Apostolic Memories: Religious Differentiation and the Construction of Orthodoxy in Syriac Missionary Literature Saint-Laurent, Jeanne-Nicole M. creator 2009 x, 264 p. born digital Thesis (Ph.D.) -- Brown University (2009) Harvey, Susan director Kraemer, Ross reader Stowers, Stanley reader Brown University. Religious Studies sponsor theses "Apostolic Memories: Religious Differentiation and the Construction of Orthodoxy in Syriac Missionary Literature" is a dissertation project on Syriac hagiography and apocryphal narrative. I argue that missionary narratives trace the gradual religious differentiation of the Syriac-speaking Churches in the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries (Byzantine Chalcedonian, Persian "Nestorian" Church of the East, and Anti-Chalcedonian Miaphysite). Through analyzing the production of missionary narratives in Syriac-speaking communities of the Roman and Persian Empires, I show that mythic legends about apostolic beginnings and expansions of communities were important in the competition among Syriac Christianities. My dissertation argues that missionary literature gave Syriac-speaking Christians a mode of expression through which monks and bishops constructed orthodox "histories" and idealized literary presentations of their past. My analysis of missionary literature maps out the gradual differentiation of Syriac Christianities in the Eastern Roman and Persian Empires. The first part of this dissertation focused on apostolic legends: the third-century Acts of Thomas, the fifth-century Teaching of Addai, and the sixth-century Acts of Mari. From Jerusalem to Edessa to Mesopotamia to India, this trilogy of Syriac missionary narratives imagined a landscape dotted with Christian cities joined together through their patron apostles Thomas, Addai, and Mari. The second component of this project examined missionary hagiography of the Syriac Anti-Chalcedonians: those who rejected the Christological formulations of the Council of Chalcedon. Many of the dissenters against Chalcedon were Syriac-speaking Christians of the eastern provinces. Later Miaphysites (Syrian Jacobites or Monophysites), the descendants of the Anti-Chalcedonians, composed stories of their missionary heroes to forge harmonized literary memory of the sixth-century's discordant events. I analyzed the "Life of Simeon of Beth Arsham," two hagiographies of Jacob Baradaeus, and the "Life of Ahoudemmeh: Apostle to the Arabs." This project demonstrated how Syriac missionary texts work together as a system that authors used to construct and represent their history. Missionary narratives, by presenting a unified portrait of the past, provided a lens for understanding how Miaphysite Christians and those of the Church of the East came to understand themselves as distinct churches. Syriac missionary literature Orthodoxy apostolic legends Hagiography RPB 20091218 engEnglish10.7301/Z0KH0KSVIn CopyrightCollection is open for research.dissertations