Jack Tannous Flashcards
What is this book about
the world the Arabs encountered when they conquered the Middle East in the mid-seventh century and the world those conquests created
a new minority religion of the Arabs met –
What kind of Christians?
Looking for a persuasive unified account
“that does equal justice to the religious landscape of the region and to its changes under both Roman and Arab rule” - 1
“The Islamic tradition has left us remarkably detailed – even at times awkwardly intimate – information about the Prophet Muhammad, and yet accounts of early Islamic history … yet
accounts have frequently been mired in interminable and intractable debates about how much, if anything, we can believe of the traditional Muslim account of Islamic origins” - 1
I will proceed from a basic assumption that if we want to understand how Christians and Muslims interacted with one another, we must first understand Christian-Christian interactions, why?
for the Middle East, in the several centuries before the birth of the prophet, witnessed the irreparable fracturing of its Christian community and the development of rival and competing churches.”
The great majority of Christians in the Middle East belonged to what church leaders referred to as ‘the simple’ –
“agrarian, illiterate, and likely had little understanding of the theological complexities that split apart the Christian community in the region” – 3
Before the Arab conquests – fierce competition for the loyalities simple,
everyday Christians among leaders of the various Christian movements in the middle east – 3
Focus on simple believers – new perspective on the conversion of Middle East –
a world in which one could hold on to many Christian practices and beliefs – 5
“For properly understanding the Middle East’s politically dominant medieval Muslim population requires understanding that it is precisely that:
a hegemonic minority whose members were descended from Non-Muslim converts
Part One –
Simple Belief
Chapter 1-
Theological speculation and theological literacy
Ancient Near East – “It was overwhelmingly agrarian with higher-level religious instruction and sophisticated theological literature like
not in great supply (or any supply). (14-15)
debates about christology not
a graduate seminar run amok
how much could a simple agrarain person have understood about theology?
I am interested in theological literacy and the ability of ordinary, everyday believers and nonspecialists to understand the Christological issues that led ot the formation of separate and distinct Christian churches”
Theological literacy?
How much training would they really have had?
sources for his claims
letters, hagiography, commentaries, exegesis, canons
“Philoxenus of Mabbug lamented that people became monks for a variety of ‘unhealthy reasons’
– among them, escaping debt or slavery, parental coercion, or abuse from one’s wife {???} “ – there are many reasons thus one would become a monk – not all of them “sincere” – 27
Constantinople?
Does not represent the majority of people living in the empire
Theological slogans?
A way of getting non-eliltes involved
John Moschos
Gives many examples to support this from both sides: “arguments and debates took place among ordinary believers over the question of Chalcedon – but these disputes were not always of a purely doctrinal nature, nor indeed they necessarily have to do with doctrine at all – 63
debating stories
“The popularity of these kinds of dueling stories points to the fact that an appeal to the miraculous or to a powerful figure provided an alternative justification for adopting a particular doctrinal stance or for associating with one communion as opposed to another: debating dialectically, citing the Bible, or researching patristic testimon
“Jacob of Edessa (d. 708)
offers a particularly vivid example of how a church leader might relate to the simple over whom he had pastoral responsibilities.” – 69
layering of knowledge
a layering of knowledge – a continuum of different levels of understanding- in the Christian community affected attitudes towards Chalcedon” –
baseline of Christian knowledge
“In both the case of the Miaphysite Timothy II and the East Syrian Timothy I, there was a recognition that a simple confession of Christ’s full humanity and divinity could serve as a sort of minimalist baseline.” – 78
paradox of the effects of Chalcedon
“the Christian communities of the Middle East in the centuries after Chalcedon and on the eve of the Arab conquests were largely agrarian and (theologically) illiterate, and yet they came to define themselves communally by reference to disagreements over sophisticated theological speculation that very few people could fully understand, much less critically evaluate.” - 79 – how did the simple relate to these debates ?
“It we want therefore to understand the shape that both Middle Eastern Christianity and Islam came to have and how they related to one another,
we must focus on this relationship between simple believers and the theological elite who wrote the texts we study and who, in fact, provide us with almost all that we know about simple believers. We must take seriously the religious consequences of a largely agrarian, illiterate population of Christians. “ – says this often -
Jacob of Edessa’s Canons
as a Window into Seventh-Century Syrian Society
Jacob’s rules
“His foundness for rules and his insistence upon the strict observation of church canons and laws made him something of a difficult character for his contemporaries, but these same qualities make him a goldmine for the social historian today.” – canons shed light on certain aspects of society in Ummayad ruled Syria - 91
SLAVE MATERIAL –
“Children and parents might have opposing Christological loyalties; so, too, might servants and masters. John, the Stylite of Litarb, asked Jacob about the case of a person who had been the servant of a heretic.” – 96
Confessional codeswitching
“In such a world, where ecclesiastical affiliations might shift within families and from generation to generation, it is not hard to imagine that there might be what one might call confessional code-switching, where a person would claim allegiance to one group or another depending on the circumstances in which he found himself in, much like a multilingual person would claim allegiance to one group or another depending on the circumstances in which he found himself in, much like a multilingual person shifts between languages depending on the context.” – 97
Confessional code switcher –
Thedota identifies him – “he was baptized a Nestorian but, going deaf because of ear problems, he had agreed to ‘strip off’ his baptism – presumably be circumcised-if a Jewish doctor would give him treatment. . . Baptized a Nestorian, a convert to Judaism, and living among the spiritual elites and highest leadership of the Miaphysite church, he had identified with a number of different religious communities over the course of his life.” (97-98) – shows the lack of utility of the category of “identity”
Confusion in the Land - sacraments
“Given that people were willing to subordinate the importance of Chalcedon and precise Christlogical doctrines to other concerns in their self-presentation and behavior, it should come as no surprise that at the level of the sacraments and church ritual, there seems to have been sharing and overlap between people supposed to be holding opposing Christologies “ – 100
Multiple axis of religious identity
“In other words, each individual’s identity was comprised of more than the one axis of their religious and confessional identification. And [perhaps more importantly] the religious component of a person’s identity was not necessarily the most important in any given situation, nor should we assume it was always the most predictive of patterns of behavior.”
How did people deal with doctrinal difference?
They didn’t
Let’s not forget oral debate
“Focusing on written polemics also misses the fact that more important than textual controversy will have been oral discussion and disagreement.” – 115
Interest versus literacy
“Anyone can be theologically curious and theologically interested, regardless of where he or she lives and what he or she does in life, and – this needs to be emphasized – pointing out that the great mass of religious believers in the late antique and early medieval Middle East were illiterate and theologically uneducated is not the same as claiming that these people had no interest in religious questions, or that they had no intellectual cravings. Theological literacy typically requires some combination of teachers, institutions, and books: theological curiosity, awareness, and interest require none of these.” – 123
how effective were stories in persuasion?
“Even debates and discussions that utilized stories of ordeals or employed appeals to legendary accounts of confessional champions vindicating this or that church’s theological stance will have had been less than fully effective. If a person’s confessional adherence was the result of nondoctrinal factors, how successful could arguments that referenced doctrine – even indirectly through stories of ordeals- be in influencing and encouraging behavior? “ – stories, persuasion and polemics – still not enough
Focus on the sacraments
“The sacraments went to the heart of what the lived experience of being a Christian was in a very tangible way.”
“The sacraments went to the heart of what the lived experience of being a Christian was in a very tactile and tangible way” – 134
Jacob “could punish a Christian who did not meet his expectations ecclesiastically, most dramatically by cutting that person off from the Eucharist, a course of action he frequently prescribed in his canons.” – 137
Life of Theodota –
“composed by Theodota at the end of his life in AD 698, it gives a vivid picture of the kinds of human needs and worries that ordinary seventh-century Christians faced and that their religious systems had to provide means of effectively confronting and dealing with those systems were to maintain their plausibility and appeal.” – 138
priestly power
“The state had only the power to kill the body, but a Christian priest, armed with the sacraments, had power to heal the body and deliver it from hell.” – 139
“we can see from Jacob’s canons that the Eucharist and other Christian means of mediating the sacred were employed in a number of different settings as weapons against undesirable realities – things like drought, sickness, or the inability to have children.” – 139-140
Eucharistic practice
“The Eucharist had apotropaic power.”- 140
“Just being placed in close proximity to the Eucharist was enough to give an object a special charge of healing power.” – 140
“People were requesting permission to take portions of the Eucharist back to their houses; Jacob, however, would only allow this if the elements were being taken to a sick person there.” - 141
“The Quinisext Council forbade giving the sacraments to dead bodies.”
spectrum of responses to adversity
“The ‘blessings of saints’ – oil that had been in contact with the relics of a holy person – were also being used for defense” – 146
“And although Jacob condemned most such uses of the Eucharist and other sacred items as tools to cope with forces beyond human control, these were nevertheless Christian responses, which had a place on one part of the spectrum of responses available to people living in the seventh century” – 147
Improper use of relics
Use of relics improperly – “Christian sacred objects and symbols were being used- however improperly- by Jacob’s lights- to try to achieve good purposes…. Addai gives the example of two men , “neither one of whom knows incantations or how to write or read, when they have a dispute and make noise and come to the point of great enmity, and one of them goes and draws lines [?] on the reliquaries of the saints and the tomb of the lepers in the name of his enemy… etc – strange practices – 148
“The Eucharist and the vessels used to administer it were treated with all the care that radioactive material today receives.” – 149
eucharistic regulations
“Stylites should not celebrate the Eucharist on their pillars, nor should they convene congregations for the liturgy there.” – 153
“But some people were going too far in restricting access to the Eucharist. Midwives were being kept out of the church and prevented from taking the Eucharist after helping women give birth. This was a practice that Jacob rejected.” – 153
Illustration of Muslim Christian relations
“John of Litarb asking Jacob whether it was appropriate for a Christian priest to give the blessings of the saints or a special mixture of dust and oil called the hnana to Hagarenes – that is-Muslims- or to pagans who were afflicted by evil spirits so that they might be healed. By all means, Jacob replied, it was appropriate, very appropriate, that such blessings not be held back from these non-Christians. Let them be given the blessings for whatever sickness. God’s granting them healing would be a clear proof of Christianity’s truth.” – 154
Powers of the clergymen - to understand how priestly power works
“a Christian clergyman had even the power to din a martyr direct access to Christ in the next life. No secular authority could wield such power.” - 155
“Great power, exercised without knowledge, would lead to the confessional chaos I have attempted to identify as one of the central problems confronting the post-Chalcedonian leadership throughout the Middle East.”
Excellent impt point-
“The Eucharist lay at the center of the formation of Christian communities.” – 158
attention to schools
“education was of fundamental importance for creating and maintaining a distinct church” – 159
impt of sacraments for Christians
“Though there were certainly exceptions, it would not be a stretch to suggest that most simple Christians likely care more about having access to central Christian mysteries- most notably the Eucharist and baptism – than they did about whether their priests held correct beliefs in matters in Christology. Claims made by church leaders that the Holy Spirit did not descend upon heretical altars can be read as an attempt to make communion in rival churches less attractive, though such claims were likely of uneven efficacy” – 160
where is the true church?
“the same period was the presence of multiple competing churches, each with its own episcopal hierarchy, monasteries, clergymen, holy men, saints and claims of continuity with the apostolic past. No other region in the Christian world had the same density of ancient churches and rival claims.” – 161
How will Christians deal with non Christian ruling authorities ?
“After the Arab conquests, the situation throughout the Middle East returned to what it had been previously for Christians in Sasanian-ruled territories: the various Christian groups now attempted to win the favor and support of non-Christian authorities against their rivals, both within their churches and in competing ones.” – 162
importance of rivaling schools
It is at the end of sixth and into the seventh that we find evidence of an educational arms race between rival churches.” – 167
“the spread of schools, like the explosion of interconfessional controversial literature, is one of the hallmarks of the post-Chalcedonian confessionalization of the Middle East.” – 168
need for some specialist
178- “Although many, if not most members of the various rival churches more than likely had little, if any, deep understanding of the issues that separated the communities, for a confessional community—Chalcedonian, Miaphysite, Nestorian, or any other- to survive in the context of rivals, there nevertheless had to be some members somewhere, who could respond to the sophisticated ques”
Between two churches
Squeezed between these two rival and more secure bodies – the Chalcedonian imperial church and the Church of the East-Miaphysites had to develop their own institutions and resources for articulating and defending their Christian confessional identity in a context where their views might be subject to fierce criticism and attack” – 180
Upbringing - Tannous balances discussion of C of E and Syrian. orthodox
“The History of Rabban Hormizd, a Nestorian born in the late sixth or early seventh century, reports that his parents took him to a school when he was twelve years old; he remained at the school for six years, and the end of which he knew the Psalms and New Testament by heart.” – so psalms were important, scripture, Psalms and NT by heart
Qenneshre as the training ground
Transconfessional interest in Greek authors – studied at Qenneshre – like Gregory of Nazianzus – which raises again the issue of Syriac-speakers needing to have access to the same resources as Greek-speakers.—center for a traditional education in grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, poetry, and astronomy / becomes the training ground for Syrian orthodox / “It was at centers like Qenneshre that graduate school syllabus of study crystallized. It was here that church leaders were trained.” – 196
education would allow miaphysite leaders to compete- translation and retranslation
“If this picture is in any way a persuasive one, we might say that the translation and retranslation of texts was being driven by the needs of a syllabus of education that equippied the spiritual and intellectual core of the Miaphysite movement, men who were operating in an environment of unstable and insecure identities and confessional competition. In such an environment, there was a strong need to marginally differentiate themselves from rivals and to assert and draw boundaries between their communities and others.” – 197
Interlude
on continuity
Important point- what made the ME distinct?
“What we have studied so far is the ferment that kept the Syrian learned world constantly active. The sectarian diversity and blurry communal lines in Syria and the Middle East more broadly- unique in the entire late Roman Christian world in the extent and depth of its robust confessional differences – led to a proliferation of educational institutions, translation, and learning among the competing Christian communities of the region.” – 201
Continuity in this monastery- lineage of thought
“members of the dissident Miaphysite church were engaged in sophisticated translations from Greek into Syriac of a number of texts” – 202
Shows continuity of thought: student – line – “the line from Severus Sebokht (d. 667) to Athanasius of Balad (d 687), George of the Arabs (d 724) and then to John of Litarb (d 737) provides more than one hundred years of continuity in intellectual inquiry and study in the Near East” – 203
“Nevertheless, we have in the monastery of Qenneshre, founded about the year 530, an institutional continuity stretching from the heart of the age of Justinian into the Abbasid period.” (205-6)
Why Timonthy I mattered
Nestorian Timothy I – “was an avid consumer of translations produced by Miaphysite philhellenes and actively sought out earlier translations to help him in his own translational endeavors.” – 209
Mar Matay – “seat of the bishop of Nineveh/Mosul and the leading Miaphysite monastery in northern Iraq, was the object of intense interest on Timothy’s part for a period of years.” – 212
Timothy cared about the accuracy and quality of a manuscript : “elite scholars in the early medieval Middle East were more concerned with getting their hands on texts than they were with the precise theological pedigrees of the circles where those texts originated.” – 215
“Qenneshre
stood out as the most important center for Greco-Syriac study and education in the Syriac-speaking Middle East” – but there were others
Post Roman antiquity of the sixth-8th centuries different from the version that defined the Romanitas of the empire
“Imperial persecution of Christological dissidents, combined with the diversity and competition that characterized the Christian communities of greater Syria-which we examined in Part II of this book- fueled the development of an alternative, intellectual and cultural elite in the Miaphysite movement, one whose primary basis of operation was in the network of monasteries anchored by Qenneshre.” – 217
why study the classical past
“Such a mediated knowledge of the classical past was not an exception, but the rule. By the early medieval period, a knowledge of classical culture had become useful as a tool for decoding and understanding the works of the towering theological authorities” of the Golden Age
Throughout he asks one question ‘ “What happened when Christian communities were formed on the basis of disagreements about theological speculation that most Christians could not understand fully or properly?
Here we have found yet another part of the answer: the educational response this situation triggered – as rival confessions competed with one another for simple believers and sought to defend their own turf—contributed to the development of a sophisticated culture of scholarship and translation that reached its fullest expression in ninth-century Baghdad.” – 221
Chapter 9 –
“A house with Many Mansions”
Gluttony quotation:
“ ‘Ali [b. Abi Talib] used to disapprove of the slaughtered meat of the Christian Banu Taghlib. He would say: ‘The only thing they have taken from Christianity is the drinking of wine.” – quoted on page 225 / fn 1- ‘Abd al-Razzaq, al-Musannaf (ed. H. al-Rahman al-A‘zami)
Critiques the notion of Christian Muslim interaction because the more important question is to ask
“ What was Christianity and what was Islam” – rather than their interactions alone
“For both of these categories, ‘Christian’ and ‘Muslim,’ simple ordinary believers are typically forgotten, and what it meant to be a Christian or to be a Muslim is supplied by the beliefs of theological elites and what might be termed ‘confessional entrepreneurs’ –
that is, people whose aim or intent it was to create a well-formed and well-bounded Christian or Muslim community in a place where a community having that particular constellation of religiously distinctive characteristics had not previously existed.” – 225
how informed were the simple believers, really?
“There is a tacit assumption that everyone in the Middle East in the Middle Ages was well informed about the contents of the theological tradition to which each person belonged – an assumption that would make that period unique in the history of the Christian church.” – 226
“But, if we understand ‘Christianity’ to include what actual Christians were doing and believing, ‘Christianity’ might include many other things as well:
the Miaphysite priest who used the Bible as a means of persuading women in congregation to sleep with him; the Lakhmid King Nu‘man b. al-Mundir (reg. 580-602), who is said to have made the pilgrimage to Mecca while he was a Christian—and before Muhammad’s prophetic career had even begun”- 226
Ephrem’s vita trad
So being able to speak Greek was a way to bring him into the circle of their great teachers – as far as Basil’s ordaining him, “Whether, in the final analysis, one reads this text as strengthening Ephraim’s bonds with the Greek-speaking church through friendly association and divine grace, or through
hellenisation and ecclesiastical subordination, one can be left in no doubt of the admiration and respect that it accords to him.” – 189
“Qenneshre stood out as the most important center for Greco-Syriac study and education in the Syriac-speaking Middle East,
but it was not unique – places like Beth Malke and Tell ‘Ada wre also sites of bilingualism and study/” – 216
What sort of Christians was Jacob of Edessa angry at?
“This is exactly what one would expect in a society where states were weak, religious education and catechesis spotty, clergy often ill-equipped and poorly trained, levels of literacy low, and levels of theological literacy even lower.” – 227
wide range of beliefs or what was acceptable
“In our period, there was a range of Christian beliefs and a gamut of understandings of what was encouraged, what was acceptable, and what was forbidden by church leaders for Christians to do and to believe” – 228
John bar Penkaye laments the
“ubiquity of fortune-telling among Christians in northern Mesopotamia.” - 231
Theodota of Amid –
laments the spirit of sorcery of a man in the monastery of Barsauma – 233
Confessional behavior and confusion –
A man who called himself a priest would rub himself with the blessings of the saints after exorcism – 233
two fronts of a battle to enforce orthodoxy and orthopraxy – 234
Theologically literate cared about well- articulated formulations but the simple did not //
do we all understand Einstein’s theory of relativity? 235
So with the coming of Islam comes a new set of actors – that is all!
But – the same problem of poorly trained clergy, spotty catechesis, low levels of theological literacy
“In such contexts – where the priests were poorly instructed, where church offices were being purchased, and where the schools were in disappointing condition –
what should we expect from the clergy, much less the laity, in terms of the conformity of their belief to an orthodox standard.” – 240
Life of John the Almsgiver:
hagiographies present listeners with situations that the readers would have understood – the existence of nonurban areas where Christianization had shallow roots – 241
John of Ephesus’ life of Simeon the mountaineer –
gives us situations that start to seem imaginable / the demands of rural life conflicted with proper instruction / so the spectrum of belief is important to consider- not implausible for there to be Christians in rural areas that didn’t know a lot about Christianity’
middle ground of literaracy
- A broad middle ground between sophisticated erudition and nearly complete innocence of influence of written traditions – 244
- Merely being able to read and write also did not guarantee right belief
“On the Genealogy of Wrong Belief”
“rather than go on enumerating examples of deviant Christian belief int eh period of Muslim rule, what needs emphasizing is that a wide range of Christian beliefs (and not just behaviors) was both to be expected and did in fact exist in this time, and that they did so within existing Church structures and institutions.” 247
Interesting idea- orthodoxy and virtuosity:
“Orthodoxy, however one capitalizes it, is in fact, no more natural a doctrinal position than being able to play perfectly a piece by Chopin on the piano is the natural starting point for a beginning player . . . . Life a musical piece, proper orthodox belief requires constant practice, training, instruction, and correction to achieve.”
- Untuned belief is the norm and not the aberration – 249
“Given the factors of a largely illiterate, agrarian population and weak catechetical instructions,
does ‘correct’ belief with response to matters such as the precise nature of the Incarnation or the relationship of members of the trinity to one another and to the created world seem more or less likely?” - 250
“Before we invoke this ancient ‘heresy’ or that non-mainstream (by later lights) Christian group to explain some belief we find popping up in the period of Muslim rule (or in the Qur’an)
we should first ask what institutional, economic, and human means would have been required for that belief to have been transmitted from the late roman world” – 250
“But perhaps what we have here is only a manifestation of the consequences of weak or nonexistent catechesis and poorly trained clergy in a world
where people were making use of the symbolic resources of their own religious tradition and those of others according to the exigencies of their lives.” 251
Christianity in the quran –
understand the image “as a reflection of and reaction to Christianity as it existed on the ground in the seventh-century Hijaz
experiment
“In many ways, this book has been an experiment: how would our understanding of the religious and social history of the Middle East be different if we changed a few basic assumptions that have often (perhaps subconsciously) dictated how scholars have approached the region in the centuries after Chalcedon and in the centuries after the life of the Prophet?”
Southwestern Asia, from the Mediterranean to the India was never fully Christianized, for instance …
Tannous takes seriously this question:
“What if it was a region populated by simple Christians and these simple Christians remained a significant portion of the inhabitants, even a majority, well into the period of the Crusades?”
When does Islam really take off?
Even archeological remains suggest that Islam only gained real momentum after the conquest of Saladin in 1187 and the expulsion of the Franks. – 493
there is no direct or necessary connection between the size of religious community and
the volume of literature that its adherents produce, especially when those adherents hold political power.”
“This book has been an argument that even a more supple view, such as the latter, is equally inaccurate, at least when it comes to the conversion of the simple Christians of much of the Middle East.
Conversion for these people was quite often anything but ideological and often may not have represented much of a change at all in their lived religious life, however consequential it may have been at a social or economic level.”
How will our understanding of the religious landscape of the Middle East in the centuries after Chalcedon change if we put simple,
ordinary Christians at the center of our story?” - 499
new focus
“How will our understanding of the medieval Middle East change if we focus on its non-Muslim majority rather than its small but growing Muslim population?” – 499
“How will our understanding of the formation of Islam and Christian-Muslim relations change if we take into account simple Christians a
nd all members of the Prophet’s community, not just its religious and political elite?” – 499-500
“What does the world that results from Chalcedon look like if take seriously the existence of a layering of knowledge in religious communities, Christian and Muslim,
and then relentlessly seek to understand the historical consequence of such a layering?”
Main take away for NAPS
“I have suggested that we cannot understand learned Christianity in late antiquity if we do not see it in the context of the great mass of simple believers and adherents. And we cannot understand Islam in the early medieval and medieval period unless we see it in the context of the great mass of non-Muslims- in formerly Roman areas, most of whom will have been simple Christians- and their gradual conversion to Islam.”
Goes deep into the sources:
“When we think about medieval mosques, for instance, would we pause to consider the role that Christians may have played in their everyday outfitting if we did not read in passing the role disapproval a Muslim religious scholar expressed of monks entering a mosque to spread out woven mats that had made for it?” - 501
- Tannous tries to tell a different story of the Arab conquest – one of cultural continuity (502).
“although the Aramaic-, Coptic-, and Greek-speaking majority population of the Middle East fades to the background or fades away completely in our histories of the region after the Arab conquests (and even before), it did not disappear. The Middle East is still populated with its descendants, though many, if not most of them, no longer identify with these forbears.” - 503
“In writing about the eastern background to Byzantine hagiography, the great Bollandist Paul Peeters wrote of a Late Antique Syrie bilingue,
a place where stories of Aramaic-speaking saints were effortlessly Hellenized and transferred into Greek. The movement of stories … was the outcome of a shared life between Greek speakers and Aramaic speakers.” - 503
“late Roman Syria was a place where linguistic frontiers
did not translate into cultural boundaries.” – 503
If you don’t engage the simple in the telling of your story,
you can miss the largest part of the story!
- ## Important to separate questions of literary and theological influence, authenticity, and historical usefulness.
Assumptions – “texts can be literary of theological and still be ‘true’, pointing to a world beyond the page. They can likewise be inauthentic – that is, in an Islamic context, a statement or an action can be attributed to a person who never actually did or said it – but nevertheless communicate important social realities and attitudes.” – 505
So Tannous was conscious of the literary nature of the texts I have used, I have done my best throughout the book to make a cumulative case:
- to assemble as much evidence as possible, from as many sources as possible, to support my arguments, with the hope that it will become more evident that we are dealing with more than just a collection of artlessly and uncritically reified examples of topoi, rhetorical artifices, and theological agendas. – The thickness of the evidence across time, place, and language is evidence itself for historical veridicality. Our texts point to social realities. “ – 509
- MOST IMPORTANTLY –
“I have attempted to put everyday, ordinary, non-elite Christians at the center of my story. But these people have, by definition, left us no sources that we might draw upon. We cannot hear their voices and must rely on the words and descriptions of sometimes hostile, patronizing, or unsympathetic religious elites to describe them. Is not our picture therefore distorted?”
wide array of sources
Tannous “put a wide array of sources, of as many types as possible, into conversation with one another so that together they yield an idea of how such people related to, understood, and made use of the symbols, teachings, and norms of the religious traditions to which they belonged.
Sources
– canonical material, saints’ lives, letters, historical chronicles, and more – some bring us closer to the simple than others (Jacob of Edessa’s canonical material – useful for getting a sense for what was happening among ordinary Christians ‘on the ground’)
Reading different sources in light of each other
Why? – what ordinary Christians were doing and how religious leaders responded to them – eg – reading a hagiography in light of canonical questions and answers – comparative – can be illuminating – Jacob of Edessa (canons) – Life of Theodota (hagiography) – keep one question in mind (confessional identity – as one read across a wide array of texts and sources.
what are the consequences of a lack of theological training?
Lacked access to doctrinal and catechetical resources that were available in major centers of Christianity; and that this had consequences for their practice and understanding of the kind of Christianity more familiar in those centers –
Great Wall of Skepticism in reconstructing Islamic history – but for Tannous – 521 – “
My interests centers around everyday believers and religious adherents, how they related to one another, how they related to elite discourses, how elite discourses related to them, and how they dealt with confessional and religious difference and conversion.
Early followers of M
– illiterate with little knowledge of the precise contents of the Prophet’s message 521
