Catalin-Stefan Popa: Invoking the patristic authority in controversies.The 318 Fathers of Nicaea and the 150 of Constantinople in late antiquity Syriac texts

It's well known that on the list of ecumenical councils recognized by the East Syriac Church only that of Nicaea and Constantinople stand by themselves.Synodicon orientale, minorly analysed on these issues before, possesses clues in this sense: Mār Abā, who travelled extensively through the Byzantine Empire, took over in his collection of Synodal canons, basic teachings from different councils concluding that his Church is in agreement with the Council of Nicaea, and introducing into equation the figure of Theodore of Mopsuestia, attempting to put the biblical interpreter “par excellence” on the same level with the Fathers of Nicaea, and this is a paradigmatic issue that seems to come frequently out into the textual tradition (both Synods are invoked in: Synod of 585 respectively of 605; Sabrīšō’s letter against the Messalian monks; the Christological creed from 612; two letters of Baršāumā of Shush, included in the Cronicle of Seert).Based on this, and respectively on other miscellaneous texts we will analyse this structural process of continuities, attempting to demonstrate to which extent the East Syriac theologians attempted to make the profiles of Nicaenum and Constantinopolitanum as their own, and respectively how and based on which concepts did they characterize these Fathers compared with the heroes of Syriac tradition, such as Theodore of Mopsuestia? Was this authority really applicable in the life of the East Syriac Church, or whether this represents only a literary motif embedded in different texts to make subjective reconstructions of the past within the Syriac Geschichtsschreibung?