Pseudo-Zacharias Rhetor

A Volume of Records of Events Which Have Shaped the World

A Volume of Records of Events Which Have Shaped the World is an anthology of Syriac documents compiled by an anonymous individual around 570 C.E. The anthology is preserved as British Library Manuscript #17,202. The compiler is referred to as "Pseudo Zacharias Rhetor" because it preserves the important Church History by the real Zacharias Rhetor.

The anthology includes:

• A writing by Sylvester, Bishop of Rome, having to do with the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine to Christianity

• Zacharias Rhetor’s Church History of 4th and 5th century Church Councils having to do with controversies concerning the person of Jesus

• Moses of Ingila’s translation of Joseph and Aseneth, a coded writing, translated from Greek into Syriac around 550 C.E.

• Two covering letters to Joseph and Aseneth. One is from an anonymous individual who relates how he found a small, very old manuscript, written in Greek in the library in Resh’aina, a collection of manuscripts belonging to the line of bishops who had originally come from Aleppo. The second is Moses of Ingila’s preface to his translation of Joseph and Aseneth. He puts the document into the category of Wisdom literature whose meaning has to be carefully discerned. He also is about to disclose its hidden Christian message and at this point the manuscript is cut off. A translation of these two letters from Syriac into English, along with a translation of a digitally restored text of Joseph and Aseneth can be found in Simcha Jacobovici and Barrie Wilson, The Lost Gospel (New York: Pegasus, 2014).

• The Legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.

Pseudo Zacharias Rhetor -- the individual who assembled this anthology -- didn’t write these documents but put together a library of works he considered important to his 6th century times. He was a compiler, not an author.

British Library Manuscript #17,202 was acquired from the British Museum which, in turn, had purchased it on November 11, 1847 from an Egyptian trader.

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