Bishop Solomon: The Book of the Bee

Audience

According to the author, Bishop Solomon, The Book of the Bee was written by him as a form of personal correspondence with a longtime friend and peer, Bishop Narses. As the text roughly notes, Bishop Narses was located in Khoni-Shabor, also called Beth-Wazik, a town on the Little Zab River near its junction with the Tigris River, in present-day Iraq. Almost nothing else is known about Bishop Narses or what he actually did with the text. Copies were ultimately made, a number of which survived to the present day.

The modern audience for the text includes the contemporary congregation of the modern equivalent of the Nestorian Church. Although it is not a large sect, the Church of the East signed an agreement with the Roman Catholic Church in 1994 and is now considered part of that church order. Syriac (or Aramaic), the language that Jesus would have spoken, is still the official language of the Church of the East, and many of their beliefs are still practiced.

The history of Christianity has typically focused on its spread to the West, through Greece and the Roman Empire and then into the nations of Europe and the British Isles and onward to the New World. Less emphasis tends to be placed on the spread of the Christian Church to the East, largely because the Eastern versions of Christianity are less “orthodox” (from the perspective of the West) and because the cultures and the historical records are complex and incomplete. The Book of the Bee, however, provides the modern reader with insight into a different version of Christianity as it was practiced in a region of the world with a complex, diverse religious history that too often remains unfamiliar to Western readers.