Traces de controverse religieuse dans la littérature syriaque des origines : peut-on parler d’une hérésiologie des « hérétiques » ? in Flavia Ruani (éd.), Les controverses religieuses en syriaque (Etudes syriaques 13), Paris, Geuthner, 2016, pp. 9-66 (original) (raw)

A research on the “notion of heresy in the Syriac culture” is a long-felt desideratum. This paper suggests to start by investigating the religious controversies attested in the early Syriac writings (including the Gospels’ versions) and also the later heresiological reports. The goal is to perceive whether a theory of heresy was conceived of by the intellectuals of the first centuries, before Constantine, and whether some of the arguments developed in the controversies of the second and third centuries were tacitly reused by “Catholic” authors of the fourth century, despite the fact that their origin was already considered heretic. The first part of this paper suggests that the Book of the Laws of the Countries, attributed to Bardaisan or his school, has been influenced by the Syntagma against all the Heresies composed in the second century by Justin Martyr, now lost. This hypothesis is based on the recent reconstruction of Justin’s work by Enrico Norelli using the writings of Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Justin himself. The paper argues that the Syntagma reached Edessa through Tatian, Justin’s disciple, thus marking the beginning of a dialogue between Rome and Mesopotamia which continued for several centuries. The paper claims next that the Diatessaron and the Vetus syra were composed as reactions to Marcion and his teachings. The third and the fourth centuries witness indeed an intense debate among movements that were later on labelled as heretic: the Marcionite Prepon polemicized against Bardaisan’s critiques, Mani refuted Bardaisan’s psychological doctrines, the pseudo-Clementine literature included a book against Marcion, and Ephrem’s Commentary to the Diatessaron attests of cosmological and exegetical differences between Marcion and Bardaisan. Among them, Manichaeism and the pseudo-Clementine literature seem to have elaborated a theory of heresy: the universalist perspective of the former required the development of dialectical tools of propaganda which led to the formulation of a heresiology sui generis; the latter, based on a Judeo-Christian core, built its own heresiological discourse which could precede or be contemporary to the more sophisticated heresiology of Ephrem the Syrian, who in turn shows to draw polemical arguments from Bardaisan’s works.