Contents
- Introduction
- The Umayyad Era, Damascus (661-750)
- John of Sedra (Miaphysite)
- A Monk of Bet Hale (Nestorian)
- John of Damascus (Chalcedonian)
- The Early Abbasid Era, Baghdad (750-861)
- Abu Ra’itah (Miaphysite)
- Iso‘ bar nun (Nestorian)
- Abu Qurrah (Chalcedonian)
- Conclusion
Introduction
In the middle of the first century of the birth of our Lord, the apostles of Jesus followed his commission to share the gospel “in Jerusalem and in all Judaea and Samaria, even to the end of the earth” [Acts 1:8], anointing elders for every town that bore fruit [Titus 1:5]. By the third century, Christianity had permeated the Roman Empire to the west and had settled as far east as India, north in Central Asia, and south in Ethiopia. In an age when long-distance communication was measured in months, unity was nearly impossible to maintain. Prior to the conversion of Constantine, local bishops accepted the apostolic charge of St. Paul to “hold to the traditions you were taught, either by discourse or by one of our letters” [2 Thess. 2:15, 1 Cor. 11:2], an exhortation echoed by St. Jude: “I had need to write to exhort you to contend for the faith delivered once and for all to the holy ones” [Jude 3].
This once-and-for-all delivered faith, these traditions, were not exhaustive enough to satisfactorily answer every question of doctrine that would arise. Early in the fourth century, the newly Christianized Constantine gathered both the Eastern and Western halves of the Roman Empire under his dominion. If apostolic succession could not ensure doctrinal unity in the church, perhaps an officially-sanctioned synod could. The council of Nicaea (325) initiated a half-century of nearly fatal labor pangs that, with the council of Constantinople (381), finally gave birth to a creed that would come to be almost universally accepted in the Christian world.
Having established the full divinity of the Son of God, the next task of Christian theologians was to explain how Jesus could be both divine and human. An extreme position that prevailed eastward from Antioch was that of Theodore of Mopsuestia. Theodore emphasized Jesus’s humanity to such an extent that it seemed to imply a distinction between the eternal Son of God and the temporal Jesus of Nazareth, whose birth and suffering and death could not have been experienced by an impassable God. Theodore’s pupil, Patriarch Nestorius of Constantinople, was ultimately condemned at the council of Ephesus (431) forcing “Nestorians” into exile where they established the East Syrian “Church of the East.”
Only two decades later another council, this time in Chalcedon (451), was necessitated by the debate over whether Christ had two distinct natures (diophysitism), one composite divine-human nature (miaphysitism), or the extreme view associated with Eutyches that the divine nature absorbed the human (monophysitism). Monophysitism was condemned in favor of the diophysite formula of Pope Leo I. Meanwhile, Miaphysites set up a rival patriarchate in Alexandria producing a schism that remains today between the Greek Orthodox and Coptic Orthodox churches. The Copts have since been joined by the West Syrian “Jacobite” Church and the Armenian Orthodox Church in a miaphysite “Oriental Orthodox” communion. They disparagingly referred to Chalcedonians as Melkites, referencing their allegiance to the Roman Emperor.
These three—Nestorians, Chalcedonians, and Miaphysites—coexisted side-by-side in the Middle East, arguing the merits of their own Christology in opposition to the other two until the 7th century when Arab conquerors brought a new dimension to the debate. Christian apologies from each sect before their Muslim overlords shine rays of light to the present age in which few Christians are able to define even their own church’s understanding of Christ. This paper will survey representative Miaphysite, Chalcedonian, and Nestorian defenses of the divinity of Christ from two historical periods: 661-750 C.E., when the Umayyad caliphate ruled from Damascus, and the century that followed when the Abbasid caliphate ruled from Baghdad. In the conclusion, we will attempt to bring these together to summarize each Christology.
The Umayyad Era
The 7th century was a time of upheaval. The first Muslim caliphate, the Rashidun, began its reign in 632. Islam was a nascent and developing faith system and both Christians and Muslims remained unsure of their relation to one another. The rise of Arab power concerned Christians politically and economically. Theologically, Islam did not begin to be seen as a distinct religion until late in the 7th century. Coins from the reign of Umayyad caliph ‘Abd al-Malik b. Marwan (685-705 C.E.) proclaim, “God is One, God is the Everlasting. He does not beget nor is He begotten, and there is none equal to Him.” According to Gerrit Reinink, this evinces the beginning of official propagation by Arab rulers of Islam as the true religion. Christian responses were initially vehement and highly polemical, portraying Islam apocalyptically as a demonic doctrine. In time, a more deferential response would be required.
By the turn of the 7th century, the literary form of dialogue had already become the most popular genre in theological writing, particularly among the Syriac-speaking Jacobites and Nestorians. Dominated socially and politically, Christians took solace in their assumed intellectual superiority. Few Muslims learned Syriac, so interfaith dialogue required Christians to begin learning Arabic, a language lacking Christian scriptures and devoid of any sort of technical terminology for intellectual learning. The earliest known Christian-Muslim dialogue is that between John of Sedra (Syrian Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch and the East) and “the Emir” (ca 715). The oldest known East Syrian apologetic work against Islam is The Disputation between a Monk of Bet Hale and a Muslim Notable (ca 720). The best known Chalcedonian critique of Islam during the Umayyad era is the treatise against “the superstition of the Ishmaelites” by John of Damascus (ca 744).
John of Sedra (Miaphysite)
The Disputation of John and the Emir purports to be a secretary’s recording of an actual dialogue which took place in 644 C.E. Dionysius of Tel Mahre, a 9th century Syrian Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch, wrote of a Muslim emir, possibly Umayr ibn Sa’d al-Ansari, who ordered an Arabic translation of the Gospel after meeting with “John of Antioch.” This may corroborate the historical setting of the encounter, but the actual Disputation was likely written later, probably around 715 C.E. The apologetic tone and the fact that it was written in Syriac rather than Arabic points to Christians as its exclusive audience, and the document as a whole comes to us in the form of a letter written to a community of Christians. While its perspective is miaphysite, its intent is more practical than theological, encouraging unity among Christians and faithful persistence in the face of the Islamic conquest.
The first point of significance is that, although “the Greeks, the Romans, the Syrians, the Egyptians, the Ethiopians, the Indians, the Aramaeans, the Persians, and the rest” each interpret it differently, the gospel itself is one. Next comes the question: “What do you say Christ is? Is he God or not?” John answers:
He is God and the Word that was born from God the Father, eternally and without beginning. At the end of times, for men’s salvation, he took flesh and became incarnate from the Holy Spirit and from Mary—the holy one and the Virgin, the mother of God—and he became man.
This is the most important statement of John for our purposes, but there is more in this document that is worthwhile. The emir continues, “When Christ, who you say is God, was in Mary’s womb, who bore and governed the heavens and the earth?” John turns to the Torah, which was accepted by Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike: just as the heavens were not vacant and the world left without its governor when God spoke with Moses on Mount Sinai, so too when God was in the womb of the Virgin.
John anticipates the emir’s next challenge from the Torah:
[T[hey said that which is the truth: “Hear, Israel, that the Lord your God, the Lord is one” [Dt 6:5]. For they truly knew that God is one and [that there is] one divinity of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Because of this, they spoke and wrote secretly concerning God, that he is one and the same in divinity and is three hypostases and persons. But he is not, nor is he confessed [to be], three gods or three divinities. … Because [there is] one divinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, as we have said. And from the Father are the Son and the Spirit. If you want, I am willing and ready to confirm all these things from the holy scriptures.
John claims that the patriarchs and the prophets understood that there is “one divinity of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” but they did not attempt to explain it because of the people’s proclivity toward polytheism. “The holy ones did not want to give the errant an occasion to depart from the living God and to go after error.”
One final point of interest from this document is its claim that John spoke on behalf of all Christians. It refers to Miaphysites as Orthodox and Melkites by their less polemical appellation of Chalcedonians. Together they “glorified and magnified God” for speaking through “the blessed lord patriarch.” The letter closes with a plea for Christian solidarity.
A Monk of Bet Hale (Nestorian)
Around 720 C.E. or shortly thereafter, the son of the aforementioned caliph, ‘Abd al-Malik, visited the Christian monastery of Dayr Mar ‘Abda in the southern part of Iraq over which he was governor. He remained for ten days while a member of his company convalesced, passing the time in religious dialogue with the local monks. A retelling of this dialogue, possibly written by a monk named Abraham, was relayed by letter to a Father Jacob as a representative account of “the Apostolic faith.” The Question-and-Answer format in which it is couched was a common form of East Syrian apologetics which instructed students on how to respond to challenges to the faith. Michael Philip Penn highlights the Arab’s constant agreement and final concession that Christian doctrine is superior to his own as evidence that the dialogue in its final form is more interested in polemics than accurately documenting the actual encounter.
After pointing to the Arab’s political authority as a sign of God’s favor, and criticizing Christians for not practicing circumcision and other ordinances given by God to Abraham, he proceeds to attack the divinity of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity, holding firmly to the absolute singularity of God. To the question of how Jesus could be God and be crucified without God suffering and dying, the monk explains:
Listen to two examples, which are very trustworthy for the friends of God. Just as when the sun stands on a wall, and you take an axe and ruin the wall, the sun is not harmed and does not suffer, so the body, that [is] from us, died and was buried and rose, whereas the Divinity did not suffer. And just as the iron that one leaves in the fire, … so the eternal Son, who sojourned in the temple which [is] from us, was with him on the cross and in the tomb and in His resurrection and showed His working.
As to the question of how God could be one and yet known in three hypostases, the monk uses the oft-repeated analogy of the sun which emits light and heat and yet is one sun. The Arab responds questioning why Muhammad did not teach God’s triune nature. Curiously, rather than challenging Muhammad’s status as a prophet, the monk uses the same reasoning John of Sedra had used to explain why Moses had not explicitly taught the Jews of God’s triunity:
Know, o man, that when a child is born, because it has no solid sense yet which can take in solid food, they feed it milk for two years, and after that they give it bread to eat, likewise Muhammad, because he was aware of your childishness and the paucity of your knowledge, has first made the One True God known to you, a teaching which he had received from Sergius Bahira. Because you were still children in knowledge, he did not teach you about the mystery of the Trinity, lest you erred [by worshipping] a large number of Gods.
After defending Christian veneration of the cross and martyr’s relics, the monk is forced to respond to the allegation that the favored position of the Muslim Arabs over the subjugated Christians is proof of God’s favor for the superior faith. He uses Deuteronomy 9:5 to suggest that God is chastising those whom He loves on account of their sins. And answering the final question of what would be the fate of the Muslim faithful if Christianity were indeed the true faith, the monk acknowledges that those who perform good deeds may yet live by the grace of the Lord, though their relative status may be that of a hired servant.
John of Damascus (Chalcedonian)
John’s father, Sergius, was a Christian tax-collector for Abd-Al-Malik, caliph of Damascus 685-705 C.E. John probably succeeded his father, serving both Abd-Al-Malik and Al-Walid (705-715) until retiring to the monastery of St. Sabbas near Jerusalem where he likely remained until his death around 749. Around 744, just a few years before the Abbasid revolution of the late 740’s, John completed the monumental work The Fount of Knowledge in three sections: a complete manual of philosophy, a catalogue of all known heresies, and An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. Though John probably spoke both Syriac (the language of the local Christians) and Arabic (the language of the Arab rulers), he wrote in Greek, the language of Chalcedon.
Among the heresies John refutes is “the superstition of the Ishmaelites” in which he demonstrates a thorough knowledge of the Koran and the Hadith. John criticizes Mohammed’s lack of authority, the inconsistency of Islamic beliefs and traditions, and the “unnatural attitude” of Muslims toward women. He justifies Christian veneration of the cross, “by which the power of the demons and the deceit of the Devil was destroyed,” and ridicules Mohammed’s writings On Women, The Camel of God, The Table, and The Heifer. After exposing Mohammed’s understanding of Christ as a heresy derived from the teachings of an Arian monk (perhaps the Sergius Bahira mentioned by the monk of Bet Hale), John proceeds to defend the divinity of Christ.
The primary proof John offers in favor of Christ’s divinity is the witness of “all the Prophets from Moses on down [who] foretold the coming of Christ” and taught that this incarnate Son of God would be crucified and die and rise again. Conversely, “although you may not marry a wife without witnesses, or buy, or acquire property,” he challenges rhetorically, “how is it that this prophet of yours did not come … with others bearing witness to him? And how is it that God did not in your presence present this man with the book to which you refer, even as He gave the Law to Moses, with the people looking on.” John concludes his Christological argument with an appeal to reason:
As long as you say that Christ is the Word of God and Spirit, why do you accuse us of being Hetaeriasts? For the word, and the spirit, is inseparable from that in which it naturally has existence. Therefore, if the Word of God is in God, then it is obvious that He is God. If, however, He is outside of God, then, according to you, God is without word and without spirit. Consequently, by avoiding the introduction of an associate with God you have mutilated Him.
The Abbasid Era
In the year 750 C.E., the ‘Abbasid dynasty replaced the Umayyad caliphate, bringing progressive changes to the Middle East. After a century of expansion and inner turmoil, Islamic society and religion began to stabilize. Toleration of Christians, Jews, and Persians gave way to Muslim evangelizing, increased taxation and dress codes for non-Muslims, restriction of public practice of religion, political benefits offered to any who would convert to Islam, and a threat of execution for the crime of apostatizing from Islam. The ‘Abbasid’s moved their capital to the newly-founded and centrally-located city of Baghdad in 762 and, consistent with their efforts to unify the empire into a homogeneous community, Arabic was officially established as the lingua franca of all territory under control of the caliphate.
To this point, most Christian treatises on Islam had been written in Greek or Syriac, languages understood only by Christians. As Christian communities were forced to begin speaking Arabic, and as the need arose to defend the faith against the external threats of Muslim evangelization, it became necessary to translate the Bible and other classic Christian texts into the new vernacular, which further required the development of a technically-precise theological vocabulary in the new language. A disputation between Nestorian Catholicos Timothy I and Caliph al-Mahdi, dated around 781 C.E., is the last great document of its type to have been written in Syriac. And judging from the extant manuscripts, it was the Arabic translation of this letter that was more accessible and hence the more useful.
By the first half of the 9th century, Arabic-speaking theologians from each of the three Christian denominations had adapted from the Syriac tradition their own variations of apologetic discourses. These served to encourage wavering Christians confronted by Muslim missionary efforts, providing them with a handbook of ready responses for common challenges to the faith. The most significant document for our purposes is a text labeled “Christological Discussion” which, although preserved in a collection of mia/monophysite texts, contains a summary of the faith of the three Christian denominations as offered to a Muslim official by representatives from each community.
It is said that ‘Abd Isu‘, the Nestorian Mutran, Abu Qurrah, the Melkite Bishop, and Abu Ra’itah, the Jacobite, were gathered before one of the Ministers. He requested each of them to describe their faith in a brief statement, without making objections against either of his colleagues.
After each representative had offered a “proof” of his tradition’s Christological definition, “the Wazir deemed what they brought him to be good, and he sent them away honorably.” This encounter, if historical, would have taken place in Baghdad during the 820s. The text itself has been organized by an editor who arranged the presentations in such a way as to highlight the root of the disagreement among them: the definition of hypostasis which is represented by the Arabic word for person or individual: sahs (pl. ashas).
Abu Ra’itah (Miaphysite)
Often referred to as Abu Ra’itah al-Takriti, Abu Ra’itah was likely from the city of Tikrit, a short distance from Baghdad. As we have just seen, the ‘Abbasid dynasty adopted Arabic as its official language and established Baghdad as its capital in 762 C.E. Born around 775 to Syriac-speaking parents, Abu Ra’itah was part of the transitional generation of those fluent in both Syriac and Arabic. Although he is traditionally recognized as a bishop of the Jacobite Syrian Orthodox church, his listing here and elsewhere as simply “the Jacobite” suggests that the designation of “bishop” may have been given to him later in honor of the importance of his writings to the Jacobite community.
The Jacobite said: I believe that the Messiah is one sahs, one nature, divine and human. For I claim that the divine sahs is united with the human in a union which precludes [any] separation in name and meaning, for He is one sahs and one nature. … The eternal sahs is united with the temporal sahs from the beginning of His existence, a separation between them in name and meaning is impossible.
Abu Ra’itah’s proof is offered in the form of a syllogism. Major premise: “One in logic can only be a sahs or a species or a genus.” Minor premise: “We agree that the Messiah is one in number,” and “it is impossible [to say] by analogy that the Messiah is one genus or species.” The necessary conclusion, then is that He is “one sahs and one nature.”
Iso‘ bar nun (Nestorian)
Although the historical figure referred to as ‘Abd Isu‘ is not immediately obvious, Sandra Keating argues with confidence that he should be identified with Iso‘ bar nun, a Nestorian—contemporary with Abu Qurrah and Abu Ra’itah—who succeeded Timothy I as Catholicos of the Church of the East from 823-828 C.E.
The Nestorian said: I say that the Messiah is two ashas—a person unceasingly begotten from the Father, the same as [the Father] in His nature and in all of His attributes, and a human sahs taken from Mary, the same as all human ashas, the only difference being sin. The name “Messiah” is not applied to one of the two ashas to the exclusion of the other, but rather [is applied] to both of them. For the Messiah is two ashas and two natures, divine and human.
“The proof of this,” he continues, “is that when we find two things bound together, they necessarily occur either in an ousia [essence] or in an accident.” These Aristotelian categories would later be applied by Roman Catholic scholastics to explain the doctrine of transubstantiation. The elements of communion are bread and wine. In the Catholic mass the ousia of the bread is believed to be wholly changed into the ousia of Christ’s body while the ousia of the wine is wholly changed into the ousia of Christ’s blood. But even though the bread no longer contains any essence of bread and the wine no longer contains any essence of wine, the accidents of the bread and the wine remain. The Messiah, however, is not an accident, as all three apologists agreed. Consequently, Iso‘ bar nun reasons that the Messiah must be an ousia: “He is two individual proper ousiae: a divine ousia and a human ousia.” The union of the Son of God and the human Messiah, then, may be compared with the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation whereby the ousia of the bread remains even as it is united to the ousia of Christ’s body and the ousia of the wine remains even as it is united to the ousia of Christ’s blood. Christ does not become bread and wine when his nature is joined to the elements. By the same logic, the Son of God does not become human in the incarnation, His divine ousia is simply united with a human ousia. And as the consecrated bread and wine are each one in number even after the union, so too is the Messiah one: “the [one] Messiah is two ashas and two natures, divine and human.”
Abu Qurrah (Chalcedonian)
A student of medicine, logic, and philosophy, Theodore Abu Qurrah, bishop of Harran in Edessa, was one of the first Christian theologians to compose in Arabic. Although Syriac was probably his first language, twenty-three of his works in Arabic and forty-three in Greek have survived. Known even among Muslim scholars as a translator, apologist, and dialectical theologian, Abu Qurrah was a Mesopotamian representative of the Melkite tradition of the Jerusalem patriarchate, traveling extensively throughout the Middle East to defend Chalcedonian orthodoxy against Nestorians, Miaphysites, and Muslims.
The Melkite said: I say that the Messiah is one sahs and two natures, divine and human. Through the divinity, He is God and through the humanity He is human, and He is one sahs, divine and human in two different ways.
Abu Qurrah’s logical “proof” begins with the shared premise that that the Messiah is one: “God in nature and human in nature.” From this, he contends that it is necessary “that the one who is God in nature is [either] the one who is human in nature or He is something else.” If, according to the second possibility, He who is God is other than He who is human (the Nestorian position), then the eternal Son of God who is God in nature must be other than the Messiah. But Christianity holds that the Son of God is the Messiah. If we agree that the Son of God is the Messiah, the Messiah must be one sahs: “God in His nature and human in His nature.”
Conclusion
To summarize the miaphysite position as posited by John of Sedra and Abu Ra’itah, the Christ is to be identified with the eternal Logos of God who personally took flesh and became incarnate. As the heavens were not vacated of the presence of God when He spoke to Moses on Mt. Sinai, so too was the Father not without His Logos when the Son took on flesh from the virgin Mary. As Christians agree that the Messiah is one in number, so too must He have one nature and one hypostasis. The hypostasis of Christ is the hypostasis of the eternal Son, and by virtue of the incarnation, the Son’s divine nature was united with human nature into one divine-human nature.
The Nestorian position as explicated by the 8th century monk of Bet Hale and the 9th century Catholicos, Iso‘ bar nun, agrees that there is one Messiah who is both human and divine in the same way that there may be one sun-drenched wall or one fire-bearing iron. The rays of the sun possess the nature of the sun while the wall possesses the nature of the material elements of which it is made. The heat born by the iron is of the nature of fire while the iron possesses its own nature. As the elements of communion may be said to be bread and wine and at the same time the body and blood of Christ, so too is the eternal Son of God and the temporal son of Mary said to be one person, Jesus Christ.
A Chalcedonian may agree with this analogy. The disagreement seems to come down to the understanding of hypostasis/sahs. The Nestorians argue that nature and hypostasis are inseparable, so two natures necessarily means two hypostases. But we can still refer to one person as possessing both a divine and human hypostasis. A Chalcedonian would say that one person equals one hypostasis, by definition, even as it may possess both human and divine natures. So with that, let us turn to the Chalcedonians.
John of Damascus and Theodore Abu Qurrah agree with the Miaphysites that the hypostasis of Jesus Christ is one, identified with the hypostasis of the eternal Son of God. But they also agree with the Nestorians that the human and divine natures possessed by the Christ are distinct, “without confusion … the characteristic property of each nature being preserved.” John argues that if Christ is accepted to be the Logos of God, which is agreed upon by both Christians and Muslims, he must be eternally of one nature with God. Otherwise God either does not have His Logos eternally, or the nature of God has suffered change, in which case it is not eternal. Abu Qurrah offers the same argument in the opposite direction: if Jesus Christ is accepted as the Son of God, then the hypostasis of the man, Jesus of Nazareth—born in time from the virgin Mary—must also be the hypostasis of the eternal-begotten Son of God; otherwise the Messiah is not the Son of God.
As the editor of the “Christological Discussion” document rightly recognized, the distinction between the three points of view hinges upon differing understandings of the word hypostasis and its rough equivalent in Arabic, sahs. Can a person have two hypostases or two ashas and still be one subject? Can a single hypostasis or sahs possess two ousiae? If two ousiae are united, do they remain distinct or do they merge into one composite ousia? These are questions of semantics, each of which is difficult to prove logically or philosophically. But all three Christian confessions agree in opposition to Islam that Jesus Christ was divine—the human Messiah is the Son of God.
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