Circulation of Isaac of Nineveh’s Ascetical Homilies outside the Church of the East

Part One: History of Scholarship

Abstract

Isaac, bishop of Nineveh, belongs to the Church of the East’s most famous ascetic authors. This three-part study explores the way how the First Part of his writings was adopted in other Syriac Christian communities. The first part offers a review of the scholarship of the issue. Makarov offers a detailed study of how Isaac’s First Part reached beyond his own church community. He identifies the issues that need exploration before one attempts to found out how the famous Nestorian ascetic became so greatly admired by both Byzantine and Syriac Jacobite Orthodox Churches, to which he had never belonged. Makarov concludes that historically there have been several positions regarding Isaac of Nineveh’s actual church adherence. The first one was based on a totally uncritical approach to the interpolated Jacobite Life of Isaac. The second position was inaugurated after Bishop Ishoʿdnah of Basrah’s Book of Chastity had been discovered. The new source, which was also treated rather uncritically, initiated the widespread consensus that Isaac of Nineveh belonged to the Church of the East. That view received additional support from more recent studies of the First Part. As a consequence, a question arose who created the alternative redaction, in which any evidence for Isaac’s Nestorian connections was either erased or altered. According to Paul Bejan and other scholars who shared that view, it was the Jacobites who had altered the text. Irénée Hausherr’s claim that the altering could have been done only by the Melkites received little notice until 2016 when Grigory Kessel, independently from Hausherr, proved it true. That however did not put the debate over the alterations in Isaac’s ascetic writings to an end. The scholars still disagree on how exactly the First Part was changed as the texts crossed borders of different Christian communities.