I'm not sure where Bishop Samra gets his ideas about the history of the use of Arabic in Antioch, which was much more deeply-rooted and earlier than he makes it sound, but this talk is still very much worth listening to in terms of how he sees contemporary Orthodox-Catholic relations in the Middle East, especially some of what comes up in the Q&A at the end.
This conference of ABp Samra indeed speaks with great frankness about the menaces, survival strategies, challenges of the past,and present continuing challenges, mostly self-inflicted - helas.
ReplyDeleteThere are some lacunae in the presentation of the historic context, such as the question of languages like Arabic. You are wright - historic evidence presented by Fr. Hanna Ghoneim in his doctoral thesis presented at the University of Vienna on the Order of Episcopal Ordination in the liturgical Arabic Melkite Sources. Hence it is prooven by a XVth cent. MS of an arabic Euchologion of the Library of St. Joseph's University speaks ckearly of the need to translate liturgical texts into the language of the People; here the eirenikà for the episcopal ordination is kept in Syriac and is called karazoutha. It seem to be proven gernally by MS witnesses, that Syriac as liturgical language did survive well into the XVIIth century in Palestine as well.
Thank You for your most valuable and precious work.
Thank you.
ReplyDeleteAt Sinai the Arabic liturgical manuscripts go back to the 9th century, with Jerusalem well ahead of Antioch in making the transition to Arabic, largely abandoning Greek for a couple hundred years in the process. I touch on it in more detail in an interview I give here:
http://easternchristianbooks.blogspot.fr/2014/05/the-orthodox-church-in-arab-world.html