Omri Matarasso

Princeton University

A Monastic Heist in Medieval Mesopotamia: Rescuing the Life of Yoḥannan the Egyptian from the Mar Awgen Monastery

In AD 912, an anonymous scribe appended a colophon to the ending of the Life of Yoḥannan the Egyptian. The scribe included in the colophon a cryptic narrative involving the transmission of the Life from the Mar Awgen Monastery in Ṭur ʿAbdin to a near-by monastery named after Yoḥannan the Egyptian. The original tenth-century manuscript on which the colophon had been written is now lost, but its contents were copied into the nineteenth-century Mingana Syriac 502. My paper will offer a primer of both Ming. Syr. 502 and the Life of Yoḥannan the Egyptian, a work which has never been edited, translated, or even studied in scholarship. Based on my reading of its tenth-century colophon, I will suggest that its cryptic narrative describes a monastic heist story representing a conflict between members of a monastic network in Mesopotamia. Members of this network traced their origins to the fourth-century Mar Awgen, the purported founder of Mesopotamian monasticism. Situating Yoḥannan’s Life in the broader context of the monastic landscape of the period, I will show how the work offers new insights into the history of East Syrian Christianity in medieval Mesopotamia.