Section 08: The Greek Ephrem and the Lenten Prayer

The collection’s flagship section of source-criticism. The two files cover, first, the Lenten “Prayer of St Ephrem” — “O Lord and Master of my life,” recited with prostrations throughout Orthodox Great Lent — its text, its use, and the careful handling of its authenticity, which scholarship judges a later Byzantine composition received under Ephrem’s name rather than a genuine work of his Syriac corpus; and, second, the larger Ephraem Graecus problem — the vast, mostly pseudonymous Greek corpus set against the authentic Syriac Ephrem of Beck’s editions, together with the legendary Vita and its famous but historically untenable episodes (the visit to St Basil, the sojourn in Egypt). This is where the collection’s discipline of attestation is most rigorously applied.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father) / Syriac

Contents

File Topic
The Prayer of St Ephrem The Lenten prayer “O Lord and Master of my life”; its use with great and small prostrations; the Greek and old-Slavonic variants; its absence from the Syriac corpus and the scholarly verdict that it is a later Byzantine composition (Steenberg, Lash); how the tradition receives it
The Ephraem Graecus Problem The vast Greek corpus under Ephrem’s name vs. the authentic Syriac; Brock’s threefold analysis; Beck’s CSCO editions and Assemani’s old edition; the legendary Vita and the Basil/Egypt episodes as accretions; what is reliably his; Jerome’s early testimony

How to Use

  • Read The Prayer of St Ephrem for the most familiar Ephremic text in Orthodox life, handled honestly as to its authorship without diminishing its standing in the Church.
  • Read The Ephraem Graecus Problem for the central source-critical question of the whole tradition — the sifting of the genuine from the attributed, on which every responsible account of Ephrem depends.
  • The authentic Syriac corpus these chapters defend is surveyed across Sections 03 and 04; the scholars who accomplished the sifting are in Section 09.

Cross-References