6
The poems collected in Ephrem’s Madrashe on Faith are recognized as the best representation of his anti-subordinationist thought. Delivered over the course of the mid-to-late fourth century, they stand, along with his Memre on Faith, as our earliest witness to the reception of Nicaea among Syriac-speaking Christians. While scholars have increasingly noted and focused upon what once seemed like the peripheral aims of Nicaea—its reorganization of church structure, its distinction of Christian from Jewish liturgical practices—the council’s reinterpretation and codification of teachings about Christ nevertheless fostered a significant shift in Christological discourse.1 Indeed, while the relationship of the Madrashe on Faith to Nicaea is not always clear, the poems’ theological character is unmistakable. They are not particularly concerned with church order or with demonizing Jews and their ritual practices. Instead, they engage in a rhetorical and dramatic presentation of, on the one hand, those who stand at odds with the Nicene condemnation of Arius and, on the other hand, a Christ who is impervious to the investigations that result in subordinationist Christologies.2 The previous chapter traced the poetic means by which Ephrem constructed his audience with respect to the Bible. In this chapter, I examine the ways in which Ephrem used the Bible to present Christ as beyond investigation and, thus, of the same order as the Father.3
Yet a theme that has emerged throughout this book is that while Ephrem’s reception of Nicaea certainly had theological ramifications, it also shaped his literary aesthetics. It led him to a particular view of the Bible and a particular way of representing it. His anti-subordinationist thought formed the ways in which he presented his poetic identity and structured his audience with respect to the biblical text. In turning to look at his representation of the biblical Christ, we see that this, too, had literary consequences. Whereas we might expect to find in this material abstruse metaphysical arguments about Christ’s divinity, such arguments are, for the most part, absent.4 Indeed, one of the more compelling aspects of the Christology of these poems is that Ephrem does not affirm the divinity of Christ through philosophical arguments but through a dramatic representation of New Testament scenes of his life. In much the same way that Ephrem structured himself and his audience through the biblical text, he also structured Christ by rewriting the narratives of the Gospel and representing them in the texture of his madrashe.
Ephrem’s use of these narrative materials offers a different perspective on the development of theological rhetoric in the fourth century. In Ephrem’s poems, the divine Christ emerges neither through metaphysical language nor through exegetical debates about specific problematic passages. Rather, Ephrem constructs this divine Christ through the dramatic representation and weaving together of the narrative scenes of the Gospels.5 Like his binding of various Old Testament stories to construct a composite image of biblical villains, Ephrem brings together diverse and disjointed scenes from the Gospels to depict a unified and obviously divine Christ. Whereas the details of his life in those writings are contradictory and difficult to interpret, Ephrem erases the texts’ gaps and ambiguities and melds together Gospel scenes to create a clear picture of Christ as the unambiguous Son of the heavenly Father who comes to earth as its rightful caretaker.6
Yet, not only does this process of representing the Gospel material have ramifications for the development of Christian discourse, it also enables us to craft a more comprehensive portrait of Ephrem’s biblical poetics. Similarly to the biblical material that Ephrem uses to construct his theological foes, allies, audience, and self, these represented Gospel scenes offer insights into the intersection of exegesis and rhetoric in Ephrem’s madrashe. As a collection of poems, the Madrashe on Faith sought to add clear boundaries to a theological and social situation that lacked them. This process of boundary crafting—between God and self, self and community, and community and others—took biblical narratives and characters as its raw materials. These narratives were retold as parables, the morals of which aided this process of boundary crafting. Ephrem read his rhetorical aims into the Bible.
However, acknowledging the presence of rhetoric in Ephrem’s exegesis is not sufficient. His rhetorical reading of the Bible depended upon a nuanced and careful interaction with the texts into which this rhetoric was being read. Ephrem’s interaction with them betrays consistent characteristics. He strips narratives down to their basic formal elements—heroes, villains, proper names, and basic actions. This minimalistic way of receiving biblical narratives allowed him to recontextualize them within his own madrashe. As a result, the narratives that appear in his poems looked much like they do in their original biblical contexts—the names were the same, and the general narrative movement was the same. But Ephrem rehoused them in a completely different context—a literary one, itself set within that of a particular fourth-century audience and performative context.
Two stanzas that retell scenes from the life of Christ show how this works. We have already seen in chapter four Ephrem’s use of the narrative of Zacchaeus as a way of dramatizing his petition for poetic inspiration. In MF 58:6, we find Ephrem drawing upon this narrative again. Here, however, he uses it to construct an image of Christ:
Who has reached out to that which is greater than him,
Without wing for his weak soul,
To come to the great height of the Humble One?
He bowed down to Zacchaeus. The short one, in the height
Of a tree dwelt. And the High One, by his grace,
Walked beneath him.
In the Lukan narrative, Zacchaeus’s short stature is read pragmatically. It merely prohibits him from seeing Christ and necessitates that he climb a tree to do so. The fact that Christ walks beneath him also bears no particular importance: it results simply from the fact that he is walking on the ground, while Zacchaeus is resting in a tree. Yet Ephrem’s reading of this narrative is filtered through his own presentation of the Bible as a record of God’s “bowing down” (rken), a condescension seen in the words of the Bible but culminating especially in Christ’s taking of a body. Much of Ephrem’s reading of the scenes of Christ in the New Testament fit this pattern. He reads and represents these scenes as momentary yet dramatic pictures of divine condescension, and in so doing draws upon consistent exegetical strategies. For example, the Zacchaeus narrative is stripped down to, and frozen on, the single moment when Christ walks by Zacchaeus, while the latter is perched in a tree. All the other narrative action—both internal (the deeds of Zacchaeus’s past and his curiosity about this miracle worker) and external (Christ’s entry into Jericho and his and Zacchaeus’s movement through the crowd)—is ignored. This single moment is then represented within the madrasha as a momentary picture of Christ’s cosmic condescension. By rewriting the Zacchaeus narrative in this way, Ephrem removes the complexities of the Gospel’s presentation of the life of Christ. The latter becomes, instead, a series of scenes that attest to Christ’s divinity.
Alongside Ephrem’s typical emphasis on the Bible as a picture of God’s “bowing down,” and his representation of biblical passages so that they depict this condescension, he more commonly represents the scenes of Christ’s life so that they become narrative demonstrations of Christ’s true name (that is, “Son”). While we see this especially in his reading of the baptismal and transfiguration scenes, poem 60:8 draws on another episode from Christ’s life:
The all-knowing Lord asked the demon
about his name—what it was. And he did not deny the name
of the defiled demon, just as none of the demons
denied his name. The scribes were ashamed and called
our savior a creature, but the demon scorned them
for he is the Son of God.
The narrative that Ephrem draws upon in this stanza appears in each of the synoptic Gospels, though Ephrem’s version of the story is closest to Mark and Luke.7 In the biblical narrative, Christ, having come “to the country of the Gadarenes,” is immediately met, according to Luke, by a man “in whom there was a demon” (Luke 8:27). Similarly to his reading of the Zacchaeus narrative, Ephrem focuses on a tiny portion of the overall narrative—only the exchange between Jesus and the possessed man. This brief exchange, as it interests Ephrem, consists in only two questions. The demoniac asks Jesus, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God” (v. 28), and Jesus, before exorcising the demon, asks in return, “What is your name” (v. 30)? In his representation, Ephrem reverses the order of the interrogation, referring first to Christ’s question (which appears second in the Gospel narrative), and then, in the third and fourth lines, to the demon’s initial question, which Ephrem takes as evidence of its recognition of Jesus’ true identity. Through this reversal, Ephrem is able to apply the language of Jesus’s question—“what is your name?”—to the demon’s original question, thus rendering the demonic question a confession of Jesus’s true name. Though the “scribes” have no part in the Gospel narrative, and nowhere in the Gospel do they identify Jesus as “creature,” Ephrem introduces them here and makes that accusation. In the context of fourth-century debates about Christ as “creature,” the demonic confession reveals Christ’s true identity and offers a tool for negative comparison: the demon recognizes Jesus’s true identity, even as the “scribes” deny it.
Ephrem builds this anti-subordinationist confession through a subtle manipulation of the Bible’s own words. The language is still that of the Bible, but Ephrem has reshaped it to make it speak again in the fourth century. In neither of these scenes does Ephrem’s reading go against the grain of the text. He preserves the basic sense of the respective passages and, in broad terms, reflects their overall shape. However, in order to use these episodes to make his broader argument, he isolates particular scenes from their larger narratives (within a single pericope, a chapter, or an entire Gospel), and restructures them within the context of his madrashe. There they become testimonies to Christ’s divinity.
This book has looked at the various ways that Ephrem rewrote biblical texts in order to craft the particular literary world of the madrashe. I have examined Ephrem’s biblical construction of investigation, Bible, self, and audience. In this final chapter, I examine Ephrem’s biblical construction of Christ as divine. My aim is to show that Ephrem’s anti-subordinationist theology led him to make particular literary choices in his interaction with the Bible. The chapter proceeds in three parts. I look first at Ephrem’s representation of the scene of Christ’s baptism and transfiguration, which Ephrem reads repeatedly as a testimony to the priority of the name “Son.” In Ephrem’s reading of these scenes, he eschews the narrative structures in which they are embedded and rewrites them as unambiguous anti-subordinationist proof texts. I then examine two individual madrashe, poems 54 and 24. These two form further examples of the “compilation poems” I examined in chapter five. Here, however, they construct portraits of Christ as divine but in compellingly different ways. In MF 54, Ephrem continues to manifest his concern with the theme of Christ as “Son” but focuses less on issues related to divine naming and instead draws a thematic picture of divine sonship. With this theme in mind, Ephrem melds together several Gospel scenes to demonstrate Christ’s care for his divine father’s creation. MF 24 moves away from the issue of Christ’s sonship and returns to the familiar defense against subordinationist readings of the Bible, focusing upon the scene of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem.
In these three sections Ephrem evidences three modes of interacting with the Bible and, by extension, three ways of constructing Christ as divine and treating the problem of divine condescension. The first section, in which I treat Ephrem’s reading of the scene of Christ’s baptism and transfiguration, provides an example of Ephrem’s exegesis at its most minimalistic. He is interested only in uncovering Christ’s true name—Son—in the Bible; all other biblical data is shorn away. In the two sections that follow, Ephrem compiles a series of biblical scenes in a way that is similar to the compositional technique seen in the preceding chapter. Aside from this overlap in compositional technique, MF 54 and 24 represent two different modes of interacting with biblical scenes. In MF 54, Ephrem uses various scenes of Christ to trace a thematic portrait of his divine sonship. In poem 24, Ephrem weaves together scenes from throughout the Old and New Testaments, brought together on the basis of shared language, to present an imagistic defense of Christ’s humanity.
THE BIBLICAL NAME OF CHRIST
When we look at Ephrem’s representation of the life of Christ within the Madrashe on Faith, the scenes of Christ’s baptism and transfiguration provide the Gospel narratives upon which he draws more than any other. Despite his consistent attention to these stories (especially the baptism), he betrays little interaction with the biblical text of the scene. He does not identify any exegetical difficulties nor does he quote any but the narrative’s most essential language. Rather, as we saw with the Zacchaeus episode above, Ephrem strips the narrative down to a single iconic moment—the moment at which a “voice from heaven,” or “the cloud” in the scene of the transfiguration, proclaims Christ “my beloved Son.”8 Shorn of any excess narrative movement, these theophanic scenes become proof texts for Ephrem’s repeated arguments for the rectitude and prominence of the name “Son.”9
This polemical insistence on the name “Son” can be read within the context of the debates, within the eastern Mediterranean of the 350s and 360s, about the proper name of God. Yet Ephrem’s argument varies from those debates in important ways. Most predominantly, whereas figures such as Aetius and Eunomius were concerned with the name “Father” and “Begetter” (and whether these could be taken to refer to God’s essence), in these passages Ephrem never emphasizes the name “Father” and—surprisingly—rarely identifies God as “Begetter.” Rather, by emphasizing the name “Son,” Ephrem implies a recognition of the name “Father” over “Unbegotten.” As a polemic against those who would read the Bible in a subordinationist way, or as a springboard for theological debate, Ephrem’s concern was not to argue about the specific inner workings of the Trinity but to shut down an obviously subordinationist pattern of naming. His reading of the baptismal and transfiguration scenes functions as a tool in this process.
We can see Ephrem’s melding and narrowing of these scenes in almost every passage he devotes to them. Before looking at some of these, however, it will help to provide the Syriac text of the verse that Ephrem draws upon—Matthew 3:17 (the scene of baptism) and Matthew 17:5 (the scene of the transfiguration). For the Syriac text of Matthew 3:17, I first provide the readings from Codex Curetonianus (C) and Codex Sinaiticus (S), which are identical but differ from the Peshitta. I then give the Peshitta version:10
Matthew 3:17:
w-qālâ ʼeštma‘ men šmayyâ d-ʼâmar leh ʼa(n)t hû ber(y) w-ḥabbîb(y) d-bāk ʼeṣtbît (C, S) (“And a voice was heard from heaven saying to him, ‘You are my Son and my Beloved. In you I am well pleased.’ ”)
w-hâ qālâ men šmayyâ d-ʼāmar hānaw ber[y] ḥabbîbâ d-beh ʼeṣṭbît (P) (“And behold, [there was] a voice from heaven saying, ‘This is my beloved Son. With him I am well pleased.’ ”)
Matthew 17:5
w-qālâ-[h]wâ men ‘nānâ d-ʼāmar hānaw ber[y] ḥabbîbâ d-beh ʼeṣṭbît. leh šma‘[w] (P) (“And there was a voice from the cloud saying, ‘This is my Beloved Son. With him I am well pleased. Hear him!’ ”)11
Commentary on the Diatessaron 14:7
meṭṭul hānâ nahreh qālâ ʼallāhāyâ men šmayyâ d-hānaw ber[y] w-ḥabbîb[y] (“On this account, a divine voice from heaven illumined him [saying], ‘This is my Son and my Beloved.’ ”)12
That Ephrem has shorn the baptismal scene of any narrative or semantic content beyond that provided by this single verse can be seen throughout the instances in which he uses it. I provide only a selection of examples here to make the point. The first relevant allusion occurs in poem 3:1:
Blessed is the one, my Lord, who has become worthy of calling you, with great love,
“Beloved Son” (brâ ḥabbîbâ) just as God, your begetter, called you.
This brief stanza introduces a poem built entirely around this “blessed is the one” formula.13 It is followed by two more praises of those who call Christ “Son” in imitation of the “the Spirit” (in 3:2) and “the Apostles and the Prophets” (in 3:3). Upon looking at the relationship between this stanza and the scene of the baptism in the synoptic Gospels, the first thing one observes is that there is almost no dependence upon the narrative outside of this single scene. There is no mention of John or the disputes regarding his worthiness to baptize Jesus, or even the descent of the “spirit in the form of a dove.” Ephrem is entirely focused upon the Father’s identification of Christ as “Beloved Son.” Moreover, whereas in the synoptic Gospels the speaker of these words is identified only as “a voice,” Ephrem identifies the owner of the voice as “God, your begetter,” thereby making the anti-subordinationist polemic all the more obvious.14 The baptismal scene has become more or less a proof text for the appropriate naming of Christ.
This manner of reading the scene is characteristic of the Madrashe on Faith. We see it again in poem 61:5:
From the Father learn the Son. For if the begetter
is akin to creatures, it is found that also his Son
is a companion to creatures. But if the Father is a stranger [to them],
is his fruit akin [to them]? Were he far from him
he would say, “He is not my Son” (law ber[y] hû). But when he calls out, He is [my] Son (brâ hû),
he has silenced the controversy.
Ephrem here provides a little more depth to his understanding of the importance of the names “Father” and “Son.” In Ephrem’s view, the similarity of the names demonstrates a similarity of relationships to the created order. In this reading, the Father’s proclamation at Christ’s baptism functions to demonstrate that the Son is like the Father rather than like the created order. On an exegetical level, this passage further confirms Ephrem’s terse reading of the baptismal scene. As in MF 3:1, Ephrem supplies the language of “begetter” and erases any ambiguity about the speaker of the text’s cryptic “voice.” As in 3:1, the baptismal scene has been represented solely as an anti-subordinationist proof text.
We have already seen in these two texts that Ephrem represents the words the baptismal scene in different ways: in 3:1, Ephrem quoted the words as brâ ḥabbîbâ (“the beloved son”), and in 61:5 as brâ hû (“he is the Son”). This tendency continues throughout this material. In 51:7 we finally find the pronoun “my” (ber[y]) (which is present in each of the synoptic Gospels) and Ephrem also glosses the scene with the topographical descriptor “at the Jordan River”:
Presumptuous it is to call you by a name foreign
to the one Your Father called you. For he called you only, “My Son”
at the Jordan River.
Later, at MF 65:13, Ephrem will use the phrase “this is my son” (hānaw ber[y]), which is identical to the Syriac of Matthew 3:17. Nevertheless, Ephrem’s varying manner of quoting the text stands not as evidence that can be used to determine his Gospel version. Rather, Ephrem has focused on these one or two words from the baptismal scene—brâ (“son”), ḥabbîbâ (“beloved”)—and is entirely comfortable citing them in a variety of ways.
Another aspect of Ephrem’s reading of the scene is that he merges it with the basic Christian baptismal formula and, thereby, with the baptismal practices of his own community, which would have been shared with non-Nicene communities.15 This connection enables Ephrem to double his polemic: not only do the Father’s words at Christ’s baptism demonstrate the rectitude of the name Son, the baptismal practices of various Christian groups support the name as well. In 51:8, Ephrem writes:
Who can deny the three names
whose hovering first ministered at the Jordan?
It is true that in the names in which your body was baptized,
behold, bodies have been baptized. And though very many
are the names of the Lord of all, in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
we clearly baptize. Praises to your greatness!
Ephrem only alludes to the baptismal scene, and his allusion uncovers a slightly different emphasis than we have so far seen. In referencing the “three names” that ministered at the Jordan, Ephrem identifies the scene as an act of the Father, Son, and Spirit. As he says in MF 51:7, Christ’s humanity is baptized by “the Father, with his voice, the Son with His power, / and the Spirit with her hovering.” In this interpretation, Ephrem is able to meld the biblical scene of the baptism with his baptismal practices and those of his audience. Ephrem reads the text and the ritual together so that both demonstrate the rectitude of the name Son.
Finally, while the baptism and transfiguration scenes are by far the predominant proof texts Ephrem uses in his argument about the name “Son,” he does draw on another less well known scene—that of the Centurion’s confession at the crucifixion. As he references this scene, he interacts much more with the narrative and its specific terminology. In MF 63:5, he writes:
Because the guard—he of the division
called Centurion—guarded [Christ] so closely,
at the words of our Savior, who cried aloud to his Father
the last of all words, and shook the earth below
and darkened the sun above, [the Centurion] too cried out and sealed
that He is the Son of God (brâ hû d-ʼallāhâ).16
The narrative to which Ephrem refers appears in each of the synoptic Gospels (Matt. 27:54, Mark 15:39, and Luke 23:47). In his use of the verb nṭar, “to guard,” and in mentioning the earth shaking, Ephrem’s retelling of the story reflects Matthew.17 From this one verse, Ephrem’s madrashe repeats only the proper noun “Centurion,” an exact quotation of the Centurion’s confession (“He is the Son of God”) and the verb nṭar (“to guard”). The latter word, nṭar, becomes the basis for Ephrem’s initial identification of the figure as “guard” (nāṭûrâ), though that term does not appear in the biblical text.
Ephrem also draws upon the scene prior to the Centurion’s confession, in which the earth shakes. In describing the event, Ephrem uses the same verb—ʼazî‘, “it shook”—as Matthew, though he has taken Matthew’s phrase “the earth was shaken” (ʼar‘â ʼettzî‘at) and made Christ the active subject of ʼazî’, “to shake.” Ephrem thus slightly rearranges the scene so that Christ’s voice becomes an active agent, causing the earthquake that follows. Likewise, whereas Matthew 27:45 says that, at the scene of Christ’s crucifixion, “darkness came over the whole land,” Ephrem renders “darkness” (ḥeššûkâ) in its verbal form—“to make dark” (ʼaḥšek), with Christ as the subject of the activity. Especially in the latter detail, this represents a significant rewriting of the chronology of the scene. Whereas in Matthew the darkness is present before Christ speaks, in Ephrem’s retelling Christ’s words cause the darkness. Ephrem thus places the event chronologically after Christ’s words. Whereas in the Gospel account the natural phenomena happen concurrently with Christ’s crucifixion, Ephrem has rewritten this chronology so that Christ’s speech act decisively affects the natural world.
Despite this much more extensive reworking of the details of the narrative, Ephrem’s rewriting suggests the same hermeneutic tendency that we have already identified. Even as he rewrites the text’s temporal arrangement, his focus is primarily on the Centurion’s confession of Christ as “Son of God.” At the same time, Ephrem’s polemical reading of this scene is noticeably different from his reading of the baptismal and transfiguration scenes. First, he incorporates much more of the vocabulary of this episode, suggesting a closer interaction with the actual vocabulary than he betrayed in his reading of the scenes of the baptism and transfiguration.18 Second, in his depiction of the Centurion, through whose eyes he focuses his audience on the Crucifixion, he rewrites the scene as a whole in a significant way. In Ephrem’s retelling, Christ is represented as active in a way that is absent from the biblical account. The Centurion’s confession, moreover, is taken not as a simple expression of awe but as an affirmation of “son” as a divine name.19
These passages rewrite the Gospel scenes of the baptism, transfiguration, and crucifixion so that they all unambiguously demonstrate the primacy of the name “Son” precisely as a divine name. Ephrem’s interaction with the text of the baptism and transfiguration is especially minimalistic. He focuses only on the lexical details that interest him, and he resituates these details in the broader literary and theological context of the poem. His incorporation of the material from the crucifixion is more expansive, focusing on the character of the Centurion, and incorporating some of the narrative detail from that scene. At the same time, his rhetorical aim—to demonstrate the primacy of the name Son—is the same. In his rewriting of each of these scenes, Ephrem resituates the biblical material in the context of his madrashe. In turn, the madrasha comes to function as a rewritten Gospel, which now unambiguously bespeaks the truth of the name “Son” against Ephrem’s subordinationist opponents.
In discussing Ephrem’s Commentary on Genesis, R. B. Ter Har Romeny notes how Ephrem incorporates the Genesis text into his commentary so that it “can be read as a narrative in its own right” and “without a Bible at hand.”20 In the case of Ephrem’s poetic recasting of these biblical confession scenes, we see him operating in an almost completely different manner. In his presentation, Ephrem’s tendency is to strip away the Bible’s narrative shell almost entirely so that one could not piece together that narrative on the basis of Ephrem’s rewriting itself. Yet his overarching literary goal in these madrasha is surprisingly similar to his goal in the Commentary on Genesis. In both, the literary work itself forms a complete lens through which the original narrative can be read. There is a sense that the biblical text must be read through Ephrem’s rewritten version, even if those rewritten versions look very different from one another.
We see yet another style of rewritten Gospel in MF 54. In this poem, Ephrem brings together Gospel scenes not to demonstrate the priority of the name “Son” but to depict Christ as acting toward creation as its rightful caretaker.
A DIVINE CARETAKER
Ephrem’s use of the baptismal and transfiguration scenes provides him with a proof text in his argument for the priority of the name “Son.” This emphasis on Christ’s proper name occupies Ephrem throughout much of the Madrashe on Faith, and it is not only the baptismal material that he uses to reflect upon the name. MF 54 is a thirteen-stanza poem that presents Christ as “Son” of the “heavenly king” and polemicizes against those who would reject this position. Ephrem does not reflect upon the name “Son” itself but constructs a portrait of Christ as cosmic son of the equally cosmic king.21 Ephrem links diverse biblical scenes throughout this poem, but my primary interest is in the first five stanzas. In these, Ephrem constructs a universalist portrait of Christ into which he embeds the specific language of the Bible. In so doing, Ephrem crafts his madrasha as a ritual text. Catherine Bell has described the way ritual texts embed a representation of the world that is coherent in a way that the world is not.22 Similarly, in this poem, Ephrem has constructed a singular narrative into which he embeds particular, isolated scenes from the Gospel.
Ephrem’s rewriting of these Gospel scenes takes place in two ways. First, the poet melds several distinct scenes into a unified literary work. Second, he unites them within the madrasha using language that is universal in its implications. Ephrem refers to the Father as “the heavenly king” and depicts the Son as having “descended to the earth” from his realm. Once on earth, the creation recognizes the Son as its divine Creator. In incorporating the biblical material into the introductory stanza of this madrashe and in building this universalist scene of divine condescension, Ephrem uses the lexicon and thought world of the madrasha to represent the biblical scenes rather than taking their language into his literary form. For example, in reference to Christ’s walking on water, he says, “the sea became his mount.” In reference to Christ’s ascent into heaven, he says, “the air [became] his chariot.” These metaphoric descriptions are certainly rooted in the Bible, but Ephrem transmutes them into a universalist idiom, so that they clearly indicate the Son’s heavenly origins. In the second stanza, Ephrem begins to incorporate the actual language of the biblical text. Yet it is brought into a madrasha that has already established its own way of presenting and speaking about Christ in relationship to heaven and earth:
In the way he was ministered to, he taught whose Son he was.
At the time of his abasement, the watchers descended and ministered
to the Son of their splendid Lord. And just as if [it were] a maidservant,
he commanded creation. The world, like a servant,
he led with a gesture, like his begetter,
Whose silence leads all.
The first two lines of this stanza are obscure but seem to allude to Matthew 4:11. That passage occurs just after Jesus’s temptation in the wilderness, in which, after Satan departs, the text says, “angels came and ministered to [Jesus].”23 The final three and a half lines of this stanza echo Jesus’s calming of the storm (Matt. 8:23–27), though the language is ambiguous and lacks any concrete biblical referents.
Ephrem has reworked both of these biblical narratives so that they present Christ as master of creation. By focusing on the brief allusion in Matthew 4:11 to the angels’ care of Jesus, Ephrem highlights this moment and renders explicit its meaning within his madrasha.24 His reading is built upon terse allusions to two biblical scenes. This allusive style coheres with his general tendency to draw out these minute scenes from the biblical portraits of Christ in order to make broad theological arguments. Through this rewriting, Ephrem represents the New Testament as a book that testifies to the divinity of Christ—a divinity that Ephrem does not state outright or define in concrete terms, but crafts by emphasizing and weaving together these different scenes into the poetic world of the madrasha.
Similarly, in MF 54:3 Ephrem does not incorporate any specific language from the biblical text but expands the metaphor of son and king so that Christ becomes “master” and humans become the “sons of his house.” Ephrem uses this occasion to articulate a general hermeneutic stance for passages in which Christ appears to behave in a way unbefitting divinity:
Because he is the master he has exalted the sons of his house.
Fools have made themselves crazy, falling down defiled.
But he descended again and lifted them up from their defilement.
Error erred when it saw our dirt on his clothes.
Knowledge alone knew that he had approached the defilement
in order to cleanse it.
By offering this general guideline for understanding the “dirt on his clothes” (a metaphoric way of speaking about biblical scenes that appear to subordinate Christ), Ephrem reasserts a hermeneutic that undergirds the whole of the Madrashe on Faith. In Ephrem’s view, the Bible offers a picture of Christ as Lord of creation who has come as its savior. Up to this point, this poem has balanced reiterations of this general hermeneutic stance (in stanzas 1 and 3) with representations of particular scenes (in stanza 2). In the fourth stanza, Ephrem incorporates three more biblical narratives in the same allusive fashion:
From his care let it be understood that he is the son of the king,
Since, as a good heir, he took pains over his father’s house.
He saw the servant who was lying down (rmê) and stood him in health.
He saw the handmaid who was cast down and rebuked her fever.
He saw the bread that was running out and filled the sons of his house.
They gave thanks to the one who sent him.
Ephrem enlists three biblical narratives to buttress the metaphoric presentation of Christ as divine caretaker—the healing of a man cast down (Matt. 9:1–8 or John 5:1–18), the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law (Matt. 8:14–17), and the feeding of the multitudes (Matt. 14:15–21 and John 6:15–21).25 Ephrem’s language hints at his particular sources, but the references are so allusive that they are very difficult to uncover. He has clearly incorporated the biblical language in such a way that renders the narratives of a piece with the already present universal language of this madrasha.
But it is clear that he has drawn on specific biblical sources. Ephrem embeds a first narrative in line 3. His language—“He saw the servant who was lying down, and stood him in health”—is ambiguous. Ephrem appears to have in mind a specific scene but uses no proper nouns or particularly distinctive vocabulary. Edmund Beck identifies here an allusion to Matthew 9:1–8, which recounts the narrative of a paralyzed man whose friends brought him to Christ for healing.26 In Matthew 9:2, the man is described as “a paralytic, lying down” (mšaryâ kad rmê), a phrase that provides a potential antecedent for Ephrem’s phrase “He saw the servant who was lying down” (rmê). Yet Ephrem’s words also echo a scene that Beck does not identify—the scene of the healing at the pool of Bethesda recounted in John 5:2–18.27 The latter passage uses similar language to identify an assembly of sick people who “were cast down (rmên hwaw) in great sickness” (v. 5:3). The story concerns Jesus’s healing of one of these sick people, who is likewise identified as “cast down” (rmê, v. 5:6). Ephrem’s reference to “health” (ḥûlmānâ) also seems to echo John 5:6–9, in which Jesus asks the sick man whether he wishes to be healed (tetḥlem) and, at the story’s conclusion, affirms that he “was healed.”28 This analysis indicates that Ephrem has a specific source in mind. But literarily he has obscured the concrete references by rendering the passage in such ambiguous language.29 Given the general ambience of poem 54, in which Ephrem seeks to declare broadly that the “Son” of “the heavenly king” has come to earth as its caretaker, this style of allusion works. Both narratives involve Christ’s healing of the sick and so both bolster Ephrem’s portrait. His language invokes the two narratives simultaneously so as to create the composite portrait of Christ as divine caretaker.
Following this ambiguous allusion, which seems to meld the distinct healing scenes of Matthew 9:1–8 and John 5:6–9, Ephrem then embeds two narratives in a more obvious way. He first refers to the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law, which appears in each of the synoptic Gospels, though Ephrem’s retelling of the narrative looks very similar to the version from Matthew.30 In this narrative, Jesus sees the woman lying down with a fever, touches her, and, as the biblical text phrases it, “the fever left her.” Ephrem rewrites this scene subtly. Though the language of the madrasha makes its source clear, Ephrem does not refer to any of the characters in the narrative, referring instead only to the “handmaid who was cast down.” Yet what is more relevant to the broader Christological portrait that this poem constructs is that Ephrem presents Christ as actively rebuking the woman’s fever. This slight change—from the Bible’s “and the fever left her” to Ephrem’s “he rebuked her fever”—places Christ unambiguously as the active agent in the woman’s healing.31 As such, it further builds Ephrem’s portrait of Christ as divine caretaker.
In alluding to the healing of the paralyzed man and the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law, Ephrem has brought together two narratives that in the Gospel text are similar though not connected in any obvious way. Thematically, they represent two healing scenes. Both identify Christ as “seeing” and the sick person as “lying down” (rmê / ramyâ). Ephrem repeats the verbs “to see” (ḥzâ) and “lying down” (rmâ) in his retelling of both. Ephrem links these narratives in the service of his own rhetorical argument, but, in constructing that argument, he chooses passages that are already similar to one another. Ephrem’s task in reading these narratives and rendering them coherent within the rhetorical framework of his own poem depends upon his ability to identify their similarities while erasing their differences. In his retelling, Gospel scenes that already appear figurally related, even if not connected in the Gospel account, become explicit figures of one another in the madrasha. From there, a figural relationship is created between the various biblical scenes and Ephrem’s own madrashe.
“Seeing” connects both of the narratives that Ephrem draws upon in this stanza. The blind man (or the paralytic) “sees” Christ, as does Peter’s mother-in-law. Ephrem uses this same verb to connect to the final narrative that is embedded in this stanza, that of the feeding of the multitudes.32 Ephrem says that Christ saw that the bread was running out.” Ephrem’s poetic representation of this narrative draws on only two of the source’s terms—“bread” (laḥmâ) and “to be full” (sba‘). Here again, Ephrem changes the text slightly to represent Christ as an active agent. Rather than saying that the multitudes “were full” (sba‘) after Christ fed them, Ephrem says that Christ “made them full” (sabba‘). This deepens Ephrem picture of Christ as divine caretaker of the earth.
In the madrasha, Ephrem has made linguistic and theological choices to render these three narratives—the two healings and the feeding of the multitudes—as a single testimony to Christ’s divine status. Theologically, he has made Christ the obviously active subject of all these scenes, subtly manipulating the biblical language to do so. In turn, that portrait of Christ as active subject underwrites the broader universalist character of this madrasha, in which Christ stands as the cosmic representative of the heavenly king. Linguistically, Ephrem has used intentionally ambiguous language to evoke multiple biblical scenes and has merged the language of those scenes with his own madrasha. In the case of the narratives we have just examined, he introduced all of them through the activity of “seeing” (first the blind man/paralytic, then Peter’s mother-in-law, then Christ himself). In his representation of the narrative of the feeding, Ephrem said that the bread “had run out” (ḥsar). This verb does not occur in any of the biblical scenes of the feeding, but it does occur in the narrative of the wedding at Cana. His use of the verb here serves to foreshadow the narrative to which he next turns.
The narrative of the wedding at Cana (John 2) occupies MF 54:5:
Who would not love the lover of humans
since he is mingled and mixed with them? His handmaid became his servant.
They invited him, and he did not look down upon it. He went to a [wedding] feast,
and gladdened it with his greatness. He set down his gift,
wine in vessels, for the treasure of his kingdom
Walked along with him.
While Ephrem clearly draws upon the biblical scene of the wedding at Cana, he uses this to further his representation of Christ as divine caretaker.33 Theologically, Ephrem presumes that the Christ who acts at the wedding exists at some distance from creation—he is the “lover of humans,” who nevertheless “mingled and mixed” with humanity. Ephrem incorporates the narrative of the wedding into this broader narrative of Christ’s care for humanity. In so doing, he takes the language of the biblical text and applies it to the narrative of divine condescension that the poem articulates. For example, the line “gladdened with his greatness” clearly refers to the host’s exclamation about the quality of the wine in John 2:10. Yet, in this poem, the specific reference reverberates generally in reference to humanity’s reception of the divine Son’s mingling with them.
After this fifth stanza, the rhetoric of the poem shifts from an emphasis on Christ’s divine caretaking to a familiar polemic against those who do not recognize his divine origins.34 The poem continues to merge the language of the Bible with the particular rhetoric of the madrasha. But these five stanzas enable us to see how Ephrem melds the language of Bible and poem, and the theological ramifications of that melding. In poem 54, Ephrem has articulated the theme of Christ’s “sonship” and solicitude for creation from four biblical angles. In 54:1, he articulated Christ’s general lordship over creation; in 54:2, he presented the angels’ ministering to Christ as evidence of his relationship to his Father; in 54:4 and 5, he drew upon four miracle scenes (two of which were healings, and two of which utilized the miraculous transformation of food and drink) to demonstrate Christ’s care for his Father’s “house.” All of these stanzas together represent a biblical picture, unified within Ephrem’s poem, of Christ as Lord.
Broadly speaking, we can say two things about Ephrem’s representation of Christ and the biblical text in this poem. First, as regards his Trinitarian theology, poem 54 provides an example of the way in which Ephrem strives to articulate the particular relationship between Father and Son without using the language of Nicaea or referencing Nicene debates in any obvious way. Ephrem’s never refers to the nature of the Father or the Son and never reflects on Christ’s relationship to the Father outright at all. Instead, he constructs a universalist narrative in which Christ dwells properly in the realm of the Creator, and then descends, on behalf of the Creator, to care for the created realm. In the construction of this narrative, Ephrem affirms that Christ belongs properly to the realm of the Creator, and not that of creatures, yet that he has overcome this “chasm” to care for human creation. Ephrem thus articulates a basically Nicene position but he does it in a unique literary idiom.
Poem 54 has its own universalist narrative structure, and it is one into which Ephrem brings the particular narratives of the New Testament. In so doing, he betrays some consistent exegetical moves. While he incorporates the language of various biblical scenes, he does so in an ambiguous way. I would argue that this is intentional. For example, when in 54:3 he refers to someone who was “lying down” without specifying who, I would argue that Ephrem intends to evoke the New Testament healing scenes generally, and, in particular, both the scene of the paralytic and the scene of the blind man. Ephrem also consistently rewrites these scenes so that passive actions—“the fever left her,” “the bread had run out”—are rendered in the active voice, with Christ as the subject. This further emphasizes the theological message that Christ descends from heaven on behalf of the Creator to care for creation. Finally, Ephrem represents these passages in language that makes them figures of one another within the madrasha. Christ attends to a “servant who was lying down” and a “handmaid who was cast down.” These two characters “see” him and, in turn, he “sees” the multitude in need of food. In the latter case, Ephrem says that “the bread had run out,” and the phrase “had run out” links the narrative to the scene of the wedding at Cana. By making these little shifts in the biblical text as he brings it into the poem, Ephrem rewrites the text so that both poem and Bible speak together in with a unified voice.
THE HUMBLE CHRIST
MF 24 is an eleven-stanza poem that reflects generally on the life of Christ and specifically on Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. As I have argued previously, much of the Madrashe on Faith developed in nonliturgical settings of study. MF 24, however, develops as a reflection on the events of “Palm Sunday.” Given the presence of this liturgical feast in the fourth century, it is likely that this madrasha was composed for that occasion.35 Here, then, we see Ephrem operating in a liturgical mode but in the context of a feast that he interprets in light of the Trinitarian controversies. Literarily, this poem is similar to MF 54 in its establishment of a broad poetic narrative into which it incorporates specific biblical narratives. Yet, whereas that poem focused upon Christ’s heavenly origins, poem 24 focuses on Christ’s having “put on a body.”
The material addressed so far has shown Ephrem’s insistence on the priority of the name Son, and, more generally, his development of the theme of Christ’s sonship. In the passages we have examined, Ephrem has rearranged and melded various scenes so that the Gospel itself is restructured as a single testimony to Christ as “Son.” In poem 24, Ephrem, though reflecting upon Christ, neither mentions the name “Son” nor emphasizes Christ’s sonship in any way. Yet, his rhetorical aim—to show Christ’s unity with the Father and solicitude for creation—is the same. He restructures Old and New Testament material to argue against subordinationist interpretations of particular New Testament scenes. Christ’s entry into Jerusalem becomes a locus for Ephrem to reflect upon divine humility writ large. Literarily, the biblical scene provides him with an opportunity to scan the biblical corpus and rewrite it as a single testament to Christ’s divine condescension. In this poem we can see clearly Ephrem’s exegetical imagination at work, as narratives and lexical details trigger new narratives and lexical details, all of which are combined in the madrasha.
The first three stanzas of poem 24 establish a basic theological dichotomy, and they do so without drawing upon any specific biblical narratives. In 24:1, Ephrem asserts that Christ “put on a body from Adam and from David” in order to overcome the shame which the body had acquired at the hands of the “Evil One.”36 In 24:2, he juxtaposes the image of Christ as “the sustainer of all,” who, nevertheless, “at the meager table / of Joseph and Mary has grown up.” In 24:3 he articulates a paradox, according to which divine majesty dwelt in the “womb of Mary” and possessed a “mortal father,” while remaining the “one who gives life to all.”
These first three stanzas portray Christ as “the great one” who has taken on “meagerness,” “shame,” and “humility” to “conquer” these very things. These three introductory stanzas establish the themes of the poem that follows. In poem 24:4, with these themes in mind, Ephrem turns to his central biblical scene, that of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on a foal. The scene becomes in Ephrem’s retelling a portrait of divine condescension with anti-subordinationist overtones:
He mounted a lowly foal and hid his victory in its lowliness.
Riders of horses and chariots are subdued and conquered.
David conquered valiant battle lines
yet a tender wife humbled his strength.37
Ephrem alludes to the entry into Jerusalem in the first line only.38 “Foal” (‘îlâ) and “to mount” (rkab) appear in each of the Gospels, but Ephrem’s allusion to the foal’s “lowliness” (šeplâ) suggests the prophecy that is embedded in Matthew (though both Matthew and Zechariah—upon which Matthew draws—use a different term, makkîk, “humble”).39 The relevant line, Matthew 21:5, reads: “Say to the daughter of Zion: ‘Lo, your king comes to you, humble (makkîk) and mounted upon a donkey (rkîb ‘al ḥmārâ), and on the foal of an ass (‘îlâ bar ʼattānâ).”40 Though Ephrem uses šeplâ (“lowly”) instead of makkîk (“humble”), he has clearly fixed on this detail from the biblical scene, even anticipating it in 24:1 where he likewise used špal, “to be lowly,” to denote the humility Christ took upon himself in taking a body. The vocabulary that Ephrem takes from Matthew—“to mount” (rkab), “donkey” (ḥmārâ), “foal” (‘îlâ), and “ass” (ʼattānâ)—structures the poem that follows, as Ephrem uses it to piece together the diverse narratives out of which the poem is made.
Already in this first stanza, Ephrem’s interaction with the Bible is noteworthy. His allusion to Matthew occupies a minimal amount of the stanza (the first line only) and draws only a few words from that line. He focuses on a single detail from the narrative—the “lowly foal”—and interprets it as iconic of divine humility. The stanza as a whole seeks to defend the fact that Christ rode a foal rather a horse. Thus, having alluded to the New Testament narrative in the first line, Ephrem offers what appears to be a general statement about “riders of horses,” according to which the latter, though exalted for a time, experience an inevitable humbling.
This general defense of Christ’s mode of transportation gives way to a second biblical narrative, which demonstrates the point Ephrem has made in this second line. Ephrem alludes to David’s defeat by a “tender wife” but does not specify the narrative to which he refers. Edmund Beck takes this as an allusion to 2 Samuel 11:2–27, the narrative of Bathsheba and David, but Ephrem takes no language from that narrative. As the poem progresses, it will seem instead that Ephrem has in mind Abigail, the wife of Nabal (1 Sam. 25). He ends this stanza, however, on an ambiguous note, and switches to a different narrative entirely. This ambiguous allusion thus lingers, foreshadowing the poem’s later developments and allowing Ephrem to evoke two narratives at once.
Poem 24:4 builds around two nouns—‘îlâ (“foal”) and rākšâ (“horse”)—both taken from Matthew. Thematically, the stanza concentrates on humility and arrogance. As the poem continues in 24:5 and Ephrem draws in more biblical material, he emphasizes texts that share lexical links with 24:4:
An ass spoke and recognized that she was an ass.
Her master, likewise, she recognized as her master.
Who is so educated that he cannot distinguish
a created creature from its Creator? (MF 24:5)
This short stanza appears somewhat randomly in the poem as it has developed. Ephrem seems to have drifted from his original theme, even though the final line rebuts his subordinationst opponents. But the logic of the stanza within the poem depends upon its use of the language of Matthew, albeit here developed without any obvious allusion to the Gospel. From the initial “foal,” to the horses of David, we come now to Balaam’s ass (ʼattānâ). The term “ass,” which Ephrem takes from Numbers 22, also occurs in Matthew 21:5 (from which the earlier scene of the entry is taken), though Ephrem did not quote it there. Nevertheless, this looks like an exegesis inspired by concordance: the presence of “ass” in Ephrem’s initial narrative (from Matthew) triggers the narrative from Numbers, which he then recounts and fits into the structure of the poem.41
Within the biblical text, the narrative of Balaam’s ass occupies the entirety of Numbers 22 but Ephrem focuses only on verses 21–35. In its biblical telling, the narrative is elaborate and lengthy, yet Ephrem has whittled it down dramatically. Neither the ass’s master, Balaam, nor any of the character names from Numbers 22 are mentioned. Ephrem signals the narrative by alluding to the action of its unusual central character—a talking donkey. By stripping the story of any extraneous narrative material, Ephrem seamlessly weaves it into his poem about Christ.
Ephrem’s representation of the story’s moral reflects the concerns of his own poem rather than those of the biblical narrative. The biblical story showcases God’s ability to thwart an unblessed mission, when Balaam goes on a military journey without fulfilling the Lord’s preconditions for that journey. The Lord then performs the miracle of “opening the ass’s mouth” to explain to Balaam why he cannot proceed. Ephrem mentions the initial miracle—“the ass spoke”—but the moral he draws from it is clearly his own. The only place in the narrative that gives ground to such an emphasis is in the ass’s insistence, in its speech to Balaam, that it is his donkey. Upon the basis of this small detail, Ephrem finds in this story evidence of the ass’s understanding of its subservience to its master. His polemic against those who cannot distinguish Creator and created is based on this aspect of the narrative applied analogously.
It is helpful here to trace how Ephrem has moved from Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on a donkey to this Old Testament narrative of a talking donkey. Ephrem began 24:4 with a terse one-line allusion to Christ’s entry into Jerusalem (“He mounted a lowly foal and hid his victory in its lowliness”). The latter provides, from Ephrem’s perspective, a humble scene. While the only noun that Ephrem takes from the New Testament scene is “foal” (‘îlâ), the prophecy that Matthew quotes in that scene also uses the noun “ass” (ʼattānâ). This noun has clearly triggered in Ephrem’s mind the story of Balaam’s ass—one of the more famous Old Testament narratives involving that animal. On this lexical basis, Ephrem moves to the narrative of Balaam’s ass, but retains, even if initially only in the background, an echo of the initial theme—Christ’s humility. In turn, while humility is more or less absent from the actual biblical scene of Balaam’s ass, Ephrem finds in that narrative precisely this moral point, which he bases on the donkey’s recognition of its proper place vis-à-vis its master. The polemical conclusion to this stanza—“Who is so educated that he cannot distinguish / A created creature from its Creator”—makes sense when one considers Ephrem’s two guiding compositional principles: the theme of humility and the equine vocabulary.
These two guiding principles—lexical and thematic—continue in 24:6–7 and reconnect to the “tender wife” introduced two stanzas earlier:
And if Nabal was punished for his brash speech—
An insolent man (mṣa‘rānâ) who opened his mouth savagely,
for he made David the great king
small and named him among the servants—
What fool would be like Nabal?
Though he used David as a negative example in poem 24:4, Ephrem reintroduces him here as a hero, drawing upon a narrative from 1 Samuel 25. As with Ephrem’s presentation of the Balaam narrative, the one in Samuel is quite lengthy and complicated, but the poet focuses on just a few details. Ephrem does not identify Nabal beyond his name and characterizes him generally as brash and insolent. Nevertheless, Ephrem’s terse allusion assumes knowledge of the general shape of the narrative.
That narrative is worth recounting briefly. In 1 Samuel 25, Nabal is a powerful and wealthy man whose shepherds King David has treated kindly. King David sends messengers to Nabal to remind him of this fact and asks him for a gift in return. Nabal responds negatively, insisting that he knows neither David nor his messengers. David does not take the rebuke well. Initially, he declares war on Nabal, but before he can attack, Nabal’s wife Abigail offers David the gift he initially sought and begs him not to take offense at her husband’s “insolence” (mṣa‘rānûtâ). David accepts the gift, but Nabal is so humiliated by his wife’s behavior that he dies on the spot. The story then concludes with David marrying the newly widowed Abigail.
Ephrem situates the proper name Nabal at the front of this stanza with no introduction as if the narrative follows logically from the narrative of Balaam’s ass.42 Ephrem’s characterization of Nabal as “an insolent man” (mṣa‘rānâ) does reflect Abigail’s own characterization of her husband, as expressed in 1 Samuel 25:25. And Ephrem’s statement that Nabal made David “one of the servants” reflects an ironic reference to the distinction made throughout 1 Samuel 25 between Nabal and his servants.
Ephrem’s seamless movement from the Balaam narrative (in 24:5) to the narrative of Nabal (24:6) gives the impression that the two have some connection to one another, yet the connection is not at all obvious. The two narratives derive from different places in the Bible and share no characters or obvious language. Moreover, while Ephrem traces a coherent theme between the two—the theme of master and servant and the need for recognizing one’s rightful place in that relationship—the prominence of this theme depends primarily upon Ephrem’s creative importation of it into the narrative.
Yet a closer inspection of 1 Samuel 25 reveals striking parallels to earlier material in the madrasha. On the most obvious level, of course, 1 Samuel 25 connects to poem 24:4 through its secondary character, David. In 24:4, the stanza in which Ephrem first alluded to Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, Ephrem also said that David was disgraced by his behavior toward a “tender wife.” As we noted, Beck assumed that Ephrem referred to Bathsheba, but Ephrem’s incorporation of Nabal suggests he actually has in mind Abigail. Ephrem does not mention Abigail by name anywhere in poem 24. But it is her characterization of Nabal as insolent that Ephrem here echoes. Moreover, in the interactions between David and Abigail in 1 Samuel 25 we see the same equine vocabulary that Ephrem uses in this madrasha. Abigail sends gifts to David loaded on donkeys (1 Sam. 25:18) and she rides a donkey to meet him when she convinces him to turn aside from his planned battle (25:23). This might suggest, then, that Beck’s identification of the “soft wife” of 24:4 as Bathsheba is mistaken and that the phrase actually refers to Abigail. Yet given what we have already seen in this chapter, I would argue that Ephrem here evokes both references. The initial reference in 24:4 to “soft wife” evokes the more famous narrative of David’s affair with Bathsheba, an act that resulted in Uriah’s murder and Solomon’s birth. Yet, by then subtly bringing in the narrative of Nabal and (implicitly) Abigail, Ephrem adds another piece to this biblical mosaic. Ephrem lets the ambiguity of the concrete referent remain as a way to bring multiple narratives and resonances into the madrasha.
Ephrem devotes one more stanza to Nabal but uses the character to bring his audience into the poem and remind them of the controversies at hand. He fixates on a question that Nabal asks in 1 Samuel 25:10: “Who is David? Who is the son of Jesse”? Nabal’s question, taken out of the biblical context and restated in that of Ephrem’s fourth century, functions as a prototype of investigative speech. These words provide Ephrem with a path back toward his initial Christological focus:
Who then is the fool who would be like Nabal?
Flee, my brothers, from his tongue and from his death!
For it was not the son of Jesse that his mouth disgraced
but the Son of David!
From 24:4 to 7, Ephrem has thus come full circle, returning to the image of the disgraced Christ, with Nabal functioning as the proto-investigator. Likely delivered in the context of Palm Sunday, this madrasha builds a biblical mosaic through concordance that singularly and dramatically speaks against those who read the biblical narratives in subordinationist terms.
CONCLUSION
Like Ephrem’s poetic self, and the audience to which he spoke, Ephrem’s Christ emerged through a nuanced and poetic reading of the Bible. In this chapter, I have looked at the New Testament material that Ephrem represented to create a particular image of Christ as divine Son. The first two sections examined two ways in which Ephrem created this picture. Ephrem read the baptism and transfiguration scenes by focusing on small textual details and removing these from their broader narrative contexts. He also offered a rereading of various New Testament narratives to portray Christ as the caretaker of the ather’s earthly realm. In the final section, we examined Ephrem’s portrayal and defense of Christ’s condescension and the particularly lexical means by which he defended this condescension.
In these materials we can see the literary carrying out of Ephrem’s theological convictions. In chapter three I argued that Ephrem’s commitment to a basic Nicene Christology bore literary fruit. Put most simply, his conviction was that Christ stood on the divine side of a chasm separating divinity and humanity. Literarily, this shaped the way he viewed the Bible. The Bible manifested a God who always transcended the writings that revealed him, yet allowed himself to be represented in those limited figures. Ephrem’s commitment to reading the Bible through this theological prism changed the way Ephrem thought about and presented the Bible in his madrashe. In this chapter we have seen the literary ramifications of Ephrem’s theological commitments from a different perspective. In the cases I have examined here, Ephrem took the ambiguous literary materials of the New Testament—materials he already accessed through the rewritten text of the Diatessaron—and rewrote them so that they unambiguously testified to the truth that God was beyond humanity but had manifested himself to humanity. In a late antique context that saw the New Testament writings codified and yet rewritten, Ephrem’s madrashe demonstrate yet another of the ways late antique authors negotiated New Testament material.
Through his reading of these scenes from Christ’s life, Ephrem rewrote the New Testament books in which this life was housed. Whereas the Gospel accounts of Christ’s life were inevitably ambiguous and open to many interpretations, Ephrem restructured them as simple and singularly focused testaments to Christ’s divinity and incomprehensibility. In his reading of the scene of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, he drew upon the whole gamut of biblical literature to construct a defense of Christ’s mounting of a donkey. Literarily, the biblical poetics underlying Ephrem’s presentation of Christ are very similar to those underlying his presentation of self and audience. In all these cases, Ephrem rewrote the Bible as a terse, yet unambiguous document.