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Theodore Abu Qurrah
M E R I D I A N M A G A Z I N E
Theodore Abu Qurrah, By Daniel C. Peterson (Professor of Muslim Studies, BYU)
One of the misconceptions that many Westerners have is that all Arabs are
Muslims, and that Muslims are all Arabs. In fact, of course, many of the major
Islamic countries in the world (e.g., Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and the
most populous of them all, Indonesia) are not Arab, and large minorities in some
Arab countries are not Muslim.
Christianity is a Near Eastern religion, not a European one, and it is has been
in the Near East since its origin. (An Egyptian Christian friend once complained
to me about how tired he had become of Americans and Europeans asking him
whether his family had been converted by the Germans, the French, or the
British. His ancestors, he pointed out, had been converted by Mark, the writer
of the second Gospel, in the first century AD. My own forebears, in Scandinavia,
didn’t accept Christianity until roughly a millennium later.)
Another misconception that many of us have is that Christendom can essentially
be divided between Protestants and Catholics. In fact, though, Protestantism is
a fairly recent religious minority in the Christian world. The much older
division is that between western Christianity (essentially the Roman Catholic
Church for many centuries) and eastern Christianity (including, but not limited
to, such groups as the Greek Orthodox and the Russian Orthodox).
There is, and always has been, an entire world of Christianity, rich and full of
variety, beyond the (to us) more familiar realm of Protestants and Catholics.
A new book just published by Brigham Young University’s Middle Eastern Texts Initiative (METI) may help to overcome both misconceptions. Theodore Abu Qurrah is the first volume in METI’s newest publication series, the Library of the Christian East, which now joins three sister ventures — the Islamic Translation Series, the Medical Works of Moses Maimonides, and Eastern Christian Texts.
(Unlike them, it is monolingual — English only — lacking the original-language
text on the facing page.) The series editor of the Library of the Christian East
is David G. K. Taylor, of the University of Oxford.
Theodore Abu Qurrah is an anthology of essays by the earliest Christian Arabic
writer whose name we know. Living between roughly 750 and 820 or 825 AD, he was
a monk at the important Mar Sabas monastery in the Judean desert, although, for
a time, he served as the Melkite bishop of Haran, in northern Mesopotamia.
(The Melkites — the term comes from a Syriac word meaning “imperial” — were
Syrian and Egyptian Christians who sided with the patriarch of Constantinople,
the capital city of the Byzantine Empire, in the disputes that arose after the
Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD. They were, thus, the “Emperor’s men.”)
Theodore’s native language was Syriac, the Christian form of Aramaic (the
language that Jesus and the first apostles spoke). But he also spoke and wrote
in Greek, a language first brought to the region via the conquests of Alexander
the Great, as well as in Arabic, which had arrived in Syria with the coming of
the Muslim Arabs in the middle of the seventh century.
He spent his life defending not only his own form of Christianity against
rivals, but Christianity itself against Judaism and against the rising challenge
of Islam — which would nonetheless, over the coming centuries, largely but not
entirely absorb the ancient Christian communities of North Africa and the Near
East.
This new book, the work of Southern Methodist University’s John C. Lamoreaux,
represents a nearly complete collection of Theodore’s surviving writings; most
of the essays included have been translated into English for the first time from
their original Arabic and Greek.
Nineteen essays follow a very substantial introduction, by the translator, that
discusses Theodore's life and ministry. Among them are such titles as "That
Christianity is from God," "Against the Jews," "On the Characteristics of the
True Religion," "On the Death of Christ," "On the Trinity," "On Free Will," and
"Refutations of the Saracens [i.e., of the Muslim Arabs]."
Theodore Abu Qurrah will, fairly shortly, be available from the University of
Chicago Press as well as via the BYU Bookstore and BYU's Institute for the Study
and Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts, the parent organization of the
Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS). It will also, of
course, be available for order through quality bookstores and from the usual
on-line venues.