Columba Stewart: “Re-situating Aphrahat’s Demonstrations and the Book of Steps in Late Antique Mesopotamia: Marcionites, Manichaeans, and other conversation partners.”

This presentation will explore ways of recovering the broader ascetic context for the well-known Syriac Demonstrations of Aphrahat (ca. 270-ca. 345 CE) and the anonymous Book of Steps (?mid-late 4th century CE). Aphrahat wrote of the ascetic qyama or “covenant,” which was also promoted by other early Syriac authors; the Book of Steps describes a bi-partite church consisting of “perfect” ascetic members and “just” (married, property-owning) members. The origins of both the qyama and the distinction between “perfect and “just” Christians are obscure. Other ascetic movements in Mesopotamia that would have been considered by the authors of those texts to be heretical (Marcionites) or inimical to Christianity (Manichaeans) may offer avenues of approach to this problem, despite challenges of recovering a complete view of their ascetic practice because of the suppression of those movements in the Roman and Sasanian empires.The study of both Marcionites and Manichaeans (especially of the latter) has expanded enormously in recent years. Marcionites are known to have been active in Mesopotamia, and Mani’s own writings were composed almost entirely in Syriac. Despite challenges, it is possible to recover a sense of their importance in that region, and to infer from Marcionite and Manichaean traces in other parts of the Late Antique world how they would have played a major role in the development of early Syriac Christian asceticism and influenced the forms of asceticism discoverable in the literature that came to be seen as representing “orthodox” Syriac Christianity.