Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T08:04:56.331Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Biblical History and the end of Times: Seventh-Century Christian Accounts of the Rise of Islam

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Jessica Lee Ehinger
Jessica Lee Ehinger*
Affiliation:
St Peter’s College, Oxford
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

By the time of the rise of Islam in the early seventh century, Christian writers had already developed a complex methodology of historical writing, one that was not merely concerned with preserving the history of past events, but which viewed contemporary and past events through the lens of the biblical narrative of history, from creation to the ultimate end as prophesied in the eschatological books of the Bible. In this model, the history of the world could be traced from creation to follow the story of God’s revelation of himself to humankind through the prophets, through inspired Scripture and, most importantly, through Christ.

Type
Part I: The Churches’ Use of the Past
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 49: The Church on its Past , 2013 , pp. 52 - 62
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 The classic example of early Christian historiography and its relationship to soteriology remains Eusebius’s Church History. Although Eusebius’s model of integrating the biblical narrative into his historical account was adopted throughout the Christian Near East, historians from the so-called ‘heterodox’ confessions often understood his history to have been corrupted by the Byzantine authorities, and so composed their own continuations in order to correct this, preserving a history that presented their understanding of the life of the church after the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon. For the development of the understanding of church history among Near Eastern sects in the sixth and seventh centuries, see Brock, Sebastian, ‘Syriac Views of Emergent Islam’, in Juynboll, G. H. A., ed., Studies on the First Century of Islamic Society, Papers on Islamic History 5 (Carbondale, IL, 1982), 9–21, 199–203 Google Scholar, repr. in Brock, , Syriac Perspectives on Late Antiquity (London, 1984), VIII Google Scholar; idem, ‘The Nestorian Church: A Lamentable Misnomer’, BJRL 78/3 (1996), 23–36; Cameron, Averil, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse (Berkeley, CA, 1991)Google Scholar; Griffith, Sidney H., ‘Anastasios of Sinai, the Hodegos, and the Muslims’, Greek Orthodox Theological Review 32 (1987), 341–58 Google Scholar; Kennedy, Hugh, ‘The Melkite Church from the Islamic Conquest to the Crusades: Continuity and Adaptation in the Byzantine Legacy’, in The 17th International Byzantine Congress: The Major Papers (New Rochelle, NY, 1986), 325–43 Google Scholar, repr. in idem, The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East (Farnham, 2006),VI.

2 Brubaker, Leslie and Haldon, John F., Byzantium in the Iconoclast era c.680–850: A History (Cambridge, 2011)Google Scholar; Howard-Johnston, James, Witnesses to a World Crisis: Historians and Histories of the Middle East in the Seventh Century (Oxford, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; as well as the proceedings of the ‘Change and Continuity’ project, funded by the AHRC and currently being undertaken as a joint research project between the universities of Leiden, Oxford and Paris, with publication of the first proceedings, from the 2010 conference in Leiden, expected in 2012. A similar trend can be seen in the slightly older work of Haldon, John, Byzantium in the Seventh Century: the Transformation of a Culture (Cambridge, 1997)Google Scholar; Cameron, Averil, Conrad, Lawrence I. and Haldon, John, eds, The Byzantine and early Islamic Near East, 6 vols (Princeton, NJ, 1992–2004).Google Scholar

3 The length of the siege of Jerusalem is one point of the chronology of the expansion that has received particular attention recently. James Howard-Johnston has argued persuasively that the siege should be dated as ending in 636, a dating which would also mean that Sophronius’s second sermon on the Muslims coincided with the city’s capitulation, which might help account for its dark tone. Howard-Johnston first developed this revised dating in his historical commentary on the Armenian chronicle attributed to Sebeos, and then expanded it in his more recent work on seventh- and eighth-century historiography: Thompson, R. W., Howard-Johnston, James and Greenwood, Tim, ed. and transl., The Armenian History attributed to Sebeos, 2 vols, TTH 31 (Liverpool, 1999), 2: 240–4.Google Scholar

4 ‘Weihnachtspredigt des Sophronius’, ed. Usener, H., Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 41 (1886), 500–16 Google Scholar, at 503.

5 Ibid. 504; translation mine.

6 Ibid. 515; translation mine.

7 For further details on the genre of apocalypses, see Alexander, Paul J., The Byzantine Apocalyptic Tradition (Berkeley, CA, 1985)Google Scholar; Brock, Sebastian, ‘An Extract from the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius’, in Palmer, Andrew, ed., The Seventh Century in the West-Syrian Chronicles, TTH 15 (Liverpool, 1993), 222–6.Google Scholar

8 Alexander, Byzantine, 46.

9 Hoyland, Robert, ed. and transl., Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam (Princeton, NJ, 1997), 282–3.Google Scholar

10 Harris, J. Rendel, The Gospel of the Twelve Apostles together with the Apocalypses of each one of them (Cambridge, 1900)Google Scholar, 1ς-1η, translation at 36.

11 The clearest example of this shift in perspective is the rise of the genre of Christian apologetics against Islam, which begin to appear in the late eighth century, and which often use a dialogue in the Muslim court between a Muslim ruler and Christian religious leader as their frame story, thus effectively accepting the current circumstance of Muslim rule as the norm; see, e.g., the Patriarch Timothy’s dialogue with the caliph: Mingana, A., ed. and transl., Woodbrooke Studies: Christian Documents in Syriac, Arabic, and Garshūni, Edited and Translated with a Critical Apparatus, 2 (Cambridge, 1928), 15–162.Google Scholar