Iranianate and Syriac Christianity in Late Antiquity and Early Islamic Period, pp. 279-332, 2021/12/21
A fragmentary Christian Sogdian version of the Six Books on the Dormition of Mary from Turfan has recently come to light, but the place of this narrative within the larger context of Eastern Christian Marian literature has not yet been studied in detail. One distinguishing trait of the Sogdian fragment is the topographic shift in the discovery story which prefaces most versions of the Six Books. Whereas according to the Syriac, Arabic and Ethiopic versions two monks from Sinai discover the “Book of Mary” at the tomb of St. John in Ephesus, the Sogdian text uniquely locates the book in the city of Constantinople. To explain this consequential change, this chapter will first reconstruct the historical and theological context of the earliest Syriac manuscripts containing the preface. These manuscripts date to the early 6th century and probably originate in an anti-Chalcedonian milieu in northern Syria. It will then be argued that the original Syriac version underwent a Melkite Syriac reworking in ca. 8th-century Syria or Palestine that involved a turn towards the Byzantine capital as the new symbolic center of Christian devotion to Mary. The last part of the study will discuss how this (now lost) Melkite Syriac narrative may have reached the Christian communities of Central Asia where it was translated into Sogdian.
