Die Legende von der abgehauenen Hand des Johannes Damaskenos. Ursprung-Varianten-Verbreitung (review)

In this work Ilse Rochow has assembled practically all of the sources of the Legend of the Cut-off Hand of John of Damascus (died c. 750).The fruit of the arduous labor of this work is a handbook of the original sources, the two recensions of the legend and many Western European and Slavic vernaculars in which the story was transmitted, and—equally important—the iconographic depiction and its veneration in the Roman Catholic West and Orthodox East to the present. An introduction presents the earliest witnesses to the legend: the Arabic versions; the Greek versions; and those in Georgian, Ethiopic, and one unpublished Maronite synaxarion (a book containing the lives of saints for their days of commemoration). It is to be noted that although in the Melkite Syriac manuscripts hymns ascribed to John of Damascus are preserved in manuscripts as old as the ninth century, there is no Syriac version of his vita, nor was his memory incorporated into Coptic hagiography. Rochow does not provide an explanation for these important lacunae. The theology of Damascene's defense of icons is soundly rooted in a Chalcedonian framework; the Coptic Church was the bulwark against the Chalcedonian "heresy." This makes the presence of John's legend in the Ethiopic synaxaria all the more difficult to explain. Rochow states that it was translated from Arabic and first appears in the later sixteenth-century recension of the Ethiopian synaxarion; one suspects that this was made under the influence of Arabic texts of Chalcedonian provenance, perhaps introduced through Western European influence.

The first chapter presents the oldest recension ("A") of the legend, in which an Islamic "Khalifah" orders John's right hand to be severed, and the second chapter offers a reconstruction of its origin. Providing ample selections—some in Greek, others in modern translation, including entire passages from Greek synaxaria, as well as Latin versions—Rochow aims to introduce the material and to demonstrate the subcollections within this recension. The purpose of this legend was to make the Damascene a confessor, to heap shame on the iconoclastic emperor Leo III or his successor Constantine V, and to polemicize both against iconoclasm in the Byzantine Empire and against Islam. Rochow admits that the legend may refer to either Byzantine Emperor while noting that only Constantine V took action against the Damascene (pp. 79–80). Rochow's important contribution is that the date of the legend can be placed during the second period of iconoclasm (815–43; pp. 95–96).

Chapter 3 examines in great detail the second recension ("B"), in which a Byzantine emperor has John's right hand cut off. It is this recension that spread widely in the West and in the East, surviving in Latin, Slavonic, modern Greek, and a number of vernaculars. The three subcollections of this recension are grouped according to the identity of the emperor: Theodosius, anonymous, and Leo. The author has painstakingly traced a very wide scope of manuscripts in more than a dozen languages to present the transmission history of this recension. Chapter 4 offers a more detailed examination of the transmission history of the emperor Leo subcollection of this legend.

Of great interest is the art-historical work that in chapter 5 the author has done in showing how the written legend of the Leo subcollection was translated into iconography, modern literature, and drama, and the role that the "Three Handed Mother-of-God" icon plays in the Orthodox Churches, and the importance of the legend of John of Damascus in the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches. Chapter 6 presents the depiction of the legend in Western religious art. Following the summary, an appendix contains a collated edition of Greek manuscripts of the Didascaliaof John of Damascus.