The Memre and the Commentaries

St. Ephrem’s work beyond the sung hymn: the memre, the recited verse homilies in the isosyllabic seven-syllable couplet that became known as “the metre of Mar Ephrem”; and his prose exegesis — above all the Commentary on the Diatessaron, the single most important witness to Tatian’s lost gospel harmony, recovered in part from a sixth-century Syriac manuscript and complete in an Armenian version; together with his selective prose Commentaries on Genesis and Exodus. This chapter surveys the recited and the prose Ephrem, the complement to the sung Ephrem of the madrashe.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father) / Syriac

The Memra: Verse Recited, Not Sung

Alongside the sung madrasha (see the chapter on the teaching hymns), Ephrem composed in a second poetic form: the memra (plural memre), the verse homily. The memra differs from the madrasha in both form and performance. It is not stanzaic, has no qala-melody and no congregational refrain, and was recited or chanted rather than sung — a metrical sermon rather than a hymn. Its form is the isosyllabic couplet of two seven-syllable lines, a structure so closely associated with Ephrem that the seven-syllable line became known in the Syriac tradition as “the metre of Mar Ephrem” (Brock, St Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise, SVS Press, 1990, introduction; the syriaca.org introduction to the Syriac saints). The memre are considerably fewer than the madrashe, and questions of authenticity attend a number of those transmitted under his name, since the seven-syllable metre was used by later Syriac poets as well.

The memra is, in effect, Ephrem’s vehicle for the sustained narrative meditation — the kind of extended exposition that the tighter, more compressed stanza of the madrasha did not suit. Where the madrasha teaches by accumulating images and returning to a refrain, the memra unfolds a theme at length in a flowing, even meter. Among the authentic memre are the cycle Sermones de Fide and homilies on biblical and ascetical subjects (Beck edited the genuine memre in the CSCO alongside the hymns).

The Commentary on the Diatessaron

Ephrem’s single most important prose work — and one of the most important texts in the history of New Testament scholarship — is his Commentary on the Diatessaron. The Diatessaron was the gospel harmony composed in the second century by Tatian, which wove the four Gospels into a single continuous narrative and was for a long time the gospel text in use in the Syriac-speaking church, before the separate four Gospels (the Peshitta) displaced it. Tatian’s harmony itself is lost; Ephrem’s commentary on it is the first dependable witness to its text and sequence, and so a primary source for reconstructing the Diatessaron and, through it, the early history of the Gospel text (McCarthy, Saint Ephrem’s Commentary on Tatian’s Diatessaron, Oxford, 1993, introduction; the New World Encyclopedia and standard handbooks on the Diatessaron).

The transmission of the commentary is itself a remarkable story. For a long time it was known only through a complete Armenian version, surviving in two manuscripts dated 1195 and edited by Louis Leloir in the 1950s. Then the Syriac original resurfaced: a parchment codex of about 480–500, Chester Beatty Syriac MS 709, acquired in 1956 from the Syrian monastery of Deir es-Surian in the Egyptian desert of Wadi Natrun and identified the following year, preserving the bulk of the work in its original language; further folios acquired in 1984 and 1986 brought roughly four-fifths of the Syriac codex back into view (McCarthy, Commentary on the Diatessaron, introduction). The Syriac is at points judged closer to the original than the Armenian. The standard English translation is that of Carmel McCarthy (Oxford, 1993).

Authorship has been debated. Christian Lange has argued that the commentary as it stands is the work of a “compiler” or a school of Ephrem’s disciples rather than Ephrem’s own composition throughout, while Carmel McCarthy holds that it would be “unduly sceptical” to remove Ephrem’s name from it entirely (Lange, The Portrayal of Christ in the Syriac Commentary on the Diatessaron; McCarthy, introduction). [Disputed: the Commentary on the Diatessaron is attributed to Ephrem by the manuscript tradition and by McCarthy; Lange argues it is the work of a later compiler or “school of Ephrem”; the question of how much is Ephrem’s own remains open.] However the authorship question is resolved, the commentary stands very close to Ephrem and transmits the exegesis of his school.

The Commentaries on Genesis and Exodus

Ephrem also left prose commentaries on Genesis and Exodus — his major surviving works of continuous scriptural exegesis. They are selective rather than verse-by-verse: Ephrem comments on the theologically significant passages, passing over the rest, and a recurring concern is to refute the heretical readings of Scripture advanced by Marcion, Bardaisan, and the Manichaeans, who attacked the Old Testament and its God (see the chapter on the prose refutations). The Commentary on Genesis in particular is an important witness to Ephrem’s reading of the Paradise narrative, which he develops poetically in the Hymns on Paradise (see that chapter) — the robe of glory lost by Adam, the structure of the garden, the trees.

These commentaries were edited by R.-M. Tonneau in the CSCO (152/153, 1955) and translated into English by Edward G. Mathews, Jr. (Genesis) and Joseph P. Amar (Exodus) in the volume St. Ephrem the Syrian: Selected Prose Works (Fathers of the Church 91, ed. Kathleen McVey, Catholic University of America Press, 1994) — notably the first volume in that long-running patristic series devoted to an author who wrote in neither Greek nor Latin (McVey, Selected Prose Works, introduction).

The Diatessaron Commentary and the History of the Gospel

The importance of the Commentary on the Diatessaron for the wider study of the New Testament can hardly be overstated, and it is worth setting out plainly. Tatian’s Diatessaron — the name means “through four,” that is, a single gospel woven from the four — was composed in the second century and became, for centuries, the standard gospel text of the Syriac-speaking church, recited in the liturgy and expounded in the schools before the separated four Gospels of the Peshitta displaced it. But Tatian’s harmony itself does not survive; no manuscript of it has come down to us. It must be reconstructed from its echoes in later writers, and Ephrem’s commentary is the single most important of these echoes — “the first dependable witness to its text and sequence” (McCarthy, Commentary on the Diatessaron, introduction). Because Ephrem comments on the harmony passage by passage, his commentary preserves a great deal of the harmony’s order and wording, and so opens a window onto the gospel text used in the second- and third-century Syriac church — a text older than the Peshitta and bearing on the earliest history of the Gospels themselves. For this reason the commentary is studied not only by patristic scholars but by textual critics of the New Testament, for whom it is a primary source of the first importance. That so much of it was lost and then partly recovered, from a palimpsest-free parchment codex rescued from an Egyptian desert monastery in the twentieth century, only sharpens the sense of how fragile, and how precious, the transmission of these texts has been.

Selective Exegesis and the Defense of Creation

The prose commentaries on Genesis and Exodus repay attention for what they reveal about Ephrem’s method as a reader of Scripture. They are deliberately selective: Ephrem does not march through every verse but settles on the passages of theological weight, and a recurring object is the rebuttal of heretical misreadings. Marcion had rejected the Old Testament outright; Bardaisan and the Manichaeans read its Creator and its creation account in dualist terms. Against all of these Ephrem reads Genesis as the good work of the one good God — the creation pronounced “very good,” the human person made in the divine image, the Paradise of Eden a real garden and a real loss (the exegetical ground of the Hymns on Paradise; see that chapter). The commentary on Genesis is thus not a neutral exposition but a polemical and constructive one, defending the goodness of creation and the unity of the Testaments against the heretics whom Ephrem fought also in verse and in the Prose Refutations (see that chapter). Here the prose Ephrem and the polemical Ephrem and the poetic Ephrem are visibly one mind: the same conviction — one God, one good creation, one saving plan across both Testaments — drives the commentary, the refutation, and the hymn alike.

The Prose Ephrem and the Sung Ephrem

The memre and the commentaries round out the portrait of Ephrem as a writer. He is remembered above all for the madrashe, the sung teaching-hymns that were his genius and his innovation; but he was also a metrical homilist and a working exegete, capable of sustained narrative verse and of careful prose commentary on the sacred text. The commentaries in particular anchor his soaring poetic theology in the discipline of reading Scripture closely — the Commentary on the Diatessaron keeping him in conversation with the very text of the Gospels, the Commentary on Genesis supplying the exegetical foundation for the great Paradise hymns. And the prose refutations, treated in the companion chapter, show the same mind turning to direct philosophical combat with the heresiarchs. Across all these forms the unity is the deacon-teacher’s purpose: to hand on the faith, whether in song, in chanted homily, or in patient commentary.

References

McCarthy, Carmel (trans.). Saint Ephrem’s Commentary on Tatian’s Diatessaron: An English Translation of Chester Beatty Syriac MS 709. Journal of Semitic Studies Supplement 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. The standard English; introduction on the manuscript history and the Diatessaron.
Leloir, Louis (ed.). Saint Éphrem: Commentaire de l’Évangile concordant (Armenian and Syriac). CSCO. Louvain, 1953–54 and later. The Armenian version and the Chester Beatty Syriac.
McVey, Kathleen E. (ed.). St. Ephrem the Syrian: Selected Prose Works. Fathers of the Church 91. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1994. (Commentaries on Genesis [trans. Mathews] and Exodus [trans. Amar]; the Homily on Our Lord; the Letter to Publius.)
Tonneau, R.-M. (ed.). Sancti Ephraem Syri in Genesim et in Exodum Commentarii. CSCO 152/153 (Scriptores Syri 71–72). Louvain, 1955.
Lange, Christian. The Portrayal of Christ in the Syriac Commentary on the Diatessaron. CSCO Subsidia. Louvain, 2005. (Argues for a compiler/school.)
Brock, Sebastian. St Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise. SVS Press, 1990. Introduction (the memra, the “metre of Mar Ephrem”).