Timothy’s interest in legal canonization and original composition mark the initial coherence of East Syrian law as a lettered tradition encompassing both ecclesiastical and civil affairs. Several other jurist-bishops active in Iraq throughout the ninth century refined that tradition further. Timothy’s successor as patriarch, a monk from the Mosul region named Ishoʿbarnun (r. 823–28), continued the precedent set by Timothy that the Church of the East’s chief bishop should also be a jurist. Ishoʿbarnun had studied with the same esteemed teacher as Timothy and subsequently took monastic vows at one of the eastern Jazira’s most prominent East Syrian monasteries, but his patriarchal career was shorter and less spectacular than Timothy’s—he is perhaps best known for his intense antipathy toward his predecessor and for trying to remove his name from the diptychs of the patriarchal church. Ishoʿbarnun did, however, compose a longer, substantial Law Book of his own on the model of Timothy’s.40 Ishoʿbarnun’s work brings together the patriarch’s decisions and responsa to lower ecclesiastics on legal topics, and it covers extensively lay civil affairs. The bulk of the Law Book treats marriage, divorce, and inheritance, while the remainder includes rulings on slavery, loans and debt, theft, and monastic and ecclesiastical order. After Ishoʿbarnun, succeeding generations of East Syrian jurist-bishops took up the task of synthesizing the episcopal law books and the earlier received materials into new treatises and civil law digests. In the mid-ninth century, ʿAbdishoʿ bar Bahriz of Mosul’s Order of Marriage and Inheritance summarized the marriage law provisions of earlier works and offered a new system of inheritance law.41 Not long after, Gabriel of Basra (fl. late ninth century) compiled excerpts from late antique canon law texts, East Syrian synodal canons, and rulings from the Islamic-period law books into treatises on distinct legal topics, creating the first systematic compendium of East Syrian law.42
ʿAbdishoʿ and Gabriel thus brought the tradition of East Syrian communal law to a clear stage of canonization. By the end of the ninth century, that tradition’s corpus of texts was extensive enough to require new works to streamline its disparate rulings and doctrines. In matters of ecclesiastical law proper, the corpus stretched back to pseudo-apostolic writings from Christianity’s early days and bishops’ synods from the Roman and Sasanian empires. East Syrian civil law, on the other hand, was largely a recent creation of the Islamic period. The civil law sections of ʿAbdishoʿ’s and Gabriel’s systematizing works draw from the legal treatises of Shemʿon, Ishoʿbokt, Timothy, and Ishoʿbarnun but no comparable earlier or unknown sources.43 A tradition of East Syrian communal law that sought to regulate not only ecclesiastical affairs but also the social, economic, and familial relations of lay Christians had thus taken shape as both a response to and a function of institutional conditions in the early Islamic caliphate. By the end of the ninth century, bishops in Fars and especially Iraq had developed that tradition into a coherent intellectual discipline cultivated by ecclesiastical jurists.
CHRISTIAN FAMILY LAW AND THE RELIGIOUS COMMUNITY
While the early Abbasid-era works of Christian jurisprudence were composed as resources for ecclesiastical judges, they were not merely a solution to an administrative problem. They also prescribed new norms of behavior for laypeople; creating Christian civil law was an opportunity for bishops to conceive in new ways of how Christian belonging was to be enacted and Christian communities constituted within caliphal society. To this end, the East Syrian legal works of the early Abbasid Caliphate show that the bishops had one principal area of social relations in view: the family. Where George I had prescribed ecclesiastical oversight of marriage contracts, Abbasid-era works of East Syrian law evince a broader concern to regulate the full range of practices and institutions associated with the formation and reproduction of households—marriage, inheritance, familial property rights. By gathering these into a single regulatory regime, the bishops put forward a new conception of the Christian household as a social institution. In doing so, moreover, they enjoined both a vertical solidarity between ecclesiastics and laypeople and a horizontal uniformity in the shape of lay households. Beyond giving ecclesiastics tools for judicial practice, Christian law marked out the linkage between ecclesiastical authority and the practices that formed laypeople into their most fundamental social units as the key element that constituted the Church of the East (and the West Syrians, as we will see later) as a social collectivity—a subject religious community—in the caliphate.
This operation of Christian law differed both from earlier Christian approaches to marriage and from strategies of socioreligious boundary drawing undertaken by other elites in the early Abbasid Caliphate. Abbasid-era East Syrian bishops focused on the economic relations and social hierarchies that made up households rather than their pious sexual discipline, the major concern of late antique Christian writing on the family, and they devoted far less attention to other realms of social interaction—marketplace commerce, for example—than did Muslim or Jewish jurisprudents. Crucially, the workings of Abbasid-era Christian law also exemplify the formation of the caliphate’s social order at the dovetailing interests of an imperial and a subject elite. The prerogative for dhimmi elites to regulate their communities’ internal affairs was a feature of caliphal governance; the interest in extending ecclesiastical authority further into Christian households and the very notion that there was such a thing as a household with a distinctively Christian material-social constitution were the result of subject elites playing out the imperatives of the circumstances of caliphal rule. Caliphal governance tacitly acknowledged the identities propounded by non-Muslim clerical classes and institutions as discrete social groups and left it to the clerics to fill in their substance; the clerics, for their part, had an interest in twinning theological identity with clear social boundaries and distinctive social practices. In the heartlands of the caliphate the result was a new formulation of Christian community rooted in ecclesiastical law’s new definition of the Christian household. Like other Christian traditions, East Syrians already had distinct (though developing) doctrinal identities, clerical classes, and ecclesiastical institutions prior to the emergence of Islam. It was the extension of ecclesiastical authority into lay households and the prescription of uniform practices of lay social reproduction that newly defined them as a socioreligious group within the public life of the Islamic empire.
Creating the Christian Household
The scope of the East Syrian law produced by Ishoʿbokt, Timothy, and other jurist-bishops differed notably from the legal traditions cultivated by contemporary Muslims and Jews. Muslim ulama aimed to discern, to the best of their abilities, God’s will for proper behavior in every facet of human life, including both ritual duties and social interactions (ʿibādāt and muʿāmalāt). The Babylonian Talmud comprised the rabbis’ Oral Law of equally wide scope as well as centuries’ worth of their dissections and analyses of it. While the East Syrian jurist-bishops sometimes give the impression that they aimed similarly to compile a comprehensive, “unified ecclesiastical legal code,”44 the vast majority of their law’s positive content focused on one sphere of social relations: the family.45 It did so, moreover, in a particular way: going beyond the interests of earlier ecclesiastical law, its goal was regulating the full complement of material-social practices that formed and reproduced households and lineages.