ForM · FORGED MEMORIES: the Church of Late Antique Iran and the West. The Textual Construction of a Relation with the Western Church and State Through Hagiographies, Epistles, Documents (4th-5th century)

According to a number of sources of diverse typology and different historical reliability - hagiography, historiography, epistles, ecclesiastical documents -, the Church of the Late Antique Iran, also known as ""Church of the East"", turned to the West searching for political support and ecclesiastical legitimation. In these sources, ""West"" is to be understood as a composite reality, including both the Roman political power, often represented through symbolic, even salvific, figures (Constantine, Helena), and the entire Church located west of the Iranian state. This search for diplomatic pressure from the Roman State and hierarchical legitimization from the ""western"" Church particularly took place during the 4th-5th century, a period in which the Church of Iran bloomed as an autonomous entity, but nevertheless a religious minority, persecuted from time to time by the Sasanian authorities. Through the edition of unpublished documents and the investigation about the reliability of known ones, the project aims at analyzing the circumstances and reasons of this longed-for intervention of the Western Church and Roman political power in both the dramatic circumstances of the persecution of Christians in the Sasanian Empire and the internal problems of the Church of East itself: to what extent and in what way does the ideological and literary re-elaboration affect the representation of this relation? What are the narrative devices adopted, and what is the role of some forged documents in that? In particular, the internal hierarchical controversies on the Patriarchal authority should receive new light through the online edition, translation, and analysis of a probably fake epistolary attributed to the 4th century Seleucian patriarch Papa Bar Aggai, that is, eight letters exchanged with exponents of the Western political and religious panorama (among them, e.g., Helena mother of Constantine).""