Collection

Demonstrations

Aphrahat

Twenty-three treatises composed in Syriac between 337 and 345, in the Persian Mesopotamia of Shapur II, by a monk-bishop later remembered as the Persian Sage. Prompted initially by a friend's letter asking what faith is, the cycle grew to cover the whole shape of Christian life — faith and works, fasting and prayer, the ascetic "sons of the covenant," pastors and their flocks, resurrection, persecution, the Jewish-Christian dispute over monotheism, and the reign of death undone in Christ. Written beyond the reach of Nicaea and untouched by Greek philosophical vocabulary, the argument advances by accumulation of scripture rather than by syllogism, in a Semitic idiom closer to rabbinic disputation and liturgical exhortation than to systematic theology, and stands at the headwaters of the tradition later carried forward by Ephrem.