Breaking the Mind

5. A Last Disciple of the Apostles: The “Editor’s” Preface, Rabbula’s Rules, and the Date of the Book of Steps

72 Kyle Smith 5. A L AST DISCIPLE OF THE APOSTLES The “Editor’s” Preface, Rabbula’s Rules, and the Date of the Book of Steps This chapter suggests that the Book of Steps is less anomalous than scholars have previously imagined. The prevailing theory is that the text is a fourthcentury witness to a marginal, proto-monastic (possibly Messalian), Syriac Christian community. Alternative interpretations about the origins of the text have hardly been considered. In an attempt to spur other revisionist studies of the text, this chapter challenges traditional notions about the authorship of the Book of Steps. The theory preliminarily advanced here is that the Book of Steps was written in reaction to the fifth-century institutionalization of Syriac asceticism under Bishop Rabbula of Edessa. In order to create plausible conditions for the serious consideration of this theory, the traditional interpretation of the text is deconstructed. Then, in order to provide a revised contextual framework for a renewed interpretation of the text, the Book of Steps is juxtaposed with Rabbula’s Rules. As textual evidence for a date of authorship well into the fifth century, this chapter considers the “editor’s” preface—a brief, hagiographical introduction to the author of the Book of Steps that was supposedly added by a later scribe. Considering the possibility that the editor’s preface was not a later addition, but was rather an integral part of the original fifth-century composition , it is further argued that the Book of Steps could be a pseudepigraphon of A L a s t D i s c i p l e 73 sorts. To be sure, the Book of Steps is an anonymous work, even though parts of it have been attributed to various monastic authors. In the new interpretation advanced in this chapter, the reasons for the text’s anonymity are called into question. Instead of trusting the editor that the text was written anonymously on account of the humility of its author, this chapter suggests that the preface was in fact written by the author of the thirty memre himself and was a rhetorical move designed to obscure the true origins of the Book of Steps. Under this interpretation the Book of Steps can thereby be read as a pious fraud—a supposedly first-century biblical commentary justifying the way of life of the Perfect and the Upright that was penned by none other than “a last disciple of the apostles.”1 Confronting Messalian Proto-Monasticism As students of the Book of Steps know well, the earliest studies of the text were largely concerned with debating its orthodoxy given an assumed connection to the Messalian controversy. As Robert Kitchen remarks in the introduction to his English translation of the text, “To mention the Liber Graduum to an earlier generation of scholars is to conjure up its alleged role in one of the on-going controversies of the late-fourth to early-fifth centuries—the Messalian controversy.”2 The presumption of this heretical association was based primarily on Michael Kmoskó’s theory in his 1926 edition of the Syriac text. Kmoskó compiled, in a lengthy preface, a list of anti-Messalian references from numerous late ancient commentators.3 On the basis of this reading of the text and Kmoskó’s suggestion of a mid-fourth-century date of authorship concurrent with the rise of the Messalian controversy, the heretical proclivities of the community described in the Book of Steps were thoroughly indicted. Irenée Hausherr, while accepting with little reservation Kmoskó’s characterization of the Book of Steps as a Messalian text, argued that it did not represent 1. The “editor” writes in his preface, “Since this blessed one desired to remain anonymous, and no other author tells us anything about him, and since we do not know precisely when he lived, we can only accept the tradition that he was one of the last disciples of the Apostles” (BoS Preface, LG 1:3–8). 2. Robert A. Kitchen and Martien F. G. Parmentier, The Book of Steps: The Syriac Liber Graduum (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 2004), xviii–xxiv. 3. Michael Kmoskó, ed., Liber Graduum, Patrologia Syriaca 1.3 (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1926), cxv– cxlix. 74 K y l e S m i t h an early witness to Messalian thinking, but instead revealed well-developed communal and ascetic structures that must have matured from an early Messalian substrate. As such, Hausherr...