Download PDF | The Old Testament In Byzantium (Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Symposia And Colloquia) ( 2010)
344 Pages
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The major renovations at Dumbarton Oaks from 2003 to 2008 prompted AliceMary Talbot, then Director of Byzantine Studies, to explore other venues and other times for symposia and colloquia. Early in this period plans were afoot to hold a major exhibit of Bible manuscripts at the Freer Gallery of Art, which holds a small but important collection of early Greek Bible manuscripts, seldom seen in public. The planned exhibition inspired Dr. Talbot to form an alliance with the Freer and Sackler Galleries, to hold a concomitant symposium on the Bible. Paul Magdalino and Robert Nelson, Senior Fellows of Dumbarton Oaks, continued the planning of that symposium with Dr. Talbot’s help. The Freet’s impressive exhibit, “In the Beginning: Bibles Before the Year 1000,” displayed more than threescore early manuscripts of the Bible, in many languages, loaned from collections around the world. The Dumbarton Oaks symposium, “The Old Testament in Byzantium,” held 1-3 December 2006 in the Meyer Auditorium of the Freer Gallery, shared in the success of that exhibit, and has resulted in this eponymous volume.
As always, Dr. Talbot was gracious and efficient in shepherding the papers delivered at that symposium into the published material that makes up the volume in hand. We are grateful for her aid in this and so many other scholarly endeavors in the past. We also wish to remember the hospitality of the Freer and the Sackler and Dr. Ann Gunter, then the Curator of Ancient Near Eastern Art and Head of Scholarly Publications and Programs at the Galleries, and to thank the staff of the Publications Department at DO for their meticulous care in converting talk into print.
This is the second volume in the series Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Symposia and Colloquia. The first, published in 2009, was Becoming Byzantine: Children and Childhood in Byzantium, edited by Alice-Mary Talbot and Arietta Papaconstantinou. Other volumes in progress include San Marco, Byzantium, and the Myths of Venice (edited by Henry Maguire and Robert Nelson), and Trade and Markets in Byzantium (edited by Cécile Morrisson).
Paul Magdalino Robert Nelson
Introduction
PauL MAGDALINO AND ROBERT NELSON
Magéa tov néyav od dd Bev cic tUTOV dpxtov oddeic
BYZANTINE CHRISTIANITY HAS BEEN STUDIED in great depth in all its manifestations, from high theology to the simple, mechanical piety of formulaic prayers inscribed on cheap pectoral crosses. Yet the Bible, the foundation of all Christian belief, has never previously been the focus of any monograph, journal, handbook, volume of collected studies, conference, or exhibition devoted to Byzantium. Such apparent neglect is perhaps not surprising, if we take the view that the importance of the Bible in any Christian culture is self-evident, and that the ubiquity of the Bible in all Christian worship both inhibits meaningful comment and makes the theme very difficult to isolate for coherent historical presentation or discussion. The slightest acquaintance with Byzantium is sufficient to reveal that the Bible was everywhere we would expect it to be. Its exegesis by the Fathers ran to dozens of volumes. Manuscripts containing various divisions of Scripture—Pentateuchs, Octateuchs, Psalters, Prophet books, Gospel books, and Epistles—were to be found in most if not all of the empire’s myriad churches and monasteries, and in every household that could afford to own a book or two. No church or chapel could function without lectionaries of Bible readings for the daily offices, the Sunday Eucharists, and the festal calendar of the liturgical year. The Bible was cited in every conceivable milieu, in word and in image. Not only were hymns, prayers, homilies, theological tracts, ecclesiastical records, and religious paintings and inscriptions suffused with biblical allusions; the Bible was also quoted extensively in secular literature, official documents, and government propaganda. What more is there to say?
One answer is that, whereas exactly the same can be said of Western Christendom, we do have a number of books on the Bible in the Western Middle Ages! and on early Bibles,” but the Bible in Byzantium has yet to be written.’ Another answer is that no two Christian churches use the Bible in exactly the same way, and their different usage is part of what makes them distinctive and worth studying. The authority of a literal, unmediated reading of Holy Scripture was notoriously a major point of contention at the Reformation, and the appropriateness of a literal reading is still a live issue in the debate over the content of the science curriculum taught in schools in some parts of the United States. At a less controversial level, the scriptural canon varies among major Christian traditions, and gains or loses variously in each different translation; each tradition has evolved its own selection and sequence of texts for liturgical reading, and trains its clergy in its own tradition of scriptural exegesis. These are all reasons why students of Byzantine religion can benefit from a sharper focus on the Bible in the Orthodox tradition. Moreover, while there is obviously a lot of common biblical ground that Byzantine Christianity shares with the Western traditions, the familiarity with the Bible text that was second nature to earlier generations of Byzantinists can no longer be taken for granted; thus, a visit to the common scriptural foundations on which Byzantine art and literature based their distinctive evolution is useful for the orientation of Byzantine studies in the twenty-first century. At the same time, modern notions of the Scriptures, derived from printed or digitized editions of the whole Bible, are likely to distort our understanding—even if “we” are Orthodox—of the ways in which medieval Byzantines read, heard, recalled, and applied the sacred text. For believers then and now, the Bible message is timeless and divine, but actual readers are neither.
But where to begin, and how to circumscribe such a potentially vast and amorphous topic as the Bible in Byzantium? The solution adopted by the organizers of the 2006 symposium out of which this volume grew was to limit the topic to the Old Testament. This choice might seem surprising, since the New Testament is not only shorter and therefore more manageable, but also, being by definition exclusively Christian, was more central to Byzantine worship and belief and to the raison d’étre of Byzantium as Christ’s kingdom on earth. Yet for the culture and society of an earthly kingdom, the Old Testament was richer in tangible historical precedents. The New Testament promises personal salvation through individual belief in a master who transcends all social roles and institutions, as well as the division between humanity and divinity, because his kingdom is not of this world. The Old Testament, by contrast, tells the story and charts the destiny of a chosen people through the social, political, and ritual institutions by which they defined their collective special relationship with God, their exclusive separation from other peoples and empires, and their claim to a promised, holy land. For believers, the Old Testament is God’s word— often his only or last word—on a variety of human experiences that God’s people must undergo: warfare, inheritance, tyranny, captivity, exile, deliverance, pollution, purification, reward for obedience, and punishment for disobedience and apostasy. It also contains the divinely approved paradigms of the institutions by which God’s people organize themselves to worship and obey him: law, charismatic leadership, kingship, priesthood, prophecy, the holy city of Jerusalem, sacred space (the Tabernacle and Temple), and sacred objects (the Ark of the Covenant). In addition to these models of social behavior and experience, the Old Testament provides, in Genesis, a world view and a creation myth; in the Psalms and the Song of Songs, it yields a rich, emotional poetry of penitence, supplication, and praise for individuals as well as groups to use for their private devotions. The New Testament’s relations with contemporary society are different, because it was written partly to spiritualize and personalize, and partly to appropriate, the culture of the Old.
Also of particular interest for the cultural historian is the process of the Christianization of the Old Testament, or the ways in which it was appropriated and reconfigured by a Church that sharply diverged from the communities for which it was written and in which it continued to be read and revered for centuries. On the one hand, it originated and remained as the sacred text of the Children of Israel. Ona literal and straightforward level, the Old Testament recorded their history and genealogy, laid down their law, and set out God’s mandate, voiced through their patriarchs, kings, and prophets, for their ultimate possession of the promised land and the establishment of a Messianic kingdom. On the other hand, it became part one of the Christian Bible, which Christians, starting with the authors of the Gospels and St. Paul, interpreted as a prelude to and prefiguration of the Gospel story. Important persons, situations, literary images, and sacred objects in the Jewish Scriptures were construed as “types” of someone or something in the life of Christ and the mystery of the Incarnation; the Law of Moses was declared to have been made redundant by Christ’s teaching, while the visions of the prophets concerning the Jews and the Messiah were all applied to Christ and the Church.’ Thus, depending on how it was read and by whom, the Old Testament was for all Christian societies the most authoritative source of “native” wisdom and inspiration and, at the same time, the book that defined and enshrined the “otherness” of a distinct religious group that formed a disenfranchised and resented minority.
The tension between these two readings existed long before the foundation of Constantinople, and it affected all branches of the Christian Church, but it was particularly relevant to the Byzantine perception and reception of the Bible. Byzantium hada longer, closer, and more fraught relationship with the Jews than any other Christian community before the eleventh century.’ The Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament adopted by the Church, had been translated by Jews for Jews in Alexandria before the advent of Christianity, and it continued to circulate in the Byzantine Jewish community along with the Hebrew and Aramaic texts and the other Greek translations, notably that of Akylas.° From the fourth century to the seventh, the Roman empire based in Constantinople was responsible for a series of policies that had permanent and widespread effects on Jewish-Christian relations and entrenched both sides in their divergent interpretations of their common biblical heritage: the repressive legislation that turned Jews into second-class citizens;’ the transformation of the land of Israel into a Christian holy land;* and Heraklios’s attempt, in the aftermath of the empire’s great war with Persia, to force the Jews to convert.’
Byzantine Judaism not only proved resilient to this oppression but also found new confidence in the seventh-century crisis of the Christian empire. The Jews welcomed first the Persian and then the Arab invasions, which on the whole improved the outlook for them.” The Islamic conquests deprived the Christian empire of most of its territory, including the Holy Land; they removed the Jews of Syria, Palestine, North Africa, and Spain from Christian domination, and seriously challenged the teleology of Christian universalism, along with the doctrine, on which this ideology was based, of the kingship and divinity of Jesus Christ, the ultimate fulfilment of the Law, the Prophets, and all sacred history. The appearance of a new, expansionist, starkly monotheist faith that advertised itself as the true heir to the Hebrew Bible, planting its own place of worship on the site of Solomon’s Temple," compromised Christianity’s claim to have superseded Judaism, and created the hope that the outcome would ultimately vindicate the original keepers of the divine covenant.” The catastrophic reversals of the Christian Empire cast doubt on Christian interpretations of Old Testament apocalyptic texts, notably the Book of Daniel, and boosted Jewish expectations that these events presaged not the Second Coming of Christ but the first appearance of their own Anointed One.’* At the same time, the clash of empires encouraged the flourishing of heretical communities, some with pronounced judaizing tendencies, in Byzantium’s deep frontier zone with Islam. In these conditions, the Jews of the seventh to tenth centuries could argue their interpretation of Scripture with conviction, and the indications are that they did so not unsuccessfully. They continued to engage in debate with Christians,” who were sometimes at a loss for arguments, and in 861 they achieved the conversion of the ruling elite of a major steppe kingdom, the Khazars.’° Eminent Byzantine churchmen, such as Maximos the Confessor,” Andrew of Crete,” Theodore Stoudites,” and the patriarch Photios,”° wrote about the Jews with a virulence suggestive of more than literary and theological convention. Indeed, the fact that the Byzantine Jewish community endured, and survived, three further attempts at forced conversion—by Leo III in 721-22, by Basil I in 873-74, and by Romanos I in 931-32—demonstrates the continuing relevance of anti Judaic polemics.” All this involved reading and rereading the books of the Old Testament, as the question for whom they were intended and to whom they belonged remained open.
The Old Testament in Byzantium was therefore more than a repository of devotional and doctrinal texts; it was a contested cultural inheritance that deserves to be studied, separately from the New Testament, as an integral component of Byzantine identity. The need for a study is indeed highlighted by pertinent but mainly brief remarks about the Old Testament quality of Byzantine imperial ideology in the seventh and eighth centuries, about Byzantium’s self perceived role as the new Israel, and, more recently, about the Judaic strain in the “exactitude” (akribeia) of Orthodox doctrine and ritual.” This collection of papers is a first step in these directions. There is much more to do; important areas of the Old Testament and its impact in Byzantium remain untouched. The cosmology of Genesis; the eschatology of the minor prophets; the wisdom literature of Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes; the theodicy of almost every book from Exodus onward: the Byzantine understanding of all these themes still awaits investigation. So too do many obvious examples of Old Testament inspiration in Byzantine art, literature, and religious practice: Byzantine veneration of the holy sites of the Old Testament; the ideological significances of famous illuminated manuscripts such as the Joshua Roll and the Paris Psalter (Frontispiece); the place of Old Testament sacred symbols in the veneration of the Virgin Mary; the use of Old Testament texts and exempla in hagiography, hymnography, and homiletics. Yet in the ground it does cover, the present collection facilitates the approach to these and other important topics by dealing in depth with two major preliminaries. First, it looks at the ways and the forms in which Byzantines, Jews as well as Christians, actually encountered the text of the Old Testament (Chapters 2-5). Secondly, it looks at the most important ways in which Byzantine Christians used the text: to establish the events and chronology of world history (Chapter 6); to find language and inspiration for private devotion (Chapter 4); and as a source of models for comparison and emulation—in political leadership, in the ascetic life, and in the configuration of sacred space as symbolized by the holy building par excellence, the Temple in Jerusalem (Chapters 7-9 respectively).
Although systematic comparison with other medieval cultures was never an aim of this project—the rich reception of the Old Testament in the Frankish kingdoms, or in the Syriac orient, would require volumes in themselves—the Byzantine experience is not considered in isolation. Rather, the question of the Old Testament contribution to Byzantine style and civilization is further highlighted by setting it in the context of the empire’s satellite kingdoms, each of which used this same sacred text to establish an independent political identity and agenda within the common framework of a Christian oikoumene (Chapter 10). Finally, the volume concludes with a reminder that Islam, too, included Old Testament figures, notably Moses, in its sacred genealogy of the Prophet Muhammad (Chapter 11).
The appropriation of the Old Testament by Christian Greek culture, through Christian biblical exegesis, began with St. Paul and was completed by the middle of the fifth century. However, the application of Old Testament texts and models to the literature, art, and institutions of the Roman world did not take off until the fourth century, and did not begin to reach full altitude until late in the sixth. The appearance in this period of deluxe illustrated manuscripts of the book of Genesis, the books known as the Vienna Genesis and the Cotton Genesis, is proof of the full acceptance of the Old Testament by aristocratic culture. But these manuscripts are exceptional textually and pictorially and have no successors in later Byzantine art.” Both the Vienna and the Cotton Genesis remain isolated, idiosyncratic works, even though scholarship has attempted to read them as normative of early book decoration.”*
Our volume, however, focuses on the following period, from the seventh to the twelfth centuries, when patterns changed quickly and decisively for later Orthodox culture. During this period, particularly its first half, Byzantine writers, artists, statesmen, and churchmen most explicitly found inspiration and meaning in the language, images, stories, personalities, and values of the Old Testament. The essays that follow discuss how this happened. But why did it happen when it did, and what did it mean? To what extent did Byzantines identify, individually and collectively, with the Old Testament experience? Why did it coincide with a preoccupation with the Old Testament in other, very different Christian societies like Bulgaria, Ireland, Anglo-Saxon England, and Carolingian Francia?” In what sense did the Old Testament experience lead Byzantines to consider themselves a chosen people and their empire a new Israel? How did it relate to their perception of the old Israel? These are weighty and elusive questions, which could easily fill another volume. Yet some preliminary discussion is in order.
Byzantine literature leaves a strong impression of a literate society completely at home with the Old Testament, a society whose readers were thoroughly steeped in the text—or at least selected texts—of the Septuagint, and writers quoted from it with easy familiarity. This applies as much to the elite, classicizing styles and genres as to more “lowbrow” media such as hagiography, chronicles, and homely advice literature. A perusal of the citation indices of fourteen Byzantine authors from the seventh to the thirteenth centuries published in recent critical editions reveals that all of them quoted from both parts of the Bible; among biblical citations, the proportion of those from the Old Testament was never less than 30 percent, while in the cases of several “high-style” authors from the twelfth century it is consistently higher:
Letters and speeches of Nikephoros Basilakes: ca. 65 percent Letters of John Tzetzes: ca. 75 percent
Occasional poems of Theodore Prodromos: ca. 75 percent Orations of Eustathios of Thessalonike: ca. 60 percent History of Niketas Choniates: ca. 75 percent.”
Monks learned the Psalter by heart, or carried it with them as their constant companion and only possession (Chapter 4). Byzantines commonly applied lines of the Psalms to their own situations, while hagiographers and encomiasts freely interpreted the events they celebrated as fulfilments of Old Testament prophecies.”” Holy men modeled their predictions on the visions and pronouncements of Old Testament prophets; two southern Italian saints even reenacted the dramatic gestures of Jeremiah. God had commanded the prophet of Jerusalem’s destruction to “Go and procure thyself a linen girdle, and put it about thy loins, and let it not be put in water” (Jer. 13:1). St. Elias the Younger accordingly, when prophesying the Arab capture of Taormina, stood in the middle of the town with his habit hitched up to his knee.”* St. Phantinos similarly obeyed God’s reported command to “cut off thine hair, and cast it away, and take up a lamentation on thy lips; for the Lord has reprobated and rejected the generation that does these things” (Jer. 7:29).”
These monastic examples from the periphery are perhaps extreme. But the extent to which ordinary Byzantines adopted and replicated the language and mentality of the Old Testament is well illustrated by the fortunes of the words (6) vad¢ (tod) Kupiov, an expression of unmistakably Septuagint origin meaning “the Temple of the Lord.”*® The expression recurs with the same meaning in Jewish and Christian apocrypha, the Fathers, and chronicles.” Then it is used in several middle Byzantine texts to refer to any church. The abbot Euthymios, according to his Life in the eleventh-century imperial menologion, “urged [the brethren of his monastery] to keep decent silence év vag Kuptov.”” According to the ceremonial treatise of Philotheos (899), the investiture of the three highest court dignitaries, the caesar, kouropalates, and nobelissimos, takes place éml vaod Kvpiov.** The contemporary Book of the Prefect (912) specifies that a newly qualified notary is to be invested év va@ Kupiov near his residence, and maintains the biblical flavor by combining two psalm verses (119 [118]:5 and 141 [140]:2).**
The near-contemporary book of dream interpretation, the Oxeirocriticon of Achmet, has an explanation for the dreamer who sees himself standing naked év vag) Kuptov.” Theodore Stoudites, rejoicing at the news of the murder of the Iconoclast emperor Leo V in the palace church (820), comments, “It was right that he who laid waste the churches should behold the swords bared against him év va@ Kupiov.”** This contemporary remark adds authenticity to a later account of the punishment of Leo’s murderers by the emperor Theophilos (829); according to the Chronicle of Symeon the Logothete, Theophilos asked the senate, “Of what punishment is he worthy who enters into the Temple of the Lord (cic vadv Kupiov) and murders the Lord’s anointed?”” Few Byzantines would have missed the biblical resonance or even the original connotations of these words, and fewer still would have been likely to realize that they were not actually quoted from Scripture. The phrase is consistent with other indications that “Bible-speak” was adopted for solemn effect. Law and legislation in the eighth and ninth centuries imitated the wording of the Pentateuch. The advice literature exemplified by Constantine VII and “Kekaumenos” resonates with echoes of Solomonic wisdom, not all of them genuine quotations.”* The language of the Septuagint, however offensive to “Attic” ears, was beyond reproach.”
To return to the expression vad¢ Kupiov: in the imperial palace of Constantinople, there was a church dedicated to the Lord, without any other qualification.”® Situated as it was in the oldest part of the palace, between the Consistorium and the Scholae, the church—called both éxxhyola tod Kupiov (church of the Lord) and vad¢ tod Kupiov (temple of the Lord) in the Book of Ceremonies—seems to have been one of the earliest buildings in the complex.” Its unique dedication, avoiding all specific reference to Christ, would surely have called to mind the Temple in Jerusalem. If the allusion was deliberate, the church of the Lord would have functioned like two other objects in the palace that were either relics or, more likely, replicas of famous instruments of power mentioned in the Old Testament: the Rod of Moses and the Throne of Solomon.” According to the Book of Ceremonies, the Rod of Moses accompanied the emperor as he went in procession, via the church of the Lord, from his palace apartments to Hagia Sophia on major feast days.” Today it is a treasured relic of the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul.“ In a manner that recalls 1 Kings 10:18-25, the emperor sat on the Throne of Solomon in the hall of the Magnaura, when he received foreign ambassadors and preached to the people.”
The public use of these Old Testament memorabilia—which were only the most prominent of a large collection of relics divided between the palace and Hagia Sophia’°—demonstrates that Byzantine imperial ideology sought to sacralize the emperor's power by identifying it with the most powerful symbols of Jewish election. It gave concrete expression to the idea that the Christian Roman Empire was the new Israel and its people the chosen people of the new covenant. This idea of divine election on the Israelite model was not unique to Byzantium; many Christian peoples have embraced it throughout history, either in triumph or in tribulation,” because it is built into the New Testament, where God’s promise to Israel is transferred to the early Church in words borrowed from Exodus and Deuteronomy: “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people.”** Yet the New Testament threw open the election of one people to all nations without discrimination. In contrast, Byzantine and later appropriations of Israelite identity more or less reversed the process and reverted to the exclusiveness of the Jewish model, proclaiming the elect status of one particular group of Christians who identified themselves in political, social, or ethnic terms and reinforced this identity with Old Testament typology. The verus Israel of the early Church was a purely spiritual communion, which found unity in religion, whereas the new Israels of the Middle Ages and later based their religious mission on some other form of group identity. The transition from the one source of identity to the other is most easily understood in the cases of newly converted ethnic groups, whose members on the one hand wanted to resist political and cultural absorption into a large imperial polity and on the other hand found that the historical experience of the Jews—their tribal system, nomadic past, and state of constant warfare, not to mention their royal and priestly elites—spoke to their own situation.
The transition is less easy to understand, and to trace, in the case of Byzantium, which was the continuation of the universal Roman Empire that had adopted Christianity in the fourth century without any immediate or conspicuous adoption of Christianity’s Jewish cultural heritage and election ideology. It is true that Eusebios hailed Constantine as a new Moses and the Council of Chalcedon acclaimed Marcian as a new David (Chapter 7); it is true also that the Church developed certain basic features of an Old Testament, chosen people mentality, in referring to all non-Christian peoples as “Gentiles,” and in regarding all natural disasters and barbarian invasions as punishments for the transgression of God’s law.” The imperially sponsored development of Palestine as a Christian holy land for elite Christian pilgrimage, with a dense network of monasteries and sacred sites dominated by huge basilicas, can perhaps be seen as the creation of a new promised land for a new Israel.*° Some of the associations and attributes of the Temple were transferred to the Holy Sepulchre.” But the Christianization of the Holy Land can equally be seen as the final chapter in the Roman suppression of Jewish independence and the Temple cult.
As Christianity came to dominate the urban landscape of late antiquity at the expense of Greco-Roman culture, the Bible gained in importance as a source of inspiration and models. Constantinople was called “a second Jerusalem” ca. 500,” and soon afterward a Roman grande dame with imperial pretensions, Anicia Juliana, built a church there that was perhaps the most faithful replica of the Temple ever constructed for Christian worship.” Yet Justinian pointedly did not follow this precedent when reputedly outdoing Solomon in the reconstruction of Hagia Sophia, nor when he had a huge basilica, the Nea, erected in Jerusalem on a scale that dwarfed the Temple of Solomon and on a site overlooking the Temple Mount.” It was more important to efface than to replicate, to supersede than to appropriate, the Old Testament model. So it was too with the reinterpretation, under Justinian, of Daniel’s prophecy of the succession of world empires: the new identification of the Roman Empire not as the perishable fourth, iron kingdom, but as the “fifth monarchy,” the kingdom without end, was introduced by the Christian Topography attributed to Kosmas Indikopleustes without the comment that this effectively equated the Christian empire with the Messianic restoration of the kingdom of Israel.” Similarly, Malalas reproduced verbatim in his chronicle the Old Testament account of Sennacherib’s attack on Jerusalem as a “typological and topical” device for averting a Persian capture of Antioch (Chapter 6), but he refrained from explicitly identifying Christian Antioch with Judaic Jerusalem, or the empire of Justinian as the kingdom of Hezekiah. And he “conceived of Solomon as a Byzantine emperor and his kingdom as the empire of the sixth century,” perhaps because he wanted to convey the idea “that Greece and Rome had a part in divine revelation and election,” implying “that Israel and the Jewish people had never been the sole repositories of revelation and election.” Israel was thus not the sole or even primary model for Justinian’s empire.
Israel assumes greater prominence in the late sixth-century Life of the patriarch Eutychios by Eustratios, where, in a text full of Old Testament comparisons, the author describes his hero’s triumphant return to Constantinople from Amaseia. On his arrival at Nicomedia, it was not only “the faithful and Christloving people, ‘the royal priesthood, the holy nation,” who turned out to welcome Eutychios, but also “the community of the infidel Jews who are outside our fold.” The patriarch entered Constantinople in accordance with Isaiah’s prophecy of the people bringing priests and Levites into Jerusalem as gifts to the Lord (Is. 66:20-21), “for was it not thus, or even more so, that the faithful people brought their father, pastor, and teacher into the holy city, the New Jerusalem and queen of cities?””
For more sustained comparisons between Israel and the Christian people, Jerusalem and Constantinople, we have to wait for the troubled reign of Heraklios (610-41), when the simultaneous invasions of the Persians and the Avars nearly brought the empire to extinction, and Persian occupation of Syria and Palestine allowed the local Jews to take brief but bloody revenge on their Christian neighbors. The local narrator of events in Palestine, the monk Strategios, resorted to the Old Testament to explain this new Babylonian conquest and enslavement of the true Israel.** The ideology of the new Israel was preached both in Jerusalem itself, after the city was restored to Christian rule and the True Cross that the Persians had carried away was recovered, and in Constantinople, the new Jerusalem that had withstood the onslaught of the raging Gentiles. Sophronios, who became patriarch of Jerusalem after the Persian occupation, made his homily on the Presentation of Christ in the Temple (Hypapante) an extended interpretation of Symeon’s canticle (Luke 2:29-32, the Nunc dimittis) as a manifesto for “out with the old, in with the new.”” “For both the Law and the prophets who came after it had grown old and sought their own dismissal. Until the illuminating manifestation of Christ, the Law held sway and the prophets prophetically announced Christ’s mysteries. But let us in reply confess the amazing prophecies of Christ; let us, who have been transformed from a multitude of Gentiles into a New Israel and constitute God’s new people, shout in the words of the psalm, ‘Oh sing unto the Lord a new song’ (Ps. 97:1)... For we have been renewed, made new from old, and we have been ordered to sing a new song unto God who has renewed us through the coming of Christ and revealed us to be his new people.”® Although Sophronios kept his discourse purely spiritual and avoided topical allusions, his appeal to the Christians of Jerusalem as the New Israel had a special meaning in the light of the violence they had recently suffered at the hands of the children of the old Israel.”
No such ambiguity surrounds the remarkable homily that Theodore, the synkellos of the Great Church of Constantinople, wrote to celebrate the failure of the joint attack on the city by the overwhelming forces of the Avars and Persians in 626.” The homily is devoted largely to demonstrating that certain Old Testament prophecies concerning Jerusalem and Israel found their fulfilment in this event and not in Jewish history. In a discourse stuffed full of Old Testament comparisons, containing several anti-Jewish asides, Theodore argues that the prophets Isaiah (7:1-12, 40:9ff.), Zechariah (8:19), and Ezekiel (38, 39:1-12) are all really foretelling the deliverance of Constantinople, the new Jerusalem, through the miraculous intervention of the Virgin Mary. Most remarkable is his discussion of the prophecy of Ezekiel concerning Gog and Magog. This prophecy was never fulfilled, says Theodore, with respect to the original people of Israel, since the only violent invasion they suffered after the Babylonian captivity was that of Titus, when, far from being destroyed, the Roman invaders had themselves destroyed Jerusalem, the Temple, and much of the Jewish people. Nor can the prophecy ever apply to the Jews in future, since they are scattered all over the world and no longer have a country to call their own. The prophecy surely applies much better to the Avars and the great losses they have suffered in their failure to take Constantinople; indeed, even the topography of Constantinople is more appropriate to Ezekiel’s description, which mentions islands and says that the cemetery of Gog was by the sea. “So I am right to interpret Gog as the gathering of nations that the rabid dog [the Avar khagan] mobilized against us, for I have learned from others that the name Gog signifies a multitude and assembly of nations. And rightly have I interpreted the land of Israel to be this city, in which God and the Virgin are piously glorified and all mysteries of pious devotion are performed. For to be a true Israel means to glorify the Lord with a sincere heart and willing soul; and to inhabit a land of Israel without deceit means to offer pure and bloodless sacrifices to God in every place. What else but that is this city, which one would not be wrong to call in its entirety a sanctuary of God?”®
The homily of Theodore is an extraordinary, almost indiscreet statement born of extraordinary, apocalyptic circumstances, but there can be no doubt that the author, as a high-ranking member of the patriarch’s staff, was expressing an official point of view. It is echoed by contemporary publicity, in the poems of George of Pisidia and in the David Plates, which celebrate the emperor Heraklios through the use of Old Testament types, notably as a new David (Chapter 7); it also corresponds to the emperor’s own efforts to sacralize his regime by restoring the Cross to Jerusalem and by adopting a form of imperial title that more explicitly declared his co-kingship (symbasileia) with Christ.°* Moreover, although the issue had been forced by a specific crisis, it did not recede when that crisis passed. The Byzantine Church perpetuated the memory of Constantinople’s near escape in annual commemorations, in enhanced devotion to the Virgin, and, probably, in the enrichment of the Lenten liturgical cycle, through the addition of a new “victory” prooimion to the Akathistos hymn, and through the institution of readings from Isaiah that were all selected for their concern with the sins, punishment, and deliverance of Jerusalem from the Assyrians.” While the selection spoke to the theme of personal penance during Lent, it also expressed the collective identity of the Byzantines as the new Israelites in the face of their enemies—not just the Avars and Persians, but the Arabs and the Bulgars who replaced them, and then, eventually, the Turks and the Latins.
The Old Testament ideology formed in the crisis of the Avar siege thus remained intact in the decades and centuries that followed. It was soon reconfigured to refer to the conquering Arabs—“the abomination of desolation,” “the desert Amalek,” “the Philistine wolf .. . the Assyrian host”**—who were seen as God’s scourge for the sins, and especially the heresy, of the Byzantines. This ideology came to the fore again under the last emperor of Heraklios’s dynasty, Justinian I] (685-695, 705-711). Justinian not only took the propaganda of co-kingship with Christ a stage further by placing the icon of Christ, with the inscription Rex regnantium,” on the obverse of his gold coinage, but also, at around the same time (691-92) called a reforming church council that gave concrete expression to the idea of the Byzantines as a chosen people by legislating to purify their moral and ritual behavior of all alien—that is, Hellenic and Jewish—adulteration. Though it defined itself as ecumenical, the Council in Trullo or Quinisext, unlike its predecessors, did not discuss theology, but issued only disciplinary canons that concerned the laity as much as, if not more than, the clergy; moreover, it prescribed the usage of the church of Constantinople as normative, condemning as “judaizing” certain ritual practices not only of the Monophysite Armenians, but also of the impeccably orthodox church of Rome. At the same time, the council had to cope with the effects of the Arab and Bulgar invasions that had overrun numerous Christian communities and driven their bishops from their sees. Thus when the assembled prelates, in their opening address, praised the emperor’s care for “God’s own people (reptodctoc Aaédc),” “the holy nation, the royal priesthood, on whose behalf Christ died,” they were not mouthing an empty formula, or simply repeating the Pauline and Petrine echoes of Exodus and Deuteronomy, for when they referred ambiguously to the 79 (passions or sufferings) that were tearing the chosen people apart, their ambiguity was deliberate: they meant both the spiritual vices that were displeasing to God and the sufferings inflicted by the invaders, who were the instruments of God’s wrath—exactly as in the history of Israel.
That Justinian II understood the references to the chosen people in their more restrictive, Old Testament sense is suggested by the information that he gave the name treptototog Awds to the army that he sent against the Islamic caliphate in the very same year as the council.” According to the source (Theophanes), Justinian’s army was composed of captive Slavs, but it is just possible that, as related in book two of the Miracles of St. Demetrios, the army included descendants of Christian Greeks who had been taken captive by the Avars and settled in the region of Sirmium ca. 620.” According to the anonymous author of the Miracles, the community survived and even increased in exile, by keeping their Orthodox faith, “just as the Hebrew people did in Egypt under Pharaoh,” until, sixty years later they were led out, “just as it is recorded in the Mosaic book of the Exodus of the Jews.” Regardless of the ethnic origins of Justinian II’s army, he and the fathers of the council in Trullo used the expression “chosen people” within a general context of reading the Old Testament history of Israel into the contemporary experience of the embattled Christian empire.
Although the failure of Justinian II’s “crusade,” and the excesses that led to his double downfall discredited his particular style of sacral rulership, including his promotion of the icon of Christ, the basic Old Testament ideology that had informed the council in Trullo was not invalidated. If anything, the conviction was intensified that the chosen people needed to regain God’s favor by stricter application of and obedience to divine law. The eighth century saw the promulgation in 741 of a new imperial law code, the Ecloga of Leo III and Constantine V, based on the Justinianic corpus but with a more religious and less Roman rationale;” it may even have seen an attempt to implement the letter of the law of Moses. It is natural to assume that the Torah had no place in a society founded on antinomian Christianity and Roman jurisprudence. Yet the Christian concept of law was derived from the Old Testament, and this had long been a major source of inspiration for canon law in the West.” Several Byzantine manuscripts preserve a collection of seventy excerpts from the Pentateuch arranged in fifty chapters under the general title Selection (Exdoyy) from the Law given by God through Moses to the Israelites.” Since most copies of it are transmitted along with the Ec/oga of Leo III and Constantine V, and since, moreover, the Nomos Mosaikos echoes the Ecloga in title and structure, it was natural to assume that both collections were produced at the same time. Andreas Schminck has recently challenged this assumption, and argued that the Nomos Mosaikos was produced by the patriarch Photios ca. 865—67 to provide a law code that could be used in place of the Ecloga by the newly converted peoples of Eastern Europe.” The argument is compelling but not decisive; it does not offer a better explanation for the manuscript tradition, and it neglects one obvious point. The authors of the Ecloga, Leo III and Constantine V, were the emperors who sought to enforce one item of the Nomos Mosaikos, namely, the second commandment of the Decalogue, against the making and worshipping of graven images. If there is one thing that students of the ink-intensive issue of Iconoclasm seem to agree on, it is that the imperial reform was basically motivated by a perception that God was punishing his chosen people for the idolatry of icon-worship. The defenders of images consistently accused their opponents of judaizing, which, however unfair, reflects the fact that the veneration of icons and the Cross had been one of the main points of contention between Jews and Christians in the seventh century.” An early pro-icon treatise, the Admonition of the Elder (Nouthesia Gerontos), portrays a venerable iconophile monk in debate with an iconoclast bishop sent by the emperor to preach the abolition of icons in obedience to the law of Moses.” The monk objects that Moses and the prophets spoke only for the world before Christ, who had introduced a new law and new traditions. The bishop maintains that the prophets uttered their divinely inspired words for all time, and repeatedly insists that, apart from the rules specifically lifted by Christ, “the Law of Moses remains forever,” adding that “the holy emperor ... agrees that the words of the Old Testament are to be observed.”
The Nomos Mosaikos, like the Ecloga, was made redundant by the revival of Roman law in the legislation of the Macedonian emperors after 867. Before that, however, we should not underestimate its impact on Byzantine legal culture of the eighth and ninth centuries.” As in prophecy, so in law, the Old Testament provided not only substance but also an authentic style of discourse for an embattled theocratic society. The Farmer's Law (Nomos georgikos), a rural law code of the eighth or ninth century, besides following the Ec/oga in its punitive clauses, is heavily influenced by the language and the concepts of the Pentateuch.”* Traces of this Old Testament tone still persist in the early legislation of the Macedonian emperors, in the prefaces to the Ezsagoge and the Procheiros nomos,” and even in chapter 1.3 of the Book of the Eparch, which, as we have seen, describes the investment of a notary év va@ Kupiov and ends with quotes from Psalms 118 and 14.
‘The restoration of icons at the Triumph of Orthodoxy in 843 spelled the end of the attempt to apply the letter of Old Testament law to the reality of Byzantine life. It did not, however, put an end to the Byzantine claim on the identity of the True Israel. That claim in one sense intensified with the production of iconophile propaganda, in word and in image, arguing that the Old Testament had prefigured not merely the Incarnation of Christ but also the images by which he and his mother were depicted.*” Photios used comparisons with Israel and Jerusalem in his homilies,” and Arethas, in debate with the Jews, re-asserted the identity of “us Christians” as the True Israel.’ The comparison of Christian saints with Old Testament types reached a high point in the panegyrical homilies of Niketas the Paphlagonian in the early tenth century.”
The self-image and cultural patronage of the Macedonian emperors were profoundly inspired by Old Testament models. This is most striking in the case of the founder of the dynasty, Basil I (867-86), whose upstart rise to power made him keen to identify himself as a new David and to claim the special protection of the prophet Elijah, to whom he built or rebuilt three churches in Constantinople.** They included the magnificent Nea Ekklesia on the edge of the imperial palace, which became a repository for the relics of Old Testament worthies;* this church has disappeared without trace, but its ideological significance can be glimpsed in a sumptuous manuscript executed for Basil, perhaps at the initiative of Photios, at around the same time: the copy of the homilies of Gregory of Nazianzos (Par. Gr. 510) that is lavishly illustrated and has a wealth of Old Testament typology.**
This concern for Old Testament models of kingship is still to be found in the tenth century. The son of Basil the new David, Leo VI “the Wise” (886912), posed as a new Solomon through his legislation and learning.”’ When Leo brought the relics of Lazaros to Constantinople, Arethas compared them to the Ark of the Covenant, and the emperor to both Moses and David.** The image of the Ark was exploited further by Leo’s son, Constantine VII, in regard to the relics that arrived during his personal reign (945-959), both on his own initiative (the body of St. Gregory of Nazianzos), and thanks to his predecessor and father-in-law Romanos I (920-945), who had organized the translation of the Mandylion of Edessa.*” So powerful and official was this image in the tenth century, with its implication that the emperor was the new David and Constantinople was the new Jerusalem, that it even influenced the perception and portrayal of translations of relics in the past.’° Thus, the Menologion of Basil II depicts the fifth-century repatriation of the remains of St. John Chrysostom using the imagery of a coffer being carried by bearers, not a casket being transported in a chariot.
Constantine VIL, his circle, and successors are associated in other ways with Old Testament images that express political and dynastic concerns. Popular in art of the mid- to late tenth century is the figure of Joshua, Moses’ successor, who led the Israelites into the promised land. The famed Joshua Roll and other images of Joshua in ivory have been seen in the context of the Byzantine campaigns in Syria and Palestine in the 960s and 970s.” In a Cappadocian church, the portrait of Emperor Nikephoros II Phokas (963-969), who campaigned against the Muslims in Syria, is associated with Joshua.” The Byzantine-Arab wars of the ninth and tenth centuries are the general background to the later epic of Digenes Akrites, which mentions the depiction of Joshua, together with other heroes of the Old Testament and Greek mythology, on the gilded mosaic vaults of Digenes’ palace.”
Perhaps the clearest visual example of the political use of the Old Testament by Macedonian emperors is the large illuminated Psalter in Paris, Bibl. Nat. gr. 139." Through accompanying personifications that “define a contemporary meaning,” the illustrations of the Paris Psalter create “a self contained idealized image of the Macedonian Emperor,” as Ioli Kalavrezou has explained.” For his part, Hugo Buchthal drew attention to an anomaly in the Paris Psalter’s portrait of David, the author of the Psalms, flanked by Sophia on the left holding a book and Prophecy on the right, pointing to David’s open book (Frontispiece). Typically, portraits of authors show them writing or displaying their treatise that begins on the facing page. David’s book, however, is not inscribed with Psalm 1, but the first verse of Psalm 71 (72), “O God, give thy judgment to the king (r@ Bacthei), and thy righteousness to the son of the king (tod Bacthéwc).””® Since Heraklios, each Byzantine ruler had styled himself as basileus, the biblical word for king or emperor. Thus, in the tenth century, this verse would also have been read as asking God for judgment and righteousness for the Byzantine emperor and his son, an association made as well visually.
Here David is crowned and wears the red shoes with pearl ornament of the Byzantine emperor. The patterned silk around his shoulders is of imperial purple and has a large embroidered section in gold with further designs. Buchthal noted that Psalm 71 (72) is quoted several times in the preface to Constantine VII’s De administrando imperio that was written for the emperor's son, the future Romanos II, and through this analogy, he suggested that the Paris Psalter or its model also might have been created for Romanos.” The action of the figure of Prophecy at the right supports that interpretation. She establishes eye contact with the beholder, points to the book, and visually asserts that the Psalm verse should be read prophetically. That judgment and righteousness have been and will be given to the king is indicated by Wisdom at the left. By her gaze, she catches the attention of the beholder and with the index finger of her left hand she points to David. The white bird above his gilded nimbus resembles the dove of the Holy Spirit at the Baptism of Jesus in the Menologion of Basil II of ca. 1000, and confirms that the subject of the Paris Psalter miniature is sacral kingship.”* Further testimony to the interest in David at the time of Constantine VII is provided by a series of epigrams that once served as captions to an extensive David cycle of (mural?) paintings.”
Constantine VII, perhaps in unconscious echo of Justinian II, or perhaps in accordance with a continuous tradition of exhortation from the throne, addressed his troops as periousios laos.'°° A contemporary homily celebrating the arrival of the Mandylion from Edessa in 944 compares it to the Ark and ends with a prayer to Christ to “strengthen God’s own (periousios) army against the blasphemers.”’** Other tenth-century texts apply the Old Testament language of election to the whole Byzantine population threatened by Arab raids.” In the next century, this identification of the empire and emperor with the kingdom of the Israelites and their king David made possible the illustrated Psalter in the Vatican, gr. 752, whose imagery, it has been argued, functions as a critique of the emperor in the guise of David.’”
References, explicit or implicit, to Byzantium as the new Israel and to Constantinople as the new Jerusalem recur throughout Byzantine rhetorical literature of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.’°* They reach a crescendo, as one might expect, in the thirteenth, with the conquest of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade (1204), the “Babylonian exile” of its people, and their repatriation after its liberation from the Latins in 1261." The Latin occupation of Constantinople proved, according to a contemporary commentary on the Great Canon of Andrew of Crete, that the prophecies of Isaiah about the captivity and ruination of Jerusalem “unambiguously concern this new Jerusalem and new Rome.” One should not underrate the value of these references, which undoubtedly express the genuine conviction of the Byzantines that they were special—that they had the right religion, that their city was the eye and navel of the world,” that their empire was sanctioned by God, and that all other peoples, including other Christians, were Gentiles. This was a period when Byzantium, now under threat from the West as well as from Islam, became increasingly defensive of its ritual and doctrinal purity, and correspondingly assertive of the exclusive, elect status of its traditions and its sacred space. The Byzantines resembled the children of Israel not only in their experience of suffering and exile, but also in their lack of missionary fervor, which differentiated them from both Muslims and Western Christians.’°* The rhetorical texts that reflect this sense of passive superiority in biblical terms often show an impressive familiarity with the Septuagint text, as well as skill in selecting the symbol, the comparison, or the quotation that casts the subject in the right Old Testament role. Yet the lasting impression is one of rhetoricity, of a masked ball in which no disguise can deceive. It is doubtful whether these typological gymnastics added any new dimension or depth to the conception of Byzantium as the new Israel and the Byzantines as the chosen people. The accumulation, repetition, and variation of Old Testament parallels were not systematic or progressive. The words and symbols remained in a world of their own, without closing the gap between the world that had created and the world that received them. This was partly because they had to compete with symbols from the other cultures to which Byzantium was heir: as always, Rome, and, increasingly from the eleventh century, ancient Greece.” But mainly it was, it may be suggested, because a literal reading and imitation of the Old Testament was blocked. Every attempt to use Old Testament typology as a prescription for the new Israel had proved a dead end. The idea of concretizing the reality of Constantinople as the new Jerusalem with a church built according to the specifications of the Temple was tried in St. Polyeuktos, but rejected in Justinian’s Hagia Sophia and in the middle-Byzantine domed cross-in-square model. The relevance of Old Testament prophecy to the Byzantine situation was never denied, but Theodore Synkellos took it as far as it could safely or credibly go in the extraordinary circumstances of the Avar siege. As for the partial revival of the law of Moses, this could never compete with the existing corpus of Roman and canon law, and it was in any case irretrievably discredited by iconoclasm, the failed attempt to condemn a traditional devotional practice as idolatry.
To read the Old Testament literally was to read it as a text written by Jews, about Jews, and for Jews, and thus to incur the charge of judaizing, or conversion to Judaism."° Judaizing and hellenizing (lapsing into paganism) were the ultimate apostasies to which deviations from Orthodoxy were compared. In this sense, the place of the Old Testament in Byzantine culture bore some resemblance to that of the pagan classics: it was dangerous if taken neat. The perils of intoxication are vividly dramatized in a tenth-century saint’s life, the Life of Basil the Younger, which contains one of the longest apocalyptic narratives in the whole of Byzantine literature.'"’ In this, the probably fictitious saint arranges for Gregory the narrator to be shown an extended preview of the Last Judgment, all because Gregory had had kind thoughts about the Jews, based on his thorough reading of the Old Testament. Contemplating in his cell one day, he had had “the strange and loathsome notion, namely that the Jews piously believe and by their reverence do right by the Creator.” He had reflected on the virtues and godliness of all the Old Testament worthies, from Abraham to the prophets, and he had asked himself, “How is their faith evil and ours good? Their faith is surely good, since they do not place faith in idols, but in God who created heaven and earth.”"”” Gregory goes off to confess his troublesome thoughts to the holy man, though not without stopping off en route to watch a race at the Hippodrome. When he arrives, he does not need to mention either his thoughts or the Hippodrome: Basil knows and is not amused."”’ He delivers a stern lecture on the perdition of the Jews, and brings on the vision of the Last Judgment as a practical demonstration. Of course, Gregory witnesses the damnation of many other groups, including corrupt and sinful clergy. However, the climax of the drama is the moment of truth for the Jews, when they finally realize that the divine judge, Christ, is none other than the man they condemned to death.""* The moral of the story is that the good Jews of the Old Testament were not really Jews at all, but proto-Christians, and the Old Testament was not really Jewish history.
The concepts of new Israel and chosen people corresponded to two beliefs that the Byzantines held about the place of their society in the world and in history. One was their sense of Orthodoxy, by which they meant not only right belief but also, increasingly from the seventh century, right practice in ritual and worship. The other was their theory of theocracy: the divine institution of the Christian empire, and the Christ-loving emperor's co-kingship with Christ. Both Byzantine Orthodoxy and Byzantine theocracy were fundamentally incompatible with Judaism. At the base of the orthodoxy defined by the early Church councils were the doctrines of the Trinity, and the Virgin Birth, Crucifixion, and Resurrection of Christ as the incarnate God; Orthodoxy also came to embrace the cult of the Virgin Mary, the veneration of icons, and reverence for the monastic life. All these features of Christianity were strenuously rejected by the Jews, as by Islam. Byzantine theocracy was based on the principle that the Christian empire was the earthly manifestation and anticipation of the kingdom of Christ, which superseded all other terrestrial realms; in other words, it was the messianic kingdom announced by the Old Testament prophets and awaited by the Jews along with the true Anointed of God."” It is thus not surprising that the three most forceful medieval expressions of the theocratic argument that the Christian empire is not the fourth, iron kingdom of Daniel’s prophecy, but the eternal “fifth monarchy,” all occur in the context of refu-tations of the Jews.'”* The need to refute Jewish messianic expectations based on the Bible also helps to explain why Byzantine apocalyptic texts foresee such a negative role for the Jews in the Last Things, as the supporters of Antichrist (i.e., their “false Messiah”),""” and as the obdurate Christ-killers who refuse to recognize the Supreme Judge until it is too late."
In the final analysis, Byzantine citation of the Old Testament was subordinated and peripheral to the New, and the identity of the new Israel was assumed to the detriment of the old. The emperors who most identified with Old Testament figures—Heraklios the new David, Leo III who enforced the second Commandment and took on the mantle of Melchisedek, and Basil I, another new David, who venerated Elijah—were also the most energetic in pressuring the Jews to convert. Basil I’s New Church with its Old Testament relics was on the edge of the palace, while at its center stood the Pharos church that housed the relics of Christ's Passion and death at the hands of the Jews,"”” as Christians were dramatically reminded in the hymns and readings of the Good Friday vigil. Justinian II, the emperor who called his army periousios laos, was also the emperor who put the icon of Christ on his coins. For all the interest in Joshua that accompanied the Byzantine offensive against Islam in the tenth century, troops fought under the sign of the Cross and were blessed by contact with the Passion relics and fortified by the prayers of holy ascetics.’*® The triumph of David is displayed on plates, stamped with the hallmarks of Heraklios, but this is private art. When the same emperor sailed from Carthage to Constantinople, the ship’s sails bore the public images of the Virgin.” Later Byzantines and their emperor went into battle accompanied by icons of the Virgin and relics of the True Cross,’ and from the time of Constantine, Byzantine crosses, even for monastic use, had a triumphal, militaristic character, especially during the Macedonian period.’”
It would be premature to assert that the Old Testament became more marginal to Byzantine Christianity than to the Christianity of other medieval societies, especially when further research in Byzantine religion and culture may lead to other conclusions and the centrality or marginality of a phenomenon as diffuse as the Old Testament involves an investigation of the entire social, economic, and political structure of a society. An Orthodox scholar has written that “the ultra-traditionalist orientation of Byzantine spirituality helped to preserve ... some themes typical of the religious culture of ancient Israel which were
lost in the Occident,”!”*
and a Catholic scholar has concluded from a study of the Theodore Psalter that, “important and influential Byzantine Christians were keen to see the common roots between their religion and that of the Jews, in the Old Testament, in apocryphal narrative, and through an interest in liturgical customs.” But even at the height of the Old Testament “craze” in the eighth and ninth centuries, one has the impression that the typology was less painstakingly and systematically applied in Byzantium than in the other Christian empire, that of Carolingian Francia—just as the process has been more thoroughly studied by Western medievalists than by Byzantinists.’** The Orthodox dropped Old Testament readings from the Divine Liturgy after the seventh century, and they did not name their children after Old Testament figures, even though they might take prophetic names on entering the monastic life. Finally, one should not forget that it was Byzantine accusations of judaizing, through the use of azymes (unleavened bread), that sparked the schism with the Latin West in 1054.7”
After Iconoclasm, Byzantine churches mainly had centralized plans and decoration largely confined to New Testament scenes and images of saints. Thus middle and late Byzantine churches do not have long naves decorated with cycles of Old Testament narratives as in Italian basilicas, and they never embraced the fashion for stained glass and panels of Old Testament images that are favored in churches north of the Alps. Frontal images of Jesus, Mary, and the saints are preferred to narrative cycles, which reappear only in later centuries. The theology and devotional practices of the icon come to rival if not prevail over the cult of relics. As a result, the many architectural accommodations that medieval western churches made for relic pilgrims find few counterparts in the East. Until 1204, Constantinople possessed the greatest collection of Passion relics in the Christian world, but, sequestered in the palace, those relics were not the objects of mass pilgrimage. In the West, by contrast, even after miraculous icons were imported from Byzantium, relics remained more important there than religious pictures. These larger differences inform the differing use and significance of Old Testament imagery in Greek and Latin Christianity.
From the twelfth century, Old Testament representation and exegesis played an ever more important role in Western Europe.’”® When King Louis IX received the great Passion relics from Constantinople, he had constructed that masterpiece of Gothic architecture, the Ste. Chapelle (Fig. 1), dedicated in 1248. The new setting, it has been remarked, was “very similar in concept to that of the Byzantine palace church of the Pharos,”’” and indeed both churches were embedded within palaces that stood not far from the cathedrals of both cities. Because the two palatine chapels are so similar, the differences in their pictorial decoration are telling. The mosaics of the ninth-century Pharos chapel, though destroyed, are known from a homily of Patriarch Photios. In the dome Christ presided as overseer. Below in concave segments were angels, in the apse, the Virgin with arms outstretched, and elsewhere, apostles, martyrs, prophets, and patriarchs.
Of the latter, only David and Jacob at the Pharos chapel can be identified through the texts they presented. Though silent, according to Photios, the prophets cry out their “sayings of yore.””*° By the pictorial economy of holy images, this communication most likely consisted of frontal figures, who were available and accessible to beholders, as in later Byzantine churches (Fig. 2). These holy figures displayed texts, and since reading then was predominately oral, not silent, these “sayings” were indeed audible, when voiced by literate viewers/readers. The Ste. Chapelle, in contrast, has rows of tall stained glass windows filled with dense imagery. It is an architecture enlivened not by the reflected light of gold mosaics, lit by candles and lamps, but by direct illumination passing through webs of pictorial narratives. Some are so distant that individual figures cannot be deciphered, at least with the visual skills that most have today, and accompanying inscriptions are absent.’ Following tradition, the north and south sides of the church are devoted to the Old Testament, visually narrated in such a way as to articulate “the foremost components of French medieval monarchic rule and the specifically Capetian claims to sacral kingship.” In so doing they “fuse biblical past and historical present in the figure of Louis IX,” thereby including him and his people among the chosen people of the Bible.’*”
Contemporary Parisian illuminated manuscripts emphasized Old Testament narratives to an extent that would be astounding in Byzantium. It has been estimated that while the Ste. Chapelle has 650 Old Testament images, the contemporary Bibles moralisées each have 1800, the Medieval Picture Bible in the Morgan Library 350, and the famed Psalter of St. Louis, 130 scenes.'*? The Morgan manuscript (Fig, 3), in particular, makes explicit the connection with contemporary France, because its biblical heroes are dressed as knights, who wage war with the full panoply of available technology.’** Nowhere in evidence is the visual distinction between past and present of the tenth-century Joshua Roll and its subtle political allegory. Now the Old Testament is appropriated, directly and fully, and one almost wants to say, crudely, in the service of a different ruler and army that aspired to conquer the Holy Land.
Looking for parallel representations in Byzantium, one can point to the later thirteenth-century Vatopedi Octateuch that reproduces the iconography of the Joshua Roll and might have some connection with the imperial family,'®* a subject treated in John Lowden’s chapter in this volume, but at no moment does it narrate the conquest of the Holy Land as graphically and realistically as the Morgan Picture Bible. Early Palaeologan Psalters repeat images from the tenth-century Paris Psalter (Frontispiece) or a sister manuscript,'** but without the latter’s ideology of imperial power and succession.’ Thus, while the Macedonian manuscript was likely made for the son of Constantine VII, to date no Palaeologan Psalter has been found to have a history to match the Psalter of St. Louis that, it has been speculated, might have been created for the son of Louis [X."** The multivolume Leo Bible from the mid-tenth century (Rome, Vat. Reg. gr. 1) has illustrated frontispieces to books of the Old Testament, but has no successors, and in general the Bible in Byzantium was packaged in multiple textual units, unlike the pandects of late antiquity,’ the Italian Giant Bibles of the Romanesque period, or the standardized single volume Bibles associated with thirteenth-century Paris.”
Since the imperial palace at Blachernae was pillaged at the end of the empire, Constantinople today lacks a royal chapel to compare to that of Louis LX, but the church of the Chora offers an approximate analogy (Figs. 2 and 4). Redecorated by the prime minister of Andronikos I, Theodore Metochites, it is the finest aristocratic church of its day and was located near the imperial palace." In the narthex, as one of us has argued, the Chora has narrative scenes of the biblical past that, like the Ste. Chapelle, legitimate the present by means of the New, not the Old, Testament.” Indirect reference is made to the reigning emperor Andronikos II through an unprecedented emphasis on the otherwise obscure St. Andronikos, who looks toward the politically salient mosaic of Joseph and Mary enrolling for taxation in Bethlehem.” The isolated Old Testament scenes on the side walls of the nearby parekklesion (Fig. 2) do not narrate the story of the chosen people, but serve as antitypes of the Virgin, largely drawn from Marian liturgies.'** Similarly, the fancifully dressed warriors below (Fig. 4) are military saints, not crusading Israelites, as in the Morgan manuscript (Fig, 3).'” These near-life-size figures and the saintly clergy at the east end of the parekklesion are positioned close to beholders and encourage veneration by those visiting the tombs here. These icons support and visually dominate the narrative scenes above (Fig. 2).
During the later Middle Ages, the East and the West had different “aristocratic practices of the sign” and “conditions of representation [that] are both determined and mediated by [them].”"*° In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Capetian rulers subscribed to a secular typology and a “virtually causal” relationship between biblical heroes and the French king.” They accorded ever greater significance to Old Testament narratives that are visible signs of a hierarchical social structure and the vertical integration of the past and present.’ Byzantine Macedonian emperors of the ninth and tenth centuries promoted the Old Testament for political and dynastic reasons (Frontispiece) and encouraged an identification with the biblical chosen people, especially when going on the offensive in the direction of the Holy Land. Consequently, our volume focuses on the period up to the end of the twelfth century.
Matters changed, however, in the Palaeologan period. When the first Palaeologan emperor Michael VII was excommunicated and his successor Andronikos II overthrown by his grandson Andronikos III, it was not the moment to extol dynasty and genealogy through the Old Testament. Instead, emperor, aristocracy, and the rest were ever more faithful to icons. The program of the Chora associated the aristocracy with Christian saints, not Old Testament figures, as befits a society that, compared to the West, had looser interpersonal ties and a more horizontal social structure.” In the last days of the empire, when Ottoman cannon were pounding the land walls of Constantinople, its defenders put their faith less in relics or imagery of Old Testament heroes than in the icon of the Virgin Hodegetria that had long been the wonder-working palladium of the city. In the prior Ottoman siege of 1422, the icon had been brought to the Chora, and once that siege ended, it was taken back to its own monastery, an event that was sermonized by means of Old and New Testament allusions.’*° Three decades later, when the city was attacked and the situation was graver, the Hodegetria again came to the Chora. After the Turks had breached the walls, the Greek historian Ducas reported that the Janissaries rushed to the church, hacked the icon into four pieces, and cast lots for the fragments. Whether true or not, this last detail makes reference to the soldiers who vied for Jesus’ garments at the Crucifixion, and thereby rhetorically deepens the tragedy through reference now to only the New Testament.’
University of St. Andrews Yale University
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