Incorruptible Bodies: Christology, Society, and Authority in Late Antiquity

By Yonatan Moss

In the early sixth-century eastern Roman empire, anti-Chalcedonian leaders Severus of Antioch and Julian of Halicarnassus debated the nature of Jesus's body: Was it corruptible prior to its resurrection from the dead? Viewing the controversy in light of late antiquity’s multiple images of the ‘body of Christ,’ Yonatan Moss reveals the underlying political, ritual, and cultural stakes and the long-lasting effects of this fateful theological debate. Incorruptible Bodies combines sophisticated historical methods with philological rigor and theological precision, bringing to light an important chapter in the history of Christianity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: May 3, 2016
• ISBN: 9780520964341

Yonatan Moss

Yonatan Moss is a scholar at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he teaches in the Department of Comparative Religion.

Book preview

Incorruptible Bodies

CHRISTIANITY IN LATE ANTIQUITY THE OFFICIAL BOOK SERIES OF THE NORTH AMERICAN PATRISTICS SOCIETY

Editor

Christopher A. Beeley, Yale University

Associate Editors

Elizabeth A. Clark, Duke University

Robin Darling Young, The Catholic University of America

International Advisory Board

Lewis Ayres, Durham University • John Behr, St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, New York • Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony, Hebrew University of Jerusalem • Marie-Odile Boulnois, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris • Kimberly D. Bowes, University of Pennsylvania and the American Academy in Rome • Virginia Burrus, Syracuse University • Stephen Davis, Yale University • Elizabeth DePalma Digeser, University of California Santa Barbara • Mark Edwards, University of Oxford • Susanna Elm, University of California Berkeley • Thomas Graumann, Cambridge University • Sidney H. Griffith, Catholic University of America • David G. Hunter, University of Kentucky • Andrew S. Jacobs, Scripps College • Robin M. Jensen, University of Notre Dame • AnneMarie Luijendijk, Princeton University • Christoph Markschies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin • Andrew B. McGowan, Berkeley Divinity School at Yale • Claudia Rapp, Universität Wien • Samuel Rubenson, Lunds Universitet • Rita Lizzi Testa, Università degli Studi di Perugia

1. Incorruptible Bodies: Christology, Society, and Authority in Late Antiquity, by Yonatan Moss

Incorruptible Bodies

Christology, Society, and Authority in Late Antiquity

Yonatan Moss

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University of California Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Moss, Yonatan, author.

        Title: Incorruptible bodies : Christology, society, and authority in late antiquity / Yonatan Moss.

    Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2016] |

    "2016 | Series: Christianity in late antiquity ; 1 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

    Identifiers: LCCN 2015035769| ISBN 9780520289994 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520964341 (electronic)

    Subjects: LCSH: Jesus Christ—Person and offices—History—To 1500. | Jesus Christ—History of doctrines—Early church, ca. 30–600. | Severus, of Antioch, approximately 465–538. | Julianus, Bishop of Halicarnassus, active 6th century. | Church history—Primitive and early church, ca. 30–600.

    Classification: LCC BT198 .M67 2016 | DDC 273/.6—dc23

    LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015035769

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To the Christians of Iraq and Syria, who currently walk in the valleys of the shadows of death.

May you soon see light.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Dissension among the Dissenters

1. Holy Flesh: The Christological Debate

2. Body Politics: Rethinking the Body of Christ

3. The Food of In/corruption: Liturgical Aspects of the Debate

4. The Body of the Fathers: Textual Tradition and Exegetical Authority

Conclusion: Severus Transformed

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is a revised and updated version of my doctoral dissertation, In Corruption: Severus of Antioch on the Body of Christ, completed in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University in 2013. Like the resurrection body in relation to its pre-resurrection kernel, this book, while closely linked to its predecessor, represents, I hope, a more glorious version thereof.

I was fortunate to have had superb working environments while laboring on both my dissertation and this book. Yale’s Graduate Program in Ancient Christianity provided ideal conditions, both intellectual and material, for my coursework, research, and writing as the body of my dissertation was coming into existence. I am deeply indebted to my dissertation adviser, Stephen J. Davis, a model scholar, teacher, and human being, who continues to inspire. I am very grateful to Bentley Layton, Harry Attridge, Christopher Beeley, Adela Collins, and Dale Martin for being my primary guides in the study of ancient Christianity. They each also helped with different stages of the dissertation process, as constructive critics, readers, and members of my dissertation committee.

Although the links between my own work and Judaic studies were not always self-evident, Steven Fraade, Christine Hayes, and Ivan Marcus, each in their capacity as alternating heads of Yale’s Program in Judaic Studies, granted me generous material support and abundant knowledge over the course of my years in New Haven. I thank Heather Voorhees and Renee Reed, the kind and able administrators of Yale’s Religious Studies Department and Program in Judaic Studies.

My special thanks go to Lucas Van Rompay. Ever since agreeing, on relatively short notice, to serve as a reader of my dissertation, he has, on multiple occasions, enhanced my work by generously sharing treasures large and small from the storehouses of his sagacity. I wish also to thank Maren Niehoff and Guy and Sarah Stroumsa for their instruction, advice, and support over the years.

During the period in which I worked on transforming the body of my dissertation into this book, I was blessed with paradisiac working conditions in Hebrew University’s Martin Buber Society of Fellows. I thank the Society’s former head, David Shulman, its current head, Ruth HaCohen, and its talented administrators, Yael Baron and Ella Janatovsky, for tilling and keeping this wondrous paradise. I also thank my wonderful colleagues at the Martin Buber Society over the past two years for embodying the dream of an ideal academic community.

This book benefited greatly from the many constructive comments I received on papers I had the privilege of delivering to the group for the study of Eastern Christianity at Hebrew University’s Institute for Advanced Studies in 2011 and 2012. I owe special thanks to the following members of the group: Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony, Philippe Blaudeau, Alberto Camplani, Oded Irshai, Aryeh Kofsky, Derek Krueger, Sergey Minov, István Perczel, Lorenzo Perrone, Serge Ruzer, and David Satran. The first and last members of this alphabetical list have also been teachers, close friends, and colleagues for over a decade. Thank you for everything, Brouria and David.

I am grateful to dear friends and colleagues from New Haven and Jerusalem (even if now many are scattered throughout the world) for their camaraderie and advice (related and unrelated to this book) over the years. My special thanks go to Ruthie Abeliovich, David Berg, Dylan Burns, Elizabeth Davidson, Simcha Gross, Maayan Nidbach, Yoni Pomeranz, Flavia Ruani, Joseph Sanzo, Sharon Weisser, and Ynon Wygoda. I am especially grateful to Flavia Ruani for her advice concerning the transformation of my dissertation into this book and for our wonderful ongoing Syriac collaborations.

I thank Christopher Beeley for his involvement in this project at virtually every step along the way: from serving on my prospectus committee to acting as a dissertation reader to inviting me to publish this book in UC Press’s Christianity in Late Antiquity series. I am grateful for the perspicuous comments of the press’s two learned anonymous readers and of its other expert reader from the editorial committee. I thank Maeve Cornell-Taylor, Cindy Fulton, Marian Rogers, and Eric Schmidt, my editors at UC Press, for their efficient and effective work on the manuscript and sage advice on a range of issues.

I wish, finally, to thank six people who, while they may have had a less direct impact on this book, have had, and continue to have, the most direct impact on its author.

My work on this book would not have been possible were it not for the curiosity, creativity, and love of texts, cultures, and languages instilled in me by my parents, David and Rosalyn Moss. Thank you for everything, Abba and Ema.

My work on this book would not have been possible were it not for the love, joy, and meaningful adventure that fill my life with my beloved Saskia and our dear children, Akiva, Yovel, and Heleni. I am also indebted to Saskia for advice on various aspects of this book. Saskia, Akiva, Yovel, and Heleni, I am deeply grateful to you, and for you.

This book is dedicated to the brave and tenacious perpetuators of the various forms of Syriac Christianity in its original homeland, in Syria and Iraq. This book would surely not have been possible were it not for them.

ABBREVIATIONS

Introduction

Dissension among the Dissenters

As to the mad dogs who have followed the witless Romanus and the stony Julian we have not a word to say, seeing that, while we talk according to the law in all respects, both in doctrines and in canonical actions, they are absurdly spreading these contrary opinions concerning us. For neither will we for our part by reason of rivalry with those filthy men abandon the middle of the royal road and walk upon the rocks on the other side.

SEVERUS OF ANTIOCH, LETTER TO SERGIUS, BISHOP OF CYRRHUS, AND MARION, BISHOP OF SURA (SL 5.15, 401–402/356)

There is no clear set of structures, behaviors, events, objects, experiences, words and moments to which body currently refers. Rather, it seems to me, the term conjures up two sharply different groups of phenomena. Sometimes body . . . seems to refer to limit or placement, whether biological or social. That is, it refers to natural, physical structures . . . to environment or locatedness, boundary or definition. . . . Sometimes—on the other hand—it seems to refer precisely to lack of limits, that is, to desire, potentiality, fertility, or sensuality/sexuality . . ., or to person or identity as malleable representation or construct.

CAROLINE BYNUM, WHY ALL THE FUSS ABOUT THE BODY?

SEVERUS OF ANTIOCH AND THE SEPARATION OF THE CHURCHES

Severus served as the imperially appointed patriarch of Antioch for close to six years in the early sixth century (November 512 to September 518). He is perceived by many to be the founding father of the independent anti-Chalcedonian Syriac Orthodox Church.¹ One overarching aim of this book is to correct that perception. Although he resolutely opposed the Chalcedonian theology that was advocated by the imperial government during much of his lifetime, I argue that Severus was equally opposed to leaving the imperial ecclesial structures and founding a new anti-Chalcedonian church.² There were indeed others within anti-Chalcedonian society who promoted separatism, in word and in deed. Severus’s theological, political, liturgical, and cultural contestations with these separatists form the subject of this book.

Severus was born to a pagan family ca. 465 in Sozopolis, Pisidia (in central Asia Minor), and studied rhetoric in Alexandria and law in Beirut.³ Baptized ca. 490, he joined the monastery of Peter the Iberian, an early anti-Chalcedonian leader, located in Maiuma, near Gaza. After receiving priestly ordination from an exiled anti-Chalcedonian bishop,⁴ Severus set up his own monastery in Maiuma, and began to exert influence as a learned spokesperson for anti-Chalcedonian christology. He spent 508–511 in Constantinople, where, together with Philoxenus of Mabbug and other anti-Chalcedonian bishops, he engineered the ouster of the sitting Chalcedonian patriarchs of Constantinople and Antioch. The following six years, coinciding with the final years of Emperor Anastasius’s life (ruled 491–518), signaled the zenith of anti-Chalcedonian influence in the imperial church. This period ended with the accession of the Chalcedonian emperor Justin in 518, when Severus, together with dozens of other anti-Chalcedonian bishops, were forced to flee to Egypt, an anti-Chalcedonian stronghold.

Severus spent almost all of the remaining twenty years of his life in exile in Egypt. The one documented exception was a sojourn in Constantinople in 535–536, undertaken at Emperor Justinian’s behest for the purpose of conciliation talks. The talks failed, and Justinian declared Severus a heretic whose writings were to be burned, and the hand of anyone caught copying his works amputated.⁵ As a result, relatively little of his massive body of work survives in the original Greek.⁶ A considerable portion, however, is available in Syriac translations, many of which were made already during his lifetime.⁷

The importance of Severus’s writings for the study of the ecclesiastical history of the Roman Empire in the early sixth century is incontestable. The diversity of these writings—hymns, letters, homilies, and theological treatises—to say nothing of their sheer volume, is unparalleled among contemporary Christian authors.⁸ This state of affairs is due at least in part to the particular vicissitudes of history. Since those who saw themselves as Severus’s heirs ultimately gained dominance in large swathes of the Eastern provinces, many of his writings were preserved while the writings of many of his opponents perished. Nevertheless, it appears that even if the writings of these contemporaries had survived, Severus would emerge, by comparison, as a very prolific author who occupied center stage in all the main controversies of his day.

Although Severus was famous for his extended polemical altercations with Chalcedonian theologians, the bulk of his writings actually focuses on questions that arose within his own party.⁹ These questions ranged from the theological to the practical.

The main theological question within the anti-Chalcedonian party that occupied Severus in the last fifteen years of his life and will occupy us throughout this book concerned the incorruptibility of the body of Christ. Did Christ’s body become incorruptible only after the crucifixion and resurrection, as Severus thought, or was it incorruptible already from the incarnation, as claimed by Severus’s fellow anti-Chalcedonian Julian of Halicarnassus and his followers?

A slew of practical questions had exercised the anti-Chalcedonian communities ever since the imperial council had promulgated its decrees in the mid-fifth century. These questions continued to occupy the movement well into the sixth century, both during Severus’s tenure as patriarch and during his subsequent years in exile. In addition to the theological question raised by Julian of Halicarnassus about the incorruptibility of the body of Christ, three practical questions will be the focus of a major part of this book. These involved the issues related to the rebaptism of Chalcedonian converts and reordination of their priests; the inclusion or exclusion of Chalcedonian names in the liturgical diptychs; and the degree to which ecclesial canons of the imperial church needed to be followed in times of persecution. These questions all boiled down to a general concern about the proper attitude to have toward the imperial church.

Like the theological debate about the incorruptibility of Christ, this concern was also focused, in a sense, on the body of Christ. In this case, it was Christ’s social, or ecclesial, and liturgical, or eucharistic, bodies, rather than his physical one. But, as I will demonstrate below, these three bodies were intimately related to one another. It is this interconnection between these three bodies of Christ—the physical, the social, and the liturgical—that is the engine that drives this book. It is what enables us, as I will argue, to draw together the various threads of evidence and weave a textured tableau of the anti-Chalcedonian movement in the first third of the sixth century.

The imperial church’s promulgation of the Chalcedonian definition of faith had presented the adherents of anti-Chalcedonian christology with a weighty dilemma. Over the course of the preceding two centuries, bishops and emperors, especially in the East, had become enmeshed in an interdependent relationship. Imperial might guaranteed the episcopate administrative authority, and episcopal preaching buttressed the emperor’s legitimacy.¹⁰ Beginning with Eusebius of Caesarea’s writings in praise of Constantine, and further developed by bishops and emperors alike over the course of the fourth and fifth centuries, was the ecclesiastico-political philosophy that viewed the Christian empire united under the Christian emperor as the one body of Christ.¹¹ This outlook actually reached its zenith in the wake of the Council of Chalcedon. The henoticist policy of Zeno (ruled 474–475, 476–491) and Anastasius—an attempt at compromise between the Chalcedonian and anti-Chalcedonian positions—and Justinian’s later elusive efforts to achieve ecclesiastical unity, were couched in language that presented the general welfare of the state and imperial sovereignty as dependent on the emperor’s enforcement of a correct definition of faith, equally shared by all churches in the empire.¹² It was precisely this long-standing ecclesiastico-political attitude that increasing numbers of anti-Chalcedonians were calling into question.

Although imperial policy over the course of the preceding seventy years had shifted back and forth between pro-Chalcedonian, anti-Chalcedonian, and the middle-ground, henoticist positions, the severity and comprehensiveness of the pro-Chalcedonian shift in 518 was unprecedented. For the first time dozens of sitting bishops had to forsake their sees.¹³ The question that the anti-Chalcedonian victims of this sea change in imperial policy now had to ask themselves was how to relate to an emperor who not only endorsed a heretical theology, but also broke with the traditional patronage relations that had inhered for centuries between the emperor and the episcopate. Could the long-standing idea of the church as the symbolic body of Christ still be understood as referring to the empire as a whole and to its head, the emperor? Could an emperor who insisted on episcopal submission to a heretical christology still be considered head of the ecclesial body of Christ? Were Chalcedonians and anti-Chalcedonians indeed still part of the same ecclesial body? Perhaps the followers of Chalcedon, including the emperor himself—in his uncompromising persecution of the faithful—were no longer part of the communal body. Perhaps this meant that the anti-Chalcedonian believers needed to separate from the imperially controlled church. The body of Christ needed rethinking.

In order to reconstruct the anti-Chalcedonian conversation on this question we must rely, unfortunately, almost entirely on the sources preserved by just one side of the conversation. Earlier I mentioned the huge disparity between the massive volume of Severus’s oeuvre that has survived and the scanty remains from the pens of his opponents. What does survive from Severus’s opponents is mostly preserved only as embedded in the polemical attacks Severus and his followers make upon it.

Given this state of the evidence, historians of the period have been faced with two formidable, and, in a sense, opposite, challenges. On the one hand, one needs to rely on Severus’s writings and other hostile sources in order to reconstruct the theological, political, and liturgical positions of Severus’s opponents. The challenge in this case is to overcome the distorting effects of the foe’s perspective.¹⁴ On the other hand, there is also another, perhaps less obvious, but therefore more deceptive, challenge facing historians. This challenge consists in accurately reconstructing Severus’s own positions. In this case, it is the potentially distortive perspective of the friends of Severus, rather than his foes, that must also be borne in mind. The historian needs to make sure not to read the events of later history and the positions of the people who designate themselves as Severus’s successors back onto Severus himself. Thus, as we will see in more detail in chapter 2, certain mid-sixth-century anti-Chalcedonian authors portray Severus as having given his blessing to a large-scale campaign of ordaining anti-Chalcedonian clergy outside of the accepted imperial structures. These later authors might have had reasons of their own for portraying Severus as a supporter of a campaign that signaled the emergence of an independent anti-Chalcedonian church. Writing after Severus’s death at a time when the independent church was already a reality they would have been eager to claim the great anti-Chalcedonian theologian as a founding father of the new church. The question is whether Severus’s own writings confirm this image.

To summarize, there are two main methodological challenges involved in the study of what I call the dissension among the dissenters, or the series of theological, political and liturgical controversies that rocked the anti-Chalcedonian movement during Severus’s lifetime. On the one hand, any reconstruction of the positions of Severus’s opponents must take into account the potential distortions caused by Severus’s hostile reports about them. On the other hand, the reconstruction of Severus’s own positions must allow for the potential distortions caused by the friendly accounts of Severus’s followers, who, living in different historical circumstances, would not have necessarily shared their master’s agenda.¹⁵

Whereas an abundance of evidence survives for Severus’s side of the controversy, little independent evidence survives for the other side. Thus, we might expect that the challenge of reconstructing the position of Severus’s opponents, such as Julian, would be harder to overcome than the challenge of reconstructing Severus’s own positions. Nevertheless, the history of research on these questions actually shows the opposite. The position of at least some of Severus’s opponents, especially Julian of Halicarnassus’s theology, has received a more balanced and methodologically sensitive treatment than some of Severus’s own positions, particularly in the realm of politics.

In this respect, René Draguet’s 1924 monograph on Julian’s theology was groundbreaking. It was groundbreaking precisely because Draguet was very careful to avoid to the degree possible the distortive effects of Severian polemics.¹⁶ He judiciously based his account of Julian’s theology solely on the fragments of the latter’s writings that survive embedded in the works of his opponents. Draguet’s monograph remains unsurpassed as the most comprehensive and balanced study of the christological aspect of the incorruptibility debate between Julian and Severus. My discussion in the following chapter of the theological debate between the two men will, therefore, draw on Draguet’s basic framework. I will highlight some aspects of the debate that, although neglected by Draguet, build on and supplement his findings.

When it comes, however, to the political and liturgical sides of the debate, much of previous scholarship has, in my judgment, often displayed less methodological sensitivity in recognizing the distorting effects of partisan accounts. The few studies that have been published over the past sixty years on the creation of the independent anti-Chalcedonian church have mostly taken the reports of post-Severian anti-Chalcedonian historians at face value, despite contrary evidence from Severus’s own writings. As I will demonstrate in chapter 2, previous scholars have alternately ignored or reinterpreted evidence from Severus’s texts that is contrary to the picture painted by these post-Severian historians.

Severus’s own writings from his patriarchate onward, I will argue, consistently reflect an ecumenical, pro-imperial position. Both during his patriarchate, when Severus enjoyed the benefits of imperial patronage, and during his exile, when he was being actively pursued by the government, Severus saw the church as a unique, Roman, imperial institution. For Severus, the appropriate response to the Chalcedonian persecutory and heretical organization that the imperial church under Justin and Justinian had become was not to secede, but to work for change from within the system. This is reflected in the positions Severus held on various practical controversies regarding the proper attitude toward Chalcedonians as well as in his actual addresses to members of the imperial government, such as Justinian himself.

This idea, however, of sponsoring change from within the imperial system was not always Severus’s position. I will show that Severus actually started out, prior to his elevation to the patriarchate, more on the side of the hard-line, separatist wing of his party. As a follower of Peter the Iberian, he initially objected to the mediating, ecumenicist, henoticist policy of Emperor Anastasius. But once appointed patriarch of Antioch by that same emperor, Severus changed his tune. From then on, his writings support the ecumenicist approach, even in the face of ongoing opposition from anti-Chalcedonian separatists.

During Severus’s almost six years in the patriarchate and even during the first years of the persecution the ecumenicist approach seems to have been predominant within anti-Chalcedonian circles. But as persecution wore on, the balance gradually shifted back toward the separatists. John of Ephesus and other anti-Chalcedonian authors writing in the generation after Severus’s death portray Severus, under the pressures of persecution, as also having gradually (re)embraced the separatist position. Most modern historians follow this narrative; some even go so far as to argue that Severus was a separatist all along. I believe the evidence of Severus’s own writings supports neither of these claims. From the time that he embraced Anastasius’s henoticist policy, Severus consistently advocated remaining within the imperial church and abiding by its canons, even as persecution mounted from without and opposition grew from within.

CHRISTOLOGY, ECCLESIOLOGY, AND LITURGY: A STEREOSCOPIC APPROACH

It is precisely this essential ecclesiological difference between Severus and opponents within his own party that is the key to understanding the series of other theological, political, and liturgical controversies that ultimately led to the creation of an independent anti-Chalcedonian church. It is the linchpin that holds together all other aspects of the so-called dissension among the dissenters that is the subject of this book.¹⁷

This claim requires justification. Assuming it can be established that, contrary to the opinion of earlier scholars, Severus opposed the separatist elements within his party, why would this difference of opinion on what was essentially an ecclesiological question have ramifications in other areas of dispute within the movement? The reason for this, I submit, is that for contemporaries these questions were all in fact intertwined. They were intertwined both on the theoretical level, in terms of how people thought through these questions, and on the practical level, in terms of the social affiliations that they involved.

Thus, our understanding of the ecclesiological question can help inform our understanding of the other realms of debate, and vice versa. We must, therefore, adopt what I will call a stereoscopic approach to our examination of this material. As with binocular vision, in which the convergence of two perspectives provides a perception of depth unattainable by one perspective alone, a simultaneous examination of Severus and his opponents through the multiple lenses of theology, ecclesiology, and liturgy grants us a deeper, more focused view of the groups involved in one of the defining events of this period: the creation of an independent anti-Chalcedonian church.

My development of this stereoscopic approach was shaped primarily by my reading of the late ancient sources—both Severus’s writings (and the rich patristic heritage he drew on, including, primarily, Cyril of Alexandria) and that of his contemporaries. Yet, my thinking was also informed by the work of several modern scholars who focus on ancient and medieval Christian uses of the body.

The rationale for my stereoscopic approach is supported by three passages in Severus’s writings that point to the fact that within both camps of the anti-Chalcedonian movement the different debates about theology, ecclesiology, and liturgy were thought of as interrelated. One’s position on the incorruptibility of the body of Christ was integrally tied to one’s position on ordination outside the imperially based canonical system; to one’s soteriological understanding of the Eucharist; and to one’s position on the rebaptism of Chalcedonian converts. In what follows I will analyze these three passages so as to bring out the links they establish between theology, ecclesiology, and liturgy, and I will dedicate the final section of this introduction to an inquiry as to why these three areas were indeed interrelated.

The first passage demonstrates the interrelationship between ecclesiology and christology: it links the debate about the incorruptibility of the body of Christ with a debate about ordinations that did not comply with the imperially sanctioned canonical regulations.

Writing to the ascetic deaconess Anastasia in the mid-520s from his hiding place in Egypt,¹⁸ Severus anxiously reports on the doings of a certain priest named Isaiah:¹⁹

I have heard that Isaiah the unlawful, like Dathan and Abiram, has risen against the laws of the priesthood, and has trampled upon everything like a hog, with foul, disorderly, uncanonical feet: and that, having gone to Pamphylia, he has thought fit to whisper lies about me, and to say that in what I wrote about the incorruptibility (lā metḥablânūtā) of the body of God and our Savior Jesus Christ I preached the faith, saying that the body was corrupted and dissolved (etḥabal weštrī) during the three days’ burial, and certain similar blasphemies which are not plausible, which wound the ears and disturb the souls of those who listen without intelligence: and it is therefore in my mind to send a man there carrying all that has been written by me, in order to establish the truth. If then you also have heard of any similar report that has been whispered there, since some persons have perhaps written and told you, tell me.

Isaiah, a native of Armenia, spearheaded an initiative to create what appears to be a new anti-Chalcedonian church. He had begun his operations already during Severus’s patriarchate.²⁰ But once governmental persecution of the anti-Chalcedonian leadership broke out he intensified his attempts to set up a new clerical hierarchy, independent of the fiercely Chalcedonian imperial church. Together with a fellow priest named Gregory of Pontus, Isaiah set out to ordain clergy at all levels: deacons, priests, bishops, and even archbishops.²¹

Severus was enraged. Although he shared Isaiah’s anti-Chalcedonian sentiment, and despite the urgent need to rehabilitate the shattered anti-Chalcedonian clerical establishment, Severus would hear nothing of Isaiah’s initiative. According to Severus, such ordinations were in severe violation of canon law. Severus alleged that Isaiah, upon his own admission, had been ordained by only one bishop rather than the canonical three, and he had never been assigned to the bishopric of a specific city, as the canons required.²² Due to these canonical irregularities Isaiah’s ordinations of other clergy were completely worthless. Like Dathan and Abiram, who challenged the authority accorded to Moses and Aaron in the desert,²³ Isaiah and Gregory trampled with foul, disorderly and uncanonical feet upon the authority of the imperially sanctioned church canons.

Considering the historical context of Isaiah and Gregory’s initiative, Severus’s objections are quite extraordinary. This is the 520s; anti-Chalcedonian leadership has been devastated; scores of bishops have been on the run for years, hiding from the imperial forces; their seats have been taken over by Chalcedonian appointees; swathes of the predominantly anti-Chalcedonian provinces of Syria and Asia Minor are subject to unrelenting pressure. As Severus himself knew full well from the constant flow of letters pouring to him from the provinces formerly under his jurisdiction, anti-Chalcedonian priests were increasingly difficult to come by, and some pious parishioners had begun to refrain from receiving the sacraments altogether.

Given this historical context, Isaiah and Gregory’s ordination project actually made sense. Stranded in Egypt, Severus and the majority of his fellow former bishops could physically no longer conduct ordinations in Syria and Asia Minor. Two nonexiled church leaders come along and take this dangerous task upon their shoulders. Rather than gratefully embracing the initiative as a beacon of hope for the survival of orthodoxy, Severus declares Isaiah a rebel. He avers that Isaiah cannot ordain priests since he had not been assigned to a specific city; but in the current climate why would this have made a difference? As it was, very few anti-Chalcedonian bishops outside of Egypt remained resident in their cities. Were these canonical regulations not legislated by, and intended for, bishops operating within the territorially based imperial church, with its diocesan divisions based on Roman governmental structures? Was the maintenance of these structures still in the best interests of a community oppressed by these very structures? In casting Isaiah and Gregory in the roles of Dathan and Abiram, Severus was ipso facto casting the emperor Justin and his imperial forces in the role of Moses. Unpacking the logic of this surprising claim will be the concern of chapter 2.

As for Isaiah’s position, we can only access it, like much of the material covered in this book, through the lines of Severus’s response. It is striking that Isaiah (according to the picture painted by Severus) focuses his reaction not on defending his own ordination campaign but on calumniating Severus’s stance on the incorruptibility of the body of God. Seizing on a seemingly recondite theological issue, he accuses Severus of saying that the body of Christ had corrupted and dissolved in the grave during the short period between crucifixion and resurrection.

Severus did not consider this a recondite issue at all. He was alarmed by the accusation, quick to deny it, and anxious to prevent its spread. He never claimed, so he says, that Christ’s body was corruptible after death. Only during his lifetime was the body of Christ corruptible.

At the same time that Severus was fending off Isaiah’s claims about his stance on Christ’s pre-resurrection body he was engaged in a full-scale controversy on this very question with his former ally, Julian of Halicarnassus. In fact, Julian made the same accusation against Severus about the body of Christ in the grave that Isaiah did.²⁴

The fact that Isaiah invokes Julian’s christological argument as a response to Severus’s ecclesiological claim leads to two conclusions. First, Isaiah of Armenia associated himself with Julian. This could indicate that the dispute between Julian and Severus was not just about christology; it was also about ecclesiology. In other words, we may (though by no means must) deduce from Isaiah’s invocation of Julian’s ideas that the two men were political allies. Julian