Ephrem the Syrian

Ephrem the Syrian, also known as Ephraem the Deacon, Ephrem of Edessa or Aprem of Nisibis, '' was a prominent Syriac-Aramean Christian theologian and writer who is revered as one of the most notable hymnographers of Eastern Christianity. He was born in Nisibis, served as a deacon and later lived in Edessa.
Ephrem is venerated as a saint by all traditional Churches. He is especially revered in Syriac Christianity, both in East Syriac tradition and West Syriac tradition, and also counted as a Holy and Venerable Father in the Eastern Orthodox Church, especially in the Slovak tradition. He was declared a Doctor of the Church in the Catholic Church in 1920. Ephrem is also credited as the founder of the School of Nisibis, which in later centuries was the center of learning for the Church of the East.
Ephrem wrote a wide variety of hymns, poems, and sermons in verse, as well as prose exegesis. These were works of practical theology for the edification of the Church in troubled times. His performance practice of all-women choirs singing his madrāšê was particularly notable, and from it emerged the Syriac Christian tradition of "deaconess" choir members. Ephrem's works were so popular that, for centuries after his death, Christian authors wrote hundreds of pseudepigraphal works in his name. He has been called the most significant of all the fathers of the Syriac-speaking church tradition, the next most famous after him being Jacob of Serugh and Narsai.

Life

Ephrem was born around the year 306 in the city of Nisibis, in the Roman province of Mesopotamia, that was recently acquired by the Roman Empire. Internal evidence from Ephrem's hymnody suggests that both his parents were part of the growing Christian community in the city, although later hagiographers wrote that his father was a pagan priest. In those days, religious culture in the region of Nisibis included local polytheism, Judaism and several varieties of the Early Christianity. Most of the population spoke the Aramaic language, while Greek and Latin were languages of administration. The city had a complex ethnic composition, consisting of "Arameans, Arabs, Greeks, Jews, Parthians, Romans, and Iranians." Ephrem, being a speaker of Syriac, an Eastern Aramaic dialect, and the community to which he and the Christians of Nisibis belonged, were most likely part of the Aramean population.
File:Nisibis Church interior.jpg|thumb|The interior of the Church of Saint Jacob in Nisibis
Jacob, the second bishop of Nisibis, was appointed in 308, and Ephrem grew up under his leadership of the community. Jacob of Nisibis is recorded as a signatory at the First Council of Nicea in 325. Ephrem was baptized as a youth and almost certainly became a son of the covenant, an unusual form of syriac proto-monasticism. Jacob appointed Ephrem as a teacher. He was ordained as a deacon either at his baptism or later. He began to compose hymns and write biblical commentaries as part of his educational office. In his hymns, he sometimes refers to himself as a "herdsman", to his bishop as the "shepherd", and to his community as a 'fold'. Ephrem is popularly credited as the founder of the School of Nisibis, which, in later centuries, was the centre of learning of the Church of the East.
In 337, Emperor Constantine I, who had legalised and promoted the practice of Christianity in the Roman Empire, died. Seizing on this opportunity, Shapur II of Persia began a series of attacks into Roman North Mesopotamia. Nisibis was besieged in 338, 346 and 350. During the first siege, Ephrem credits Bishop Jacob as defending the city with his prayers. In the third siege, of 350, Shapur rerouted the River Mygdonius to undermine the walls of Nisibis. The Nisibenes quickly repaired the walls while the Persian elephant cavalry became bogged down in the wet ground. Ephrem celebrated what he saw as the miraculous salvation of the city in a hymn that portrayed Nisibis as being like Noah's Ark, floating to safety on the flood.
One important physical link to Ephrem's lifetime is the baptistery of Nisibis. The inscription tells that it was constructed under Bishop Vologeses in 359. In that year, Shapur attacked again. The cities around Nisibis were destroyed one by one, and their citizens killed or deported. Constantius II was unable to respond; the campaign of Julian in 363 ended with his death in battle. His army elected Jovian as the new emperor, and to rescue his army, he was forced to surrender Nisibis to Persia and to permit the expulsion of the entire Christian population. Ephrem declined being ordained a bishop by feigning madness, because he regarded himself unworthy for it.
Ephrem, with the others, went first to Amida, eventually settling in Edessa in 363. Ephrem, in his late fifties, applied himself to ministry in his new church and seems to have continued his work as a teacher, perhaps in the School of Edessa. Edessa had been an important center of the Aramaic-speaking world, and the birthplace of a specific Middle Aramaic dialect that came to be known as the Syriac language. The city was rich with rivaling philosophies and religions. Ephrem comments that orthodox Nicene Christians were simply called "Palutians" in Edessa, after a former bishop. Arians, Marcionites, Manichees, Bardaisanites and various gnostic sects proclaimed themselves as the true church. In this confusion, Ephrem wrote a great number of hymns defending Nicene orthodoxy. A later Syriac writer, Jacob of Serugh, wrote that Ephrem rehearsed all-female choirs to sing his hymns set to Syriac folk tunes in the forum of Edessa. In 370 he visited Basil the Great at Caesarea, and then journeyed to the monks of Egypt. As he preached a panegyric on St. Basil, who died in 379, his own death must be placed at a later date. After a ten-year residency in Edessa, in his sixties, Ephrem succumbed to the plague as he ministered to its victims. He died in 373.

Writings and authorship

Ephrem wrote exclusively in his native Aramaic language, using the local Edessan dialect, which later came to be known as Classical Syriac. In his works, Ephrem repeatedly refers endonymically to his language as Aramaic, his homeland as "the land of Aram," and his people as the Arameans. He is therefore known as "the authentic voice of Aramaic Christianity."
In the early stages of modern scholarly studies, it was believed that some examples of the long-standing Greek practice of labeling Aramaic as "Syriac," found in the Cave of Treasures, could be attributed to Ephrem, but later scholarly analyses have shown that the work in question was written much later by an unknown author, thus showing that Ephrem's original works still belonged to a tradition unaffected by exonymic labeling.
One of the early admirers of Ephrem's works, theologian Jacob of Serugh, who already belonged to the generation that accepted the custom of a double naming of their language, not only as Aramaic but also as "Syriac", wrote a homily dedicated to Ephrem, praising him as the crown or wreath ''of the Arameans, and the same praise was repeated in early liturgical texts.
Only later, under the Greek influence already prevalent in the works of the mid-fifth-century author Theodoret of Cyrus, did it become customary to associate Ephrem with a Syriac identity and to label him only as "the Syrian". Theodoret described him as a poet who "daily waters the ethnos of Syrians with streams of grace," and Sozomen similarly claimed that Ephrem, "who wrote in the language of the Syrians, surpassed the Greeks in wisdom." In turn, over a century later, Jacob of Serugh explicitly vaunted Ephrem as the poet of a Syrian people, and he seems to have framed this Syrian people as descended from Aram. Such portrayals show how Ephrem, who in his own writings identified with Aram and the Arameans, was gradually reframed in both Syriac and Greek traditions as not only an Aramean but also as a representative of the Syrians.
Some of these problems persisted into recent times, even in scholarly literature, as a consequence of several methodological issues within the field of source editing. During the process of critical editing and translation of sources within Syriac studies, some scholars have practiced various forms of arbitrary interventions, including the occasional disregard for the importance of original terms used as endonymic designations for Arameans and their language. Such disregard was manifested primarily in translations and commentaries, by the replacement of authentic terms with polysemic Syrian/Syriac labels. In the previously mentioned memrā dedicated to Ephrem, one of the terms for the Aramean people'' was published correctly in the original script of the source, but at the same time it was translated into English as "Syriac nation," and then enlisted among quotations related to "Syrian/Syriac" identity, without any mention of the Aramean-related terms in the source. Even when noticed and corrected by some scholars, such replacements of terms continue to create problems for others.
Several translations of his writings exist in Classical Armenian, Coptic, Old Georgian, Koine Greek, and other languages. Some of his works are extant only in translation.File:Ephrem's Commentary on the Diatessaron.jpg|thumb|Parchment manuscript of Ephrem's Commentary on the Diatessaron. Egypt, late 5th or early 6th century. Chester Beatty Library

Manuscripts

According to the Catalogues of Syriac Manuscripts in the British Library published by Forshall & Rosen and Wright, there are "ninety or so manuscripts which contain works by or attributed to Ephraem."

5th century	6th century	7th century	8th century	9th century	10th century	11th century	12th century	13th century
6 mss.	14 mss.	4 mss.	11 mss.	19 mss.	7 mss.	12 mss.	8 mss.	11 mss.