Christian traditions, the idea that getting married is fundamentally a religious practice defined by religious law may seem unexceptional. Nothing, however, is necessary or natural about that idea. When George issued his canon in the late seventh century, there was no systematic sacramental theology of marriage in any major Christian tradition, including the Latin one; these would develop only later in the medieval period.44 The notion that administering the formation of marriage bonds was exclusively the domain of the religious tradition and its clerics was decidedly novel. In fact, given that East Syrian synods of the Sasanian period routinely issued a smattering of canons related to marriage, it is all the more striking that only in 676, under the rule of the caliphate, did George make marriage the Church of the East’s canonically delimited territory.45
Why did he do so when he did? Particular conditions arising from the Arab conquests and initial spread of Islam, concentrated in this case in eastern Arabia, provide the answer. These conditions included ecclesiastical schism, the specter of apostasy to Islam, and the unacceptable heterogeneity of local marital practices, especially the pattern of Christian women marrying non-Christian men. From the point of view of East Syrian bishops like George, these developments impinged alarmingly upon the social integrity of eastern Arabia’s Christian communities and, ultimately, the Church of the East as a whole. One way to attend to this threat was to affirm a constitutive connection between the religious community and marriage, that ancient institution whose purpose was to facilitate the formation of households and the social reproduction of the human species. Bringing that institution under the purview of ecclesiastical law was an effort to ensure its proper practice in service to the religious community: reproducing not only the species in general but the true-believing individuals and households that together made up the church. By making marriage exclusively subject to the law of the religious tradition, George promoted a specific vision of East Syrian Christians as a distinct social collectivity within the caliphate.
Rebellion, Apostasy, and Polygamy on the Persian Gulf Coast
The immediate impetus for George’s synod of 676 on the Persian Gulf island of Dayrin was ending a schism between the East Syrian patriarchate and the ecclesiastics of Bet Qatraye that had developed a generation earlier.46 Under George’s predecessor as patriarch, Ishoʿyahb III (r. 649–59), the bishops of Fars—the ecclesiastical province on the Iranian side of the Gulf to which the Qataris were subordinate—had declared their autonomy from the patriarchate in Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the former Sasanian capital in central Iraq. Fars was an old and venerable see that claimed apostolic foundation; it appears that when the Arabs overthrew the Sasanians, the ecclesiastics of Fars saw no reason to recognize the bishop of a now defunct imperial capital as their superior.47 While they ultimately reconciled with Ishoʿyahb, their fellow bishops of Bet Qatraye continued to claim autonomy for themselves. Only under George did the various factions come to terms; he and six Qatari bishops convened the synod of 676 to formalize the reconciliation.
From Ishoʿyahb and George’s perspective, an ecclesiastical schism like the Qataris’ represented a major loss to the Church of the East. The bishops of Bet Qatraye severed an entire province from its ecclesiological structure when they removed themselves from communion with Seleucia-Ctesiphon. The laypeople of Bet Qatraye were in danger of losing their chance at salvation, as the ecclesiastical stewards who mediated their communion with the body of Christ had disconnected their link with the true church. The patriarchate, moreover, lost the spiritual, human, and material resources embodied in the region’s Christian communities.48 That loss was magnified, moreover, by the specter of apostasy occasioned by the Arab conquests and the spread of the Arabs’ new religious movement. According to the Islamic tradition, the coastal regions of eastern Arabia (comprising the caliphal districts of al-Bahrayn, roughly equivalent to Bet Qatraye, and ʿUman) were incorporated into the Arab-Muslim polity fairly swiftly in the 630s.49 However confessionally distinct Islam was or was not at that early date, the Arabs’ new religious movement certainly spread in the region, at the very least among its Arab tribes—and at a cost to the Church of the East. We know from several of Ishoʿyahb’s letters that the Christian inhabitants of Mazun, the Syriac name for the peninsula of ʿUman or a town thereon, had recently joined the religion of the Arabs (Syriac ṭayyāyē). The Mazunites did so to avoid paying a tax imposed by the conquerors: “They forsook the faith [shbaq[w] haymānutā] forever but held onto half [their] possessions [pālgut qenyānē] for a little while.”50 Mazun was a single bishopric, so its apostate Christian community was unlikely to have been large.51 Nevertheless, Ishoʿyahb’s reference demonstrates that losing believers in the Arabian Peninsula to the rulers’ new religious movement was a real possibility in the eyes of the bishops. Significantly, Ishoʿyahb invoked the memory of the Mazunites’ apostasy in his attempts to end the schism between the patriarchate and Bet Qatraye. “A single departure from the faith, like that of the Mazunites, would already have been enough for Satan,” he wrote in a letter to the laypeople of eastern Arabia, “but the bishops of Fars and Bet Qatraye, zealous to forsake Christianity … even more than what Satan wanted [āp yattir men mā d-ṣābē [h]wā sāṭānā], have signed, sealed, and delivered [their] apostasy [ktab[w] wa-ṭbaʿ[w] w-shaddar[w] kāporutā].”52 In the patriarch’s eyes, the Qataris’ ecclesiastical schism and the Mazunites’ apostasy both contributed to the same problem: losing the very believers who constituted the church of eastern Arabia.
Against this background, George’s synod assumed the task of securing the integrity of that social and institutional body. Besides ending the ecclesiastical schism, George’s canons aimed to correct deviant local practices, which would put Bet Qatraye’s Christians back on the path to salvation and simultaneously construct clear social boundaries between them and other locals of different religious affiliations. This aim is apparent in the synod’s canons that regulate interactions with non-Christians, including prohibitions of litigating before non-ecclesiastical judges, socializing at Jewish taverns, and participating in ostentatiously “pagan” mourning rituals.53 Marriage, however, had a special place in this effort. Among the Qataris’ “practices in need of correction” condemned by George’s canons were those same marital ones familiar to us from postconquest Syria: polygamy, concubinage, and marriages between Christian women and non-Christian men. In a region where the East Syrian patriarchate’s hold on the local Christians was already tenuous, these marital practices threatened communal integrity in two distinct ways: by leading believers astray in the current generation and by perverting the divinely mandated, proper method for reproducing future ones. George’s canon §16 states that men who take multiple wives or concubines, according to “pagan customs” (ʿyādē ḥanpāyē) and in contravention of the church’s teachings, “have become estranged … from all Christian honor” (hwaw mnakrēn … l-kul iqārā da-krēsṭyānē).54 Canon §14 castigates Christian women who marry unbelievers (ḥanpē), most likely meaning members of the Arab ruling class, since doing so introduces them to “customs of strangers to the fear of God” (ʿyādē d-nukrāyin l-deḥlat Alāhā)—that is, it pushes them toward apostasy.55 In these respects, aberrant marital practices, like the other modes of interreligious contact addressed by George’s canons, threatened to thin the ranks of believers in Bet Qatraye. George’s prescription of ecclesiastical administration of marriage between Christians was an effort to tamp down this danger—to ensure that marital unions harmonized with ecclesiastical expectations and thereby kept laypeople within the communal fold, particularly in a region where ecclesiastical schism and apostasy had shaken the patriarchate’s confidence in the local church’s foundations.
More than other “practices in need of correction” among the Christians of Bet Qatraye, marriage was further significant because it had implications for future generations of believers in addition to the current one. Marriage was the institution that facilitated the reproduction of the human species in accordance with God’s plan. The problem for George in seventh-century Bet Qatraye was that the institution itself was not necessarily reproducing good, true-believing Christians. This concern is especially evident in George’s condemnation of interreligious marriage, which is gendered—it concerns
