Ishodad of Merv

Ishodad was bishop of Hadatha, on the Tigris in what is now Iraq, in the middle of the ninth century. He was a member of the Church of the East, the great Syriac-speaking communion that had spread from Mesopotamia across Persia, Central Asia, and as far as China, living entirely outside the Roman world and, in his lifetime, under Abbasid rule from Baghdad.

In 852 he was a candidate for the patriarchate of the Church of the East and lost. The winner, Theodosius, was elected in part, according to the chronicles, because he could pay, and Ishodad's supporters withdrew. It is one of the few personal facts recorded about him. He appears to have died not long after 850, and the details of his death are not preserved.

What he left is a commentary on the entire Bible, Old Testament and New, written in Syriac.

Its value is of a particular kind. Ishodad was not primarily an original thinker. He was a collector, and he collected from a library that has since burned. He quotes Theodore of Mopsuestia constantly, Theodore was the great authority of his church, and much of Theodore's work was destroyed in the Greek world after he was condemned in 553, so Ishodad's citations are among our chief means of recovering him. He quotes Ephrem the Syrian, Narsai, Chrysostom, and a range of Syriac writers whose books no longer exist.

He also records readings of the biblical text itself that differ from every surviving manuscript, variants that go back to older Syriac versions and, in some places, to the Diatessaron, Tatian's second-century harmony of the four Gospels, which was suppressed and lost. Textual critics working on the earliest form of the Gospel text still comb Ishodad for these.

His method is the plain, historical, grammatical reading that the school of Antioch had taught: what does the text say, in its own setting, in its own words. He asks about Hebrew idioms, about geography, about who is speaking. He handles Genesis with an interest in the natural world.

Margaret Dunlop Gibson published and translated the commentaries at Cambridge between 1911 and 1916, five volumes of a text almost nobody in the West had read.

Ishodad is on this wall as a reminder that the Bible was being studied, seriously and critically, in Syriac, under a caliph, at a moment when western Europe was barely holding its schools together.

Sources: The Commentaries of Isho'dad of Merv, ed. and trans. Margaret Dunlop Gibson (Horae Semiticae, 1911–1916); William Wright, A Short History of Syriac Literature; Bar Hebraeus, Chronicon Ecclesiasticum; Sebastian Brock, A Brief Outline of Syriac Literature.