Syriac Christianity

“ The unique original contribution of primitive Syrian Christianity lay in its message, universal rather than pro- vincial or national, spiritual instead of ritualistic and ceremonial, unselfish and other-worldly as opposed to this- worldly, full of hope for the poor and the weary, the outcast and, above all, the sinful who would repent and seek re- demption. ”

“ Islam is, of course, the official religion of the government; but in the southern half of the country the majority of the inhabitants are Christians. The most powerful church is the Greek Orthodox; next in importance come the Maronites and Greek Catholics, who render allegiance to the Pope of Rome. Nearly a dozen other sects, exclusive of the Protestants, are actively working and hating and scheming in Syria. ”

“ But if Syria is to be regenerated, and to be ever the home of an industrious, clean, and moral people, in sympathy with the enlightened world, the change is to be made by exhibiting to the people a higher type of Christianity than they have known hitherto,—a Christianity that reforms manners, and betters the social condition, and adds a new interest to life by lifting it to a higher plane ”

“ The son of the East has been richly rewarded. He is the religious teacher of all mankind. Through him all scriptures have come into being. All the great, living religions of the world originated in Asia; and the three greatest of them—Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism—have come into the world through the Semitic race in that little country called Syria. The perpetual yearning of the Oriental for spiritual dreams and visions has had its rewards. He sowed bountifully, he reaped bountifully.
{87}
Note the Syrian's daily language: it is essentially Biblical. He has no secular language. ”

“ Thus far Syria seems to have maintained its general Christian character, but now the situation began perceptibly to change. It may be assumed that after al-Mutawakki's enactments many Christian families in Syria emigrated or accepted Islam. The converts were actuated mainly by the desire to escape the humiliating disabilities and tribute and to acquire social prestige or political influence. The theo- logical conquest thus followed the military by over two centuries. No Moslem could embrace Christianity or Judaism without risking his life. ”

“ The ecclesiastical bodies of Syria are numerous, jealous and extremely fanatical. In striking contrast to the awkward reticence of the West regarding religious matters, every Syrian not only counts himself an adherent of the faith into which he was born, but he thrusts that fact upon your attention and, on the slightest provocation, is ready to fight for his belief. A man’s ancestors, descendants and home may be cursed with all the wealth of Oriental vituperation, and he will probably accept this as a mere emphatic conversational embellishment. ”

“ The more energetically the prophets condemned the religion of the Syrians, the more strongly they contended against all customs and sacrifices, against sensuality, luxury, and debauchery, so much the more closely did the elements thus attacked and almost overcome combine together; the more stubbornly did the opposite party cling to the rites of the neighbours, the more eagerly did they collect all the Syrian deities in and round Jerusalem. ”

“ The Syrian churches which may be seen in South India to-day are constructed with Saracenic arches, sloping roofs, and buttressed walls. For the most part they are red in hue, and are built of stones squared and polished in the quarries. They have bells cast in native founderies. The traveller off the lines of modern missions may be startled to hear the sound of church bells among the hills, indicating the neighbourhood of some old church of the Syrian Christians.
Lastly, we have traces of Syrian Christianity in China. ”

“ The Christians of Syria have no monopoly of such scandals. Yet there are otherwise intelligent people who speak of modern Christianity as an automatic promoter of ethics, and have the effrontery to try to thrust it on the East as a moral panacea. It is human ideals which make or mar a soul when once the seed of any sound religion has been sown, and they depend upon environment and climate more than our spiritual pastors admit ”

“ None of the Hebraeo-Aramaic dialects long survived in Syria the conquest of the Arabs. Syriac still lived on in Western Persia and in Mongolia, and in India for a time, but only survived as a dead liturgical language. Chaldæo-Hebraic made its way westwards to Morocco, Italy, Spain and Gaul. The faithful in Samaria, now nearly extinct, clung to their Pentateuch and their religion through all vicissitudes, and have never ceased to write the Bible in the Hebrew script of ancient Palestine. ”

“ As is well known to church historians, the Syrian Christians of the Semitic stock have had very little to do with the development of the "creeds of Christendom." Theological organization has been as foreign to the minds of the Eastern Christians as political organization. They have always been worshippers rather than theologians, believers rather than systematic {405} thinkers. Their religious thinking has never been brought by them into logical unity, nor their mysticism into full metaphysical development.
The Oriental has been a lender in religion and a borrower in theology. ”

“ Is it not true, that far in the West, the gospel sun began to rise and shed its beams on Syria, many years ago, and that in our day that cold odoriferous wind of truth and life, fragrant with the love of Jesus and the love of man, is beginning to blow from Syria Damascena, over all the Eastern world! The church and the school, the printing press and the translated Bible, the periodical and the ponderous volume, the testimony of living witnesses for the truth, and of martyrs who have died in its defence, all combine to sweep away the systems of error, whether styled Christian, Moslem or Pagan. ”

“ It is beyond dispute, however, that he is decidedly opposed to the efforts of the new missionaries from America.
As might naturally be expected, the lower orders of the Syrian clergy are generally more illiterate than the Bishops; and how can it be otherwise? Their education for the priesthood is confined to a perusal of the Syriac rituals, which they are taught to read in a convent or in some obscure school, or of which they pick up a superficial knowledge whilst acting as servants to the church or village where they reside. ”

“ In the faith of Islam the connecting bond may be found which may knit the scattered Arab and Syrian peoples into a nation, and it is not among the degraded sects of Eastern Christians of mixed nationality, but in the sturdy stock of the native Moslem race, that the future hope of Syria is to be found. ”

“ The religions of the land seem to be in league with the powers of darkness for the propagation of magic lore. It is an extraordinary fact that Syria has sent forth to the ends of the earth a religion that is the Eternal Word of God to mankind, and yet herself has reverted to the religious conceptions of ancient Semitic paganism. ”

“ The merchants always took an interest in the affairs of heaven as well as in those of earth. At all times Syria was a land of ardent devotion, and in the first century its children were as fervid in propagating their barbarian gods in the Occident as after their conversion they were enthusiastic in spreading Christianity as far [110] as Turkestan and China. As soon as the merchants had established their places of business in the islands of the Archipelago during the Alexandrian period, and in the Latin period under the empire, they founded chapels in which they practised their exotic rites. ”

“ Syria has always been cursed with races, tribes, and faiths enough to split up the country, and to cause all manner of confusion." This, however, is beside the chief object of his pamphlet ; which is to claim adequate European protection for some recent cases of conversion to Christianity ; some, indeed, to Protestantism, but mostly to the Church. Still more, perhaps, is the author anxious to give an account, though but too briefly, of the miraculous circumstances attending the conversion of the Catholic neophytes among this number. ”

“ Though notoriously jealous of each other's progress, they are always united in their common opposition to the Evangelical faith, and an open Bible. We have thus not only the old colossal fortresses of Syrian error to demolish, but the new structures of Jesuitical craft to overturn, before Syria comes to Christ. ”

“ Although Cœle-Syria and Upper Syria, with the exception of the city of Antioch, was slowly converted to Christianity, it was not lacking in ecclesiastical philosophers, whose conduct appeared the more heroic from their having to encounter the enmity and hatred of the inhabitants of the place. ”

“ On the part of the Saracens the conquest of Syria was conducted with ferocious piety. The belief of the Syrian Christians aroused in their antagonists sentiments of horror and indignation. “I will cleave the skull of any blaspheming idolater who says that the Most Holy God, the Almighty and Eternal, has begotten a son.” The Khalif Omar, who took Jerusalem, commences a letter to Heraclius, the Roman emperor: “In the name of the most merciful God! Praise be to God, the Lord of this and of the other world, who has neither female consort nor son.” ”

“ In Syria and beyond the river Euphrates, the Bible was interpreted by Christian scholars who spoke Syriac—a language akin to Hebrew—upon the methods of the Jewish schools; but by this time the Jews themselves had fallen into an abyss of artificial Rabbinical interpretation, from which little true light could be derived for the understanding of Scripture. The influence of the Jewish interpretation which ruled in the East can be traced, not only in the old Syriac translation called the Peshito (or Pĕshittâ) , but in the writings of later Syriac divines. ”

“ The Syrians, while worshiping their gods, also believed in Yahweh of the Hebrews, for their prophets said to the Syrian king: "Their gods are gods of the hills; therefore they were stronger than we; but let us fight against them on the plain, and surely we shall be stronger than they." ”

“ The spirit of Christianity had sunk so low in Palestine before the Mussulman occupation as to manifest its zeal{242} by using every effort to defile that part of the Temple area which they regarded as the Jewish Holy of Holies. The young faith of Islam, fresh and vigorous, and not as yet embittered, made an easy conquest of the effete religion, which has lived since then on sufferance, lamenting its sufferings, but never realising its desert of them. To this day the Christian travelling in Syria is oppressed by the sense of its desertion. ”

“ In a former publication, [1] along with a translation of some parts of the Syriac New Testament, I submitted an account of the several versions of holy scripture extant in that language. This consisted of successive notices of the Old Testament in Aramean, that, namely, in the possession of the Syrians, and the various Targums of the Hebrew synagogue; the versions of the New Testament, the Philoxenian, Jerusalem, and Karkaphensian; and, more largely, the Peschito, or "old Syriac;"—in illustration of its great antiquity; its relation to the original Greek, and to certain oriental versions ”

“ The soul of the Christian, the Moslem and the Jew—wherever he may be—turns to some sacred spot in Syria for religious inspiration. Every thoughtful Western man can trace some of his most fundamental values and beliefs to that ancient land.
Closely associated with its religious contribution was the ethical message southern Syria—Palestine—conveyed. Its people were the first to insist that man is created in the image of God and that each is the brother of every other man under God's fatherhood. ”

“ It would be more than folly not to honour the old tribes of the chosen people of God. In Syria only the Jews, Druzes, and Bedawi can boast of their origin. In the Syrian world we know, only the Jews and Catholics can boast of antiquity of religion. An Eastern Jew cannot but be proud of his religion and his descent. As I turn over my old Damascus journal, my heart warms to think that some of our dearest native friends at Damascus were of the Jewish religion. ”

“ The capital of Syria had all at once a new religion, and was inhabited by a new people. A considerable part of the spoils of the Saracens was employed in repairing and ornamenting the churches which had been converted into mosques. The Greeks and the Latins mingled their vows and their hymns, and prayed together to the God of the Christians to conduct them to Jerusalem. The leaders of the army then joined in addressing a letter to the princes and nations of the West, in which they made a relation of their labours and their exploits. ”

“ The poor men who came to endeavour to obtain from the Pasha here the re-institution of the Syrian patriarch in those churches in Merdin, from which he had been ejected by the Roman Catholic bishop, are now returning without success, but carrying back with them two boxes of Arabic and Syrian New Testaments to the Patriarch. May the Lord water them by his most Holy Spirit, so that they may become the ground of living churches, instead of those of stone which they have lost. ”

“ You will find it difficult sometimes to distinguish manners from religious practices. Many Syrian customs are religious in their origin. Moslems live their religion far more intensely than most of us do. Begin by watching them carefully.
Social customs enter into not only your personal relations with Syrians you have met, but all public activities, such as buying in the bazaars, eating and drinking in public places, and the relations to women. Learn the forms of address on meeting people and use them. ”