The view from Tblisi

The Christian monastery at "Mount Sinai" might not be at the Israelites' Sinai, but it has earned its own importance in Christian history. Because the Roman Christians unilaterally stuck the name "Sinai" onto the site, and because it was, well, kind of dry and out of the way; it preserved a lot of manuscripts not preserved elsewhere. In 2005, a set of MSS rediscovered 1975 were published. Many MSS were in Iberian Kartuli, sometimes called "Georgian" today; Stig Simeon R. Frøyshov in 2012 published a summary.

I am sure that followers of Robert Hoyland's work - and of Stephen Rapp's - were hoping that there might be some Islam As Others Saw It in there. Well there wasn't. It's mostly eastern Christian liturgy. The base content isn't interesting to Muslims and it's not much more interesting to us Latins, influenced by Charlemagne as we are. But what it does give us, is a snapshot of the liturgies of early Iberia. Also of the Kartuli language still spoken there. And, it happens, of the Christian liturgies of the Late Antique Near East.

Christianity didn't start from the Caucasus; it started from Roman-occupied southwestern Syria. When the Iberian nation accepted Christianity, they had to learn how do Christianity. The Laz on the Pontic coast were beholden to the Greeks, and the Hayots of Armenia accepted much from northeastern Syria; but the Iberians over the hills chose to bypass it all, and to take it from the source. Then just prior to the Crusades, Iberian monks in Muslim-ruled Palestine moved their libraries to Sinai: some from Jerusalem, some from the laura of Mar / Saint / Agios Saba. The Iberians saved pretty much all of it, with few losses. As a result, there's a lot of early Jerusalem Christian practice in Kartuli, which later Christian reforms subsequently changed in Iberia as much as in Palestine; which stayed the same in Kartuli at Sinai.

Although Kartuli-language Christianity in Palestine (before the move) stayed Palestinian, Frøyshov points out that back home in Iberia the locals were drawing from further east. The Kura River flows to the Caspian, remember. Via Heinzgerd Brakmann, the ordination prayers in the MS "Tbilisi NCM A-86", had taken on additional prayers from Mahoze / Madain. These Iraqi prayers got to Iberia at some point after the Testamentum Domini, of the 300s AD; and before the MS's transcription circa 1000 AD. There's also a "Ninevite fast", by which we must read early Islamic Mosul.

I expect that non-Hellenophone Melkites all along that post-Byzantine frontier from Jerusalem to Tblisi (they say თბილისი means "warm" but, consider "theo-polis"...) never did close the door against the Nestorians. Under Islamic rule came several Christian attempts at rapprochement between communions - All In This Together, You Know.

There's even a Kartuli rite of marriage at Sinai! For Latins these days this is of interest, in that we're now being told that our sacrament derives from the Synod of Diren in the 670s AD. That one is "Nestorian" but for those early days, I never could much extricate Nestorian doctrine from post-Toledo filioque Catholicism. I'd love to see what relationship the Jerusalem(?) rite has with the Nestorian sacrament.

UPDATE 7/13 10:45 PM - This noonish post can just go to 7/9 because, why not.