Gerard of Nazareth

A hermit of the Black Mountain near Antioch (mod. Antakya, Turkey) and Benedictine monk at Mount Tabor in his native Galilee, Gerard became bishop of Laodikeia in Syria (mod. Al-Ladhiqiyah, Syria) around 1140.

In 1159 Gerard was involved in the reconciliation of Prince Reynald of Antioch with Emperor Manuel I Kom-nenos, but soon after this, perhaps as a result of the agreement, he seems to have been replaced in his see by a Greek Orthodox bishop. He appears sporadically in witness lists in the kingdom of Jerusalem in the early 1160s.

Gerard’s importance lies in his pastoral, theological, and polemical writings, which, even in their fragmentary condition, advance our knowledge of the intellectual life of the Latin Church in Outremer. Passages of his De conversatione servorum Dei, Vita abbatis Eliae, De una Magdalena contra Graecos, and Contra Salam presbyterum survive in the sixteenth-century Historia Ecclesiastica of the Magdeburg Cen-turiators, and shorter fragments in Carmelite manuscripts from the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. The first two of these works deal with Frankish hermits and reforming monks, largely in Galilee and on the Black Mountain, and show Gerard to have been sympathetic to new eremitical foundations inspired by Cistercian austerity. His vivid biographical sketches of Bernard of Machanath and Elias of Narbonne demonstrate the difficulties faced by reformers in the face of opposition from traditionally minded monks, and recall familiar episodes in Western reform foundations at the same period. The De una Magdalena, which propounds the Western identification of Mary Magdalene with Mary the sister of Martha, was a defense of an earlier sermon, Ad ancil-las Dei ad Bethaniam, written for the nuns of Bethany, against Orthodox criticism. This polemic was widened in the Contra Salam, written against a Greek priest of Laodikeia, which defends Latin episcopal authority over Orthodox clergy. The English historian John Bale (1495-1563) claimed Gerard as a Carmelite.

-Andrew Jotischky

Bibliography

Jotischky, Andrew, “Gerard of Nazareth, John Bale and the Origins of the Carmelite Order,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 46 (1995), 1-23.

-, The Perfection of Solitude. Hermits and Monks in the

Crusader States (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1995).

-, “Gerard of Nazareth, Mary Magdalene and Latin

Relations with the Greek Orthodox in the Crusader East in the Twelfth Century,” Levant 29 (1997), 217-226.

Kedar, Benjamin. “Gerard of Nazareth, a Neglected Twelfth Century Writer of the Latin East. A Contribution to the Intellectual History of the Crusader States,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 37 (1983), 55-77.