2010/01/01 by Jane Stevenson · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Historical and Linguistic Studies #Archaeology and Historical Studies #Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies #Anglo saxon #History #Ancient history #Art
paper · pdf · doi:10.31826/hug-2010-010116
openalex publication_date 2010/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
The Anglo-Saxon church was of complex origin: it owed much to Christian Ireland, and much to informal and semi-formal contact with Frankia. But above all (especially as presented by that great mythographer, Bede), it owed its beginnings to Rome, and in particular, to that most Roman of early Popes, Gregory the Great. The Christianisation of the Anglo-Saxons got under way in the late sixth century, and was consolidated in the seventh: the period in which the Eastern and Western halves of Christendom went their separate ways, and the West almost entirely stopped using Greek. The seventh century is also the century of Mohammed, in which most Syriac-speaking Christians found themselves forcibly separated from their Byzantine neighbours. So there is a whole series of good reasons why we would not expect to find Syriac influence on this young church in the distant West. But despite all this, there is one father of the Syrian church who was known in England, both by name, and for his actual work; it was, of course, St. Ephraim, the only early Syriac church father to have some of his works translated into Greek, and from Greek, into Latin. Quite a number of works attributed to Ephraim, sometimes wrongly, circulated in the West in the early middle ages. The interesting thing about Ephraim in Anglo-Saxon England, as we shall see, is that not only did pseudo-Ephraimic texts circulate there, there is a very real possibility that some genuine works of Ephraim came to this island.