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15 Oct “Famous Among the Monarchs:” Queen Tamar and the Rhetoric of Female Success. Part II

Posted at 13:36h in Into the Storyworlds

Sandro Nikolaishvili continues to follow the panther’s footsteps into the storyworld of the medieval Georgia’s most celebrated woman.

The Verse and Prose lauding Tamar

Throughout her long reign, the Georgian Queen Tamar proved to her Christian and Muslim subjects that they were mistaken to doubt her abilities to govern the kingdom and achieve successes. She not only managed to maintain her father’s legacy but also made the Georgian kingdom even more formidable political and military power through aggressive campaigns and series of expansions. One of the reasons as to why Tamar attained great authority to become one of the dominant figures in Georgian history lies in a well-devised and sophisticated court rhetoric propagated to various strata of Georgian society by Tamar and her supporters. Highly rhetorical literary texts in prose and verse dedicated to Tamar and composed by her contemporary and near-contemporary intellectuals dwarf the literary pieces dedicated to her predecessors and successors. The Georgian royal court used diverse media, including poetry, to overcome institutional obstacles to woman’s sovereignty and enforce the idea that woman and political authority were not inconceivable. The Knight in the Panther Skin, one of the most popular and revered pieces of Georgian secular literature, contributed to the popularization of Tamar’s personality. As already pointed out, Šota Rustaveli constructs an image of a strong female monarch in the face of Tinatin – the poem’s female heroine and Tamar’s literary prototype. However, an equally essential message concerning Tamar’s kingship was articulated in the prologue of Rustaveli’s poem. Rustaveli directly addresses Tamar, eulogizes her as a “king,” and emphasizes the divine ordination of the monarchy.

Behold the sun of our King Tamar – bright of face and dark of hair.
I do not know how I shall hymn her praises. Do I dare to dare?
Pleasing gifts should be offered in joy from all who have seen her there.
By shedding tears of blood we praise our king and I’ll say at the start:
I think myself far from the least of those who’ve played a praising part.
((Šota Rustaveli (Lyn Coffin trans.), The Knight in the Panther Skin, 11. ))

It seems that poetry and rulership became increasingly interconnected during Tamar’s reign. The poetry acquired immense significance in ritualized court culture. We are fortunate to have two unique praise poems, Abdulmesiani and In Praise of King Tamar, composed in honor of Tamar. These poems were probably performed orally during special ceremonials in the queen’s presence. The appearance of laudatory poems, previously unknown in the Georgia milieu, was a sign of unprecedented literary developments caused by the changing nature of Georgian kingship. In her quest for legitimacy and power, Tamar relied on men of literature to craft her public image and good reputation. She was the benefactor and patron of intellectuals, and her court was a comfortable place for prominent learned men. For instance, poet Ioane Šavteli, the author of Abdulmesiani, was a member of Tamar’s inner circle. Tamar’s biographer characterizes Šavteli as a “great poet and famous rhetor.” Šota Rustaveli, in the epilogue of his Knight in the Panther Skin, praises his contemporary poets and states that everyone liked Šavteli’s poetry.

While the use of laudatory poems to construct and negotiate a positive image of the ruler was something new in medieval Georgia, it had a long tradition in Byzantium. The rhetorical texts that praised the emperor were frequently composed and performed orally in presence of the emperor and a broad public at the imperial court. In the twelfth-century Byzantium, eminent learned men and poets, Theodor Prodromos and “Manganeios” Prodromos wrote panegyrics to boost the reputation of John II and Manuel I Komnenos. Poetry and verse writing were one of the sub-branches of rhetoric that enabled learned men to display the scope of their intellectual ability. The verse was favored in Byzantium because it had an aesthetically pleasing advantage; it could appeal to the mind as well as to the senses. A learned gentleman was expected to be equally proficient in composing verse and prose.

The concept that poetry was a potent method for conveying messages to the audience was upheld by educated individuals in Tamar’s circle. Šota Rustaveli contended that poetry was a form of philosophy and wisdom, with the primary aim of succinctly expressing lengthy and complex ideas in an engaging manner.

The poet’s art was from the start a branch of wisdom’s mighty tree.
The task of poetry is holy, as all godly men agree,
And verse is pleasant for a worthy man to listen to and see.
Long thoughts contained in shorter lines most beautifully expressed may be.
As horses can best test their mettle in a long and rugged race,
And players best boast their skillful moves and hits in a public place,
Long poems test a poet’s skill in giving sweet words their proper space.
((Šota Rustaveli (Lyn Coffin trans.), The Knight in the Panther Skin, 12-13. ))

Probably few female rulers are claimed by contemporaneous written accounts to be as powerful and exalted in status as Tamar. Particularly bold statements are made by In Praise of King Tamar and Abdulmesiani. These poems, composed in highly ornate and rhetorical language and rich with laudatory epithets and imageries, transgress the gender boundaries traditionally maintained in medieval narratives and present Tamar as a divinely appointed ideal and Christ-like ruler, almost god-like being, morally superior and perfect human. For instance, In Praise of King Tamar claims that Tamar, like Christ, assumed flesh and came from heaven to earth for the salvation of humankind. According to Tamar’s encomiasts, she brought her subjects peace, stability, and unprecedented prosperity. She is portrayed as a powerful and independent female ruler who had a central role in the governance of the state.

The audience/reader is further persuaded that though Tamar could not lead the armies in the battles, she was the main architect of the Georgian kingdom’s successful expansion. The military victories won against the Muslim powers during Tamar’s rule are claimed to have a similar scale and importance as emperor Herakleios’ (r.610–641) triumph over the Sassanian Persia in the seventh century. Although the Georgian army won major battles under the command of Tamar’s second husband, Davit Soslan, the court rhetoric tried to bring to the fore Tamar’s role in these victories. Interestingly, claims made by laudatory poems concerning Tamar’s role in the military successes align with statements made by the historiographical narratives. For instance, the Life of Tamar, King of Kings argues that the queen was the defender of the Christians and that “her army” was always ready to put the Muslims in check: “Let him learn of the tribute Tamar laid upon the lands which stretched from Georgia to Iraq and from Bagdad to Maragha … It is enough to say that the Caliph in person prays to the creator for mercy.” Elsewhere, the Life of Tamar argues: “The hopes of the Muslims were running out, and totally powerless, they appealed to the mercy of Tamar…”

Undoubtedly, Tamar was an ambitious ruler who defied societal norms to maintain her status as a senior ruler in the kingdom. The extant literary narratives persistently emphasize that Tamar carried out governmental duties, a role traditionally reserved for men. Moreover, the court propaganda underlined the hierarchy between Tamar and her husband, Davit Soslan, challenging the typical power dynamics of the time. Ioane Šavteli in Abdulmesiani asserted Tamar’s supremacy, a bold statement in a society where male rulers were the norm. The poet stated that Davit had derived his power and the “sun-like brightness” from Tamar, thus highlighting her influence and power. One may doubt the extent to which the rhetorical texts reflect reality regarding Tamar’s position in the kingdom. However, bi-lingual (Georgian-Arabic) coins, the official media of the royal court, confirm the claims made by Tamar’s poets.

Two features underline Tamar’s prominent position on the coins. First, her abbreviated name in Georgian was placed on the left side of the coin obverse – a place traditionally reserved for the senior ruler. Second, the legend in Arabic hails only Tamar as “Queen of the Queens, Glory of the World and Faith, Tamar, daughter of Giorgi, Champion of the Messiah.” By means of the laudatory phrase “champion of the Messiah,” Tamar addressed her Muslim subjects and Arab-speaking audience that she was the guardian and defender of the Christians. The Georgian kings started to fashion themselves as “the sword of the Messiah/champion of the Messiah” from the second quarter of the twelfth century when the Georgian kingdom was on the offensive against the Seljuk Turks.

A Wise and Erudite Ruler

The panegyric poems could not bypass without commenting Tamar’s wisdom and learnedness. The wisdom, an essential royal ideal, is the source of Tamar’s good rulership and a cornerstone of her authority. Ioane Šavteli celebrates Tamar as an exemplary philosopher, equally learned in ancient philosophy and patristic theology. The poet goes as far as to claim that Tamar displayed far superior knowledge of philosophy than Proclus and Iamblichus – Neoplatonist philosophers of Late Antiquity greatly admired in the eleventh- and twelfth-century Byzantium.

Apart from praising and elaborating on Tamar’s profound erudition in theology and philosophy, her poets present her as a good polemist and exemplary rhetorician. We are to believe that Tamar’s eloquent speech and persuasive abilities had such an overwhelming impact on listeners that even pagans would come under its sway and convert to Christianity. In the twelfth-century Byzantine imperial discourse, aside from the emperor’s learnedness, his rhetorical abilities were frequently commented on and praised. The rhetoric was believed to be a powerful medium which had an ability to manipulate the audience. We should not underestimate Tamar’s court literati’s claims concerning her elite learning and erudition. As an heir to the Georgian throne, she probably received the best education, and her father, Giorgi III, sought to it that the best teachers instructed her. Learnedness and good intellectual capabilities could empower Tamar to consolidate her reputation further. Interestingly, Tamar’s wisdom was celebrated not only by her court poets but also by the writers of the historiographical narratives. The Histories and Eulogies of the Monarchs draws parallels between the wisdom of Tamar and Old Testament Solomon: “With the serenity and moderation of David, and the wisdom of Solomon, and courage and care of Alexander, she held the kingdom firmly in her hands, which stretched from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea…”

By all accounts, Tamar is an exceedingly intelligent and wise ruler. Her authority is claimed to have had a broad appeal in Georgia, Christian East, and the Islamic world. Her charisma, a wide range of virtues, and captivating and almost supernatural beauty enforced the obedience of her subjects and forced the most prominent military men to bend their knees and become her loyal servants. There is no ambivalence towards Tamar’s political authority because of her gender. No text hinted that she transgressed the divine order by appropriating power. Nor is there any claim that Tamar had to assume masculine behavior to overcome the weakness characterizing the female sex. One of her biographers made the following statement when claiming that Tamar handled all her royal obligations and duties excellently: “We should also say that many other women showed their power, but not one did it like Tamar.” Another biographer, who composed his historiographical text after her death, summarized the first Georgian female ruler’s reign in the following manner: “If someone among you goes again and again through the chronicles that narrate the lives of old and new kings, he will see that not one of them exceeds by his deed those performed by Tamar.”

The elevation of a female ruler to the rank of royal power caused significant changes to the Georgian ideology of rulership. The royal rhetoric became more sophisticated and multidimensional. The learned men close to Tamar exploited rhetoric’s discursive possibilities and produced the encomiastic literature, which did not exist in Georgia before. Without a doubt, the praise poems Abdulmesiani and In Praise of King Tamar and Rustaveli’s epic poem, The Knight in the Panther Skin enhanced Tamar’s authority. These literary pieces succeeded in imposing a new social norm on high echelons of society, namely that a woman could rule the kingdom and be equally successful and virtuous as other male rulers. After her death, Tamar left behind a great legacy and her unblemished authority. As it appears, the Georgian royal rhetoric was so successful in promoting the image and reputation of Tamar that her successors were eager to associate themselves with her. During his reign, Tamar’s son and heir, king Giorgi-Laša IV (r. 1210–1222), never ceased to fashion himself on the coins as “Giorgi, son of Tamar.” Had Tamar failed to attain great fame and reputation, Giorgi-Laša IV would not have affiliated himself with his mother. Instead, he would have referred to his father, Davit Soslan, or grandfather, Giorgi III, on his coinage. Tamar’s daughter, Rusudan (r. 1222–1235), who assumed power after Giorgi-Laša IV’s death and ruled in her own right, also modeled herself on her coinage as “Rusudan, daughter of Tamar.” Undoubtedly, association with Tamar was a source of legitimacy and prestige, a testament to the enduring influence of her reign.

09 Sep “Famous Among the Monarchs:” Queen Tamar and the Rhetoric of Female Success. Part I

Posted at 16:27h in Into the Storyworlds

Sandro Nikolaishvili follows the panther’s footsteps into the storyworld of the medieval Georgia’s most celebrated woman.

In the last decades, scholars have taken considerable interest in studying medieval queenship and the ways women of high standing exercised power and established authority in medieval Latin Europe and the Byzantine Empire. Regardless of the proliferation of scholarship on this subject, the rule and political career of the Georgian Queen Tamar (r. 1184–1210) remains largely unknown to the English-speaking world. Tamar reigned in her own right for more than two decades, and throughout her long reign, the Georgian Kingdom reached the height of its military and political power. Consequently, Tamar became among the most eulogized and celebrated Georgian rulers. Soon after her death, the Georgian Kingdom started to decline and disintegrate, never achieving the same success and prominence as during her rule. Tamar’s reign and her personality became the subject of legends and myths.

In 1178, King Giorgi III (r.1156–84) coronated his daughter Tamar as a co-ruler. With this bold move, Giorgi III signaled to his subjects that he intended not only to pass power to his daughter, but he also wanted her to become a ruler in her own right after his death. To safeguard Tamar’s position, during the six years of co-rulership (1178–84), Giorgi neither arranged a marriage for Tamar nor betrothed her to a suitable candidate. Giorgi was aware that the male consort could threaten Tamar’s authority and limit her power. In the context of a male-centered medieval society where Christian ideology emphasized men’s domination over women, Tamar could have been marginalized by her husband and excluded from the governance of the kingdom. In the neighboring Byzantine Empire, which considerably impacted Georgian political culture throughout the centuries, several ambitious empresses’ power and authority were eroded and curtailed by their male consorts.

Giorgi III minted a new type of copper coin to further propagate Tamar’s authority as an heir to the royal throne and celebrate the joint rulership. Abbreviated text on the coin hailed Giorgi III as “king of kings” and Tamar as “king and queen.” For the first time, a woman’s name was placed on the coin issued by a Georgian ruler. Giorgi III referred to his daughter with a male title in order to emphasize that after his death, Tamar would take the place of the king and rule in her capacity as a regnal queen.

The Kingdom of Georgia was a stratified and decentralized polity without a developed bureaucratic apparatus, dominated by the nucleus of powerful aristocratic houses. In the absence of political institutions, the kingdom’s integrity and survival in the fragile and hostile geopolitical environment depended on the king’s military charisma and his governmental skills. Georgian kings’ authority and legitimacy rested on their ability to lead the army in the battles and secure military victories. In the twelfth century, the Georgian Kingdom, under the leadership of martial kings, became a leading political and military power in the Caucasus. Thus, in light of this context, leaving a woman in charge of the Georgian Kingdom for the first time in its history was a far more challenging endeavor than in neighboring Byzantium, where, throughout the centuries, empresses and imperial women participated in the governance of the empire.

The event of 1178, a turning point in the history of Georgian kingship that paved the way for woman’s accession to the throne, captured the imagination of Šota Rustaveli and found its reflection in his epic poem, The Knight in the Panther Skin. A learned man and court poet, Rustaveli composed his literary masterpiece towards the end of the twelfth century, on Tamar’s order and under her patronage. The Knight in the Panther Skin was not a ceremonial and panegyric poem directly concerned with the idea of rulership. Rustaveli’s poem’s plot revolves around the imagined world of the Near East, and actions occur in the kingdoms of Arabia, India, and China. Nevertheless, the thirty-ninth stanza of his epic poem elaborates on the question that bothered many of Rustaveli’s contemporaries – the legitimacy of transferring the royal power to a woman.

The background story of the thirty-ninth stanza is the following. In the imagined Kingdom of Arabia, king Rost‘evan is having a royal banquet in his palace. The high-ranking courtiers, viziers, realize that Rost‘evan is gloomy and bothered by some thoughts. They approach the king and try to cheer him up. Failing to improve Rost‘evan’s mood, viziers reveal that they are perfectly aware of what bothers him. As it turns out, Rost‘evan plans to designate his daughter and only child, Tinatin, as his successor and considers coronating her as a co-king. Viziers state that they fully support the idea of elevating female Tinatin to the throne and told Rost‘evan the following words to encourage him.

Although a woman, she is a sovereign, ordained by God’s decree.
We are not flattering you, but even in your absence agree.
Like her radiance, her deeds are as bright as the sunshine to see.
Lion’s whelps are equally lions, though female or male they be.
(Šota Rustaveli (Lyn Coffin trans.), The Knight in the Panther Skin, 17. )

Rost‘evan is a literary prototype of king Giorgi III, while Tinatin is queen Tamar. Apparently, decades after Tamar’s coronation, the fact that a woman assumed power for the first time could not be passed without comment by court poet Rustaveli. Tamar desperately needed to prove that despite her gender, she was a suitable candidate for the throne. Rustaveli portrays an idealistic picture that is far from reality. In fact, the question of female rulership would not be as widely accepted and approved as Georgian court rhetoric would have us believe. King Giorgi III would have to spend the lion’s share of energy and resources to persuade his inner circle and certain members of powerful aristocratic houses to accept Tamar’s sole rule.

Giorgi’s plan to secure his daughter’s sole rulership, however, collapsed after his death. In 1184, not everybody welcomed Tamar’s reign. The powerful aristocrats refused to support her unless she complied with their demands. One of the demands was for Tamar to find a suitable husband and marry as soon as possible so the kingdom would have a male ruler to perform the military duties. Because of her sex, Tamar was not fit to lead the army in the battles and command the troops. The powerful courtiers and military aristocrats feared that the kingdom was exposed to external threats without a male and martial ruler. The Georgian Kingdom’s foes could perceive a woman’s ascension to the throne as a sign of weakness. The rulers of the Muslim states surrounding Georgia would be more tempted to tilt the balance of power in their favor. Like Christianity, Islam also considered women and rulership incompatible. There is a famous hadith attributed to the prophet Muhammad that questions and opposes the reign of a woman: “Never will succeed such a nation as makes a woman their ruler.” Tamar had to prove not only to her Christian subjects that she was a worthy heir of her father, but she had to demonstrate to the Islamic world that although a woman, she could be a powerful and respected ruler.

Tamar was not naïve to believe that the power transition would be smooth after Giorgi III’s death. Six years of co-rulership with her father had taught her the peculiarities of Georgian power politics. She probably expected the challenges and had plans for how to overcome the obstacles. Tamar found a way out of political and military crises and upheavals that ensued in the first years of her reign. She made some concessions to her opposition and agreed to marry, against her wish, Iurii Bogolubskoi, a prince in exile from the Rus principality of Vladimir-Suzdal. However, when Tamar realized that her husband wanted to allocate to her the role of a queen consort and limit her power, she did everything to take him down and get rid of him.

Tamar was not the type of woman to become a pawn in the hands of her husband and had no intention of compromising her autonomy and independence. The Georgian sources emanated from the royal court and written by Tamar’s supporters imply that the queen accused her Rus husband of being drunkard and homosexual. Allegedly, Tamar could not tolerate Iurii’s “sexual misconduct” and frequent indulgence in debauchery anymore and brought the issue of divorce in front of the state council. The degree to which allegations were grounded is not entirely clear, but one should not rule out the possibility that Tamar could have made false accusations to achieve her goal and divorce her husband.

(To be continued…)

27 May The Narrations of Hagia Sophia: an interview with Stephanos Efthymiadis

Posted at 12:27h in Into the Storyworlds

This spring, one of the Retracing Connections advisory board members, Stephanos Efthymiadis, has spent time at Dumbarton Oaks, working on his book project Hagia Sophia of Constantinople: its Political, Social, and Urban History (537-1453). Since Ingela Nilsson was there too, drafting the very first version of her narratological commentary on the Life of Theodore of Edessa, she took the opportunity to ask him a few questions about the narrative aspects of his book project.

Ingela: What makes the narration of a monument a narrative, rather than just information? Is it simply a question of age or are there other things that matter?

Stephanos: For the book I have been working on for some time now, narrations about Hagia Sophia constitute an important source. Those composed in the sixth century, that is, after the inauguration of Justinianic Hagia Sophia in 537, aim to verbally depict an architecturally and artistically magnificent church. The sixth-century excerpts from the historical and rhetorical works of Prokopios and Agathias, coupled with the elaborate poems of Paul the Silentiary, capture, in their detailed fabric, the uniqueness of the edifice. Despite the elegant style and sophisticated diction in which they were cast, they do not mix reality with myth and legend. In the narrations of Hagia Sophia produced after the end of late antiquity such adherence to a realistic representation of the monument is not at play. For instance, the Narrative (Diegesis) about the Construction of Hagia Sophia, a text that was compiled in the late ninth century and won wide popularity, clearly gears towards mythography, retaining only a loose connection with historical truth. The same may be suspected with other shorter narrations of hagiographical content.

Now, writing about the political and social history of a monument essentially identifies as an endeavour to explore and interpret the voices and views of the people who lived and experienced its design and space, exterior and interior, across time. Rather than treating them as sources providing information, the narrations of the Byzantines and of the foreign visitors we still possess about Hagia Sophia invite us to study them together so as to trace and reconstruct the monument’s own narrative for the long time-span of nearly 1,000 years. And for reaching this goal both documentary and fictional narratives matter alike!

Ingela: Could one say that the narrative of a monument like Hagia Sophia is a kind of biography?

Stephanos: It is a biography, first of all, in the sense that we deal with a living body with a remarkable longevity. And as such, it is rich in experiences, threats that endangered its existence and secrets that challenge anyone who aims to study it in some depth! Moreover, its narrative can read like a historical biography because, contrary to the impression it creates to its modern beholder, Hagia Sophia in Byzantium was not a static and serene monument. Rather, it was a living entity reflecting the shifts in attitudes of the people (emperors, patriarchs, clergymen, and the populace) who were engaged in its function as an imperial and patriarchal church and who were always prompt to treat it according to their proper interests. The three conversions it saw during the late Byzantine period (two into a papal church in 1204 and 1452 and one into a mosque in 1453) suffice to demonstrate its flexibility and accommodation vis-à-vis the new historical realities which Constantinople, the city of which it was the symbol, was confronted with.

Ingela: Are you the narrator of this narrative/biography, or does Hagia Sophia herself sometimes act as narrator or at least focalizer?

Stephanos: As I hinted at, there are periods when we hear a lot of Hagia Sophia and periods which, to our disappointment, are silent. Doing justice as it should to the ambitious Justinianic project of its reconstruction, the sixth century, for instance, is so rich and dense in descriptions of what was an architectural miracle. But there is a high degree of risk here to lose attention and neglect what the plethora of these discourses transmit between the lines, what was at stake for an emperor Justinian for creating such a miracle. One must then give voice to Hagia Sophia herself, try to understand what was behind a major or a minor intervention on its fabric, interpret precise events occurring in its space as an interaction between, on the one hand, its own needs and calls and those committed to defend it as a symbol and institution, on the other.

Ingela: What does the ideological charge of Hagia Sophia mean for your project? Do you simply leave at 1453 or do you take the later development into account?

Stephanos: Extending research on Hagia Sophia to its Late Byzantine period fell beyond my initial book planning. Yet my fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks in the spring semester of 2018 and the feedback I received from colleagues I met there proved persuasive enough to cross the line of 1204. Late Byzantium is a historical period for which documentation, though richer than the one we possess from and about previous centuries, is too disparate and diverse and thus less straightforward to handle. Pursuing the same kind of research beyond the landmark of 1453 would take me into deeper waters, yet it will be necessary at least to gain sight of developments occurring in the first decades of the Ottoman period.

Ingela: Last but not least, which is your favourite story of Hagia Sophia, among the many sources that you are looking at for your project?

Stephanos: My favourite story is a fairly short beneficial tale that we read both in the collection of Paul of Monembasia (tenth century) and the Synaxarion of Constantinople. It refers to a shoemaker named Zacharias who, together with his wife, eked out his living in one of the hovels located in the northern arcade of Hagia Sophia. The man is stalked by an imperial dignitary who discovers that Zacharias is a very pious man and ends up having meal with him and his wife at their humble dwelling in the same arcade. Thereupon the dignitary realizes that the shoemaker was a saintly figure indeed and promises not to reveal the man’s secret identity until the end of his life. Apart from the mystery it is wrapped up with, the story brings out the other, less impressive and more mundane, aspects of the Constantinopolitan cathedral.

Retracing Connections thanks Stephanos for his support and wishes him
best of luck –

we all look forward to reading his biography of Hagia Sophia!

For the wonderful Dumbarton Oaks online resources, see here!

06 Sep On Jesus as a Trickster Child, and the Unpredictable Narratives in Medieval Manuscripts

Posted at 18:55h in Into the Storyworlds, Uncategorized

Marijana Vuković takes a less traveled narrative path and follows the adventures of Jesus the Menace.

It seems unlikely that the foremost person in Christianity – Jesus – would ever appear in a Christian narrative as a child who gets up to mischief, brings harm to his peers and teachers, or generally acts in a way atypical for a child that he is expected to be. However, according to an apocryphal narrative entitled The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, he acted in such a way in his childhood and adolescence, from the age of five to twelve. Much of his relations with other people, children, and his parents, Mary and Joseph, go wrong in many versions of this text in various languages and manuscripts.

We learn from the narrative that Jesus played at the ford of a rushing stream after rain as a five-year-old boy. He gathered water into pools, making them clean, and molded sparrows out of soft clay (on a Sabbath, though), which caused an uproar among the Jews. When they complained to Jesus’ father, Joseph, Jesus quickly turned the sparrows into living creatures to help them fly away. When a Jewish child, in return, destroyed his pools, he threw a curse and killed him. On another occasion, colliding with a boy in the street, he likewise threw a curse, and the boy dropped dead. The Jewish mob again complained to Joseph, wishing to force them out of the village. As an act of revenge, Jesus blinded them all.

He was no better in school. On three attempts to get an education in this story, he was expelled at least two times. Knowing already what he was supposed to learn in school, he pretended not to know anything and kept silent. When the teachers punished him for his silence, Jesus killed them, too.

Not all of his behavior is notorious in the story. He retrieved the eyesight of those he had previously blinded. He revived from death a child who fell from a house’s roof. He helped his mother bring water from a well, sowed crops with his father, did carpentry, and helped his brother collect wood in the forest. Jesus also performed several healing miracles in this text.
Scholars still need to determine when the original text of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas first emerged. According to the testimony of Irenaeus of Lyons (Against Heresies, 1.20.1), an episode describing Jesus and his teacher circulated, possibly independently, already in the second century. The text may have been composed between 125 and 185 CE in Asia Minor, Egypt, or Antioch. The cutting-edge scholarship inclines towards Egypt as the place of the story’s origin.

Besides the murkiness of the story’s contents, the text had an incredibly intricate transmission that would amaze even those who studied some of its parts through individual manuscripts and languages. Such a complex textual situation begs the question of what constitutes the core of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. The text’s fluidity challenged the very definition of text as a composition with a fixed beginning and end.
In the various manuscripts and the form(s) that we know of, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas occupies from four up to twenty-two manuscript folios. The text has no established beginning or end; various manuscripts have different beginnings and endings. Due to its episodic character, which is an essential characteristic of its narrative structure, the different versions of the text take episodes in and out according to their preferences and purposes. The episodes of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas are sometimes differently aligned in manuscripts. Finally, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas is occasionally copied with other texts as part of a story cycle or of another text, sometimes even without the title.

Speaking of the titles, no manuscript or version of the text bears the title “The Infancy Gospel of Thomas,” which is established as a scholarly convention. Some scholars use other modified appellations to designate the text, such as The Childhood Deeds of Jesus, Paidika, or The Infancy Gospel of Pseudo-Thomas.

The text’s title transformed almost from manuscript to manuscript. To illustrate it with several examples: in an eleventh-century Greek codex (Jerusalem, Library of the Greek Patriarchate, Sabaiticus 259, f. 66r), the text opens with the following lines: Τὰ παιδικὰ μεγαλεῖα τοῦ δεσπότου ἡμῶν καὶ σωτῆρος Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ. In an eleventh-century Latin manuscript (Paris, BnF, lat. 1772, f. 88v), the Infancy Gospel of Thomas provides a different introduction: De infantia d[omi]ni n[ost]ri I[hes]u Chr[ist]i; Incipit infancia d[omi]ni n[ost]ri I[hes]u Chr[ist]i. Postqua[m] reversus est in Galilea de Egipto.

In a Latin twelfth-to-thirteenth-century manuscript (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 288, f. 79r), the Infancy Gospel of Thomas starts without a title as a continuation of the previous text. One can guess the beginning of the text only by a larger capital letter.

In a thirteenth-century Greek manuscript (Vienna, ÖNB, Theol. gr. 123, f. 192r), the Infancy Gospel of Thomas also begins without a title from the phrase μνημόνευέ μου (“remember me”), which appears in the middle of a sentence in episode 10. The text in the manuscript is incomplete and reduced to a few pages (192r-193v), covering approximately half of the episodes. Unlike in the Latin tradition, the text is not connected to the other texts around it.
In a fourteenth-century Latin manuscript (Berne, Burgerbibliothek, 271, f. 41r), the Infancy Gospel of Thomas appeared entitled Tractatus Thomae hysmaelite de operibus ihesu post regressionem eius de egypto, while a fifteenth-century Greek manuscript from Vienna (Austrian National Library, Cod. hist. gr. 91, f. 199v), opened the text with the following title: Λόγος ἰσραηλίτ[ου] φιλοσόφου εἰς τὰ παιδικὰ κεφάλεια τοῦ κ[υρίο]υ ἡμῶν Ἰ[ησο]ῦ Χ[ρίστο]υ. Κύριε ἐ[λέη]σον.

One Old Slavonic fourteenth-century manuscript from Moscow (Russian State Historical Museum, Collection of A. I. Hludov, Cod. 162, f. 200v) started the text with the title Reading of the Childhood of Jesus Christ (Чтениѥ дѣтьства Іс[уса] Х[ристо]ва), and another, from St Petersburg (Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 13.3.17, f. 177r), opened it with the line Deeds and childhood of our Lord Jesus Christ (Дѣанїа и дѣтство Г[оспод]а наше[га] И[сус]а Х[рист]а).
Not only do the titles of this text need to be clarified. What adds to the complexity is that the Infancy Gospel of Thomas – mainly in the Latin tradition – was often integrated into a story cycle – a “family history” – called the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. This “gospel” consisted of several originally independent texts, now constituting a sequence of events in the life of Jesus’ family, starting with Mary’s childhood (Protoevangelium of James) and proceeding with her adult years when Jesus was a two-year-old boy during their refuge in Egypt (Prologue in Egypt). The cycle commonly ended with Jesus’ childhood from the age of five to twelve (Infancy Gospel of Thomas). The sequence was followed by other episodes from the life of Mary or her parents, Joachim and Anne.

The entire cycle, specifically the Infancy Gospel of Thomas within it, would sometimes end the narrative flow abruptly in the middle of a sentence. In the Latin manuscript Paris, BnF, lat. 1772, for example, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas ends in the middle of a sentence on folio 90r after a few episodes. The layout immediately continues with another text, Augustine’s Sermons on St. Vincent.

The richness of the material evidence of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas will not stop surprising us soon. The text continues its afterlife into modern times through various media. In 2016, the movie was released according to the story, entitled The Young Messiah. Represented as a biblical drama, directed by Cyrus Nowrasteh and co-written by Betsy and Cyrus Nowrasteh, the movie is based on the novel Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, written by Anne Rice.

Just glancing, one notices that the movie’s plot has transformed. Jesus’ colliding with another boy who drops dead turns into a proper street fight with the same outcome. The scene of making a bird alive is simplified, spotlighting only Jesus’ miracle and omitting the audience – Jews – leaving only a few cousins to witness the miraculous event. The plot relies on one of the lesser-known textual versions, where Jesus’ family relocates from Alexandria to Nazareth, Galilee, and where his parents, Joseph and Mary, are fully aware of Jesus’ divine nature, trying to conceal it from the rest of the world.

This variety of narrative containers allows us to trace the narrative transformations from antiquity until modern times. We must still decide whether such a textual destiny was related explicitly to apocryphal texts in the Middle Ages or whether it was a broader textual phenomenon. The possible unfavorable textual treatments in the past mean so much to us today since they allow us to follow all the steps of the textual afterlife of these stories in need of constant revision. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas provides an excellent example of how such stories survive, live, and outgrow their authors’ initial ideas and intentions over centuries.

* Source: The Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge,
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

24 Jan Babel: translation and alternate worldmaking in a recent novel

Posted at 18:56h in Into the Storyworlds

Last spring, our research programme reading group focused on translation theory and translation studies, reading our way through a rather long list of essays, articles and books. One of them was Jacques Derrida’s “Des tours de Babel” (1985), in which Derrida dwells on the problems that translation causes: the confusion of language and its changing meanings. The biblical account of the tower of Babel is used as an example or image of this confusion. Derrida’s essay is difficult to read, marked by irony and in itself rather confusing, but one important point is that God’s destruction of the tower creates the need for language to be translated, while at the same time making it impossible to be translated. And the word Babel is itself a case in point, argues Derrida: it cannot be translated, because we don’t even know if it’s a name or a noun.

When we struggled with Derrida in the spring of 2022, we didn’t know that a novel entitled Babel: An Arcane History would soon appear and become a global bestseller, drawing on similar imagery and turning translation issues into an issue of historical and political concern. Had I known, I would have put R. F. Kuang’s novel on our reading list, because it would have offered a perfect complement to our scholarly readings not only in its sophisticated treatment of language and translation issues, but also in its crafting of an alternate universe – its translation of the historical Oxford we know into a different world where language magic runs the world.

The fact that language runs and creates the world is nothing new, but in Kuang’s novel it takes on epic proportions. The setting is an alternate-reality 1830s England in the wake of the Opium wars, where the empire’s economic and colonial supremacy is driven by magical silver bars. Silver, in this storyworld, has the magic power to capture what is ‘lost in translation’ between languages. Silver bars inscribed with ‘match-pairs’ of words in different languages, with similar but not identical meaning, have a magic effect that help run various aspects of the empire, from trains to medicine. Oxford University hosts “Babel”, the Royal Institute of Translation, where students are trained to find such match-pairs and become scholars in the service of the empire. The full title of the novel –Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution – indicates that this set-up turns out to have serious consequences.

Needless to say, this is necessary reading for anyone who is interested in language, translation or worldmaking. I hope to get back to it in more detail as soon as I have time, but right now I just want to encourage everyone to read and enjoy!

Ingela Nilsson