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
