The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers by Jack Tannous (review)

The mostly agrarian population of the late ancient Middle East was composed of people of limited theological literacy. But christological controversies and divisions after Chalcedon had shaped their social world, religious communities, institutions, and practices. In his groundbreaking book, The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers, Jack Tannous argues that one cannot understand the beginnings of Islam in the Middle East without recognizing the context of the simple believers living under Roman and Arab rule.

A thorough review of a book of this length, breadth, and depth is not possible here. This review, therefore, highlights some compelling points that Tannous’s work has for scholars of ancient Christianity. The fourteen chapters of the book address five main topics: (1) Simple Belief, (2) Consequences of Chalcedon, (3) The Question of Continuity, (4) Christians and Muslims, and (5) The Making of the Medieval Middle East. The book contains two appendices on Approaching the Sources and The “Arab Conquests.”

This book challenges scholarly assumptions about the religious and social history of the medieval Middle East. Scholars of ancient Christianity articulate narratives that explain how christological debates and disagreements caused fractions in the fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-century churches. Tannous stirs his readers to extend their gaze forward into the seventh and eighth centuries, the centuries after Chalcedon, and he brings them into the villages, monasteries, schools, and countryside of late Roman Syria, a place of fluid religious, linguistic, and cultural boundaries. Tannous introduces readers to the religious elites and their texts (hagiographies, exegesis, letters, canons, and commentaries) and interprets them against the backdrop of an agrarian and largely theologically illiterate population.

This book does not study the general encounter between Christians and Muslims in late antiquity. Instead, it asks what kind of Christians met a small hegemonic Muslim minority, descended from non-Muslim converts (7). Through his careful use of a wide range of sources, readers encounter the virtuosi of the Miaphysites and Church of the East who studied and transmitted their theological traditions. But Tannous also sheds light on a large group of ordinary agrarian people who engaged in a wide range of practices that they identified as “Christian.” Tannous acknowledges that what historians know about simple believers comes from what the elites write about them (509–10). However, descriptions about them can still point to social realities when sources are analyzed carefully. Examples from the writings of Timothy I (Church of the East) and Timothy II (Miaphysite) show that a “minimalist baseline” of Christian knowledge among the simple was a straightforward confession of Christ’s full humanity and divinity (78). Simple Christians of untuned belief (249) may have been a majority. Many ordinary believers may have had an interest in theology, but lacked strong clerical leadership and access to catechetical training. It is historically misleading, Tannous shows, to expect that they would have understood the theological intricacies and disagreements that had fractionalized Christians of the Middle East. Tannous argues that this reality is key to understanding the momentum that Islam gradually gained over the people of this region.

Tannous turns to hagiography to illustrate the social and religious contexts of the simple believers of the Middle East. Despite literary conventions and hagiographic embellishments, sacred stories still presented contexts and scenarios that the reader would have understood (241). Tannous looks at examples from John Moschos, John of Ephesus, and the Life of Theodota. These hagiographies suggest that ordinary Christians recognized confessional boundaries that divided them from other Christians. But they didn’t necessarily follow those divisions or adhere to one particular church. Nor could they articulate what the theological differences among the Miaphysites, Church of the East, and Chalcedonians were. Ordinary believers might have debates with Christians from rival churches, but these debates were not necessarily about doctrine (63). Scenarios from John of Ephesus’s Life of Simeon the Moutaineer display the poor catechesis in rural areas...