www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life Books +Abp Joseph Tawil: The Patriarchate of Antioch throughout History

Has anyone else read this book? I found the style a little challenging, as it was mostly a collection of notes, but the content was very engaging.

I am curious to hear others' repsonses to his treatment of the break in communion between Patriarch Cerularius and Rome, which glosses over what many others focus on - the validity of the excommunication, etc. He spends more time on Photios and tries to portray the whole series of breaks in communion between hierarchs as ongoing and frequently repaired. I'll try to add some quotes when I get home tonight.

He roundly condemns the alliance of the Western Church with the Franks, saying it undermined the Pope of Rome's historic role as mediator between East and West.

His treatment of the non-Chalcedonians is also interesting. I was intrigued to read about Jacob Baradaeus, who is portrayed as a sort of vagrante par excellence, wandering through most of Eastern Christendom in rags and ordaining thousands upon thousands of priests and many hierarchs.

The book is very impressionistic and I would recommend only using it with considerable caution. It does not at all engage with most of the serious literature written about Melkite history that would have been available by the time of its publication, particularly (but by no means limited to) the work of Frs Joseph Narallah and Sidney Griffith.

Samn,

Do you have any recommendations for reading Fr. Joseph, whose works appear to be originally in French - my grasp of which is rather poor - or Fr. Griffith. I see a Vitae [semitics.cua.edu] for Fr. Griffith at Catholic University.

Nasrallah wrote in French (most works on Melkite history are in French or Arabic), but if you're comfortable in it, his multi-volume Histoire du mouvement littéraire dans l'Eglise melchite functions as the closest thing to a comprehensive history of the Melkite patriarchates that exists, apart from Asad Rustum's three-volume Arabic work.

Griffith tends to write scholarly articles rather than books, but his The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque is a very useful introduction to medieval Arab Christianity.

More recently, there's The Orthodox Church in the Arab World, 700-1700: An Anthology of Sources, edited by Samuel Noble and Alexander Treiger, which, in addition to translations of primary sources, provides a pretty detailed outline of the history of the Melkites from the time of the Arab conquest up to the schism of 1724.

In a few weeks, an English translation of Constantin Panchenko's Arab Orthodox Christians Under the Ottomans, 1516-1831 should be coming out. In addition to an extremely detailed analysis of the Ottoman period, the first hundred pages or so surveys the pre-Ottoman period.

(Full disclosure: I had a small hand in preparing the latter two books, so I may be biased.)

As I think of it, another very accessible (especially in terms of price), though now slightly outdated history of the Melkites is the translation of Ignatius Dick's Melkites: Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholics of the Patriarchates of Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem published by Sophia Press. I would recommend this as a much better alternative to Abp Tawil's book.

Thank you! May I ask your opinion on another offering by Sophia Press - the one by Fr. Serge Descy, The Melkite Church: An Historical and Ecclesiological Approach [melkite.org]?

As a history of how Melkite Catholic ecclesiology evolved and responded to an evolving Roman ecclesiology from 1724 until the mid-1980s, it's a very worthwhile read. Its account of history prior to the schism should be corrected with reference to the Panchenko volume I mention above and, obviously, some significant events have happened since the time when it was written....

Thanks for these recommendations. I have worked my way through the Descy and Dick books. One of my friends picked up the Panchenko volume from the recommendation on your blog, so I may be able to get my hands on it soon. I've also found myself browsing the NASCAS mailing lists and scouring the archives of Parole de l'Orient, Le Lien, and other magazines. I think I need to work on my French.

As a Melkite Catholic, I am most interested in the various schools of thought regarding union between the Patriarch of Antioch and the Latins, but the writings on that turn up lots of delightful tangents. Nikon of the Black Mountain has held my attention for a little while now.

It always makes me happy to hear someone get interested in this stuff!

French is definitely a huge asset if you're wanting to do serious reading on Melkite history. In the past couple decades or so, scholarship on the medieval period has mostly gone over to English, though with important studies still being published in Russian, French and German, probably in that order of importance... but, for the period of the schism (or union, depending on one's perspective), a lot of the serious work is still being done in French, particularly by Aurélien Girard (who puts most of his publications up on Academia.edu) and Bernard Heyberger. Heyberger's Les Chrétiens du Proche-Orient au temps de la Réforme catholique makes a valuable companion to Panchenko's book, since they're working on the same period from very different sources-- Heyberger covers European missionary and Catholic sources very well while almost entirely ignoring Orthodox sources (or sources in Orthodox manuscript libraries), while Panchenko makes unprecedentedly comprehensive use of Russian and Arabic (both Catholic and Orthodox) manuscript and archival sources, but is somewhat weak on European Catholic sources. And then, neither use Ottoman archival sources-- for that, see Hasan Çolak's dissertation (the published version has to be ordered from Turkey, though it's amazingly cheap to do so right now) downloadable here. [etheses.bham.ac.uk].

And you've probably run across it, but for the benefit of anyone reading through, a very valuable starting-point for just seeing what exists in terms of scholarship on Melkite history is the bibliography prepared by Alexander Treiger, available here. [academia.edu]