A 4th-century deacon taught theology through choirs of women
Ephrem of Nisibis wrote his theology as songs and had choirs of women sing them, founding the tradition of deaconess choristers in Syriac churches. So loved were his hymns that for centuries other writers published hundreds of works under his name. He feigned madness to avoid becoming a bishop.
Ephrem was born around 306 in Nisibis, today's Nusaybin in Turkey, a frontier city recently absorbed by Rome where people spoke Aramaic, officials used Greek and Latin, and pagans, Jews and several strands of Christianity lived side by side. His hymns suggest both parents were Christians, though later biographers made his father a pagan priest. He grew up under Bishop Jacob of Nisibis, who attended the Council of Nicaea in 325, and was appointed a teacher, a title Syriac Christians still hold in high esteem. He is traditionally credited with founding the School of Nisibis, later the intellectual centre of the Church of the East.
His city sat on the front line. After Constantine died in 337, Shapur II of Persia besieged Nisibis in 338, 346 and 350. In the third siege the Persians diverted a river against the walls, but the defenders patched them while the enemy's elephants floundered in the mud, and Ephrem wrote a hymn picturing Nisibis as Noah's Ark riding out the flood. In 363, after Emperor Julian died on campaign, his successor Jovian handed the city to Persia and its Christians were expelled.
Ephrem, then in his late fifties, resettled in Edessa, a crossroads of rival creeds where he found Nicene Christians outnumbered by Arians, Manichees, Marcionites and gnostic sects. He kept teaching and writing hymns, verse sermons and biblical commentary, practical theology for troubled times. He wrote only in his native Aramaic, in the Edessan dialect later called Classical Syriac, and called his people Arameans; the label the Syrian came later, under Greek influence from writers such as Theodoret.
He died in 373. Every traditional church venerates him as a saint, and the Catholic Church named him a Doctor of the Church in 1920. Scholars regard him as the most important of the Syriac-speaking church fathers, ahead of later figures such as Jacob of Serugh, who praised him as the crown of the Arameans.
Source: Ephrem the Syrian
