Ishodad of Merv

Mar Ishodad of Merv (; fl. AD 850) was an Assyrian Christian prelate who served as Bishop of Hdatta during the Abbasid Caliphate. He was a prominent theologian of the Church of the East, best known for his Commentaries, which covered the Syriac Bible.

Life

Very little is known of Ishoʿdad's life, but a few details have survived in annotations to the list of patriarchs compiled by Mari ibn Suleiman and Amr ibn Matta. His epithet "of Merv" may denote a birthplace, meaning that he was born in the city of Merv in Khorasan, but this inference remains conjectural: his relationship to Merv is not known with certainty. A member of the Church of the East—historically, though inaccurately, known as the Nestorian church—he became bishop of Hdatta, a town close to the mouth of the Great Zab in modern Iraq, perhaps in 837 after Abraham II of Seleucia-Ctesiphon left the see to become Patriarch of the Church of the East. At the time the patriarchate was subject to the Abbasid Caliphate, and after two failed attempts to select a new patriarch, a secretary of the reigning caliph al-Mutawakkil, Ibrahim ibn Nuh al-Anbari, the Commentaries. The Commentaries were widely influential in the Syriac world, not only in the Church of the East but also the miaphysite West Syriac Orthodox Church. The West Syriac author Jacob Bar-Salibi, for example, made use of Ishodad's work in his own commentaries on the Psalms.

Contents

The subjects of Ishodad's commentaries are as follows:

Old Testament The Pentateuch The Book of Sessions: Joshua Samuel Kings Ecclesiastes Ruth Song of Songs Job Sirach Isaiah Twelve Prophets Jeremiah Ezekiel Daniel Psalms

New Testament The four Gospels Acts of the Apostles Three "Catholic Epistles": James 1 Peter 1 John Epistles of St Paul: Romans 1 and 2 Corinthians Galatians Ephesians Philippians Colossians 1 and 2 Thessalonians 1 and 2 Timothy Titus Philemon Hebrews

Characteristics

Ishodad's work largely followed the lines set by Theodore of Mopsuestia, Nonetheless, Ishodad differed from Theodore in certain significant respects. Against Theodore, he accepted the canonicity of the Book of Job and the Song of Songs. Moreover, he drew on a wide range of previous commentators beyond Theodore, including Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Nazianzen, Basil of Caesarea, and John Chrysostom, and among Syriac authors Aba I, Ephrem the Syrian, Narsai, and Henana of Adiabene. Paul S. Russell views Ishodad's work as displaying a "scholarly sensibility along the lines of modern biblical research" in its careful treatment of different editions of the scriptural texts.

Ishodad is the earliest authority to identify the disciple Nathanael, mentioned in John, with Bartholomew, one of the Twelve listed in the Synoptics.

Historical context

Ishodad wrote the Commentaries in a fraught context. Under al-Mutawakkil, the tolerance of the Abbasid Caliphate towards its Christian and Jewish subjects had begun to wane. Though the increasingly characteristic pessimism of the works of Ishodad's era is not evident in the Commentaries, their intended audience is limited to Christian scholars, reflecting a period in which the possibilities for interreligious dialogue were declining.

Modern editions

The first modern edition of Ishodad's works was prepared by Gustav Diettrich, who published selections of Ishodad's commentaries on the Old Testament in 1902. His New Testament commentaries were edited and translated into English in five volumes by Margaret Dunlop Gibson in 1911–16; Ceslas Van den Eynde prepared a complete edition and translation into French of the Old Testament commentaries in 1950–81.