End of last month, Philip Jenkins mooted that Anxious-Bench are "Palutians", just like how other Christians called the Syrian Ephraim (sic). Today, rereading Gabriel Reynolds' The Quran and the Bible, I find that Ephrem denied the intercession of saints before sura 53 had denied it.
Ephrem was already questionably-orthodox in my eyes. He did his work under a Eunomian empire UPDATE 7/20 and christologised accordingly. He also proffered some straaAAange notions on what Paradise should look like. On cosmology too: his Eden is a mountain breaching the Firmament, so I surmise he was a flat-Earther like Theodore. "Oh it's just poetry." Hmmm.
We Catholics and Orthodox cannot approach "Mar" Ephrem for intercession. We are not in communion with Ephrem when we pray Saint Gertrude's rosary; Greeks cannot (or should not) display icons of Ephrem. If Palut is "us" to Jenkins, he's speaking only for the Anxious-Bench.
It might not, then, have been gnostics who pinned the "Palutian" label on Ephrem's protoIslamic sect. Ephrem was a fine poet but he might not have been an innovator.
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