The Legend of Mar Qardagh: Narrative and Christian Heroism in Late Antique Iraq (review)

The History of Mar Qardagh—that is the title of the Syriac text—is one of a very disparate body of accounts of Christian martyrs in Iraq and Iran during the Sassanid period, 224–642 c.e. These range from contemporary and matter-of-fact accounts of real martyrdoms to legends properly so called, that is, imaginative works tied to history only by the name of the martyr or a cult site. The reader who encounters these texts in Syriac in the usual place, the seven volumes of P. Bedjan's Acta martyrum et sanctorum (1890–97; Qardagh is in vol. 2, 442–506), gets no help in distinguishing one kind of text from the other. For the History of Mar Qardagh there are, to be sure, two other editions of the Syriac text (by J.-B. Abbeloos and by H. Feige, both 1890), but neither takes the historical and literary questions raised by it very far.

Now Joel Walker has furnished not a re-edition but just the necessary English translation and critical study of this martyrdom, and it is a model of its kind. The first thing that emerges (Walker's part 2, chapter 1) is that Qardagh's "history" belongs at one end of the hagiographical spectrum, i.e., that of the legend. Qardagh, according to the story, was a high government official, a marzba\n and pat≥ah≥ša\, who converted to Christianity and was martyred in 358/9 during the great persecution under Shapur II (309–79). But nothing in this story points to authenticity—hardly anything even to the existence of Qardagh as a historical person—and everything to the cult of the saint located at Melqi near Arbela, for which there is abundant evidence (part 2, ch. 5).

This conclusion is, however, only the logical beginning of Walker's study. Three remarkable central chapters (part 2, chaps. 2–4) demonstrate how much the text can be made to say about Christian attitudes and thought in "late antique" Iraq, that is, at the later time when he places its composition, c. 600–630, during the reign of the Sassanid emperor Khosro II. For example (chap. 2), in Qardagh Christians got a hero of the kind known to Iranian epics (sources little known to most scholars of the patristic era but admirably exploited by Walker), a prodigious marksman, polo-player, and hunter. After his conversion Qardagh puts away frivolous things, but his heroic virtue is not lost, and he becomes a Christian warrior leading his army against a Roman and Arab force who were raiding in Persian territory. The text thus suggests a certain measure of loyalty on the part of Christians to the Sassanid regime by this time, a result confirmed by the official statements of bishops in the Synodicon of the Church of the East and by other historical sources.

Walker devotes a similar analysis (ch. 3) to the philosophical argument against Zoroastrianism found in §§16–22 of the legend, which derives from John Philoponus and which displays what Walker calls an Aristotelian koine\. A second analysis (ch. 4) focuses on the unusually harsh attitude to his family which Qardagh displays and which seems actually not to be typical of Christian literature of the time.

The more convincing these arguments are, the more the reader is left with a question raised by Walker himself (89). Could this text, containing a vigorous polemic against the state religion and having a hero who is a convert to Christianity (such converts were still subject to the death penalty in the seventh century), have been read publicly at a time before the advent of Islam made its subversive elements irrelevant? One supposes it must have been for quite private reading among Christians who knew the communal language of Syriac.

Walker's discussion is well documented, sometimes to the point of...