Harrow

Another of Ephrem's little comments was that he supported the Harrowing of Hell. I didn't know, since the book I'd read on the Harrowing - Crossans' Resurrecting Easter - didn't cite him.

One Richard Edward McCarron by then (2000!) had written up a dissertation "The Appropriation of the Theme of Christ’s Descent to Hell in the Early Syriac Liturgical Tradition". Aphrahat and Ephrem, as contributors to Isho'Yahb's famous liturgy, had - let us say - an interest in the events of the Holy Weekend. Aphrahat lived, I think, outside the Constantines' frontier, and prior to the AD 410 Mahozë Synod; so was not a Nicaean. Ephrem from Nisibin and Edessa-Callirhoë at the time dwelt under the Byzantine Imperium.

The Crossans focus more on the Byzantine and Latin littoral. Perhaps the Greater West didn't care about "Aphraates" so much; but we absolutely did care about Ephrem. Western scholars have been negligent of the Ephrem corpus - still are. Although in the Crossans' case the omission goes against interest. Because their whole aim was to introduce us to the Oriental tradition, at least to the Middle Orient's.

McCarron, 97f argued that the Harrowing was a Homoean trope, canonised in three Imperial-driven councils AD 359-60, before it became Catholic(ish). For this faction, Christ was like the Father. Ephrem's Diatesseron read that Christ descended into "the home of the dead" rather than just "death", and broke its "bars" besides just its "gates". The more-Nicaean (rather, post-Theodosian) creed of the AD 410 Mahozë will skip all that (and has, for the Sarcogenesis > Incarnatio, that Christ "put on a body").

I propose that the Homoeans, by contrast with Eunomians like Philostorgius and early Constantius II, engaged in a limited-hangout. Ephrem praised Jesus the Christ in all ways without allowing he be actually God. I am reminded of how Nestorius, and Chrysostom and maybe even Jerome, praised Mary in all ways except that she be Deipara. Jesus, for the Homoean, had to prove he was the next-best-thing to God. That he could do in the underworld.

I do not find the Harrowing in the Quran nor in Islamic text generally, excepting maybe some poetic flourishes about what Hell looks like. Sura 4 exists in part to deny exactly that Jesus has yet got near the place. God had him ascend from the Cross directly; by tradition he is the only living man in Paradise. He's supposed to come back later, to enact the promise of his title as "Christ" - that is, to rule. Then he shall taste death. Maybe Jesus will do something down there in future - the Hadith is a great ocean - but he hasn't yet, because God hasn't allowed it yet.

But if the Harrowing would pose a controversy to Muslims; I don't know to what extent it could offend Christians, any more than Jerome's veneration of Mary ever offended the Greeks or Copts or west-Syrians. I still think that the very veneration of saints who weren't Christ would have been more a problem swirling around Ephrem.

BACKDATE 7/20. Needed some time on this one.