The elaborate process of transcription, production, and circulation of the acts that formed the documentary record of the councils themselves became a subject of controversy (Price and Gaddis, 2005 i: 75-8). Council participants engaged in heated debates over accusations of forgery in the transcripts; debates that invoked broader questions of truth, falsehood, and the authority of the written word. The complex interaction of the acts’ multiple layers of documentation, visible especially in the lengthy and convoluted first session of Chalcedon, shows us how the concerns of church leaders, charged with finding truth in authoritative Scriptures, converged with the legalistic and bureaucratic requirements of the late Roman imperial state to express a uniquely late antique obsession with textuality, and with the rigorous authentication of texts, as a basis for legitimate authority. Late Antiquity, broadly speaking, was an age in which great projects of codification and systematization were undertaken, in spheres ranging from secular law to religious doctrine, reflecting a broad-based cultural shift in favor of authoritative tradition and consensus (on law: Harries 1999; Humfress 2000 and ch. 25 in this volume; Matthews 2000; on religious and patristic authority: Gray 1989; Lim 1995). Late Roman Christianity, of course, was a religion that based itself very much upon the authority of the written word. In earlier centuries, the Church had assembled various sacred writings into an authoritative canon of Holy Scripture. In the fifth century, the decrees and credal statements of past councils, and the writings of certain long dead theologians, acquired an almost scriptural authority of their own. But the desire to find absolute truth in texts was tempered by the realization that copyists could be mistaken and manuscripts corrupted, scribes bribed, and transcripts doctored.
Scarcely had the council adjourned before Chalcedon itself became the subject of struggles to control its meaning and message. The hand of Theodoret of Cyrrhus - whom the bishops had only grudgingly rehabilitated from charges of ‘‘Nestorian’’ heresy - has been seen behind the ‘‘Address to Marcian,’’ a document issued in the name of the council but probably composed shortly afterward, which attempted to place a more strongly Antiochene Dyophysite spin on the Definition of Faith than had been apparent during the council’s recorded deliberations, which had tended instead to stress the Definition’s consistency with Cyrillian and Alexandrian teaching (Price and Gaddis 2005, iii: 105-7, 111-20). The production and dissemination of the official Acts, the authoritative textual record of the council, was hardly a neutral process. Separate Greek and Latin versions of the Acts, compiled respectively by imperial and patriarchal staff in Constantinople, and by editors sympathetic to the papal position, reveal the competing agendas of their authors. The ongoing ecclesiastical rivalry between Rome and Constantinople shaped successive stages of editing, from the immediate aftermath of the council up through the time of Justinian a century later. Texts were arranged, or language omitted or altered, in support of arguments over the Twenty-Eighth Canon, or over how much weight ought to have been given to the authority of the pope’s representatives at the council (Price and Gaddis 2005, i: 78-85). Monophysite opponents of Chalcedon, meanwhile, were alleged to have been responsible for deliberate mistranslations of Pope Leo’s Tome, and of other writings, into Greek and Syriac, rewritten in order to conform them to the polemical caricature that attributed to him - and, by extension, to Chalcedon itself - a ‘‘Nestorian’’ division of Christ into two persons (Leo, Ep. 130, 131).
Much remains to be learned from careful study of the compilation and circulation of the conciliar acts, as well as the various documentary collections that often accompanied them (Chrysos 1990; Price and Gaddis 2005, i: 78-85; iii: 157-92). How did they circulate, who had access to them, in what manner were they copied, excerpted, or translated? For example, it remains a mystery how Nestorius - long since disgraced and condemned as a heretic, exiled in a remote corner of the Egyptian desert - managed to obtain full transcripts of the proceedings of Ephesus II, on which he commented at great length in his own Bazaar of Heracleides. The deepening cultural, political, and linguistic divisions of the fifth-century empire conspired to limit the ability of westerners to participate in theological debates that took place almost entirely in Greek. Language barriers generated constant headaches for the papal representatives, handicapped throughout the council by the necessity of speaking through interpreters. Back in Italy, translators were in short supply and important documents might sit unread for years, further complicating what were often delicate negotiations with Constantinople (see, e. g., Leo, Ep. 113 to Julian of Cos). Amazingly, more than a century would pass before a complete Latin edition of Chalcedon’s proceedings would become available to westerners (Price and Gaddis 2005, i: 83-5). How easily and how accurately did eastern texts and knowledge about eastern developments reach Rome and the Latin west generally? These seemingly mundane considerations would hold great implications for the later evolution of the Greek and Latin churches.
World History
