Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 27:2 (Summer 2023)
Article: Winds, Tombs, And Wingless Birds: Sin In The Fifty Homilies Of Macarius
Author: Anonymous

Winds, Tombs, And Wingless Birds: Sin In The Fifty Homilies Of Macarius

Hannah Faith Turrill

Hannah Faith Turrill serves as Classical and Christian Studies Teacher at Highlands Latin School, Louisville, Kentucky. She earned her MDiv from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky, and presently she is completing her PhD in Church History and Historical Theology at Southern Seminary. Hannah is married to Schuyler, and they are members at Sojourn Church J-Town, Louisville, Kentucky, where she also serves in the women’s ministry.

Very little can be said for certain about the individual who wrote the collection of fifty homilies that have been traditionally ascribed to an author by the name of Macarius, but the collection has played an influential role in Christian devotion since its composition in the late fourth century. Its influence is seen in the writings of Isaac of Nineveh, Mark the Monk, and other church fathers from the fifth century onwards, and it was highly valued by John Wesley.1 Though the original attribution of authorship was given to Macarius of Egypt, a 4th-century desert father well-known in the tradition of eastern orthodoxy, scholars since the 1920s have raised questions about the validity of this attribution, and very few would currently hold such a view.2

The primary theory regarding the authorship of these homilies currently is that they were written at the end of the fourth century by someone living in the vicinity of Syria who was influenced by both Syriac and Egyptian Christianity, but little else is known.3 The difficulty is further complicated by the fact that the corpus of this particular author is uncertain, with various collections of homilies, letters, and assorted documents being considered as part of the corpus.4 Based on similarities between some of the doctrinal emphases of the homilies with those of the Messalian movement, an idea was

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at one point advanced that the author of the homilies was himself a Messalian, but that idea has since been judged doubtful.5 There have also been some suggestions that the homilies, or at least some of what is considered to be the Macarian corpus, were written by Symeon of Mesopotamia, who was a Messalian, but this attribution is by no means certain.6 Because of the difficulty of discerning the identity of the author, the author of the homilies has been variously listed as Macarius, Macarius-Symeon, and Pseudo-Macarius. In this artic...