of Controlling Contested Places: Late Antique Antioch and the Spatial Politics of Religious Controversy and Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem’s Hymns in Fourth-Century Syria.
Shepardson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, A Memory of Violence: Syriac Christianity and the Radicalization of Religious Difference in Late Antiquity, and shared the following:
Scholars of early Christianity know well that opposing interpretations of key texts can make the difference between orthodoxy or heresy, between a promise of eternal peace or the threat of eternal torment. With that in mind, I approached the Page 99 Test with some trepidation, wondering what I would find, but also what it might mean to see “the quality of the whole... revealed” on that page. I believe that readers will indeed find the quality of the book reflected on page 99 in its depth, rigor, methodology, and topic, even if its words reveal only one part of the book’s complex story.Learn more about A Memory of Violence at the University of California Press website.
Page 99 catches readers in a morass of insults that miaphysite Roman Christians (named for their ‘one-nature’ – mia-physis – doctrine about God’s Son) lobbed at their Chalcedonian Roman Christian opponents (who accepted the 451 Council of Chalcedon, which miaphysite Christians rejected). Page 99 cites late fifth- and early sixth-century Greek and Syriac writings of Bishop Philoxenus of Mabbug and Patriarch Severus of Antioch, two pillars of today’s Syrian Orthodox Church, immersing readers in these church leaders’ politicized struggles to claim the title of Christian orthodoxy.
Previous chapters laid the historical foundation for the project, and traced miaphysite claims to inherit orthodoxy from the church’s earlier apostles, martyrs, saints, and councils, before tracing their opponents’ genealogies of heresy through page 99. Later chapters demonstrate leaders’ strategies to persuade congregants to persevere in miaphysite Christianity for the promise of eternal rewards, even if it meant suffering and persecution in this world under Chalcedonian Christian emperors. The final chapters follow Syriac miaphysite Christians through the late sixth-century consolidation of Chalcedonian Christian power under Emperor Justinian, to the seventh-century rise of Islam, when the conquests of Muhammad’s followers separated most Syriac-speaking Christians from the Christian Roman emperors who considered them heretics.
While religious radicalization can lead to violence and schism, opponents often share more in common than their heated arguments suggest. As page 99 shows, for example, “All sides of these debates claimed to inherit orthodoxy’s lineage.” It is my hope that studying the intersections of radicalization and violence in the past might help us de-escalate our increasingly violent and polarized present.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
