The Orthodox Church in the Arab World, 700–1700

An Anthology of Sources

Samuel Noble, Alexander Treiger

• Editore: Northern Illinois University Press
• Anno: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781609091552
• Argomento: Teología y religión
• Categoria: Denominaciones cristianas

All of the texts chosen for this volume are interesting in their own right, but the collection of these sources into a single volume, with helpful introductions and bibliographies, makes this book an invaluable resource for the study of Arabic Christianity and, indeed, the history of Christianity more broadly. ? Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies

Arabic was among the first languages in which the Gospel was preached. The Book of Acts mentions Arabs as being present at the first Pentecost in Jerusalem, where they heard the Christian message in their native tongue. Christian literature in Arabic is at least 1, 300 years old, the oldest surviving texts dating from the 8th century. Pre-modern Arab Christian literature embraces such diverse genres as Arabic translations of the Bible and the Church Fathers, biblical commentaries, lives of the saints, theological and polemical treatises, devotional poetry, philosophy, medicine, and history. Yet in the Western historiography of Christianity, the Arab Christian Middle East is treated only peripherally, if at all.

The first of its kind, this anthology makes accessible in English representative selections from major Arab Christian works written between the eighth and eigtheenth centuries. The translations are idiomatic while preserving the character of the original. The popular assumption is that in the wake of the Islamic conquests, Christianity abandoned the Middle East to flourish elsewhere, leaving its original heartland devoid of an indigenous Christian presence. Until now, several of these important texts have remained unpublished or unavailable in English. Translated by leading scholars, these texts represent the major genres of Orthodox literature in Arabic.

Noble and Treiger provide an introduction that helps form a comprehensive history of Christians within the Muslim world. The collection marks an important contribution to the history of medieval Christianity and the history of the medieval Near East.

Introduction

Samuel Noble and Alexander Treiger

Arab Christianity—A Neglected Area of Church History

The Middle East is the birthplace and the ancient heartland of Christianity, where the first Christian communities were founded by the apostles. On the eve of the Islamic conquests in the seventh century CE, Christians formed a majority or a plurality in most areas of the Middle East. They spoke and wrote a variety of languages, including Greek, Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopic, Armenian, Georgian, Middle Persian, and Sogdian. Arabic, too, was spoken by those Arab tribes and sedentary populations in Arabia, Palestine, Syria, and Iraq who had converted to the Christian faith in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries.

In the course of the seventh century, an estimated half of the world’s Christians found themselves under Islamic rule.1 The Islamic conquests set in motion two processes affecting these Christian communities: the process of Arabization, causing them gradually to adopt Arabic as a spoken, literary, and liturgical language (often alongside their ancestral tongues) and the much slower, yet persistent process of Islamization. To the degree that they underwent Arabization but not Islamization, Middle Eastern Christians are Arab Christians, though those of them who do not consider themselves to be of Arab descent, such as the Copts of Egypt or the Maronites of Lebanon, often reject the term.

Middle Eastern Christians successfully adapted to the new reality shaped by the Islamic conquests and developed new and unique ways of bearing witness to the Christian gospel in a culture largely defined by Islam. Though their proportion in the total population declined significantly over the centuries, Middle Eastern Christians in general and Arab Christians in particular have retained their cultural importance up to the present day.

Christian theological literature in Arabic is at least 1300 years old, the oldest surviving texts dating from the eighth century.2 Pre-modern Arab Christian literature embraces such diverse genres as Arabic translations of the Bible and the Church Fathers, Biblical commentaries, liturgical texts, lives of the saints, homilies, theological and polemical treatises, ascetical literature, devotional poetry, philosophy, medicine, history, and diaries, as well as archival documents that offer indispensable information on Arab Christian and Middle Eastern history.3 As the catalogs of Christian publishers in Cairo and Beirut and now a plethora of Christian websites in Arabic clearly show, Arab Christian literature continues to flourish today.4

Despite all the above, in the Western historiography of Christianity, the Arab Christian Middle East is treated only peripherally, if at all. The popular assumption, current even among scholars of Christianity, is that in the wake of the Islamic conquests, Christianity abandoned the Middle East to flourish elsewhere, leaving its original heartland devoid of an indigenous Christian presence. To make things worse, the term “Arab” is widely—though needless to say incorrectly—regarded as synonymous with Muslim, and so even the very notion of Arab Christianity appears to many to be a contradiction in terms.

Even those Westerners who are aware of the existence of Arabic-speaking Christian communities—primarily through personal contacts with émigré Middle Eastern Christians living in the West—are rarely able to name even a single author or literary work from the Christian heritage in Arabic. This is hardly surprising, as virtually no such authors or works are mentioned in the standard histories of Christianity available to the Western reader and the existing translations of such texts are not easily accessible to nonspecialists. (The bibliography at the end of this anthology will offer a guide to these translations.)

To take just a few examples: though Middle Eastern and Arab Christianity would easily merit their own volume in such a detailed and otherwise excellent work as Jaroslav Pelikan’s five-volume The Christian Tradition, all one finds is a number of scattered references to one or two Arabic-writing Christian theologians.5

Similarly, Kallistos Ware’s The Orthodox Church simply remarks that after the Islamic conquests, “[t]he Byzantines lost their eastern possessions, and the three Patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem passed under infidel control.”6 Little is said about the subsequent history of these patriarchates until they resurface again much later in the narrative, in the chapter devoted to the Orthodox Church in the twentieth century. Arab Orthodox Christians are referenced only once, in connection with the contemporary situation in the patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem.7 Only one Arab Christian author from the preceding centuries is mentioned.8 The chapter entitled “The Church under Islam” begins with the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, with not the slightest hint that three patriarchates had been under Islamic domination for more than eight centuries prior to that date.9

Even more recently, John McGuckin, in his monograph The Orthodox Church (2008), takes the position that “[a]fter the rise of Arab [read: Muslim] power in the seventh century, the once great Christian communities of Antioch and Alexandria fell into disastrous decline.”10 The reader is made to understand that the decline was so drastic and so disastrous that there is hardly any need to comment on these communities’ subsequent fate.

The same neglect of Arab Christianity is evident also in McGuckin’s recent two-volume Encyclopedia of Eastern Orthodox Christianity (2011). Though this encyclopedia features separate articles on Orthodoxy in Latvia and Orthodoxy in Lithuania, it has no comparable article on Orthodoxy in Lebanon. Sporadic references to Arab Orthodox Christianity are only found in entries on the patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem and in the entry on the “Syrian Orthodox Churches.” The latter, however, somewhat confusingly reports that “[t]he Syrian Orthodox Christians, in the Byzantine sense (i.e., those that accept all seven ecumenical councils) . . . belong either to the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East or the Antiochian Orthodox Church”11—despite the fact that the “Greek” Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch is the Antiochian Orthodox Church. There is not a single entry in the entire encyclopedia on any Arabic-writing Christian theologian.

It is only in recent years that surveys of Christianity in general and Orthodox Christianity in particular have begun to include chapters on the “Arabic tradition.” Thus, Kenneth Parry’s The Blackwell Companion to Eastern Christianity (2007) features a chapter on Arab Christianity, as does the volume The Orthodox Christian World, edited by Augustine Casiday (2012). Likewise, the Cambridge History of Christianity volume on “Early Medieval Christianities” (2008) features a general survey chapter on “Christians under Muslim Rule.” This subject is taken up much more extensively in the German manual Das orientalische Christentum by Wolfgang Hage (2007) and in the excellent Russian study Blizhnevostochnoe Pravoslavie pod Osmanskim vladychestvom (Orthodox Christianity in the Middle East under Ottoman Rule) by Konstantin Panchenko (2012). The first monograph in English that attempts to do justice to the richness of the Arab Christian tradition while also being accessible to the general reader—Sidney Griffith’s The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque—was published in 2008.12

These are hopeful signs for the future, yet much work remains to be done before this important aspect of Christian history can be fully appreciated. Close to 90 percent of the vast corpus of Arab Christian literature has not yet been edited or translated, let alone adequately studied. Numerous texts, including documents of considerable importance, are unknown even to Arab Christians themselves, being buried in the manuscript repositories of Europe and the Middle East, while many others have been edited in Arabic but remain inaccessible to the English reader.

The present anthology—the first of its kind—intends to fill this important gap. It is the editors’ hope that it will mark a step forward in correcting this deplorable Western myopia with regard to Arab Christianity by making accessible in English representative selections from major Arab Christian works, several of them previously unpublished, written during the millennium from 700 to 1700.

For the sake of consistency, this anthology focuses on one particular tradition among the many varieties of Middle Eastern Christianity (on which more below): what we shall term “Arab Orthodox Christianity.”13 Arab Orthodox Christians are those Arabic-speaking Christians who accept the definitions of the seven ecumenical councils (including the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon) and are in communion with the other Orthodox churches: the churches of Greece, Russia, Serbia, Romania, Georgia, and others. Traditionally, these Christians were called “Melkites” (literally “royalists”) by their opponents, a term that implied that the Arab Orthodox were followers of the Byzantine emperor in matters of doctrine and ritual.14 In Arabic, they are frequently called “Rum Orthodox”: “Roman” (i.e., Byzantine-rite) Orthodox. In the West, they are often called “Antiochian Orthodox,” due to the fact that the majority of their churches in North America are affiliated with the Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch.

It must be mentioned in this connection that even as Arabic came to predominate within the Middle Eastern Orthodox Christian community, Syriac and Christian Palestinian Aramaic long remained in liturgical use in many regions,15 while Greek, Georgian, and even Persian and Turkish were also employed in some times and places. Since, however, these languages lie outside the scope of this anthology, it is to a more detailed account of the history of the Arab Orthodox community—and of Arab Christianity in general—that we must now turn.

Arab Christianity before the Rise of Islam

Arabic was among the first languages in which the Gospel was preached. The Book of Acts mentions Arabs as being present at the first Pentecost in Jerusalem, where they heard the Christian message in their native tongue.16 Not long thereafter, the Apostle Paul states that immediately after his conversion he traveled to Arabia.17 The term “Arabia” as used by Paul presumably refers to the Nabatean kingdom, centered in Petra in present-day Jordan. While ethnically Arab, the Nabateans had come to use Aramaic as they became sedentarized. In the early second century CE they were conquered by Rome and incorporated into the Roman Empire as the province of Arabia Petraea.18 It is such sedentary Arameo-Arab groups that were the first Arabs to be exposed to, and to gradually embrace, Christianity.

Other than the people of Arabia referenced by Paul, one can mention the Arameo-Arab Abgarid dynasty of Edessa (present-day Urfa in Turkey). According to some early Christian sources (e.g., the fourth-century Church historian Eusebius of Caesaria and the fifth-century Syriac text The Doctrine of Addai), King Abgar V the Black (d. 50 CE) was converted to Christianity by the Apostle Addai, thus becoming the first Christian king.19 Scholars have disputed the historicity of this information and the identity of the Abgar in the story, sometimes attempting to equate him, instead, with Abgar VIII the Great (d. 212). Whatever the identity of the king who converted to Christianity, it is undeniable that the Abgarid dynasty of Edessa was early on favorable to, or at least tolerant of, Christianity and that the new faith had gained acceptance in the city by the end of the second century CE.20

The spread of Christianity to Arabic-speaking nomads and semi-nomads soon followed.21 The chief areas of the Arabian Peninsula to have had a significant Christian population were the southern Arabian city of Najran (near the modern border between Saudi Arabia and Yemen), the northeast edge of the peninsula (especially the city of al-Hira near modern Kufa in Iraq and the coastal region of Qatar), and the desert areas bordering Byzantine Syria and Palestine. It is in this last region in the fourth century CE that the Byzantines began to recruit semi-nomadic Arab tribes to secure the porous border region from incursions from the desert. As part of this arrangement, the Arabs allied with Byzantium were required to convert to Christianity. It would appear that these new converts quickly became zealous for the Nicene Orthodoxy they had received: when the emperor Valens (r. 364–78) attempted to enforce Arianism as the creed of the Empire, these Arab foederati, led by their queen Mavia, revolted against his rule and successfully demanded that a pro-Nicene Arab hermit named Moses be ordained their bishop.22 Writing in the fifth century CE, the church historian Sozomen claims to have heard odes composed in Arabic that celebrated Mavia’s victory over Valens. Not only is this the earliest account of Arabic poetry, it is also the earliest account of an oral Christian literature in Arabic.23

In the fifth century the relative unity of the Christian world was shattered by intense controversies over Christology. These controversies came to define the communal and theological identities of Arabic-speaking Christians both before and after the rise of Islam. The first stage of the controversy centered on the debate between the patriarch of Constantinople, Nestorius (d. 451) and the patriarch of Alexandria, Cyril (d...