The Early Medieval Era · c. 700-1009 · Palestine, Syria
Melkite Arabic Christianity
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About This Movement
When the Arab conquests cut Palestine and Syria off from Constantinople, the Chalcedonian Christians of those provinces — Melkites, 'the emperor's people', as their neighbours labelled them — found themselves a minority under a new government and, within a few generations, doing something no church had done before: praying, arguing and writing theology in Arabic. Their intellectual heart was the monastic world of the Judean desert, above all the monastery of Mar Saba, where John of Damascus, from a family that had served in the Muslim administration, wrote the great defence of religious images that Byzantine emperors could not silence because he lived beyond their reach. A generation later Theodore Abu Qurrah was writing theology in Arabic for a mixed audience of Christians and Muslims, and anonymous works such as the treatise now called On the Triune Nature of God were explaining the Trinity in the vocabulary of the world around them. The window closes hard in 1009, when the caliph al-Hakim ordered the Church of the Holy Sepulchre razed.
Sources
- John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images (trans. Andrew Louth, SVS Popular Patristics) (primary) — The Mar Saba theologian, writing under the caliphate; Louth's translation is the standard English version. His Fount of Knowledge includes the first Christian theological account of Islam.
- Theodore Abu Qurrah, works (trans. John C. Lamoreaux, Library of the Christian East, BYU Press, 2005) (primary) — First English translation of nearly the complete corpus of the first major Christian theologian writing in Arabic (bishop of Harran, c. 810).
- On the Triune Nature of God (early Melkite Arabic apology, Sinai Arabic 154, 8th c.) (primary) — One of the oldest surviving Christian texts composed in Arabic - the tradition learning to write theology in Arabic in real time. Edition/translation: M. D. Gibson, Studia Sinaitica VII (1899), partial English.
- Sidney H. Griffith, The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque (Princeton, 2008) (secondary) — The standard modern account of Arabic-speaking Christianity under early Islam, with the Melkites at its center.
- Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 3, ch. 9: 'Christians under Muslim rule' (Sidney H. Griffith) (reference) — Direct fit for this movement, from the vol. 3 TOC.