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ArameansHoly Mor Ephrem the Aramean in the Synodical Letter to Mar Papa
"While we were not yet comforted in this grief of ours, a fresh, evil blow was struck against our severe, bitter wound through the reading of those two letters sent to us by our brother, the holy Mor Jacob, the Bishop of Nisibis, and the holy Mor Ephrem the Aramean, who has appeared in our generation like a prophet.
When their letters were translated from Aramaic into Greek and read aloud in the assembly, we received word from them of the crime which raging deceivers had committed with the consent of consecrated men who had been named bishops by you."
This work, titled "The Synodical letter that the Western Fathers wrote to Mar Papa catholicos" (Syriac Corpus #692), is an anonymous piece of East Syriac canon law literature belonging to a larger dossier known as The Letters of Papa bar Aggai.
While the text traditionally claims to be a 4th-century synodical letter written by prominent "Western" Byzantine bishops to defend Patriarch Papa against an internal rebellion, modern scholarship has proven it is a pious forgery (pseudepigrapha) created in the late 5th or early 6th century.
The true author, an anonymous East Syriac church lawyer, fabricated this correspondence to create an ancient and authoritative precedent. The goal was to legally secure the absolute supremacy of the See of Seleucia-Ctesiphon over rebellious local bishops.
The text contains major chronological errors, such as depicting an adult Mor Ephrem (d. 373) writing letters during a conflict that occurred around 315 AD. Strikingly, the text refers to him as "Mor Ephrem the Aramean" rather than using "Suryoyo" (Syriac), which is his standard historical identifier. This terminology further proves the historical synonymosity between the terms Suryoyo (Syriac) and Oromoyo (Aramean) in early church literature.
When their letters were translated from Aramaic into Greek and read aloud in the assembly, we received word from them of the crime which raging deceivers had committed with the consent of consecrated men who had been named bishops by you."
This work, titled "The Synodical letter that the Western Fathers wrote to Mar Papa catholicos" (Syriac Corpus #692), is an anonymous piece of East Syriac canon law literature belonging to a larger dossier known as The Letters of Papa bar Aggai.
While the text traditionally claims to be a 4th-century synodical letter written by prominent "Western" Byzantine bishops to defend Patriarch Papa against an internal rebellion, modern scholarship has proven it is a pious forgery (pseudepigrapha) created in the late 5th or early 6th century.
The true author, an anonymous East Syriac church lawyer, fabricated this correspondence to create an ancient and authoritative precedent. The goal was to legally secure the absolute supremacy of the See of Seleucia-Ctesiphon over rebellious local bishops.
The text contains major chronological errors, such as depicting an adult Mor Ephrem (d. 373) writing letters during a conflict that occurred around 315 AD. Strikingly, the text refers to him as "Mor Ephrem the Aramean" rather than using "Suryoyo" (Syriac), which is his standard historical identifier. This terminology further proves the historical synonymosity between the terms Suryoyo (Syriac) and Oromoyo (Aramean) in early church literature.