13 VI 2024: Phil Booth (Oxford) John of Ephesus as historian

This paper explores various apologetic elements within the Ecclesiastical History of John of Ephesus, which blends elements of historiography, apology, and autohagiography. Starting from the ambiguous status of John and his colleagues in the new, minority Jacobite (Syrian Orthodox) episcopate formed in the middle 560s, and using a wider Syriac documentary and textual corpus as a control on John’s narrative, it demonstrates various distortions through which John both inflates his own role in events, and defends the highly controversial circle of the patriarch Paul the Black, which included John, Longinus of Nubia, and others. John is presented as a far more marginal, contentious, and compromised figure than has often been appreciated.