Walter Beers: Knowing and Ordering Communal History in the Corpus of John of Ephesus (c. 507–88)

Despite a few signal contributions, John of Ephesus, Syriac author of the Lives of the Eastern Saintsand a partially-preserved Ecclesiastical History, remains seriously understudied. In his corpus we encounter an old man’s reflections on half a century spent in the growing anti-chalcedonian movement, from the watershed of the 520s to the renewed persecutions and schisms of the 570s and 80s. John’s works, like those of other miaphysite authors of the period, are concerned with justifying the existence of his religious community in the face of the rejection of Constantinople, Rome and many of his fellow Christians.This paper will explore how both his works strive to invent a mode of knowing ecclesial community that prioritizes the charismatic and martyrological over the doctrinal and theological. He seeks out the roots of this community in the charism of its ascetics and bishops in the Lives of the Eastern Saints, and in the (mostly) figurative martyrdoms of its clergy and monks in the Ecclesiastical History—always with a strong emphasis on oral sources. Like his younger contemporaries John Rufus and Zachariah of Mytilene, John finds in historiography and hagiography tools with which to marshal his proofs for the legitimacy of the miaphysite church and to organize his and his contemporaries’ oral histories into a cohesive narrative of communal formation. It will be seen that implicit in this narrative is a contrast between a past generation of ascetic prowess and courageous witness, and a present one marked by greed, pride, and faction.