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Syriac Christians and Muslims in late antiquity

Christine Stoddard | Catholic Herald

As attacks against Christians in the Middle East continue,
Christianity and Islam peacefully converged at the Seventh
North American Syriac Symposium June 21-24 at Catholic
University in Washington. Scholars explored everything from
the portrayals of the Virgin Mary in the Quran to Christian
law in medieval Iraq, with an emphasis on late antiquity.

In his presentation entitled, “Shaping Christian Law in
Abbasid Iraq,” Catholic U. Professor Lev Weitz, said, “Family
structure and social laws were similar for Christians, Jews
and Muslims. … There was an integration of Christians
into the Muslim world.”

“Civil law was rooted in regional (not religious) patterns,”
he said. “There is this false assumption that Christian law
in the Middle East stemmed from Roman law.”

In medieval Iraq, Christians were legally defined not as
individuals but by their “relationships of dependence”- their
household, their sex and their claim to patrimony. At that
time, Christians and Jews used Muslim courts, and interfaith
marriage was not uncommon.

During his presentation, “Translation as Tampering,” Coleman
Connelly, a doctoral candidate at Harvard University in
Cambridge, Mass., discussed what he described as Muslim
“accusations” against early Christian Greco-Arabic
translators for performing “textual trickery.” The Arabic
word for this falsification is tahrif, meaning “corruption,”
and implies what Connelly said is an “obliteration of the
past.” During antiquity alone, Jesus’ presumably Hebrew words
were translated into Aramaic, Greek, Syriac and Arabic.

“(Muslims) believed that translators may have sought
political gain in mistranslation and corrupted Jesus’ message
in a desire to deceive and conceal,” he said.

The Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch has existed since the
first century and remains popular in the Middle East, Asia
Minor and southern India. According to Syriac Orthodox
Resources, an online web library founded at the University of
California, Los Angeles, and now run by Catholic U., “The
church justifiably prides itself as being one of the earliest
established apostolic churches.”

Since 1991, the North American Syriac Symposium has united
Syriac Christian scholars from across the world to discuss
history, language and literature. Support comes from Catholic
U.’s Center for the Study of Early Christianity, the
Department of Semitic and Egyptian Languages and Literatures,
the School of Theology and Religious Studies and other
programs.

Stoddard can be reached at [email protected].

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