John of Ephesus - Writings

Writings

John's main work was his Ecclesiastical History, which covered more than six centuries, from the time of Julius Caesar to 588, although John himself employs the Seleucid era. It was composed in three parts, each containing six books. The first part seems to have wholly perished. The second, which extended from Theodosius II to the 6th or 7th year of Justin II, was - according to F. Nau - reproduced in full or almost in full, in John's own words, in the third part of the Chronicle which was till lately attributed to the patriarch Dionysius Telmaharensis, but is really the work of an unknown compiler. Modern research has shown that it is more likely that large parts are missing. Of this second division of John's History, in which he may have incorporated the so-called Chronicle of Joshua the Stylite, considerable portions are found in the British Museum manuscripts Add. 14647 and 14650, and these have been published in the second volume of J. P. N. Land's Anecdota Syriaca. But the whole is more completely presented in the Vatican manuscript (Codex Zuquenensis, shelfmark Vatican Syriac 162), which incorporates much of John's chronicle in an autographon dated to the eighth century. (English translation, with notes, by Amir Harrak, The Chronicle of Zuqnin, Parts III and IV (Toronto, 1999) and by Witold Witakowski, Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre: Chronicle, Part III (Liverpool, 1997)).

The third part of John's history, which is a detailed account of the ecclesiastical events which happened in 571-588, as well as of some earlier occurrences, survives in a fairly complete state in Add. 14640, a British Museum manuscript of the seventh century. It forms a contemporary record of great value to the historian. Its somewhat disordered state, the want of chronological arrangement, and the occasional repetition of accounts of the same events are due, as the author himself informs us (ii. 50), to the work being almost entirely composed during the times of persecution. The same cause may account for the somewhat slovenly Syriac style. The writer claims to have treated his subject impartially, and though written from the narrow point of view of one to whom Monophysite "orthodoxy" was all-important, it is evidently a faithful reproduction of events as they occurred. This third part was edited by William Cureton (Oxford, 1853) and E.W. Brooks (CSCO 105, Louvain, 1935), and was translated - sometimes paraphrase - into English by Robert Payne Smith (Oxford, 1860), into German by J. M. Schonfelder (Munich, 1862) and into Latin by Brooks (CSCO 106, Louvain, 1936).

John's other known work was a series of Biographies of Eastern Saints, compiled about 569. These have been edited by Land in Anecdota Syriaca, ii. 1-288, and translated into Latin by Douwen and Land (Amsterdam, 1889), and into English by Brooks (Patrologia Orientalis vols 17-19, 1923–26). An estimate of John as an ecclesiastic and author was given by the Louis Duchesne in a memoir read before the five French Academies on October 25, 1892.