The Chronicle of Seert: Christian Historical Imagination in Late Antique Iraq by Philip Wood (review)

Discovered in the early twentieth century, the Arabic Chronicle of Seert is an extensive narrative history of Christianity in Iraq. Composed in the tenth century as a universal history, the Chronicle has not survived intact. What remains is a record of a four-hundred-year period from 250 to 650 c.e., with a large gap in the coverage of the mid-fifth century. Despite what has been lost, the surviving material fills four fascicles of the Patrologia Orientalis. Perhaps because of its length, its chronological breadth, and the daunting array of late antique sources upon which it relies, no one has attempted a holistic study of the Chronicle. This is where Philip Wood’s ambitious new book comes in.

For Wood, the Chronicle is primarily useful as a window through which we can see how the Church of the East imagined, and re-imagined, its late antique past. Because the Chronicle’s compiler “adopted a very conservative attitude to editing, preserving contradictory accounts of the same events alongside one another,” Wood argues that we can reverse engineer how the Chronicle was produced (6). The root of the Chronicle is a fifth-century “patriarchal history” onto which a number of later sources were grafted. These later sources include everything from martyrdom narratives and monastic biographies to Roman ecclesiastical histories, Syriac scholastic literature, and Sasanian royal lineages, all of which are subordinated “to a ‘universal’ history, structured around the catholicosate” (3–4).

The first two chapters of Wood’s study address the beginnings of the Chronicle’s episcopal history by considering how martyrdom narratives about fourth- and fifth-century Persian Christians were “reworked.” The Catholicoi, who wanted to establish cordial relations with the shah and exert their authority over the Church of the East, put forward “more neutral representations of the martyrs as ideal priests and passive victims,” not firebrands and rebels (65). By the sixth century, the catholicosate was remembering “a sanitized version of its own history … which obscured real divisions over episcopal authority and the relationship with the state” (51). The two very different martyrdom narratives of Simeon bar Ṣabbaʿe (the fourth-century bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon whom Wood considers in Chapter Two) do suggest that a clean-up job occurred, but Wood’s “sanitation” argument is less compelling as an account of fifth-century history. As Geoffrey Herman has recently shown, stories about Christian zealots who vandalized Persian fire temples in the early 420s c.e. may have arisen in the eastern Roman Empire. And, as Wood himself acknowledges (117, 235), it is possible that the acts of the Synod of Dādišoʿ in 424 c.e. were so significantly interpolated in later centuries that they actually tell us relatively little about fifth-century divisions over episcopal authority.

These issues do not detract from Wood’s major thesis, which focuses on how the Chronicle narrates the period from 483 to 650 c.e. According to Wood, the “centralizing narrative” of the Chronicle truly begins with the renewal of the catholicosate under Acacius. In the synod that he convened in 486 c.e., Acacius “reacted strongly against the challenges of Barsauma of Nisibis, who had attempted to assert the dependence of the catholicosate upon his bishops” (93). In Chapter Three, Wood sets out a number of “medieval redactions of the fifth- and sixth-century patriarchal chronicles” and then reconstructs the earlier compositions in order to assess “their significance for the cultural and political self-presentation of the catholicosate of Acacius through its reorganization of the past” (67).

Chapter Four pits the issue of clerical reform against the growing influence of powerful Christian scholastics from Nisibis. Chapters Five and Six explain how, in addition to the rise of the School of Nisibis and the spread of Roman ecclesiastical history in Syriac, the “rapid expansion of monasticism in Iraq from the 550s” and “the increasing prominence of a Christian elite, many of whom were from...