Commentary on John of Ephesus’s Ecclesiastical History

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Hartmut Leppin
• Subject Area: Ancient History ; Protestant Theology
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 461840240

John of Ephesus’s Ecclesiastical History (= EH) forms one of the most extensive historiographical sources for the Eastern Roman Empire and the Middle East on the eve of the long-lasting political and cultural changes that began in the seventh century. The EH offers a distinct vantage point on the understudied late sixth century: it was written in a dialect of Aramaic called Syriac, and it comes from the pen of a bishop from an ecclesiastical body that competed with the imperial church. Only the third part of this work survives intact, and John of Ephesus wrote it while living—and indeed while intermittently imprisoned—in the imperial capital of Constantinople. Although historians and theologians have both made extensive use of the EH, these perspectives have rarely been brought together. The proposed project will bridge this divide by integrating historical and theological research on the EH in a new critical edition, translation, and comprehensive commentary on the third part of this work. Open access digital and print versions of the edition, translation, and commentary are planned, and preliminary digital publications in several repositories will invite feedback from the scholarly community during the course of the project. Collaboration with several digital humanities projects will also result in a suite of didactic aids to support students and scholars learning Syriac. Finally, this project will draw attention to one of the literary achievements of a community in antiquity which many recent immigrants to Germany and the European Union count as their heritage.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants