Eva María Rodrigo Gómez: Reconsidering Narsai’s Rabanutha:an inquiry on his life's chronology.

Frederick McLeod, first in his PhD Dissertation and then afterward in his edition and translation of the Christological memre of Narsai, uses some verses of these homilies to try and date them. These verses speak of an “assault to the charge of the rabanutha”, which McLeod interprets as the head office of the School of the Persians, a role that the Narsai himself would take up for twenty years, according to the traditional primary sources. In this paper we will examine other passages of Narsai’s work in which this term appears in order to try and determine what he truly means by it, challenging the interpretation given by McLeod. We will find that it seems to be a term specific to Narsai and for this reason it does not appear in Payne-Smith’s dictionary, for example, as it does not seem to be a common word in other authors. In fact, it seems to be a creation by Narsai which he made by adding the “-utha” suffix, indicating an abstract feminine noun, to the word “rabban”.
If we consider that the sources about his life are contradictory on some crucial points, it is essential a careful study of the author’s work to try to extract from these texts hints that can help to establish a more accurate chronology of his life. We hope that this research can be a contribution to this task, trying to shed some light to the question of the Edessa’s period.