Fr Touma (Bitar): Even if you don't know how... you are bound for salvation.

 Arabic original here.

Even if you don't know how...

You are bound for salvation. 

 

There are people who surprise you! They have not known, or rather, had never practiced Orthodoxy until recently, but despite that you find that they have remarkable awareness, seriousness and composure, while many others who were considered to be inside the Church you find to have shocking flippancy, disdain and indifference to the faith. Do you think it's an issue of knowledge and information? It doesn't seem to be! There are those who profoundly feel God's presence and there are those who do not feel it. This has no connection to whether you have been Orthodox for generations, but rather to whether you have an upright conscience, even if you grew up outside the Orthodox Church!

Your Lord works in ways you do not know, whether in what you value, inside the Church or outside of it. Your Lord does not treat titles like people do. Everyone, without knowing it, is from Him, in Him and to Him! His categories are not your categories. His calculations are not your calculations. In your own eyes, perhaps, it is as though you are coming from the unknown and setting off into the unknown, even if you are accustomed to shielding yourself with the name of your Lord. In reality, you might be acting according to your natural disposition, as though you have no power with God. In a world where your Lord is sidelined as though He had no connection to the details of your life, and you just grew up like that, you find yourself as though you were free to take account of Him or disregard Him, without a care. It all depends on your temperament.

But for your Lord, your situation is different.

There is an inevitability that you revolve around Him, even without knowing it. Every hair on your head is counted! Every thought, every impulse, every movement, every heartbeat, every endeavor would not have been possible without you being at the center of your Lord's plan for your salvation! How do you explain what happens to you? This does not mean that you are right in what you are doing. No, but your Lord is truth. He is the path to truth. There is nothing easier than following a path when you don't know what it is. You think it is one thing, and it turns out to be something else. You think you have reached a certain place and you strive for it diligently, then it becomes clear to you that you are in another sphere. In any case, do not forget that you are in your Lord's care.

Everything that has happened and is happening is in the service of salvation. I am not saying your own salvation alone, but the salvation of all humankind! However, this does not mean each of us individually, because so long as we do not work for each other, we gain no benefit. In other words, each is charged with his brothers, with all people. The dynamism of the salvation of each of us is activated through zeal for others' salvation. The issue does not stop at the limits of each being for himself. For you to fast, to pray and to remain in inner contact with your Lord is of course important, but you are not on fire in the Spirit unless it is through love! The warmth of a loving heart depends on compassion for your brothers! The more you genuinely embrace what belongs to others, the more you grow and the Spirit of God intensifies within you.

In this context, the return of the enemy, the stranger, the poor, the distant, the oppressor, the one immersed in his sin will be even greater for you if you embrace him with visceral zeal! "My brother is my life," in the words of St Silouan the Athonite. Love is poured out all the more upon the sinner, the stranger, the sick, the straying... and this benefits all the more the one who pours it out without keeping count.

Before you is one astray. Do not judge or condemn him! You do not know what hell he is coming from. There is the heart-- who knows what is in it apart from its Creator? Most people are sons of pain. I seek mercy and not sacrifice! Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the wicked and unjust, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven!

The man of sin is characterized by lying and deception. Man, in this context, is the great prosecutor. He invents images of himself to protect himself, to defend himself. For him, truthfulness and dishonesty are both equally permitted. He chooses what suits him. There is nothing easier for him than to be truthful in the service of dishonesty. Exaggeration is something natural for him. There is nothing to prevent him from lying when passing on truthful statements that suit him. His motto, easily, is fabrication.

As for deception, in the words of Fr Elias Morcos, may God have mercy on him, "Man is a deceptive animal." Deception is related to desire, to trickery, to ambiguity, to one's self-image. And of course, to imagination, to fantasy, to dreams. Thus, in general, fantasy comes from darkness in the soul. The world of fantasy is the world of sin par excellence. If Adam had not gone wild with his fantasy, it would not have occurred to him that he was a god and so he would not have strayed from obedience to his God! The impulse to fantasy that the snake breathed cast him into the pit of falsehood! Accepting an image of himself other than what God told him in the commandment made him into a liar.

There are, nevertheless, people who have acquired qualities not devoid of goodness and integrity even though they are not of the Church. Who has passed through whose life, and what has he left behind? This remains a mystery with many. There are things in the soul found dormant, amidst events that influence their owners' direction. On this level, along people's path they are swallowed up by noise that they can only escape though a shock. At that point, they wake up to secrets that they never imagined existed, here and there, in the corridors of their conscience. What is revealed might result not only in something surprising, but something that might radically alter their direction.

A sinner is not generally at ease with his situation and is not pleased with staying in place. If we were to describe his internal existential state in one word, we would say that he is someone mired in anxiety. Of course, he tries to normalize a certain peace within himself, but he does this especially at times of crisis, with fabrications that only lead to more anxiety and confusion, no matter how much he relies on things that calm his nerves. In the final analysis, a sinner suffers from loss, and time and again his reaction cannot overcome the limits of escapism that always ends in tragedy. In general, he is inclined to go from failure to failure. In the long run, a sinner will inevitably awaken to a great emptiness. After a frivolous life, a frivolous death looms before him on the horizon. "Every vessel overflows with what it contains."

The secret remains in pain and at its center is an existential emptiness. In the end, a person cannot bear meaninglessness. What stirs within him, after everything that he has gone through in his life, pushes him to wonder existentially: "Where to?" There is something that is not within anyone's capability and there is no power, whatever it may be, apart from the Spirit of your Lord, that can provide someone with an answer at an existential level about the meaning of a son of Adam's life. They come from east and west and sit with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but the children of the kingdom are cast outside!

How and when can a soul change? Your Lord alone is the Knower of Hearts. What remains constant, however, is that the Most High wishes for all to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth. As St Silouan the Athonite says: "Keep your mind in hell and despair not!" The important thing is to not despair.

 

Archimandrite Touma (Bitar)

Abbot of the Monastery of St Silouan the Athonite-- Douma, Lebanon

February 1, 2026  

The Patriarchs of Jerusalem against Christian Zionism

 

 Source.

A STATEMENT FROM THE PATRIARCHS AND HEADS OF THE CHURCHES IN JERUSALEM ON UNITY AND REPRESENTATION OF THE CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES IN THE HOLY LAND

 

January 17, 2026

The Patriarchs and Heads of Churches in the Holy Land affirm before the faithful and before the world that the flock of Christ in this land is entrusted to the Apostolic Churches, which have borne their sacred ministry across centuries with steadfast devotion. Recent activities undertaken by local individuals who advance damaging ideologies, such as Christian Zionism, mislead the public, sow confusion, and harm the unity of our flock. These undertakings have found favor among certain political actors in Israel and beyond who seek to push a political agenda which may harm the Christian presence in the Holy Land and the wider Middle East.

Holy Scripture teaches us that “we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another” (Romans 12:5). To claim authority outside the communion of the Church is to wound the unity of the faithful and burden the pastoral mission entrusted to the historic churches in the very land where our Lord lived, taught, suffered, and rose from the dead.

The Patriarchs and Heads of Churches further note with concern that these individuals have been welcomed at official levels both locally and internationally. Such actions constitute interference in the internal life of the churches and disregard the pastoral responsibility vested in the Patriarchs and Heads of Churches in Jerusalem.

The Patriarchs and Heads of Churches in Jerusalem reiterate that they alone represent the Churches and their flock in matters pertaining to Christian religious, communal, and pastoral life in the Holy Land.

May the Lord, who is the Shepherd and Guardian of souls, grant wisdom for the protection of His people and the safeguarding of His witness in this sacred land.

—The Patriarchs and Heads of the Churches in Jerusalem

Paul Ulishney: New Evidence for Conversion to Islam in Anastasius of Sinai’s Hodegos

Paul Ulishney, "New Evidence for Conversion to Islam in Anastasius of Sinai’s Hodegos," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 78 (2024), 29-48.

 

Abstract:

Contrary to the judgment of earlier scholars, who suggested that all that could be found concerning early Islam in the writings of Anastasius of Sinai had already been discovered, this article unearths new evidence for conversion to Islam in Anastasius’s Hodegos: a list of aporiai raised by those “who now apostatize from Christianity.” I argue that these apostates should be understood as Christian converts to Islam, and that the aporiai themselves shed new light on the nature and content of the earliest Christian–Muslim disputations. In the context of other evidence for early Islamic belief in other seventh-century Christian authors, Anastasius’s aporiai distinguish themselves by offering evidence for the actual intellectual content of Christian–Muslim disputation, rather than words put into the mouths of fictional Muslim interlocutors. The unique nature of this evidence also parochializes traditional conceptions of Christian–Muslim disputation in the Middle Ages, i.e., that of the “monk in the emir’s majlis.” Instead, they offer us a likelier portrait of what Christian–Muslim disputations may have looked like in the earliest days: Greek-speaking converts to Islam engaging in aporetic questioning on the subject of the Greek Christian scriptures with members of their old faith.

Read the full article here.

  

Jack Tannous: What is Syriac? Explorations in the History of a Name

 Jack Tannous, "What is Syriac? Explorations in the History of a Name," Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 28.1 (2025), 65-153.

 

Abstract

This article looks into various aspects of the history of the name “Syriac,” arguing that this glottonym has had different meanings at different points in history. While scholars today use “Syriac” to refer to the Aramaic dialect of Edessa, historically, it has also been a word that referred more generally to the northwest Semitic language that today is commonly called “Aramaic.” This is true for both “Syriac” as an English word and its various cognates and equivalents in other languages. “Syriac” was a language used by pagans, Jews, Manichees, and a variety of different Christian groups and its association with specific Christian confessions in the Middle East is also a historical development. The article ends by
suggesting possible reasons that Edessene Aramaic—as opposed to some other type of Aramaic—became the linguistic vehicle of choice for many Middle Eastern Christian groups.

  

In addition to being an incredibly useful article about what premodern writers meant when they described someone or something as "Syriac", there is also a lot of information about the much-neglected use of Syriac by Chalcedonian Orthodox communities, such as the following:

"There are more dated Melkite manuscripts from the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, than there are dated manuscripts from the Church of the East."

"Many Christians of Maʻlūlā were of course Chalcedonians and one only need point to the history of this church to further show that liturgical language in a Middle Eastern context does not reflect the language of day-to-day life: in this church, usually regarded as the most Arabophile and Hellenophile and least Syriac of all the Christian communities of Greater Syria and the Fertile Crescent, Syriac was still in use liturgically until the seventeenth century. Indeed, Korolevsky suggested that, apart from international centers like Jerusalem, Alexandria, and the Sinai, places which received a constant-influx of Greek speakers from outside the Middle East, all Chalcedonian liturgical manuscripts from the ninth to seventeenth centuries throughout the region were in fact Syriac ones.72 St. Catherine’s monastery in the Sinai, an institution whose Chalcedonian credentials are impeccable, has one of the most precious collections in existence of Christian Greek manuscripts; it is perhaps less well-known that its collection of Syriac manuscripts is regarded as one of the 'ten most important collections in the language in the world.'"

Download the entire article in open access here. 

Jad Ganem: Politicizing the Faith

 Arabic original here.

 

 Politicizing the Faith

An interview that Metropolitan Elpidophoros recently gave to a Greek newspaper demonstrates a striking paradox in church discourse when it comes to the relationship between the Church and politics. On the one hand, the metropolitan sharply criticizes the Russian Church, regarding it as employing Orthodoxy in the service of state interests and stating that the churches ties to "non-democratic organizations" harms Christianity in the long term. The paradox arises, however, when the discussion turns to his own role and the relationship between his archdiocese and the Greek government, since he explicitly states that his institutional duty is "serving Greece and national interests."

This discrepancy in standards raises a whole set of essential questions about the concept of "politicizing the faith" and who has the right to define the boundary between what belongs to the Church and what belongs to the nation. If using the faith to serve Russian politics is to be condemned, then how can "serving the national interests of Greece" be an institutional duty? Here lies a critical point: this discourse rejects employing religion for politics when others do it, but it excuses it when it comes from within the Greek-Constantinopolitan system.

The contradiction can be highlighted with three chief observations:

1) The metropolitan describes Russian influence in Syria as a "tutelage" that exploited Orthodoxy as a cover for a Russian nationalist agenda. This is a political characterization par excellence, which assumes that the role of the Church is to be completely apart from the state, even when the state is providing momentary protection. However, in contrast, when he is asked about his own role with regard to the Greek government, he emphasizes that it is his institutional duty to serve Greece "regardless of which government is in power."

2) The metropolitan repeatedly refers to "national interests" by characterizing them as the point of reference for his ecclesiastical activity in the United States. Within this context, he justifies any contact with the White House or interference in bilateral relations as a national duty. This statement shows that in his view, the Church is not only a religious institution, but part of the Greek state apparatus abroad, reproducing exactly what he criticizes when it comes to the Russian Church.

3) When asked about the baptism of children from a same-sex family, the metropolitan talks about "a distortion of the message of the Gospel," by classifying baptisms as "gay" or "straight." This admission gives the impression that the standard is not theological so much as it is tied to the social and political context, raising further questions about the extent to which his pastoral decisions are independent.

The metropolitan also talks about "a network of centers and paracenters" in Greece and America that is working to distort his image, stating that part of the media campaign against him is tied to internal political conflicts in Greece, which once again drives home the point that his ecclesiastical position now strongly intersects with national policies, despite his sharp criticism of such a phenomenon in the Russian context.

On this basis, the picture of a double discourse comes together: from one side, affirmation of the purity of the faith and its separation from authoritarian organizations, while from the other side an obvious integration of the role of the Church into Greek national identity. This problem is not only personal. Rather, it expresses the historical tension within the Patriarchate of Constantinople between its global spiritual identity and its nationalist role within the Greek diaspora. When condemnatory language is deployed against others' political use of Orthodoxy, while at the same time there is a demand for the bishop to serve "Greek national interests," the question naturally becomes: Is the problem a matter of principle, or is it an issue of who is acting on this principle?

This discourse reveals that the greatest challenge for worldwide Orthodoxy today lies not only in the division between ecclesiastical centers, but also in the ability of each center to transcend narrow ecclesiastical nationalism and to distinguish between what is of the Gospel and what is of nationalism. In a world where everyone uses religion to bolster political influence, there is a pressing need for fixed standards that do not change according to which national flag the speaker happens to be waving.

Adrian Pirtea on a Newly-Discovered Maronite Chronicle from 713

Adrian Pirtea, "A Hitherto Unknown Universal History of the Early Eighth Century: Preliminary Notes on the Maronite Chronicle of 713." Medieval Worlds 23 (2025), 155-167.

 

Abstract

This research note introduces the Maronite Chronicle of 713, a hitherto unknown Christian world chronicle in Arabic, recently identified by the author in the collection of manuscripts at St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mt. Sinai. Extant in a single thirteenth-century manuscript (Sinai Ar. 597), this Arabic chronicle is a translation of a lost Syriac work, originally composed in 712-713 CE, probably in a Syriac Monothelete milieu with close ties to the Monastery of Mar Maron. The chronicle covers the history of the world from Adam to 692-693 CE and exhibits numerous parallels with the so-called »eastern source«, which informed the chronicles of Theophanes, Michael the Syrian, Agapius of Mabbug and the anonymous Syriac Chronicle of 1234. To demonstrate the links between these sources and the new chronicle, the note analyses, as a case study, a passage discussing the main events of the year 633-634 CE. The author argues that the Maronite Chronicle of 713 provides an alternative chronology of events for this year and thus represents an independent source for the early stages of the Arab conquests. A more detailed study and a critical edition and annotated translation of this new chronicle are in preparation.

 

Read the entire article in open access here. 

Joe Glynias: Ibn Buṭlān, a Physician on the Move between the Byzantine and Islamic Worlds

 

Ibn Buṭlān, a Physician on the Move between the Byzantine and Islamic Worlds

 

Joe Glynias 

 

Medieval Worlds 23 (2025), 115-138.

 

 

Abstract:

 

In this paper, I introduce a novel perspective on the Baghdadi physician Ibn Buṭlān, analyzing how he flexibly deployed his Christian identity, his Baghdadi medical education and connections, and his knowledge of the Greek and Arabic traditions to gain employment and fame as he traveled across both the Byzantine and Islamic worlds. Ibn Buṭlān is known to scholars of medieval Arabic medicine and literature as an exemplary Arabic litterateur of the Islamicate world. However, his actions and career as a Christian Arabic author – including his authorship of a treatise on the Eucharist for the Byzantine patriarch in the midst of East-West schism in Constantinople in 1054 – are much less well understood. In this paper, I show how Ibn Buṭlān marketed his Baghdadi intellectual heritage as he traveled across the Islamic world. Furthermore, I show that he converted to join the Byzantine church and became a Byzantine monk. This enabled him to join other Arabic-speaking Christian scholars active under Byzantine rule in the city of Antioch, and to market his Baghdadi heritage to new Byzantine audiences, both Arabic- and Greek-speaking. I argue that, by composing Arabic texts and instructing students in Antioch, he helped instigate a wider, long-lasting Byzantine interest in the Greco-Arabic medicine of Baghdad. 

Download the article free in open access here.