The Nicene Dossier in Western Syriac Canonical Collections
This paper examines the reception of the 325 Synod of Nicaea in late antique and early medieval Western Syriac collections of canon law. Particular attention is paid to a collection that originated in the 7th century and probably goes back to the multilingual miaphysite scholar Jacob of Edessa. Like many oriental collections of canon law, it is based on the Greek Corpus Canonum of the Church of Antioch. However, compared to most witnesses of the Corpus Canonum tradition, it offers a considerable number of additional documents related to the Synod of Nicaea. It includes the letter in which Constantine moved a synod planned in Ancyra to Nicaea, which is only preserved in West and East Syriac collections. Furthermore, it offers the anti-heretical appendix to the Nicene Creed (Appendix Antiochena) in a more detailed version, which is otherwise only preserved in a single Coptic manuscript. In addition, it contains a Nicene decree on the date of Easter, which is preserved in Greek in the Synagogue of John Scholasticus, deprived of its context. Finally, it contains the letter of the Nicene Synod to the Church of Alexandria, which is otherwise preserved in distinctly different contexts, always outside of the Corpus Canonum tradition. The collection is also the only witness for the letter of the Synod of Antioch (324/25). It is erroneously attributed not to the Synod of Nicaea, but to the Church Council of Antioch (341), but an accompanying commentary relates it to the Nicene Creed. The paper begins with an introduction to the structure and history of the collection, all the manuscripts of which can be traced back to an archetype that can be located in Tur-‘Abdin during the eighth century. The individual documents are then presented and categorised in terms of their transmission history. It can be shown that they were already found in the Greek model of Jacob of Edessa and, if they were not compiled by the editor himself, were taken from the archive(s) of the fifth-century Church of Antioch. The Syrian editor was interested in them as historical-canonistic documents, as well as for philological reasons. Together, they provide a comprehensive picture of the Nicene Synod, which is analysed in detail in the article. In the process, the effects of the collection in Michael the Syrian’s chronicle also come into view.