Priest, Scholar, and Preacher

St. Joseph of Damascus was ordained to the priesthood in 1817, at the age of twenty-four, and rose to be Great Economos of the Mariamite Cathedral and the leading preacher of Orthodox Damascus. This file traces his self-made learning — Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew; his mastery of Scripture; his catechetical, editorial, and biblical labor; and his renown as a preacher in Arabic — the scholar-priest behind the martyr.

Tradition: Antiochian Orthodox (Arab New-Martyr of the Patriarchate of Antioch)

A Self-Made Scholar

The most striking thing the sources record about Joseph before his martyrdom is the range and depth of his learning, achieved without wealth or a formal higher education. The biographical tradition presents him as an autodidact of remarkable persistence: a poor young man who worked in the silk trade and taught himself by night, and who acquired, in the end, a command of Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew and a mastery of the Scriptures that his contemporaries found extraordinary (John Sanidopoulos, “Saint Joseph of Damascus (1793–1860),” johnsanidopoulos.com, 2013, on the languages and the self-education). He is said to have studied Arabic letters under a Muslim scholar, Muhammad al-Attar, and to have received his theological formation from George Shahadeh Sabbagh — a detail worth noting for its own sake, since it shows the ordinary intellectual traffic between Christian and Muslim Damascus that the massacre of 1860 would so violently interrupt (Sanidopoulos, “Saint Joseph of Damascus,” 2013, naming al-Attar and Sabbagh; on the shared intellectual world, cf. Bruce Masters, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World, Cambridge, 2001).

His command of Scripture is the point the accounts press hardest. He is said to have memorized a great part of the Bible and to have worked directly with the texts — comparing the Greek Septuagint against the Arabic translations, the labor of a man who could read the Word in the languages of the Church and of his people alike (Sanidopoulos, “Saint Joseph of Damascus,” 2013, on the memorization of Scripture and the comparison of the Septuagint with the Arabic). For the Orthodox of Antioch, whose liturgical inheritance is Greek but whose living tongue is Arabic, such a bilingual biblical scholarship was not an ornament but a service: it is the work of making the Church’s Scripture and worship available in the language the faithful actually spoke.

Ordination and Office

Joseph was ordained to the diaconate and then to the priesthood in 1817, at the age of twenty-four, for the Diocese of Damascus (Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch, “St. Joseph of Damascus,” antiochpatriarchate.org, “ordained to the holy priesthood at the age of twenty-four in 1817”; the age fits a birth in 1793). He would later be elevated to the rank of archpriest, and he held the senior administrative dignity of Great Economos (Oikonomos) of the Patriarchal Cathedral of the Dormition of the Most Holy Theotokos in Damascus — the church known as al-Mariamiyeh, the Mariamite Cathedral, the mother church of the Orthodox of Damascus (Patriarchate of Antioch, “St. Joseph of Damascus,” on his office as Great Economos of the Mariamite Cathedral). The Economos is, in the Byzantine ecclesiastical order, the priest charged with the administration of a church’s or diocese’s material and financial affairs; to be Great Economos of the patriarchal cathedral was to hold one of the most responsible clerical offices in the Arab Orthodox community.

He was also, from 1836 to 1860, the director of the Patriarchal School in Damascus — the see’s institution of higher learning — which under his leadership grew, in the estimate of the biographical tradition, into a leading Orthodox school of the Middle East (Patriarchate of Antioch and Wikipedia, “Joseph of Damascus,” on the Patriarchal School and Joseph’s directorship, 1836–1860). His tenure there places him at the center of the intellectual formation of a generation of Damascene Orthodox — the educational side of the same Arab Orthodox awakening whose later chapters run toward the Arabization of the Patriarchate (see Joseph and the Antiochian Revival).

The Preacher

If learning was Joseph’s foundation, preaching was his public vocation. The sources remember him above all as the great preacher of Orthodox Damascus — a man who spoke to his people in Arabic, their own tongue, and whose sermons were distinguished, in the words of the Antiochian tradition, “by his proofs and his convincing and irrefutable answers,” delivered from the ambo of the patriarchal cathedral (Sanidopoulos, “Saint Joseph of Damascus,” 2013, on his preaching; Antiochian Archdiocese biographical account). In a community that lived amid the pressures of an Islamic majority, an internal Orthodox–Catholic competition after the 1724 schism, and the arrival of Protestant and Catholic missions in the nineteenth-century Levant, a preacher who could give clear, learned, and persuasive account of the Orthodox faith in Arabic was a figure of real weight. That the crowd of 1860 would single him out and name him “the leader of the Christians” is, in part, a grim tribute to how prominent his public teaching had made him (Antiochian Archdiocese biographical account, on the mob’s designation).

His preaching in Arabic is of a piece with his biblical scholarship. Both are expressions of the same pastoral instinct — to bring the Church’s faith, Scripture, and worship home to Arabic-speaking Orthodox Christians in a form they could receive. This is why the Antiochian tradition venerates him not only as a martyr but as a teacher and a light of his Church (see Martyrdom and Arab Christian Identity).

Catechetical, Editorial, and Biblical Labor

What of Joseph’s own writings? Here the record calls for care, and the honest picture is more modest than the word “hymnographer” might suggest. The biographical tradition presents Joseph’s literary work as largely that of a translator, editor, and copyist in the service of the Church’s texts, rather than a producer of a large body of original composition (Sanidopoulos, “Saint Joseph of Damascus,” 2013, noting that he “confined himself to translating, editing, and presenting” the writings of the Fathers rather than to original works). Specifically, the tradition credits him with:

Catechetical translation — Arabic translations of the catechetical works of the Russian hierarch Philaret (Drozdov) of Moscow, whose catechism was widely diffused across the Orthodox world in the nineteenth century (Sanidopoulos, “Saint Joseph of Damascus,” 2013; on Philaret’s Catechism, see St. Philaret of Moscow);
Patristic editing — editorial work on Arabic texts of the Fathers, including St. Basil the Great’s commentary on Genesis (the Hexaemeron) and a collection of orations of St. Gregory the Theologian (Sanidopoulos, “Saint Joseph of Damascus,” 2013, on the Basil and Gregory texts);
Biblical labor — a share in the Arabic Bible work of the period, associated with the London (“Van Dyck”-era) Arabic Bible enterprise, consistent with his known labor of comparing the Septuagint with the Arabic (Sanidopoulos, “Saint Joseph of Damascus,” 2013, on the Arabic Bible edition);
Copying, attested by the seal he is said to have placed on manuscripts: “This book was copied from an old manuscript, and compared to it completely” — the colophon of a careful and self-effacing scholar (Sanidopoulos, “Saint Joseph of Damascus,” 2013, quoting the manuscript seal).

The fuller assessment of these survivals, and the caution proper to claims about “his hymns,” belongs to Section 07 (see His Liturgical and Literary Work). What is established here is the shape of the man: not a solitary author but a churchman’s scholar — one who put a rare learning at the service of the Church’s Scripture, Fathers, and catechesis, and made that service, in Arabic, available to his people. It is this scholar-priest of the Mariamite cathedral who, on 10 July 1860, would take up the Reserved Sacrament and go out to die among his flock (see The Martyrdom of Joseph and His Flock).

References

Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East. “St. Joseph of Damascus.” antiochpatriarchate.org. (Ordination at twenty-four in 1817; the office of Great Economos of the Mariamite Cathedral of the Dormition.)
Sanidopoulos, John. “Saint Joseph of Damascus (1793–1860).” johnsanidopoulos.com, 2013. (The self-education and languages; the teachers al-Attar and Sabbagh; the memorization of Scripture and the Septuagint–Arabic comparison; the preaching; the translations of Philaret; the editing of Basil’s Genesis commentary and Gregory the Theologian’s orations; the Arabic Bible work; the manuscript seal.)
Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America. “St. Joseph of Damascus.” Biographical account. (His preaching and its renown; the mob’s naming of him as “leader of the Christians.”)
“Joseph of Damascus.” Wikipedia. (The Patriarchal School and Joseph’s directorship, 1836–1860.)
Masters, Bruce. Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World: The Roots of Sectarianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. (The shared Christian–Muslim intellectual world of Ottoman Damascus; the missions of the nineteenth-century Levant.)