Book of the Cave of Treasures

Context

After its advent in the Roman province of Judea, Christianity spread rapidly, not only west toward the Mediterranean world, Rome, and Europe but also east into the lands of the Sassanian Persian Empire. Numerous trade routes and other roads, such as the Persian Royal Road, provided avenues for Christian evangelists to travel and spread word of their faith. Geographically, the lands to the east were more accessible for Christian missionaries than were the far-flung lands of Europe. Since the Book of the Cave of Treasures originated in the world of Eastern Christianity, it was written in the Syriac language rather than the more commonly known languages of Latin or Greek.

Unlike with Western Christianity after the time of Constantine I, whose Edict of Milan of 313 extended recognition to the religion in the Roman Empire, in the lands of the Sassanian Persian Empire there was no widespread acceptance of Christianity. Persecutions were common; the Persians killed some sixteen thousand Christians in just forty years during the fourth century. Despite this hostility, Persian lands were attractive to those Christians whose theological views were not in line with the official doctrine of the bishops of Rome, whose influence was becoming dominant in western Christianity. Numerous councils met in these early centuries of the Christian Church, attempting to reach uniformity of thought on divisive issues such as the exact nature of the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth. Although these councils often declared a “solution” to such issues, they rarely achieved unity. Groups left on the outside by these councils, such as the Jacobites and Nestorians, migrated to lands beyond the bounds of Rome, where they were able to establish churches free of outside control.

One of the most significant geographical centers of eastern Christianity was northern Mesopotamia. Cities such as Nisibis (modern-day Nusaybin, Turkey), on the trade route between Asia Minor and the Near East, were important centers of church governance and culture. As many as a hundred monasteries once flourished in this area. Nisibis, in particular, was important as a refuge for scholars from Edessa (modern-day Urfa), one hundred miles to the west, after Roman church officials closed the Nestorian university there. As the religious world of the West was becoming more homogeneous by the year, in the eastern Persian lands Nestorian and Jacobite Christianity coexisted with Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and—by the seventh century—Islam.

Beginning in the sixth century, at about the time scholars believe that the Book of the Cave of Treasures was written, a common concern among educated Christians revolved around the genealogies of Jesus circulated by religious leaders. This concern stemmed from the theory that the original documents recording the genealogy of the patriarchs had probably been destroyed during the Babylonian Captivity, the period during the sixth and seventh centuries BCE when the Hebrew people were deported to Babylon by the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Subsequently constructed genealogical records were believed to be faulty—either out of error or a conspiracy by Jews to hide the true ancestry of Jesus. Thus, a demand existed for “correct” studies of the ancestry of Jesus and the history of the Old Testament. Additionally, Arabian adherents of Islam, as descendants of Abraham and his concubine Hagar, shared this desire for an accurate account of the ancient past. Syrians, Ethiopians, and Egyptians had similar interests in ancient genealogy at this time.

Thus, the Book of the Cave of Treasures was written in an environment dominated by many competing religious traditions that yet had common historical and geographical roots. By presenting the Christian story of salvation as an integral part of the stories of the lands and peoples of the region, the Book of the Cave of Treasures served as a way for the Christians of Mesopotamia to stake a claim to legitimacy in an increasingly crowded marketplace of faiths.