The heretic travels under a false name

Claim (verbatim)

Nestorius wrote his own defense in exile - the book known as the Bazaar of Heracleides - and the Greek original is gone as completely as the empire intended: Theodosius II's edict of 435 had ordered his writings burned. What survives is a Syriac translation of about 540, transmitted in the Church of the East under the protective pseudonym on its title - the Tegurta (bazaar, emporium) of Heracleides of Damascus - a false name that let the book slip the ban and cross into Persia. Its survival then narrowed to a single thread: one known pre-modern manuscript at the patriarchal residence of Qudshanis in the Hakkari mountains, found and copied from 1889, edited by Paul Bedjan in 1910, translated by Nau (1910) and Driver-Hodgson (1925); the Qudshanis codex itself is reported to have perished in the destructions of 1915, leaving the modern copies as the text's whole foundation. The authentication is countable: Friedrich Loofs' Nestoriana (1905) assembled the Greek fragments of Nestorius that survive independently inside his refuters and the conciliar acta, and where those overlap the Bazaar they lock the translation to the lost original - while everything beyond the overlap is text that exists because of the translation alone. One edict, one pseudonym, one mountain codex, one round of copies: the survival chain of the century's most consequential heresiarch's self-defense, every link of it on the translation side of the ledger.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: building the concordance between Loofs' Nestoriana fragments and the Syriac Bazaar (through Nau's identifications and Abramowski's studies), at least 10 independently transmitted Greek fragments will find accepted passage-level counterparts in the Bazaar while more than two thirds of the Bazaar's bulk has no surviving Greek parallel at all (primary clause: >=10 locked fragments plus the >2/3 translation-unique share; the verdict follows it); secondarily, the work's full witness genealogy in every language will collapse to one pre-modern codex and its documented modern copies; a counterpart means a match accepted in the cited scholarship rather than a thematic parallel, the count runs over the whole transmitted text regardless of the debated interpolations in part I (Abramowski 1963), and the test voids if the literature yields fewer than 5 candidate matches to adjudicate.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Bedjan's 1910 edition with Nau's and Driver-Hodgson's translations, Loofs' Nestoriana (1905), and Abramowski's Untersuchungen zum Liber Heraclidis (CSCO, 1963) - a Greek-fragment-to-Syriac concordance census plus a witness-genealogy check.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The survival chain is stated in every treatment - Syriac-only, the pseudonymous title, the single Qudshanis codex with its modern copies, Bedjan's and Nau's 1910 editions - and the authentication concordance is itself printed: Nau's annotated translation keys the Bazaar's self-quoted sermon and dossier passages to the Greek fragments in Loofs' Nestoriana, and Abramowski's Untersuchungen re-runs the match in extenso. The >=10 locked fragments are index-arithmetic on those printed identifications, the >2/3 translation-unique share is guaranteed by the meager bulk of the Greek fragment corpus against the Bazaar's length, and the witness-genealogy clause restates the editions' own prefaces.

• P. Bedjan (ed.), Nestorius: Le Livre d'Heraclide de Damas (Paris-Leipzig, 1910)
• F. Nau (trans.), Nestorius: Le Livre d'Heraclide de Damas (Paris, 1910), annotations
• F. Loofs, Nestoriana: Die Fragmente des Nestorius (Halle, 1905)
• L. Abramowski, Untersuchungen zum Liber Heraclidis des Nestorius (CSCO 242, Subsidia 22, Louvain, 1963)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.