When Christians First Met Muslims by Penn Michael Philip;

Author:Penn, Michael Philip;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

Edessene Apocalypse

Most likely Miaphysite

Most likely early 690s C.E.

Due to missing pages, this document’s original title has not been preserved. But because of its emphasis on the city of Edessa, modern scholars most often refer to it as the Edessene Apocalypse (or sometimes the Edessene Fragment). This text is a substantially abridged and revised version of the earlier Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius. Although heavily dependent on Pseudo-Methodius, the Edessene Apocalypse makes several important changes to its source’s apocalyptic schema that particularly augment the emphasis on sacred space. Unlike Pseudo-Methodius, the Edessene Apocalypse specifies that both the Sons of Ishmael and a horde of unclean nations from the north will be defeated in Mecca, that the city of Edessa will remain inviolate, and that Christ’s final victory will follow two reconquests of Jerusalem. It also claims that as a final portent of Christianity’s coming victory over the Sons of Ishmael, a horse that had never had a human rider will enter the church of Constantinople and place its head into a bridle made from the nails of Jesus’s true cross. Here the author draws from the Syriac Judas Cyriacus Legend. This earlier text claims that Constantine’s mother, Helena, discovered the true cross in Jerusalem and made a bridle from its nails for her son. As most scholars date the Edessene Apocalypse to the 690s, its multiple references to Jerusalem and Jesus’s cross would have been especially poignant to contemporaries, as ʻAbd al-Malik was establishing Jerusalem as an Islamic center and regulating Christian displays of the cross at the time.

The Edessene Apocalypse points to both the continuation of Syriac apocalyptic responses to Islam and the creative modification of these traditions. Its dependence on Pseudo-Methodius also attests to the rapid dissemination of that text. Along with the Book of Main Points, the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius, and the Apocalypse of John the Little, the Edessene Apocalypse represents a brief but significant period in Syriac reactions to Islam. These texts likely originated in a moment when the second Arab civil war and the subsequent consolidation of Umayyad rule under ʻAbd al-Malik motivated many Syriac Christians to proclaim the imminent demise of Arab rule, despite ever increasing indications to the contrary.

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