Christian Thought in the Medieval Islamicate World: ʿAbdīshōʿ of Nisibis and the Apologetic Tradition by Salam Rassi;

Author:Salam Rassi; [Rassi, Salam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192662170
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2022-01-03T00:00:00+00:00

4.2.2 From ʿaṣabiyya to Ecumenism: ʿAbdīshōʿ’s Arabic Christology

Having examined the way ʿAbdīshōʿ expresses Christological difference in his Syriac Pearl, we now turn our attention to his Arabic Christology. As we observed in the previous section, the Pearl’s discussion of Christology takes place within a church-historical framework in which narratives about Ephesus appear alongside discourses on Christ’s natures. Now, although the ideas expressed in his Arabic works are in keeping with the same doctrinal traditions, the literary forms underlying them differ in some important regards.

The literary forms in question are rooted in Christian–Muslim discussions about the Incarnation, a feature that is impossible to overlook where ʿAbdīshōʿ’s Arabic Christology is concerned. As we observed in Section 4.1, Muslim and Jewish theologians often took note of the historical divisions among Christians, enumerating and outlining these positions before refuting them all as equally objectionable. This strategy is paralleled in Christian Arabic theological writing from the early Abbasid period onwards. Typically, Christian writers outlined the three main positions before championing their own and refuting the remaining two. As Mark Beaumont has pointed out, this method was intended to inculcate key aspects of Christological doctrine to an internal audience while presenting ‘an apology designed to commend the doctrine of the Incarnation to a Muslim interlocutor’.105 A central feature of this didacticism is the use of analogy and metaphor to explain the various modes of the union between the human and divine in Christ. To better understand ʿAbdīshōʿ’s use of this method, it is necessary to provide an overview of its earlier development.

The earliest iteration of this analogical approach comes from the writings of the Church Fathers, many of whom looked to Aristotelian and Stoic understandings of mixture, composition, and union, in order to adequately describe the coming together of Christ’s natures.106 A systematic treatment of these analogies in Syriac occurs in Theodore bar Kōnī’s Scholion, a late eighth-century summa in question-and-answer form, the tenth mēmrā of which has received attention from Sydney Griffith concerning its anti-Muslim apologetic agenda.107 Of greater interest to us for the moment is Question 54 of the sixth mēmrā. Here, Bar Kōnī provides the following definition of union and its types, each of which he elucidates with a specific analogy:

Uniting is the bonding (ḥzāqa) and confining (ʾassīrūṯā) of separate things that are united as one thing and is the result of either two or more things. Its types are seven:

i. Natural (kyānāyā) and qnōmic (qnōmāyā), like the soul and the body that become one in nature and qnōmā through uniting and the elements that unite and constitute the body of humans and animals;

ii. Voluntary union (ḥḏāyūṯā ṣeḇyānāytā), like a gathering of believers being one spirit and one mind (Acts 4:32);

iii. Conjunction (naqqīpūṯā), like the man who will leave his father and mother to join his wife to become one in flesh (Gen 2:24, cf. Mat 19:6);

iv. Personal (parṣōpāytā), like the messenger who assumes (lḇeš) the person of the king;

v. Composition (rukkāḇā), like gold and silver that are composed (meṯrakḇīn), and constitute a [single] chest (qēʾḇōṯā);

vi.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.