little of Ishoʿbokt’s life other than his Persian geographical and cultural background and the 770s as the probable time frame of his ordination as a bishop.29 His Jurisprudential Corpus, composed in Middle Persian but extant in a Syriac translation, is a remarkable text: it draws on Sasanian law to bring an unprecedented breadth of practices under a single ecclesiastical legal regime. In an introductory discourse, Ishoʿbokt notes that he has received requests for a unified Christian law for his eparchy of Fars from his suffragan bishops. He tells the reader that he will create one by committing to writing the laws “adhered to in the tradition [yubbala] of [our] ancestors in our area,” supplemented with the customs of other orthodox Christians.30 In other words, Ishoʿbokt set out to transmute the judicial custom (ʿyādā) of Fars, its churches, and its peoples into a Christian civil law (dinā, dinē) embodied in a written text.31 Comparison of the Corpus to a late Sasanian juridical compendium, as well as Ishoʿbokt’s use of technical Middle Persian terminology, demonstrates that the local traditions he drew on were essentially Iranian-Sasanian law, still familiar among non-Muslims in eighth-century Fars.32 Further exceptional was the breadth of his interests: the Corpus comprises six extensive treatises covering legal theory, marriage and divorce, testate and intestate succession, various forms of contract, and judicial procedure. In a single work, Ishoʿbokt claimed the authority to cover practical topics as diverse as what makes for a legitimate betrothal contract, how to give loans and charge interest, and how to pay hired laborers.33
The Jurisprudential Corpus was highly innovative in the great range of legal subjects it brought under a single ecclesiastical regulatory regime. It was also fairly provincial in its connection to southwest Iran, having been written in Middle Persian rather than Syriac and taking local traditions as its focus. In fact, since we do not know exactly when in the eighth century Ishoʿbokt flourished, it is best to think of his work primarily as continuing a Persian Christian jurisprudential tradition in the vein of Shemʿon even as it responded to caliphate-wide legal developments. In Fars, ecclesiastics like Shemʿon and Ishoʿbokt were literate in Middle Persian, familiar with Sasanian law, and best situated to appropriate that law into their own, provincial sphere of judicial activity as caliphal institutions developed around them. Despite its provincialism, however, the sheer range of Ishoʿbokt’s law book was exceptional; and when it circulated in the Church of the East’s Iraqi heartlands, it became an influential model for East Syrian patriarchs and other jurist-bishops responding to the growing hegemony of Islamic law and the caliphal judiciary. Timothy I, the East Syrian patriarch from 780 to 823, approached Ishoʿbokt’s work in just this manner. Timothy was a particularly prominent bishop whose long reign left an indelible mark on the intellectual culture of Abbasid Iraq and the historical trajectory of Syriac Christianity.34 He was trained in the East Syrian schools of the hill country of the eastern Jazira, the Church of the East’s demographic heartland and home to many monasteries and associated institutions of learning. Timothy is probably best known for his theological disputation with the caliph al-Mahdi dramatized in one of his letters and his Christian missionizing efforts in Central Asia. Just as significant were his more prosaic activities related to East Syrian law. In fact, Timothy stands out as the first patriarch on record to try both to consolidate the disparate, varied Christian legal works of earlier centuries and to bring the provincial concern for civil law evident in Ishoʿbokt’s writings into the broader tradition of the Church of the East. In a word, his efforts mark the formation of East Syrian law as a comprehensive communal tradition encompassing both ecclesiastical and lay affairs.
These efforts are visible, again, in the textual record. Timothy commissioned the translation of Ishoʿbokt’s Corpus from Middle Persian into Syriac; he may have been responsible for the translation of Shemʿon’s legal treatise as well.35 Furthermore, he was likely responsible for a redaction of the East Syrian Synodicon,36 the collected proceedings of the Church of the East’s late antique synods and related legal texts, as well as for incorporating into it the Syro-Roman Law Book,37 a late antique Syriac translation of commentaries on Roman law. Overall, Timothy appears to have had a strong interest in identifying and collecting various received texts that could together define a canon of East Syrian law. But the majority of these received texts did not offer much guidance for regulating the social relations of laypeople, so just as significant are Timothy’s own original legal writings. In addition to several epistles that treat family law,38 Timothy collected ninety-nine of his judicial rulings, prescriptions, and legal responsa into a single composition, his Law Book. Much like Ishoʿbokt’s work, Timothy’s Law Book was a practical juristic collection intended to give ecclesiastical judges the material they might need to adjudicate lay civil affairs and obviate laypeople’s interest in going to caliphal courts, an aim Timothy highlights in the work’s preface.39 To this end, the Law Book covers three major areas: the order and prerogatives of the ecclesiastical hierarchy; marriage and divorce; and inheritance. Though not as long or as systematic as Ishoʿbokt’s Corpus, Timothy’s Law Book thus represents a major evolution in the traditions of Christian law in the Islamic world. It is the first work we know of that not only sought to regulate both ecclesiastical and lay civil affairs in a detailed fashion but, by virtue of having been composed by a sitting patriarch, claimed the authority to do so for the entire Church of the East.
Timothy’s interest in legal canonization and original composition mark the initial coherence of East Syrian law as a lettered tradition encompassing both ecclesiastical and civil affairs. Several other jurist-bishops active in Iraq throughout the ninth century refined that tradition further. Timothy’s successor as patriarch, a monk from the Mosul region named Ishoʿbarnun (r. 823–28), continued the precedent set by Timothy that the Church of the East’s chief bishop should also be a jurist. Ishoʿbarnun had studied with the same esteemed teacher as Timothy and subsequently took monastic vows at one of the eastern Jazira’s most prominent East Syrian monasteries, but his patriarchal career was shorter and less spectacular than Timothy’s—he is perhaps best known for his intense antipathy toward his predecessor and for trying to remove his name from the diptychs of the patriarchal church. Ishoʿbarnun did, however, compose a longer, substantial Law Book of his own on the model of Timothy’s.40 Ishoʿbarnun’s work brings together the patriarch’s decisions and responsa to lower ecclesiastics on legal topics, and it covers extensively lay civil affairs. The bulk of the Law Book treats marriage, divorce, and inheritance, while the remainder includes rulings on slavery, loans and debt, theft, and monastic and ecclesiastical order. After Ishoʿbarnun, succeeding generations of East Syrian jurist-bishops took up the task of synthesizing the episcopal law books and the earlier received materials into new treatises and civil law digests. In the mid-ninth century, ʿAbdishoʿ bar Bahriz of Mosul’s Order of Marriage and Inheritance summarized the marriage law provisions of earlier works and offered a new system of inheritance law.41 Not long after, Gabriel of Basra (fl. late ninth century) compiled excerpts from late antique canon law texts, East Syrian synodal canons, and rulings from the Islamic-period law books into treatises on distinct legal topics, creating the first systematic compendium of East Syrian law.42
ʿAbdishoʿ and Gabriel thus brought the tradition of East Syrian communal law to a clear stage of canonization. By the end of the ninth century, that tradition’s corpus of texts was extensive enough to require new works to streamline its disparate rulings and doctrines. In matters of ecclesiastical law proper, the corpus stretched back to pseudo-apostolic writings from Christianity’s early days and bishops’ synods from the Roman and Sasanian empires. East Syrian civil law, on the other hand, was largely a recent creation of the Islamic period. The civil law sections of ʿAbdishoʿ’s and Gabriel’s systematizing works draw from the legal treatises of Shemʿon, Ishoʿbokt, Timothy, and Ishoʿbarnun but no comparable earlier or unknown sources.43 A tradition of East Syrian communal law that sought to regulate not only ecclesiastical affairs but also the social, economic, and familial relations of lay Christians had thus taken shape as both a response to and a function of institutional conditions in the early Islamic caliphate. By the end of the ninth century, bishops in Fars and especially Iraq had developed that tradition into a coherent intellectual discipline cultivated by ecclesiastical jurists.
CHRISTIAN
