I recently delivered a paper at #NAPS2017 (the annual meeting of the North American Patristics Society). My paper was part of a two-session panel that I helped co-organize with Kyle Smith and Philip Forness.
The topic of the paper was the use of the Syriac word taḥwitha (ܬܚܘܝܬܐ) as a title of a work in late antiquity, particularly with respect to the Demonstrations of Aphrahat, the Persian Sage. More specifically, I argued that it is likely that this “title” was added later by an editor, and thus they are not original to the corpus. The full abstract is below.
Abstract
“Collecting Writings and Constructing a Genre: The Demonstrations of Aphrahat as an Edited Anthology”
The fourth-century Syriac corpus known as the Demonstrations and attributed to Aphrahat is difficult to classify with respect to genre. In fact, it is often taken for granted within scholarship on the Demonstrations that “demonstration” (Syr = ܬܚܘܝܬܐ) is a genre itself. After all, each of the twenty-three individual Demonstrations begins with a heading that includes this word. However, this classification fails on two grounds: 1) it is an otherwise unknown genre; no other work in Syriac literature claims to be a “Demonstration.” And 2) more importantly, the assumption that “Demonstration” is a genre masks the diversity of writings with the corpus of the Demonstrations and even ignores data within the corpus that might help us classify the individual Demonstrations more specifically and accurately.
I have argued elsewhere that the Demonstrations as they are preserved in the Syriac tradition are an edited corpus of previously existing writings. In this paper, I will expand on this argument by examining evidence for smaller collections of writings that make up the Demonstrations based on various terminology for genre found within the corpus. Additionally, I will argue that the “genre” of Demonstration was the creation of the literary editor who compiled the writings into their final form. In so doing, I will reflect on the broader question of what we know about early Syriac literary production and the ways that ancient editorial practices have affected our understanding of genre in Syriac literature.
And here’s a tweet from a friend who was present to document it:
James Walters argues that “demonstrations” (re:Aphrahat) is not a genre but the name for a collection of works. #NAPS2017 @jedwardwalters pic.twitter.com/vEb4FMx8L6
— Ian N Mills (@IanNelsonMills) May 26, 2017