In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

C h A P T e r 2 Theodore Abu Qurra ‫سرودواث‬ ‫وبأ‬ ‫ةرق‬ John C. Lamoreaux In the south of modern-day Turkey, not far from the Syrian border, near the ancient city of Edessa, lies the town of Harran. It was there, we read in Genesis , that Abraham stopped while on his way from Ur of the Chaldeans to the land of Canaan. There, too, Isaac and Jacob are said to have taken their wives. While this village is not much to look at today, it was of immense cultural significance in the early Middle Ages. A home to Jews, Muslims, and Christians , to pagans and to heretics, it was a town alive with religious controversy. It was a place where theologians met and fought, both with each other and with the theologians of antiquity. It was a place where ancient traditions of learning were transformed—translated from Greek and Syriac into Arabic. There, too, those same traditions were still practiced. While paganism had died out elsewhere in the early medieval Middle East, it remained a vital tradition in Harran.1 There an illustrious series of scholarly families devised an amalgam of ancient Babylonian paganism and Neoplatonism and sought to make it intelligible to a world transformed by monotheism. Living in Harran, among the adherents of these many religions, was a small community of Orthodox Christians. Caring for the souls of this community in the late eighth and early ninth centuries was its bishop, Theodore Abu Qurra. Theodore is a figure well known to specialists in the study of Arab Christian literature—and for good reason. He was both one of the first Christians to write in Arabic2 and one of the first to undertake a sustained theological defense of Christianity against the rival claims of Islam. We know remarkably little about Theodore’s life.3 Though the evidence is slight, it is likely that he was a native of Edessa, a large town just to the north of Harran. He was born toward the middle of the eighth century, to judge from the fact that he was a mature theologian by the early decades 61 Theodore Abu Qurra of the ninth century. It is usually suggested that Theodore spent his early years, and perhaps his later years as well, as a monk at the famous Palestinian monastery of Mar Saba. As has been argued elsewhere,4 this is unlikely. Evidence supporting such monastic connections is far from strong. While no dependable source presents Theodore as a monk at the monastery of Mar Saba, a vast number of sources, both Christian and Muslim, remember him to have been the bishop of Harran. It is usually suggested—wrongly, I think—either that he occupied his see for a short time, only to be deposed, or that he was ordained bishop of Harran, was deposed, and took up the reins of authority again at a later date. Such claims are based on a single source, one that is late, hostile, and otherwise ill informed about Theodore’s life and theology.5 By contrast, we do know for certain that Theodore went to Armenia and there debated with the Miaphysite theologian Nonnus of Nisibis, at the court of the Bagratid prince Ashot Msakeri (d. 826)—an event that took place between 813 and 817, most likely toward the end of that period. The last reference to Theodore in the historical record is the Arabic translation of pseudo-Aristotle’s De virtutibus animae, which he produced for the Muslim general and governor of Khorasan (northeastern Iran), probably in 816. Theodore must have died not very long after this.6 The corpus of Theodore’s surviving works is large. It includes an extensive collection of Arabic works, almost all fairly substantial.7 Also published are more than forty Greek treatises,8 including a few substantial freestanding treatises, in one case a translation from Arabic into Greek,9 the remainder being fairly short, seemingly fragments of larger treatises now lost. Yet other published Greek works bearing his name were not in fact written by Theodore. They are, rather, records of debates in which he participated .10 Besides these Arabic and Greek works, Theodore is also known to have written at least one work in Syriac: a massive defense of the Council of Chalcedon, which, to the best of our knowledge, has not been preserved .11 Finally, there exist Georgian versions of almost all of Theodore’s Greek works, of which a few have been published.12 In...

Share