your salary will enable you to begin. Besides, if you choose
to study while teaching, I will aid you all I can; and I have little
doubt you can enter the Sophomore class instead of the Freshman.”
This was a step I had not thought of, and I quickly resolved not a
moment should be lost; to teach and to study should be my work for
another year.
Among the first of the new pupils that particularly interested me
when I entered upon my duties was Ezra Metcalf. Stimulated by his
little teacher, he had put forth very commendable effort; and
through the interest of Mr. Gordon and one or two benevolent ladies
of Terryville, Mr. Harlan had been induced to take him, the boy
paying his board, as I had done, by labor.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bar Hebraeus, 1226-1286, author.

Table of Contents ................................................................................................................... v

The Jacobite Patriarchs of Antioch to 1292 ..........................................................508

Counter-patriarchs to 1293 ................................................................................ 508

The Bishops of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, c.280–399 .................................................... 512

The Metropolitans of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, 399–421 ............................................ 512

Abbreviations of Periodical Titles ........................................................................... 518

THE CAREER OF BAR HEBRAEUS

13 Takahashi, ‘Simeon of Qal’a Rumaita, Patriarch Philoxenos Nemrod and Bar

THE LITERARY ACHIEVEMENT OF BAR HEBRAEUS

19 Ibid., ii. 453.

Encyclopaedic and philosophical works

ʿOmar al-Abhari (†1262). 28

Medical and mathematical works

Other scientific works

30 Duval, Ibid., 410; Wright, Ibid., 280.

(kunnasha d’kanone) of the Nestorian metropolitan ʿAbdishoʿ bar Brikha of Nisibis,

THE C H RONICLE OF BAR HEBRAEUS

38 Duval, Ibid., 293–94; Wright, Ibid., 273–74.

THE E CCLESIASTICAL C H RONICLE AS LITERATURE

45 Wright, Ibid., 1–3.

46 Michael the Syrian, Chronicle, ii. 486.

47 Bar Hebraeus, Ecclesiastical Chronicle, ii. 69–77.

48 Ibid., i. 781–89 and ii. 487–93.

49 Ibid., ii. 391.

bishop Ishoʿzkha of ʿUkbara shouted: ‘Besides, it would be disgraceful if we got a

have chosen Yohannan bar ʿIsa to be our catholicus, because we believe he is

51 Mari, 86–87 (Arabic); 76–77 (Latin).

ʿAbbasid caliphs is undoubtedly malicious, it is also very funny. It is also, at bottom,

THE E CCLESIASTICAL C H RONICLE AS HISTORY

52 Bar Hebraeus, Ecclesiastical Chronicle, ii. 223–27.

56 Bar Hebraeus, Ecclesiastical Chronicle, i. 161–77.

particular interest. Muslim oppression forms the essential background to most of

62 Griffith, The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque, ii. 106–28.

ʿAbdon (1004–30), the stoning to death of the elderly metropolitan Eliya of

67 Bar Hebraeus, Ecclesiastical Chronicle, ii. 233–35.

Church in a novel position. The Chalcedonian Greeks were temporarily sidelined,

71 Michael the Syrian, Chronicle, iii. 225–26.

73 Ibid., ii. 471–75.

77Wilmshurst, The Martyred Church, 9–11, 86–91 and 182–83.

Hebraeus, Ecclesiastical Chronicle, ii. 61–77.

81 Bar Hebraeus, Ecclesiastical Chronicle, ii. 133 and 141–45.

83 Michael the Syrian, Chronicle, iii. 442–47.

Hebraeus, Ecclesiastical Chronicle, ii. 301.

Hong Kong, February 2016