Michael the Syrian; The Forgotten Patriarch-Historian

The Chronicle of Michael the Great, Patriarch of the Syrians 

Among the chronicles of the medieval world, few are as sweeping or as neglected as The Chronicle of Michael the Great; the twelfth-century universal history written by Michael the Syrian, Patriarch of the Syriac Orthodox Church. Composed in Syriac and preserved through an Armenian translation, his work gathers the wisdom of centuries: from Julius Africanus and Josephus, to Eusebius, Jacob of Edessa, and countless other voices now lost to time.

Michael wrote not as a court historian or imperial theologian, but as a bishop of an exiled church, standing outside the Roman and Byzantine traditions. For him, “orthodox” Christianity meant rejection of the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE); a stance that placed his Church at odds with both Rome and Constantinople.The Roman Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox Church do not recognize him as a father of the faith; his Christology is officially deemed heretical in their eyes. Yet this condemnation is rooted not in divine truth but in ecclesiastical politics; the same politics that enthroned men as arbiters of faith. The very idea of “orthodoxy,” as later defined by the imperial Church, was not born from the apostles but from the bishops who learned to govern themselves by councils and creeds. It was the so-called “rule of faith,” established by the Church to define its own boundaries, that made orthodoxy self-governing; a circle of authority that justifies itself.

In the earliest days, bishops were not monarchs; they were elders among elders, shepherds within a single flock, chosen to serve, not to reign. But in time, the bishop of Rome exalted himself above his brethren, claiming a throne and a crown through what he called “apostolic succession.” Yet succession, as Eusebius himself records, was never a chain of hands laid upon heads; it was a succession of teaching, a faithful preservation of the Gospel’s truth, not a lineage of enthroned men.

Even Rome’s own history betrays the myth of an unbroken line. The first great schism of the Roman Church came when it rejected Hippolytus of Rome, a man of profound learning and holiness, as bishop; creating two rival bishops ruling at once. Such a scandal tears the veil from the illusion of perfect continuity. If two men could both claim Peter’s seat, then the line itself was never divine but administrative, a hierarchy stitched together by ambition and political survival.

In that light, the rejection of Michael the Great by the later churches is hardly surprising. His witness exposed what they had buried; that true succession lies not in titles or thrones, but in the unbroken testimony of those who kept the Gospel pure, unmixed with empire or philosophy. To call him heretic was to silence the echo of an older faith; the faith that lived before Rome ever learned to call itself holy. Yet his Chronicle remains a monumental preservation of the ancient Near Eastern Christian worldview; a tapestry of Scripture, history, legend, and theology interwoven into a single narrative of divine providence.

Michael the Great was no son of Rome. He stood outside its gilded walls, a patriarch of the old Semitic faith long before popes claimed their keys of heaven. As head of the Syriac Orthodox Church; the ancient see of Antioch, where the disciples were first called Christians; he carried a tradition that never bent its knee to the decrees of Chalcedon or to the purple-robed bishops of empire. Rome called him heretic; Byzantium called him schismatic. Yet his faith was older than theirs, shaped in the tongue of Christ and the soil of the prophets, unpolished by philosophy and untouched by imperial ambition.

While the Latin and Greek churches crowned their hierarchs with gold and enthroned men as gods, Michael wrote of kings who mistook their own breath for divinity, of temples built to demons who wore the names of heroes. His chronicle is the record of a world seduced by power; and a warning to every age that follows it. For he saw what others would not: that when religion weds empire, truth becomes ceremony, and the devil’s throne is mistaken for God’s. No wonder Rome did not honor him. His faith was a mirror too clear, reflecting the face of a Church that had traded the Spirit of God for the shadow of Caesar.

Modern scholars value Michael not for his orthodoxy, but for his historical reach and cultural independence. He preserved hundreds of documents otherwise lost; records of early Syriac, Armenian, Greek, and even pagan sources.Through his eyes, history becomes a moral drama: empires rise and fall not through chance or politics, but through the justice of God. Where Byzantine and Latin chroniclers saw divine favor resting on empire, Michael saw divine punishment for imperial arrogance and heresy; even interpreting the Muslim conquests as God’s scourge against the persecuting Byzantines.

To read Michael the Syrian is to hear Christianity’s Eastern, Semitic conscience; a voice long silenced by the politics of empire, yet resonant with the moral weight of ancient prophecy.

For Michael the Syrian and the Syriac Orthodox Church, the word “Orthodox” carried a meaning entirely different from that used in Rome or Byzantium. In his tradition, Orthodox meant anti-Chalcedonian; faithful to the older understanding that in Christ, divinity and humanity are perfectly united in a single, inseparable nature. The Council of Chalcedon (451 A.D.), which defined Christ as having two distinct natures, divine and human, was seen by Michael’s church as a disastrous innovation that divided what God had joined. The Byzantine Empire and the Roman Church embraced Chalcedon as the cornerstone of official theology; Michael regarded it as heresy, born of imperial politics and Greek philosophical reasoning. Thus, when Byzantine writers spoke of “Orthodox” Christians, they meant the imperial, Chalcedonian Church; but when Michael used the same word, he meant the persecuted communities of Syriac, Armenian, and Coptic believers who refused to bow to the decrees of empire and preserved what they believed to be the true, undivided faith.

Michael the Syrian saw himself as a historian of the twilight; a bishop writing when the light of faith seemed to fade from the world. He looked back on the great teachers of old as men who had written in the dawn and noontime of revelation, when divine wisdom still shone brightly. His own age, he lamented, was darkened by ignorance and persecution, yet he hoped that the breath of the Holy Spirit might still kindle a spark of understanding. In his preface he speaks of passing on “the rays of the Sun of Justice,” (metaphor) meaning the light of Christ, to illuminate the hearts of believers. He dedicates his work to Zion, our holy mother; envisioned as the Bride of Christ and the New Jerusalem; so that her children might be taught, renewed, and forgiven. Writing history, for Michael, was not merely to record the past but to hand the torch of divine light to the next generation, keeping the radiance of the heavenly city alive in a world 

In the ancient imagination, creation itself was woven in pairs; light and darkness, heaven and earth, male and female; each complement completing the other in divine balance. When early interpreters said that Adam’s sons were born with twin sisters, they were not inventing curiosities but describing the human echo of cosmic order: male and female joined as one reflection of heaven’s symmetry. This tradition first appeared in Second Temple; era Jewish writings, especially the Book of Jubilees (2nd century B.C.), which named Cain’s sister Awan, Abel’s Azura, and sometimes identified Seth’s wife with the same name. The idea passed into Syriac and Coptic Christianity and was later taken up by early fathers such as Methodius of Olympus and Anianus the Monk, who gave the sisters new names; Klimia, Beluda, and Azura; and used them to show how the first families of the earth mirrored the paired harmony of creation itself. For them, the three sets of twins; Cain and Klimia, the first earthly pair of labor and life; Abel and Beluda, the spiritual pair of innocence and offering; and Seth and Azura, the restored pair of reconciliation and promise; embodied the rhythm of heaven still pulsing through human flesh. When Cain murdered Abel, that cosmic equilibrium was broken, and the harmony between body and spirit, man and woman, earth and heaven collapsed into chaos. Yet with Seth’s birth the balance began to heal, signaling that God’s order still lived beneath the world’s ruin.

The Roman Catholic Church, however, never adopted these stories. Because their earliest sources; Jubilees, Enoch, and related apocrypha; were excluded from the biblical canon, the Western Church regarded the twin-sister accounts as pious speculation, not revelation. They were preserved in the East for their symbolic power, but in the West only the canonical text of Genesis was deemed authoritative, where Adam’s named children are Cain, Abel, and Seth. Thus, while later theology in Rome and Byzantium left the twins in silence, the Syriac and Eastern fathers kept them as living symbols of divine symmetry, reminders that even in exile humanity still bore the pattern of Paradise. In this light, the “twin sisters” stand not merely as ancestral wives but as signs of cosmic unity and fertility, proof that heaven’s harmony still touched the earth; a foreshadowing of its final restoration in Christ and His Bride, the New Jerusalem.

In the centuries after the apostles, the meaning of “orthodoxy” itself began to change. The first Christian communities were guided by elders (presbyters) who shared authority together; over time, one elder in each city emerged as the bishop, a coordinator meant to preserve unity. During the second and third centuries these bishops began appealing to what they called the “rule of faith”; a concise summary of apostolic teaching; and claimed that their succession from the apostles guaranteed the truth of their doctrine. This idea of apostolic succession was not something that could be historically verified; it was a theological claim used to mark continuity and to identify authentic teaching in an age of rival sects. In the Roman and Byzantine worlds, this episcopal consensus hardened into institutional power: bishops and councils came to decide what was orthodox, and their rulings were treated as the voice of the universal Church. Yet in the earliest generations, bishops were still elders among elders, servants rather than sovereigns, their authority resting on fidelity to Scripture, shared faith, and the moral witness of their communities.

Eastern churches like the Syriac Orthodox, from which Michael the Syrian later wrote, preserved that older memory; where truth was guarded not by imperial decree but by the living tradition of the faithful. In their view, what was truly apostolic was not what bishops declared orthodox, but what remained faithful to the apostolic teaching itself; the unbroken harmony between Scripture, creation, and the divine order it reveals.

In the ancient imagination, creation itself was woven in pairs; light and darkness, heaven and earth, male and female; each complement completing the other in divine balance.

Thus, while later theology in Rome and Byzantium left the twins in silence, the Syriac and Eastern fathers kept them as living symbols of divine symmetry, reminders that even in exile humanity still bore the pattern of Paradise. In this light, the “twin sisters” stand not merely as ancestral wives but as signs of cosmic unity and fertility, proof that heaven’s harmony still touched the earth; a foreshadowing of the great marriage of heaven and earth that reveals the eternal Bride and Bridegroom, from whose union the apostles were born as children of the bridal chamber, and whose joy believers share as witnesses and guests at the wedding feast.

Eastern churches like the Syriac Orthodox, from which Michael the Syrian later wrote, preserved that older memory; where truth was guarded not by imperial decree but by the living tradition of the faithful. In their view, what was truly apostolic was not what bishops declared orthodox, but what remained faithful to the original union of heaven and earth, the divine harmony from which the apostles themselves were born and through which all creation is destined to be restored.

From the earliest ages, sacred writers spoke of a mystery older than creation itself; the union of the Word and His counterpart, the divine pairing that would later appear on earth as the marriage of heaven and earth. The poets of Israel gave this hidden truth a human tongue: “You have captured my heart, my sister, my bride; you have ravished my heart with one glance of your eyes” (Song of Songs 4:9). Here the Bride is called not only “bride” but “sister,” hinting at a twin relationship within the divine life; two who share one essence, the giving and the receiving side of love itself. The ancient teachers saw in that verse the reflection of the pre-cosmic union of the Word and Wisdom, the heavenly Bridegroom and His Bride, whose embrace brought forth the world.

The echo of this mystery reappears in the New Testament’s quiet greetings: “The children of your elect sister greet you” (2 John 1:13). To many early interpreters, such language was not mere politeness but a continuation of the same pattern; the divine family extending through creation, heaven and earth joined in kinship. If Christ is the heavenly Bridegroom, then His “elect sister” is the eternal counterpart through whom life is conceived and revealed, and the children are those who live in the light of that union. Thus the apostles were spoken of as children of the bridal chamber, born from the marriage of Word and Wisdom, and all believers are invited as guests at the wedding feast, to witness the joy of that reunion when heaven and earth are one again.

In this way the scriptures preserve, in symbol and greeting, the memory of the twin harmony that runs through all things: the Word who speaks and the Wisdom who receives, the Bridegroom and the Bride, whose love is the fountain of creation and the destiny of its return.

Yet alongside this harmony, the ancient chronicles remember the moment it was broken. Michael the Great, the twelfth-century patriarch of the Syrians, recorded how the world that once knew its Creator turned instead to the works of its own hands. In his Chronicle, he writes not as a polytheist but as a moral historian of the soul: humanity, he says, began by worshiping the one God, then mistook the stars for gods, then the spirits that moved behind them, and finally the statues and names of men. Thus were born the old deities; Baal, Belus, Dagon, Asherah, Ishtar; names, not of rival powers, but of men and spirits who had fallen from the truth. The stars themselves were innocent, the images were human invention, but the influence that answered through them was demonic; the activity of those fallen beings who sought worship in place of their Maker.

In this vision, the gods of the nations are masks worn by the same rebellion. Michael’s Belus, the Assyrian Baal, is no true god but a deified tyrant, one of the ancient kings through whom the spirits of darkness taught astrology, sorcery, and the ways of idolatry. These powers, he says, worked through men and were later honored as gods, until all the world bowed to the shadows of its own making. Behind them stood the Adversary; the prince of the fallen host whom later ages would name Beelzebub, the Prince of Darkness; whose servants became the unseen rulers of the nations.

For Michael, every idol is the face of that same rebellion: the longing for creation without its Creator, for power without love. Yet even in the ruins of that idolatry, he saw a faint memory of what once was holy; the echo of the lost harmony between heaven and earth. To see through the mask of Baal is to remember the true light that the false gods imitate; to hear in the din of kingdoms the yearning of creation to return to its first union. Thus, in the history of demons and idols, Michael discerned not only the story of humanity’s fall, but also the hidden ache for restoration; the promise that when the Bridegroom returns, heaven and earth shall again be joined in one eternal concord, and the world will remember its first love.

In the days when the fields of the Chaldeans lay desolate and their gods were deaf, a youth named Abraham lifted his eyes from the dust and began to think. The idols were silent, the stars unmoved by sacrifice, and yet the heavens themselves seemed alive with hidden purpose. Then, says Michael the Great, a ray of light entered his heart and he knew that behind every orbit and season there moved one unseen Hand; the Creator whom men had forgotten. Calling upon this “unknown God,” he found what the nations had lost: the living voice that answers prayer (and it wasn't Mary!). Thus the age of sorcery and idols gave way to the dawn of faith, when a single soul, illumined by grace, discerned the truth that the stars only reflect. In that moment the long night of false worship began to wane, and the world once more felt the breath of its Creator stirring in the heart of man.

When the first kingdoms rose from the dust, men began to crown their own likeness with the names of heaven. Michael the Great tells how Belus, the founder of Assyria, was worshiped as a god after his death, and how his son Ninus raised golden images to his father and bowed before them. Thus began the ancient blasphemy: the deification of men through the whisper of demons. For the fallen spirits, hungry for the worship they had lost, clothed themselves in the memory of kings and heroes. They taught the art of images, the rites of fire and incense, and received honor through the faces of the dead. What seemed to the nations the veneration of ancestors was, in truth, the old rebellion reborn; the Adversary enthroned behind the masks of empire.

Yet even as Nineveh glittered with idols, God raised a priest in secret. Melchizedek, spared from the altars of his father’s gods, was nourished by the hand of Heaven and built the Village of Peace. In him the true kingship was renewed: a priest not made by men but chosen by God, foreshadowing the eternal Priest who would reconcile heaven and earth. And when Abraham burned his father’s idols and called upon the unknown God, the cycle of deception was broken. For idolatry is always the same lie; the creature claiming the glory of the Creator; but faith restores the order of creation, giving worship back to the One who moves all things. Thus the chronicles remember: empires fall, idols perish, but the light that touched Abraham’s heart endures, and through it the world remembers that man was made to reflect God, not to replace Him.

After Ninus fell, his throne passed to Semiramis, the witch-queen of Assyria. The chronicles remember her not only for her splendor but for her sorceries. She raised the cities her husband had begun, shaping the earth into vast mounds and terraces;tils; to fortify her dominion and to rival heaven itself. Yet beneath the glitter of her crown worked a darker art. Semiramis wove enchantments around her empire, binding the hearts of men with the same spell that first made kings into gods. Her rule was the perfection of idolatry: the power of a woman enthralled by demons, exalting the image of flesh and gold above the breath of the living God.

Michael the Great writes that when witchcraft filled the earth and the worship of idols rose like smoke, God’s anger shook creation. Storms and tempests broke the proud towers, and the winds buried the idols and their spirits beneath the very mounds their makers had raised. There they remain, he says, tormented in the earth, the tils still humming with their unrest. Witches, drawn by the echo of that ancient power, seek them out to practice their arts, and the old voices rumble like thunder from the ground. Thus the queen who crowned herself with magic left behind a kingdom of graves; idols turned to dust, demons chained in the ruins of their own worship. For every empire built on enchantment becomes its own tomb, and every spell cast against heaven ends in silence beneath the weight of the earth.

After Semiramis, witchcraft didn’t fade; it spread like a plague. The same spirits buried under the mounds found new voices among the nations. When Pharaoh’s magicians fell silent beneath the Red Sea, their craft reappeared in new forms: false miracles and the worship of men. Michael the Great records how, even as God destroyed the armies of Egypt, the nations turned the drowned into gods. The Ethiopians built shrines to the dead, and soon after, Phoenicia crowned Heracles as a divine hero while Dionysius claimed the vine as his gift to mankind. The old witchcraft had simply changed names. What God had judged, men sanctified. Every empire that rose from that delusion kept the same creed; that man can be god.

After the empires of idols came Israel’s golden king. Solomon began in wisdom but ended in witchcraft. The same hand that built the house of God soon raised temples to Chemosh and Moloch, and within their courts he placed the images of Aphrodite (Venus/Ishtar/Asherah).His knowledge of creation became mastery, and mastery became pride. The signet ring once engraved with the Name of God; given to command the spirits for the building of the Temple; turned into a seal of dominion. The power that once bound demons to labor for holiness became the power to bind them for vanity, until the master of spirits was mastered by them. Thus wisdom turned to sorcery, and the friend of heaven became the first magician-king.

Even his sacred art betrayed the change. The great bronze sea rested on twelve bulls, a vision of strength corrupted into idolatry; the same beast that Israel once worshiped in the desert now holding up the water of purification. What had been holy became spectacle; what reflected heaven began to mirror Babylon. Michael the Great saw in this the mystery of all empires: when kings confuse the gift of God with their own genius, the Temple becomes a throne room and the altar a mirror. The ring, the bulls, and the idols all tell the same story; that divine wisdom, once claimed as personal power, is indistinguishable from witchcraft. And so the lesson endures: every Solomon who forgets his Source will one day find his crown in the dust and his ring in the hands of the spirits he thought to command.

The Queen of Sheba appears in Scripture like a spark in the dark; named only in passing, yet carrying a weight far greater than her few lines would suggest. The Bible gives her no genealogy, no prophecy, not even a name, only that she came “from the south” to test Solomon with hard questions. It is strange that such a figure, whose meeting with Israel’s wisest king marks one of the most symbolic encounters in sacred history, is mentioned so briefly. The silence itself seems deliberate; as though her identity were meant to be hidden, a mystery belonging to the nations beyond Israel, the wisdom that waited in the margins for the voice of truth.

When she stands before Solomon, her questions cut deeper than curiosity. Her riddles probe the nature of God, the pride of kings, and the illusion of holy blood. In one exchange she forces Solomon to confront his own lineage: the foreign mother, the sons of scandal, and the thieves who became kings. It is an accusation disguised as a riddle; and the king, instead of defending his crown, confesses. Tamar, a Canaanite widow who disguised herself as a prostitute, became the ancestress of Judah’s line. From her came Pharez, from Pharez came David, and from David, Solomon himself. Thus the royal house was founded not in purity of descent, but in the redemption of sin.

The Queen’s wisdom exposes what every empire fears to admit; that divine kingship is not born of blood but of grace. The God of Israel does not preserve a “pure line,” but a repentant heart. Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba; women condemned by law or scorned by birth; were written into the covenant to prove that holiness cannot be bred or falsified. Solomon’s answer, and his humility before the Queen, destroy the illusion of sacred genealogy. The true “divine blood” is not royal ancestry but mercy itself; the lifeblood of God poured into the unworthy to make them His own. In that meeting of Solomon and Sheba, the old dream of noble descent dies, and a greater kingdom begins: one founded not on heritage, but on forgiveness.

The meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba still judges the modern church. For what the Queen exposed in the court of Israel; the pride of birth, the worship of position, the confusion of lineage with holiness; survives beneath new robes and titles. The church that claims apostolic succession often forgets that the apostles themselves were fishermen, tax collectors, and zealots, not inheritors of sacred rank. It was grace, not genealogy, that called them. Yet generation after generation, men rebuild the same illusion Solomon confessed and renounced: that holiness can be institutionalized, that power can sanctify itself.

In every age, the temptation returns; to make the priesthood an inheritance, the hierarchy a bloodline, the faith a pedigree. Bishops proclaim themselves the heirs of the apostles by office, forgetting that the Spirit alone gives succession. Churches guard their creeds like royal patents, while mercy and humility; the only true marks of divine authority; are treated as ornaments rather than foundations. The Queen’s riddle dismantles all of this: “Identify the sons born in shame who became kings.” Her question still pierces the pulpits and cathedrals of our day.

For if the Son of God came through Tamar’s deception, Rahab’s house, and Bathsheba’s repentance, then no throne, no robe, no institution can claim purity apart from that same mercy. The church’s true lineage is not apostolic succession or dynastic order; it is the unbroken chain of repentance and faith. Wherever hearts are humbled, there the church is found. And wherever men exalt themselves as mediators of grace, the spirit of Solomon’s downfall stirs again: wisdom turned to pride, priesthood turned to power. The Queen of Sheba’s voice still echoes across the centuries, asking every generation of believers the same question: Is your God the living One; or only the image of your own authority?

The Queen’s riddles revealed Solomon’s heart, but the riddle of the cook exposes every age of faith. Beneath its plain words lies a mystery: there is only one true cook; the High Priest who feeds His people with His own life. The meal is singular, its flavor divine, and it cannot be improved. All who serve the altar are but helpers in His kitchen, stewards of that one table. Yet from the moment men sought to season the truth with their own opinions, the bitter taste of corruption entered the feast. A single wicked cook; a priest, bishop, or teacher who bends the Word toward ambition; can sour the table for generations. And until judgment, that bitterness lingers wherever men serve themselves instead of the Master.

The church of every century has repeated Solomon’s error. It begins with wisdom, builds temples, and ends by serving idols dressed as sacraments. When the priest forgets that he is not the chef but the servant of the Chef, the bread becomes stale and the wine turns to vinegar. The Queen’s riddle about the invisible Bridegroom still asks the same question: Whose table are you feeding from; the living God’s, or the one you built for yourself?

In our time, the priesthood has multiplied cooks and lost the taste of the meal. Theology has become a contest of recipes; one denomination adding spice, another sugar, all insisting theirs alone is pure. But the excellent cook needs no improvement. His food is the truth that cleanses and restores; His kitchen is the heart made humble. To serve Him is to return to simplicity; to strip the altar of pride, to cast down every golden utensil polished by self-importance, and to remember that grace cannot be cooked twice.

The modern church will not be healed by more cooks or finer recipes. It will be healed when it remembers that there is only one table, one Priest, and one meal: the Word and Wisdom joined as Bridegroom and Bride, feeding the world with love that cannot spoil. Everything else, however splendid, is seasoning for the bitter taste that endures until the Day when He Himself returns to serve His people once more.

In the days when King Uzziah of Judah lifted his hand to burn incense in the Temple and was struck with leprosy, the prophet Isaiah fell silent; and in that silence, across the sea, another fire was kindled. Michael the Great records that in Uzziah’s thirty-third year, a man named Romulus; whom the Latins later called divine; began to rule for forty-three years, founding the city that would call itself eternal. At the same time, the Egyptians hailed Heracles, the strong man deified as Jupiter, and the Greeks crowned their philosophers as priests of wisdom. The pattern was the same in every land: when the true altar was profaned, men built their own.

Rome’s birth, in Michael’s telling, is not a triumph but a symptom. It rises in the same generation that saw Judah’s king defile the sanctuary and lose his crown to disease. As holiness withdrew from Zion, the nations began to worship their own strength. Heracles became Jupiter; the mighty became gods; and Romulus, murderer of his brother, was lifted up as a son of heaven. Thus the Roman kingdom was founded upon fratricide and apotheosis; the worship of man as divine.

In Michael’s chronicle, this synchronism is no coincidence. When the prophetic voice fell silent, the voice of empire began to speak. The temple of God and the city of man were built in the same century; one sanctified by repentance, the other by pride. From that day, history divided itself: Jerusalem, waiting for redemption, and Rome, exalting its own power as everlasting. And the gods they raised; Heracles, Jupiter, and the deified kings; were only men enthroned by demons, the same powers that whispered to Babel in the beginning: “You shall be as gods.”

The Cathedra Petri, or Chair of St Peter, has long been revered as a sacred relic of apostolic authority, yet even the Vatican’s own research reveals a more complicated legacy. According to a press release from the Vatican News Service (25 October 2024), restoration work uncovered ivory reliefs depicting mythological and heroic scenes, including the labours of Hercules and celestial motifs. Art historians such as Karl Weitzmann (Studies in Classical and Byzantine Manuscript Illumination, Princeton, 1971) date the ivory panels to the eighth or ninth century, suggesting they were repurposed from an earlier imperial throne. Margherita Guarducci, in her study The Tomb of St Peter (1960), proposed that these carvings were inherited from Greco-Roman artistic traditions, blending pagan symbolism into Christian relics. Scholarly discussions summarized in public sources such as the Wikipedia entry on the Chair of Saint Peter continue to note the mixed Christian and mythological imagery embedded in the design.

Eusebius of Caesarea’s Chronicon laid the foundation for synchronizing biblical and Roman history, a framework later followed by Michael the Great in his Chronicle, translated by Robert Bedrosian (2019). There, Michael directly connects the rise of deified kings such as Belus and Romulus to the work of demonic powers masquerading as gods. Even The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) acknowledges the uncertain origins of the “Chair” and the medieval dating of the bronze statue of St Peter; another object suspected of having once represented Jupiter himself.

Mainstream historians accept that both artifacts belong to the medieval period, but they also recognize their pagan stylistic inheritance. The claim that the bronze statue was once Jupiter, and that the chair bears carvings of Hercules, may rest more in theology than archaeology, yet the symbolism is unmistakable. It fits perfectly with Michael the Great’s ancient warning: that the worship of man disguised as divine authority endures wherever the Church forgets the humility of its first apostles.