The Rabbula Gospels

Reflection

The Rabbula Gospels — Florence Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana Plut. I, 56 — is the earliest dated illuminated Christian manuscript to survive intact. The scribe Rabbula, working at the Monastery of St. John at Zagba in eastern Mesopotamia, signed and dated the colophon in the month of Av in the year 897 of the Seleucid era, corresponding to August 586 AD. The codex is written in Estrangela Syriac and carries the Peshitta text of the four Gospels — the standardized Syriac New Testament that had displaced the older Old Syriac versions in the fifth century. The illumination program is unparalleled for its date. Full-page miniatures of the Crucifixion and the Ascension stand at the head of the canon tables, framed by architectural arcades and populated with figures arranged in narrative registers. The Crucifixion image is the earliest surviving full-page depiction of Christ on the cross in a Western manuscript and the model from which the conventions of Byzantine and Western Crucifixion iconography descend. Massimo Bernabò and John Lowden have shown that the Rabbula miniatures were not original to the codex but a separate Syrian gospel cycle bound in at the front, evidence that the workshop assembled the illuminated front matter from a pre-existing pattern book. The manuscript is the single most important early witness to Eastern Christian visual exegesis and to the maturity of Syriac scribal culture on the eve of the Arab conquest of the Mediterranean East.

Sources: Massimo Bernabò, ed., Il Tetravangelo di Rabbula (Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2008); John Lowden, Early Christian and Byzantine Art (Phaidon, 1997); Sebastian P. Brock, A Brief Outline of Syriac Literature (St. Ephrem Ecumenical Research Institute, 2nd ed. 2009).