A FORGOTTEN TRANSLATION OF PSEUDO-METHODIUS 263

calls the Kingdom of the Greeks and Romans malkutii d-yawaniiye d-iyteyh

d-romiiye, �a,:i m..ach.ar<:i r6la..a:, r<c\-i� - that is, the ByzantineEmpire - wi u timate y o out, protecte y t e invincible ower of thecross. The final King of the Greeks ( malkii d-yawaniiye, r6la..a:i � , the lastByzantine Emperor, according to Pseudo-Methodius, will lead the Christiansin a great war in which the Ishmaelite Arabs will be expelled from the holyland, driven into the desert, and made subject once more, so that "their slaverywill be a hundred times more bitter than that which they had imposed." TheKing of the Greeks will return all the displaced peoples back to their landsof origin and punish bitterly all the apostates from Christianity. Finally, afterthe defeat of Gog and Magog, the King of the Greeks will go to Jerusalem, sur­render the crown of the Roman Empire to God, and this will be the end of allearthly rule. The Son of Perdition will arise and persecute Christians, but willthen be defeated with the return of Christ and the Last Judgment, with whichthe apocalypse concludes.6

Now, very few manuscripts of the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodiu.s exist in Syriac, many of them are fragmentary, and they are all fairly late. The primary witness to the Syriac text is a manuscript of the year 1586.7 Not surprisingly considering the apocalypse's popularity in the Byzantine world, many more manuscripts of the Greek translation of Pseudo-Methodius survive, close to one hundred if one counts all the different recensions and epitomes, but these too are relatively late, and the vast majority date from the post-Byzantine period.8 Nonetheless, four eighth-century manuscripts of the Apocalypse of

Pseudo-Methodiu.s survive in Latin, one of which can be precisely dated on the

6 For the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius, see Die Syrische Apokalypse des Pseudo-Methodius,

ed. G.J. Reinink, 2 vols (Leuven, 1993), 1:1-48 (for the Syriac text) and 2:1-78 (for a translation

in German). There are several English translations of Pseudo-Methodius, though they are

based on a single manuscript instead of Reinink's critical text. These are found in Martinez,

"Eastern Christian", pp. 58-203; Alexander, Apocalyptic Tradition, pp. 36-51. A partial transla­

tion is included in Andrew Palmer, Sebastian Brock, and Robert Hoyland The Seventh Century

in the West-Syrian Chronicles (Liverpool, 1993), pp. 230-242.

7 The primary witness to the text is Vaticanus syriacus 58, fols. 118v-136v. For the manuscripts

of Pseudo-Methodius in Syriac, see Reinink, Die SyrischeApokalypse, 1:xiv-xxi. For his critical

edition of the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius, Reinink also uses extensive selections of the

text quoted in Solomon of Basra's thirteenth-century Book of the Bee, which gives evidence of

Pseudo-Methodius' text from earlier than the extant manuscripts.

8 For descriptions of several of these manuscripts, see Anastasios Lolos, Die Apokalypse des

Ps.-Methodios, Beitriige zur klassischen Philologie 83 (Meisenheim, 1976), 26-44; idem, Die

dritte und vierte Redaktion des Ps.-Methodios (Meisenheim, 1978), pp.12-19.

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270 BONURA

Identical colophons in at least five thirteenth-century manuscripts of the

Armenian translation of Pseudo-Dionysius indicate that it was undertaken by

Step'anos and Davit from manuscripts in Constantinople in the year 6220 of

the creation of the world according to the Greek numbering, in the 14th indic­

tion, the second year of the reign of Emperor Philippikos. Colophons from the

manuscripts of two other works translated by the pair place their translation

activities in the reigns of Anastasios II and Leon III, and presumably these

translations were also undertaken in the Byzantine capital.29

TABLE 16.I Dates and locations of works translated by Step'anos of Siwnik' and Davit'

"Hiwpatos'; according to the colophons of surviving manuscripts.•

Work Location

Pseudo- Constantinople Dionysius

Scholia of Cyril

of Alexandria

Various works by Gregory of Nyssa

Year

("Greek

numbering")

6220 (711-712AD)

6224 (715-716AD)

6227 (718-719AD)

Indiction Regnal Year

14

14

14

Second year of

Philip(pikos)

Second year of Astas

( Anastasios II)

First year of Leo (m)

• Based on Thomson, The Armenian Version, pp. ix-xiii. The manuscripts containing thecolophons with information on the place and time of Step'anos' translation of Pseudo­Dionysius are codices Matanadaran 49, 51, 166, 167, and 1500. The colophon in Matanadaran 51 also includes the information on the translation of Gregory of Nyssa. The colophon with information on the translation of the Scholia of Cyril of Alexandria is in codex Bodleian Arm.69, fol. 172: Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare, Catalogue of Armenian Manuscripts in the BodleianLibrary (Oxford, 1918), p. 160.

These dates in these colophons are problematic. Some of the years listed do not

match up with the regnal years of the emperor listed, and most of the years are

placed in the wrong indiction (tax year).30 Still, while it is not surprising that

29 Thomson, The Armenian Version, pp. ix-xiii.

30 Thomson, The Armenian Version, p. xiii: The colophon for the copies of Pseudo-Dionysius

date it to the Byzantine year 6220 (September 1, 711-August 31, 712 AD), which it correctly

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A FORGOTTEN TRANSLATION OF PSEUDO-METHODIUS 273

was not just circulating in the periphery as Aerts and Kortekaas' assessment

implies, and it suggests that there was a similar interest at the Byzantine capi­

tal in the fate of Christians ruled by the new Islamic Arab power as among

Christians in Mesopotamia living under Muslim rule. It suggests that the Arab

invasions were not seen just as another barbarian invasion, but as something

more threatening, both a military and a religious challenge which needed to

be countered ideologically. This is why the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius

would have been so valuable: it claims to have been written by a fourth-cen­

tury Christian church father. If a patristic writer, had centuries, earlier foreseen

the coming of the Islamic Arabs through a vision from God, then it follows

that whatever depredations they committed were part of the Christian God's

plan for humanity; and if that same writer had foreseen the destruction of the

Islamic Arabs then their annihilation at the hands of the last Emperor of

the Christian Romans must have been just as assured as their sudden rise from

out of the desert.

Finally, for the Byzantines, who already by this time had come to see them­

selves as the New Israel, the Chosen People of God, the apocalypse makes clear

that God had not withdrawn his favour from them. The final age of the world

would not see the destruction of the Roman state, but its resurgence. This was

a crucial point. Repeated defeats at the hands of the Arabs, the loss of Syria,

Palestine, and Egypt, as well as two major sieges of Constantinople, meant that

old certainties of Christian universalism and God's ultimate support for the

Christian Empire of the Romans had gone out the window. We see these anxiet­

ies come to the fore in contemporary Byzantine thinking in a number of ways,

already in the canons of the Quinisext Council - held in the years 691-692,

about the same time as the original composition of the Apocalypse of Pseudo­

Methodius - and most notably a generation later in the iconoclast movement

that emerged under Leon III in the immediate aftermath of the second Arab

siege of Constantinople.37 The iconoclasts may have sought to root out a per­

ceived sin for which God was punishing his Christian people. The Apocalypse

37 For the canons of the Quinisext Council, see Concilium Constantinopolitanum a. 691/2 in

Trullo habitum (Concilium Quinisextum), ed. Heinz Ohme (Berlin, 2013). For a discussion

of the council as an attempt to deal with Byzantine anxieties over defeat and invasion,

see Frank Trombley, "The Council in Trullo (691-692): A Study in the Canons Relating to

Paganism, Heresy, and the Invasions," Comitatus: A journal of Medieval and Renaissance

Studies 9 (1978), 1-18. The standard work on Iconoclasm is now Leslie Brubaker and John

Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era c. 680-850: A History (Cambridge, 20n). See also

idem, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era (c. 680-850): The Sources (Aldershot, 2001), pp.

272-275.

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III