The Ephraem Graecus Problem

The central source-critical problem of the whole Ephrem tradition: the vast Greek corpus that circulates under his name — the Ephraem Graecus — set against the authentic Syriac Ephrem recoverable from the critical editions. This chapter distinguishes what is reliably Ephrem’s from what is not: the genuine Syriac hymns and homilies in Beck’s CSCO editions; the enormous, mostly pseudonymous Greek corpus; and the legendary Life with its famous episodes — the visit to St Basil of Caesarea and the sojourn among the monks of Egypt — that scholarship judges historically impossible accretions. It is the flagship of this collection’s discipline of attestation.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father) / Syriac

A Corpus Second Only to Chrysostom’s

No problem is more fundamental to the study of Ephrem than the question of what he actually wrote. The difficulty is not scarcity but excess: an enormous body of material circulates under his name, far more than he could ever have composed, and the genuine must be sifted from the spurious before anything can be said of “Ephrem’s theology” at all. The bulk of the false attribution is in Greek. The corpus of Greek works ascribed to Ephrem — the Ephraem Graecus — is, in sheer volume, second only to the works attributed to John Chrysostom among the Greek Fathers (Brock, St Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise, SVS Press, 1990, introduction; Brock’s bibliographic guide to Ephrem). Yet Ephrem wrote only in Syriac; he composed nothing in Greek. Every Greek text under his name is therefore, at best, a translation, and at worst an outright pseudonymous composition that never had anything to do with him.

Brock’s Threefold Analysis

The most useful way through the Greek corpus is the threefold analysis Brock proposes. The Ephraem Graecus divides into three quite different kinds of material: first, genuine works of Ephrem translated from the Syriac — a real but small portion, since only a fraction of the authentic Syriac was ever rendered into Greek; second, translations of Syriac works that are not by Ephrem but circulated under his name in Syriac before being carried into Greek; and third — the largest part — works composed originally in Greek by later authors and attributed to Ephrem, with no Syriac original at all (Brock, Hymns on Paradise, introduction; Brock, syri.ac bibliographic guide). The corpus is, as Brock puts it, “very disparate,” united by little more than the name attached to it; and it has received very little critical examination, so that even now the boundaries between the three classes are imperfectly drawn. The Lenten “Prayer of St Ephrem” treated in the companion chapter belongs to this Greek tradition, with no Syriac witness — a representative instance of the larger problem.

The practical upshot is severe: a text’s appearance in Greek under Ephrem’s name is no evidence at all that Ephrem wrote it. For the authentic Ephrem one must go to the Syriac, and there the ground is firm.

The Authentic Syriac and Its Editions

Against the disparate Greek corpus stands the genuine Syriac Ephrem, and here modern scholarship has done its decisive work. The old comprehensive edition was the Roman Editio Romana of J. S. and S. E. Assemani (Sancti Ephraem Syri Opera Omnia, 6 vols., Rome, 1732–46), which gathered Syriac, Greek, and Latin material together — valuable in its day but uncritical, mingling the genuine and the spurious. The modern foundation is the critical edition of Dom Edmund Beck, whose paired Syriac-text and German-translation volumes in the Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium (CSCO, Scriptores Syri), published between 1955 and the late 1970s, established the authentic Syriac corpus on a sound textual basis (Beck, CSCO; Brock, bibliographic guide). It is to Beck’s editions — the Hymns on Faith, on the Nativity, on Virginity, on Paradise, against Heresies, the Carmina Nisibena, and the rest (surveyed in the chapter on the teaching hymns) — that any responsible account of Ephrem must anchor itself. Some four hundred and more genuine madrashe survive, alongside the authentic memre, the prose refutations, and the scriptural commentaries (see the chapters on the memre and prose). The acrostic signature on the Discourses to Hypatius (see the prose refutations) is one of the surer internal guarantees of authenticity in the whole corpus.

The Legendary Life

Parallel to the spurious Greek writings runs a spurious biography: the sixth-century Syriac Vita (Life) of Ephrem, a hagiographic composition written at least a hundred and fifty years after his death and, in Brock’s blunt judgment, “full of unhistorical material” (Brock, Hymns on Paradise, introduction). The Vita is the source of most of the colorful legends that later attached to Ephrem, and two of its episodes are especially famous — and especially impossible.

The first is the visit to St Basil the Great of Caesarea: the Vita and the Greek tradition tell of Ephrem journeying to Cappadocia to meet Basil, the two great saints recognizing each other’s holiness. The second is the sojourn in Egypt, in which Ephrem is made to spend years among the desert monks. Both are regarded by scholarship as legendary — chronologically and geographically improbable, and theologically anachronistic. The Egyptian episode in particular retrojects onto Ephrem the image of an Egyptian-style desert monk, which he was not: the historical Ephrem was a town-dwelling deacon and “son of the covenant” in the indigenous Syriac mold, not an anchorite of the Egyptian pattern (Brock, Hymns on Paradise, introduction; Griffith on early Syriac asceticism; see the chapter on the deacon). [Disputed: the visit to St Basil of Caesarea and the sojourn among the monks of Egypt are recounted by the sixth-century Vita and the Greek tradition; scholarship (Brock, Griffith) judges both episodes legendary accretions, historically untenable and anachronistic in their monastic portrayal of Ephrem.] The same Vita supplies the much-loved but historically insecure account of the feigned madness to avoid the episcopate (see the chapter on the deacon) and the pagan-priest father (contradicted by Ephrem’s own hymns).

How the False Corpus Grew

It is worth asking how so vast a body of spurious material came to gather under one name, for the mechanism is instructive and not peculiar to Ephrem. Three forces worked together. First, genuine fame: Ephrem was revered as a teacher of the highest authority, his works read in churches after Scripture (Jerome, De Viris Illustribus 115), and a famous name is a magnet for anonymous works seeking an audience — a homily by an unknown hand travels farther under “Ephrem” than under no one. Second, the practice of translation: Ephrem began to be rendered into Greek very early (Jerome had read a Greek version of his On the Holy Spirit), and once a stream of translation existed, it carried along with the genuine works a quantity of Syriac material wrongly attributed to him even in Syriac, and then attracted fresh Greek compositions written in his manner. Third, the looseness of ancient attribution: in a manuscript culture, a work’s heading was easily altered, and a text “in the manner of Ephrem” could become a text “by Ephrem” through nothing more than a copyist’s confidence. The result, over centuries, was the Ephraem Graecus corpus — a snowball of attribution, gathering mass as it rolled, until the genuine core was buried under the accumulated pseudonyma. The same forces, of course, produced the legendary Vita: the great name drew to itself not only spurious works but spurious deeds, the visit to Basil and the Egyptian sojourn among them.

Why the Sifting Matters

One might ask whether the sifting of genuine from spurious is worth the labor — whether it matters, for the Church’s life, that the Lenten prayer or some Greek homily is not literally Ephrem’s. It matters for two reasons. The first is simple honesty: a knowledge base that asserts what it cannot support is poisoned at the root, and the difference between “Ephrem wrote this” and “this circulates under Ephrem’s name” is exactly the difference between knowledge and rumor (see the methodology). The second is theological: the genuine Ephrem is a particular and precious thing — the pre-Hellenized, symbolic, Semitic theologian whose vision this collection has tried to set out — and to read him through the lens of the later Greek pseudonyma is to lose precisely what makes him distinctive, flattening the Harp of the Spirit into a generic Byzantine ascetic voice. The recovery of the authentic Syriac Ephrem (the work of Beck, Brock, and the others; see the chapter on modern scholarship) is therefore not pedantry but restoration: it gives back to the Church a Father it had half-lost beneath his own fame. The sifting serves both truth and treasure — it keeps the record honest, and it returns to view a theology worth having.

What Is Reliably His — and Why Jerome Matters

So what is reliably Ephrem’s? The genuine Syriac corpus in Beck’s editions: the great hymn-cycles, the authentic memre, the prose refutations and commentaries — these are the firm ground, and on them the account of Ephrem given throughout this collection rests. What must be held at a distance is the Ephraem Graecus corpus in its pseudonymous bulk, the Lenten prayer included, and the legends of the Vita.

It is worth ending on the one piece of early external testimony that both grounds the historical Ephrem and helps explain how the false corpus grew. Jerome, writing his De Viris Illustribus in 392 — within twenty years of Ephrem’s death — records that Ephrem “wrote much in the Syriac language, and attained such distinction that, in some churches, his writings are publicly read after the Scriptures,” and adds that he himself had read a Greek translation of Ephrem’s work On the Holy Spirit (Jerome, De Viris Illustribus 115). This single notice does double duty. It confirms the historical Ephrem as a Syriac author of immense authority, read in the liturgy after Scripture itself. And it shows that the translation of Ephrem into Greek began very early — within Jerome’s own lifetime — which is precisely why his fame, and his name, became magnets for so much later Greek material. The very reverence that made Ephrem worth translating made his name worth borrowing; and the Ephraem Graecus problem is, in the end, the long shadow of his fourth-century glory.

References

Brock, Sebastian. St Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press (Popular Patristics 10), 1990. Introduction — the Ephraem Graecus corpus, the threefold analysis, and the unhistorical Vita.
Brock, Sebastian. “A Brief Outline of Syriac Literature” and the online bibliographic guide to Ephrem (syri.ac). On the editions and the genuine/spurious distinction.
Lash, Archimandrite Ephrem. “The Greek Writings Attributed to Saint Ephrem the Syrian.” In Abba, ed. for Bishop Kallistos Ware. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2003. On the disparate Greek corpus.
Beck, Edmund (ed.). The CSCO Scriptores Syri editions of the genuine Syriac works (CSCO 154/155, 169/170, 174/175, 186/187, 198/199, 218/219, 223/224, 240/241, etc.). Louvain, 1955–. The critical foundation for the authentic Ephrem.
Assemani, J. S. and S. E. Sancti Ephraem Syri Opera Omnia. 6 vols. Rome, 1732–46. The old uncritical edition.
Jerome. De Viris Illustribus 115 (392). The earliest external witness; the early Greek translation of Ephrem’s On the Holy Spirit.
Griffith, Sidney H. “Asceticism in the Church of Syria.” On the anachronism of the Egyptian-monastic portrayal.