Letters (review)

The past decade has seen a remarkable growth of scholarly interest in the Gaza area during early and late ancient Christian times. A good number of monographs (e.g., Chryssavgis, 2000; Steppa, 2002; Hevelone-Harper, 2005; Horn, 2006; Bitton-Ashkelony and Kofsky, 2006), edited volumes (e.g., Bitton-Ashkelony and Kofsky, 2004) as well as editions and/or translations of primary sources (e.g., Neyt, de Angelis-Noah, and Regnault, 1997–2002 [SC 268 is not considered in the bibliography]; Chryssavgis, 2003) have appeared in relatively brief succession of one another. Discoveries of new manuscript witnesses to significant authors like Procopius of the rhetorical school of Gaza (Schamp and Amato, forthcoming) raise one’s hopes that further study can be expected for the not too distant future. Such an abundance of new tools and resources contributes towards sustaining the study of ancient Christianity in Palestine as an exciting field of inquiry. John Chryssavgis’s two-volume publication of the first complete English translation of the sixth-century correspondence of two of the leading Gaza ascetics, Barsanuphius and John, offers an appropriate and timely contribution to this larger enterprise.

A short but handy bibliography stands at the head of each of the two volumes. Volume 1 offers a brief introduction to the corpus, which suffices for orienting the non-specialist reader with regard to questions of monasticism in Palestine at the time, the persons of the two authors of the letters, i.e., Barsanuphius and John, questions of authorship, arrangement (Chryssavgis sees in Dorotheus the editor of the corpus), and basic content of the letters, influences upon the letter writers, aspects of the Nachleben and influence of their compositions on others, and, finally, an overview of manuscripts, editions, and translation. Without doubt the information provided is useful. Yet given the considerable size of this collection of letters, a more fully developed discussion especially of the Gaza area as a prime location of Palestinian asceticism in the sixth century and its relationship to asceticism in the Judaean Desert would have been desirable. The lack of engagement with the work of Bitton-Ashkelony and Kofsky on asceticism in Palestine, on the Gaza region specifically, and on John and Barsanuphius comes as a surprise.

The correspondence contains a welcome variation of nearly 850 letters to laypeople, ascetics, and ecclesiastical leaders. While evidence for the presence of women ascetics in the Gaza area is available for the preceding century, Barsanuphius’s and John’s letters cover over in silence almost any mention of women, both among the laity and the monks. Nevertheless, both for the researcher and otherwise interested reader, the letters’ content is a treasure trove for inquires into a wide range of topics. Certainly, the letters allow one to study organized monasticism, ascetic leadership, human and divine authority, and spirituality. Yet they also offer rich details in the more mundane fields of inquiry into private and social life in late ancient Gaza, including dream interpretation, health and sickness, marriage, death, family life and household duties, ancient economic conditions, insights into slavery, penitential practices, charity and poverty, and relationships between Christians and non-Christians (both Jews and adherents of Greco-Roman religion), merely to single out a few areas that are well represented.

Each volume is followed by three indices of names and places, of subjects and key words, and of Holy Scripture that relate to the text covered in the respective volume. In large part the Greek text on which the translation is based follows the recent Sources chrétiennes edition. Yet Chryssavgis also consulted manuscripts directly, including Bodleian Cromwell 18 (B) kept in Oxford and the Athonite MS Vatopedi 2, and he availed himself of the first complete edition of the correspondence produced by Nikodemus of Mt. Athos on the basis of several manuscripts from the Holy Mountain. Thus via the translation presented here the reader gains access to a text that differs slightly from the now standard Greek edition by...