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Christian-Jewish Relations on the Eve of Islam

Introduction

Despite popular depictions of the peoples of the late ancient Arabian Peninsula populace as uneducated and uncivilized, recent scholarship has begun revisiting the diverse populations who lived in this region. We will discuss how various factions of Christians interacted with the growing kingdom of Himyar (modern-day Yemen) under its Jewish ruling elite. The Christians’ use of violence and odd healing practices to convert others to Christianity is quite strange to modern ears. As we learn more of the cultural attitudes about women, power, gods, and violence, we will piece together some meaning behind the startling stories. It will help us understand what the Arabian people had witnessed on the eve of Islam coming to power.

Dr. Luckritz Marquis is Assistant Professor of Church History at Union Presbyterian Seminary, where she explores early Christian communities and their practices, especially those from Egypt, Syria, and the Arabian Peninsula. She’s especially interested in memory and spatial practices, the role of violence, and understanding the body. Her forthcoming book is Death of the Desert: Monastic Memory and the Loss of Egypt’s Golden Age.

Transcript

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Shirley Paulson

Hello everyone and welcome. This is welcoming you to the May, 2025 Bible and Beyond Discussion. And I’m your host Shirley Paulson, and I’m so pleased to introduce our guest scholar this evening, Dr. Christine Luckritz Marquis. The title of our Discussion tonight is “Christian-Jewish Relations on the Eve of Islam.” Well, I have to say that Christine is going to bring us into some thought provoking stories about the relations between the Jews and Christians after they had made a separation from each other pretty clearly. I have to say that what I’ve learned so far from Christine is not what I had expected to hear about these things. So I’m appreciating your being with us to guide us into a territory probably most of us don’t know much about.

Anyway, let me offer a brief introduction here. Dr. Luckritz Marquis is assistant professor of church history at Union Presbyterian Seminary where she explores early Christian communities and their practices, especially those from Egypt, Syria, and the Arabian Peninsula, which is where we’ll be tonight. She’s especially interested in memory and spatial practices, the role of violence and understanding the body. So her forthcoming book is Death of the Desert, Monastic Memory and Loss of Egypt’s Golden Age. Well, welcome Christine. So glad you’re with us tonight.

Christine Luckritz Marquis

Thank you. Thank you so much. And I will just say the book is no longer forthcoming, and it sounds like we have to update. No, it’s fine. So it’s all good, but if you read it, the Death of the Desert exists and is out there!

Shirley Paulson

I’m so glad to know that. That’s great news then. Okay, thank you.

Christine Luckritz Marquis

Absolutely.

Shirley Paulson

All right, so you are introducing us to a topic that’s frankly kind of a stretch for those of us who have been educated almost entirely from the Bible. Because I think we’re all interested in understanding more about Christian-Jewish relations during the early Christian years, but your specific stories are quite startling. You picked a specific time and location for us to reflect on. So maybe you could start by telling us why you picked the Arabian Peninsula and around the end of the fourth century. Why not Israel or Rome, or somewhere with more dominant Christian holdings? And then can you describe just where you’re talking about?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

Yeah, so I will give a very short version of how I got here, which was that I got interested in Coptic Christianity and early extra canonical biblical texts. So I started in the Bible like many of you, and then I ended up doing Syriac as part of my PhD. And I helped translate a text that I’ll talk perhaps a little bit about where it references this conversion on the Arabian Peninsula that happened in the early sixth century. And so when I finished my first book on Egypt and I was sort of thinking about where I wanted to go next, it seemed very timely to think about Jewish Christian relations on the eve of Islam. So that’s sort of how I came to have an interest in this topic because my first book was also very interested in violence. So as I was explaining to you in our prep, the thing is about violence, you have to occasionally step away. So I’m just going to share a screen for a minute for you all. Let’s put you down here if that’s okay. So you guys can all see the map because I think this is important.

This is the area right here, Jerusalem, Damascus. This is the area we tend to think about right over into Egypt. And so what I’m going to do tonight is suggest that we are missing an important piece of early interfaith conversations when we don’t talk about what happened on the Arabian Peninsula in the fifth and sixth centuries. So this map, is really reflecting different Christian groups after the Council of Chalcedon that happens in 451. So one of the things that I’m certainly not the only scholar, but I am a big proponent of, we tend to talk about Nicaea when we think about Christianity as this watershed moment. And it is, but what frames Christianity in our global world today is actually more Chalcedon. And Chalcedon was originally envisioned not to happen at Chalcedon, but actually at Nicaea and be a Nicaea 2.0 that’s meant to sort of correct confusion that had happened in the intervening 125 years.

Shirley Paulson

Can I stop you for just a second here? Yes. I have a feeling that maybe some people don’t know that there were more councils than one.

Christine Luckritz Marquis

Oh yes.

Shirley Paulson

When you’re talking about Chalcedon, tell us why we have another council? When was that again?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

In 451. So I will tell you all about that in just one second.

It’ll make sense? But I just wanted you to know what you’re seeing on the map.

Christine Luckritz Marquis

So there are different types of Christians –  is what you need to know for the moment. And I’ll explain what all of these mean in a moment, I promise. So here’s Chalcedonian, and here are the Miaphysites and the Dyophysites, and then various Jewish groups all the way down here. Okay?

This is like Ethiopia, modern day Eritrea. Here are parts of Egypt. Here is the kingdom we’re going to be talking about tonight (Himyar). Here is Mecca, where Mohammed will come from. So that’s just sort of where we are. So now I’m going to take the map away because it’s distracting. So Nicaea  we have it really figured out right in 325 we’re so clear that we’re not clear that there are lots of other councils attempting to correct it. And so one of the things to know is if you say the Nicene creed in church, it’s not the creed that was approved at Nicaea. The creed that was approved at Nicaea includes all these anathema, right? We anathematized Arius and his believers. And so that sort of theological struggle that was happening about the relationship of the father to the son and the Trinity. The Holy Spirit doesn’t get much play. So in 381 you have the first council of Constantinople, and that’s where you really start to see more of the Holy Spirit. The Cappadocian fathers who were three very important bishops are very informative in that. And so what we say at church is more like a Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed.

So that’s the first piece, right?  It’s what we think of as the Nicene creed in church isn’t just the Council of Nicaea even itself. But the problem was once you’d figured out the relationship of the father and the son and the Holy Spirit, suddenly folks started realizing they weren’t sure what the relationship between the human and the divine parts of Jesus were. And so that opens up a whole other set of arguments. And what I’m going to explain really briefly can just sound like people arguing about prepositions, but what was at stake was how you were saved. So when I teach at the seminary, I do intro to history one, I actually make my students game Chalcedon, this later Council, with all of this background material because only when you embody it does it in some ways make sense because the idea is Jesus from two natures or is he in two natures?

And these represent two different bishops, Cyril of Alexandria and Nestorius who was bishop of Constantinople. So they’re having this fight in 431, so just a little over a hundred years, 106 years after Nicaea. And they have this argument and Nestorius is deemed a heretic and he’s exiled and many of his followers end up in the Persian empire to the east. So this is important for us, because these strong “in two natures” people say that they don’t want the divine natures sullied by its contamination with the human nature. These folks get derogatorily called Nestorian Christians, but a more accurate or respectful name would be Dyophysite, which is one of the names you saw on the map. And I can show you guys that again, then there are still boring factions because Cyril is made to write a letter two years after the council making nice with the bishop of Antioch John.

So now there’s Cyril who says from two natures in some letters and in two natures in the other. And so what this leads to is this continued argument, and there had actually been another council in Ephesus in 449 CE. So we’re talking mid-fifth century. This is sometimes referred to as the “Robber Council,” because by this time the Bishop of Rome, Leo has been involved in it. And so it becomes this, like Nicaea, a very political affair. And the emperor Theodosius dies and his son-in-law Marcian takes over. And so in 451 he calls this council to Nicaea, and it’s supposed to be a Nicaea 2.0. We’re going to all come together; we’re going to unify, ala Constantine; we’re going to get it right this time. And he’s also fighting sort of encroaching peoples on his northeastern front. And Marcian is getting distracted. And so in the months leading up to the council, the bishops descend out of Nicaea and they start fighting in the streets and their supporters start fighting in the streets. And so actually the council gets moved. So we call it the Council of Chalcedon, and we don’t always realize it had this intimate history and relationship to the first council of Nicaea that we do now because Marcian has to move them closer, to imperial oversight. So he puts them in Chalcedon across the Bosphorus so he can have imperial power shadowing over them while he deals with military attacks. And so what happens at Chalcedon is they try to make a compromise that pleases everyone and it pleases no one.

Shirley Paulson

Oh gosh, this is a little bit mind boggling for people who may not know those names and all that, but I think we got the idea that we’re fighting over how to understand Jesus, whether there’s from two natures or in two natures of being divine and human. So the whole question is how do you know Jesus basically and anything with people fighting over that in a very serious way. Great. Okay, so what an introduction to Christian history. But anyway, so now what about Jews and Christians have been pretty distinct by now, is that right?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

So I mean we have folks like John  Chrysostom of the fourth century who’s still complaining about some of his congregants going to synagogue sometimes. And so that’s in the fourth century and the east. So we have a stronger sense of a split between Christians and Jews in Western Christianity. But the further you get to the east, it’s less clear.

Shirley Paulson

Interesting. Okay. I hadn’t known that. Okay. So then would you say that there were more Jews or more Christians in the Arabian Peninsula then, by now?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

Neither. So what’s really interesting is can I share the map again? Is that all right?

Shirley Paulson

That would be helpful. Yeah.

Christine Luckritz Marquis

I am sorry. I know that I look at your beautiful faces, but I also want to make sure we’re clear. So what’s interesting here is, so this is the ‘C’ is for Chalcedonian Christians. Christians that liked what came out of Council, they’re sometimes derogatorily referred to by other Christians as Melkites – or king-lovers. This is the type of Christianity we are used to in the West, even if we don’t know, that’s our trajectory. This is all, whether you’re a Roman Catholic or you’re Protestant. And what’s interesting about this story is that there’s a little blip in the corner there, but this represents the Byzantine empire that does have a lot of influence. Good so far? And these are the areas that we think about. Well, some of these Dyophysite Christians had ended up in Persia near the capital, Seleucia-Ctesiphon.

Some of them had been converted, some Arabian tribes near al-Hira. And so what’s interesting is Chalcedon, in the immediate aftermath, you had a lot of folks who didn’t buy into it. And these Miaphysites, or “from two natures,” more strongly Christians were in Egypt and Syria, and they started proselytizing. So they proselytized to several Arabian tribes here. So this is important because you have folks living on the Arabian Peninsula who are Miaphysite or Dyophysite Christians, and then we know that there were some Jews. So we know that there is evidence for Jews in Himyar, and there are Jews at Yathrib, because we hear, by the time of Mohammed, that there were long established Jewish tribes.

Shirley Paulson

Okay, that’s helpful. I appreciate the map again, to get a picture of who’s where.

Christine Luckritz Marquis

You, but most of this is not Jewish or Christian, right?

Shirley Paulson

Yeah, that’s what I’m seeing on your map. That’s really helpful to see. But you’ve also told me a couple of terrible stories about Jews persecuting Christians and then Christians attacking a young Arab girl and they’re doing this to assert their religious authority and to dominate others by their religious allegiance. Is that right so far?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

Yeah. The story of how Christianity comes to the Arabian… to the Himyars,in particular. So you’ll see there’s an ‘M’ here for Miaphysite. This city, Najran, is the top of the Himyar kingdom, right? So if you imagine, I actually think I have a slide in this set. Here we go. This will help you guys have a sense of what we’re talking about.Okay, so this is the little kingdom of Himyar here—this is where we’re talking about. We’re talking about the southern most tip of the Arabian Peninsula, and right across is the port of Adulis, and the capital of the Ethiopian kingdom at the time, Axum. So we have mostly various types of local tribal gods and goddesses worshiped until probably most scholars think around the fourth century. There seems to be this increased interest in what scholars call some sort of proto-Monotheism. It seems like it’s Judaism, but it’s not necessarily always clearly Rabbinical Judaism.

So we’re talking in the fourth century—sort of this moment that we’re coming up to. But what is interesting and important is that this Ethiopian kingdom is Christian. It has been… Athanasius of Alexandria, the famous bishop, has Chalcedon, this will eventually become the Coptic Christian Church (in the contemporary moment). But they continue to have this relationship with Ethiopia because they’re supplying bishops. So the king of Axum is a Miaphysite Christian, and they occasionally try to take over and often claim that they rule the kingdom of Himyar, even when they don’t. And so the point is, you have this very small Jewish ruling elite in the kingdom Himyar, and then you have these ruling Miaphysite Christians. So you have Christians and Jews fighting, and that’s what leads to this persecution that you were starting to ask me about. Does that help orient?

Shirley Paulson

So I guess I don’t understand what is the violence about now, if they’re not fighting over the meaning of Jesus? Or is that what the fight is about? Are they fighting over winning converts or are they trying to fight over territory or being saved or what’s the fight about?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

My short answer is yes, which is helpful. But we have a tendency to want to neatly separate political and religious motivations. And as I’m sure you guys have had other speakers… that doesn’t fully work in the ancient world. And so political success equals your god’s success. And so one of the things I always say when I’m talking about this, is you have the kingdom of Himyar you guys have never heard of. But the kingdom of Himyar was very influential and actually very powerful. And in the moments leading up to this violence we were talking about, they had taken over most of the Arabian Peninsula north. And so they were threatening to both the Romans and the Persians, the two main powers of the day before the rise of Islam. This matters because they get totally wiped out and they don’t end up being important. And so we forget them in history, but at their own moment, they are a powerhouse and they’re a powerhouse kingdom that has identified as Jewish. So it’s a proof that Judaism is the correct religion because look how successful they are.

Shirley Paulson

Okay. So what about this story then you told me about this girl’s face getting hit with arrows. I mean, what is that about?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

Yes, so that story comes from a sixth century hagiography, the sort of imagined life of these two monks, Paul and John. It’s set in the fifth century, a century early, but we have these sixth century Syriac manuscripts, and there’s a translation of them. It’s a good story of them wandering around and various things happen to them. But what is interesting for our purposes is they pick up a thread that has been important in other sources, contemporary to them, that’s making claims for Christianity coming to Himyar. So they want to make a claim that there are Christians there because there are, if you remember my map, there are some at the bottom there and there are some up in Najran at the top of the kingdom. And so in this story, Paul and John are wandering and they want to go to Mount Sinai and have a holy experience.

And their fellow brothers tell them, if you go, you’re going to be attacked by the Midianites. So they make this sort of biblical echo, but then what happens is they get there and they’re kidnapped by some Arabs, and so they’re taken to Himyar, these Arabs, right? This sort of derogatory language should flag for us that we need to listen with a little suspicion to their story. They’re taken to them and they’re in this tent and they’re bound, and they’re going to be sacrificed. And overnight this young girl starts screaming and she’s like, “They’re shooting fiery arrows in my face!” like spiritual warfare of some kind.

This is a big deal because holy men are supposed to heal. They’re not supposed to harm and then heal. So this is kind of an unusual story for Himyar, and this is why I got interested in this story. What are we doing when a holy man actually inflicts the harm that he will then take away? So they tell her, “Hey, if you convert, we’ll stop shooting the fiery arrows at your face.” And of course this poor young girl is like, “Yes!  Yes, I will convert to whatever god makes this pain go away.” And so she converts, they take away the pain. All the people in her local community see this and are amazed and they convert. And then the story actually continues that the king of Himyar, who’s supposed to be a Jew, gets wind of this, and then they have it out underneath a palm tree, all of First kings 18 in a very sort of similar way. So they have these biblical echoes in similar lands, but that’s the sort of claim to conversion that happens in that particular monastic story. It’s not true.

Shirley Paulson

Why are we even hearing this story then if it’s not true? I mean, how does this relate to actual conversion ideas?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

So what is interesting is that in almost every version of conversion, you have Christianity with this sort of violent edge around it, and it’s because of the political violence that was happening in the moment. This is my argument.

Shirley Paulson

I see. Alright. Is there’s something about the girl’s face. Why would Christian men be sending arrows to a girl’s face? How does that work just to heal her, and she was able to be healed or what was the point of that?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

So the fire often represents divine warfare. It can represent heresy. So she is being attacked, but the face is important in the ancient world because it’s communal locus, right? And I think women, in particular, there’s another set of stories, the Martyrs of Nazran, which are the stories of this Jewish king killing some Dyosyphite Christians, different subgroup of Christians in 523. And you have a lot of beheading and violence to women’s faces because sort of head/face logic says that women’s heads are especially sacred. This is a culture that still probably has a fair bit of veiling happening. You don’t just go out in public. So women in their faces are a very sort of special site that’s communally owned. This is a very uncomfortable thing to talk about, as a woman. But in a world of patriarchy… So attacking a young girl’s face in particular is to attack her. It is this symbolic move in the text to attack the wrong religiosity that her people represent?

Shirley Paulson

Okay, you’re right. This is very difficult. Tell us a little bit about why you think it’s important to think about this.

Christine Luckritz Marquis

So thank you for that question. Why tell you weird stories from the past. First, I think this moment is important for us because other parts of the world still remember it. So I’ve encountered Jews and Muslims and Christians in the Middle East who are like, wait, you teach that? So I have just in the last year we had a Palestinian scholar visiting where I work and I was telling him what I teach and he was like, you know that story. And so we in the West are missing an important piece of the history of interfaith dialogue and what’s happening in the Middle East now is rooted in this shared and contested history. So the important piece for us is when this king of Nazran martyrs a bunch of Christians, the Ethiopian king sends over some troops and he ultimately is killed and Judaism is squashed in Himyar. And he sends over elephants, this Ethiopian king sends over elephants. That seems like a silly weird thing to tell you unless you’ve ever read any biographies of Muhammad. Muhammad is purported to have been born in the year of the elephants. The chronology is wrong, but the Islamic historiography is pointing back to this big political fight, this big religious fight that happened in 523 to 525. So that’s one reason: it plays an important role.

The other piece, and this is where I always want us to be sensitive, is it’s not an implicit invitation to antisemitism, right? It’s not like, oh, look at this horrible Jewish king who offed a bunch of Christians. But it does invite us to think about how when we are in a minority group or when we are engaging a minority group and we have the power, how do we frame one another? It creates an othering that I think is very relevant for our political moment and that we have this tendency to flatten and homogenize the idea of who that other is. And these more intricate histories are complicated to follow. I just talked way too long. But the complexity is actually for me where the richness comes from, right? Because it’s not like you can just go, oh, good guys, bad guys that make a much cleaner talk for you. But actually most of the world is really messy because we’re messy and humans have always been messy. And I like to tell my students history is differently  wonderful, differently awful.

Shirley Paulson

Yeah. Okay. So thank you for explaining to us why we need to be thinking about that. So let’s go back to the girls again. You made an interesting case about the girls’ faces or the women’s heads. Is that why girls and women are at the forefront of these attacks from both Jews and Christians? Were they actually martyrs?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

So there are women martyrs, so it’s two different Christian subgroups who hate each other, and that’s important to know, but this girl is in a Miaphysite Christian text, and the martyrs that King Yusef—the Jewish king who is purported to have killed—we have these martyrologies, which again are not necessarily the way we think of history, just like detailed stories. They’re meant to be inspirational. But there are lots of women who are killed very violently and in particular have facial violence done or beheading, which was a very common practice both for the Romans and the Persians for poorer people. But these are wealthy women in some cases being beheaded.

I know, I’m sorry.

Shirley Paulson

Well, it’s okay. We need to know the story here. So the title of your talk here is about the Christian Jewish relations on the eve of Islam. So tell us the Islam part then. What is happening then when Islam comes to see what’s going on, what happens then?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

So Yusef is purported to have killed all of these Christians at Najran in 523. And we get these…and we know because we have extant inscriptions in this language, Sebaic (?), in stone. So he brags about them, that he killed some people, but he doesn’t say, “oh, I martyred these women.” It’s Christians who write stories of violence about themselves, just like earlier Roman martyrdoms. It’s Christians reflecting their sense of persecution and minoritization through this lens of violence is being done to me. And these letters get sent to those Arabian tribes that have converted to Christianity that I pointed to in the north. And so on the eve of Islam, you have a lot of Roman and Persian interference all up and down the Arabian Peninsula in the aftermath. So when Mohammed is purported to be born in 570, that’s later than 525, but it’s not in loose understandings of time historically. It’s a generation or so. He’s born in this moment where we remember a great deal of instability on the Arabian Peninsula.

And so Rome and Persia are fighting these proxy wars on the Arabian peninsula up in Armenia and Georgia as well with one another. And most good Islamic historiography points out that part of what happens is Arabs get tired of being told to believe this one thing or this other thing. And so when they have their own prophet, that ends up having a powerful momentum force. And it’s, in fact, Jewish tribes that Muhammad has the most trouble with once he gets to Medina. Initially he allies with them and then he has all this difficulty if we take those stories seriously. But then Muhammad is able to take over large swaths of both the Roman and the Persian empires because of all this infighting for the decades before. So this sort of historical instability of Himyar becoming powerful and then them interfering to press it back with both political and religious connotations sets the stage for Islam success. It is not the sole reason, and again, this is not a moment to be anti-Islamic and say, “oh, well that’s the only reason it happened,” but it is the historical world in which that became a possibility.

Shirley Paulson

It’s interesting that we’re talking about these religious communities as if they’re just simply fighting over things that have nothing to do with inspiration or the reason you have religion in the first place. I guess I’m trying to say that the religious story doesn’t sound like the kind of inspired ideas that Jesus tells us about loving our neighbors or the Hebrew shema, a commitment to loving God wholeheartedly. So you’ve explained really helpfully, I think that history has its positive things and its negative things. What is your takeaway from this that we can maybe dwell on to do something about?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

That’s a great question. So I think for me, what is most interesting is to think about, and I would just add, well before I respond to that question, that Islam also has this care for the poor. Like you tithe, so all three traditions have that impulse, but that impulse can get lost in the realities and politics of the day. So that actually is what I think the takeaway is, is all of these folks are responding to precarity, whether or not their situation is actually precarious. They experience themselves as they’re being threatened and they need to protect themselves. And this should sound very familiar to us, right? Regardless of where you find yourself on the religious or the political spectrum, there’s a tendency for us when we feel threatened to double down and say, well, I’m being hurt. You caused this. And that is the entire sort of situation that results in Christianity and Judaism and Islam having these complicated, sometimes good, sometimes bad interactions for the next thousand plus years.

Shirley Paulson

That’s a very, very helpful overview of the whole situation, and it’s helpful to hear the history to put some meat to this. So we will continue thinking. I want to stop here and prepare our community here for participating in this conversation. So we’re ready for everyone else to hop in and ask you some questions. But before I hand over the mic, I would like to pause and ask if you please consider becoming a Bible and Beyond supporter on Patreon. For those of you already Bible and Beyond supporters, a huge thank you to you. If you’ve offered support through Patreon before, it’s quite simple. You just go to patreon.com/bible and beyond and it will show you how to make a monthly donation at any amount that’s just right for you. And that will be just right for the rest of us too. We benefit from when you help us. So thank you for that. And I want to turn over the mic to anybody who has questions. So it helps me if you are able to find the electronic hand raising so I can find you. If not, raise your hand and I’ll hopefully find you. So while you’re thinking about that, Okay, go ahead, Peggy.

Peggy Williams

It’s a quick thing. In case you didn’t memorize what Shirley just said in the chat you’ll find the Patreon information as well as alternatives, what you need.

Shirley Paulson

Good. Thank you, Peggy. Appreciate that. So

Peggy Williams

It’s in writing.

Shirley Paulson

It’s in writing. Very good, thank you. Okay, so while people are thinking of this, maybe could you tell us a little bit more about, and I see we have a, I say, well, let’s go ahead with Katie’s question first and then we’ll come back to mine. Katie, go ahead.

Katie Grigg-Miller

Oh, thanks. I lost track of what the council was in 381, so I’m curious about what that council was, but I did write down that this was at least somewhat in regards to bringing back the Holy Spirit into the conversation. And I wondered if that was seen as a feminine side of God or not, something else.

Christine Luckritz Marquis

So the first council of Constantinople…so it was held in Constantinople in 381, and it was less a bringing back the Holy Spirit than in incorporating the Holy Spirit in the Nicene creed. So in the original Nicene Creed, when we say, “And I believe in the Holy Spirit”, it was period. And there was no articulation of what that meant. By the time you get to the Council of Constantinople where it is elaborated, it’s not necessarily a particularly feminized version, unfortunately. So the Holy Spirit has off and on, been read as sort of a more feminine component of the Trinity, but sadly at this Coun, that was not the thing being redeemed.

Shirley Paulson

What’d you say, Katie?

Katie Grigg-Miller

So you just said that they elaborated on the Holy Spirit as opposed to bringing it back in.

Christine Luckritz Marquis

Yes. So there wasn’t a strong notion of what the Holy Spirit did in the whole situation. And that’s strange because you have folks like the New Prophecy movement in North Africa who are prophetesses, who are speaking in tongues, and so we have people who think they are taken by the Holy Spirit. But articulating how the Holy Spirit relates to the Father and the Son has not actually been done very clearly at that point.

Shirley Paulson

Okay, yeah, thank you for that. Okay, pat, go ahead.

Pat Nester

Okay, thank you. This is kind of a military question. You mentioned that the kingdom of Himyar, which I had never heard of before, came to be very powerful, and from all the taking of the Latin classes and Caesar’s Gallic commentaries, and the theory at the time was that the Romans were by far the most potent military power that had ever existed. So how did Himyar become a military power as compared to the Persians and the Romans?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

Great question. So the reason is because it was on the trade routes. So Persia and Rome had both discovered spices in India, had discovered silks further to the east in what we think of as modern day China. And so there was a lot of movement by this period, and most of that went through the Arabian Peninsula one way or the other. And Himyar, which is basically modern day Yemen, was very lush and a great sort of agricultural location. It wasn’t desert and it wasn’t like the, what’s often called the empty quadrant further to the northwest on the Arabian Peninsula. If it’s helpful for me to share that map one more time. Sorry, you guys are going to get lots of maps instead of my face, but as you can see, it’s right here on the Red Sea where it connects out. And so it was in fact a strategically placed location for a kingdom on the water because it prevented anything that was shipping through there to get sort of trapped before it got to the Romans or the Persians. And similarly on the land routes when they expanded to the north, all of those smaller kingdoms were kind of okay with coming under Himyarite rule. So it was an alliance of different peoples on the Arabian Peninsula in order to have some autonomy and muscle to counter the Romans and the Persians.

Pat Nester

And was the population dense enough to support armies to go out and do the fighting?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

It seems to have been. I mean, they were successful. They took large swaths of the Arabian Peninsula, and then a couple of decades later when Muhammad received his revelation from the Archangel Gabriel, when people began to convert, he had an army to take with him. So it would seem so.

Pat Nester

Thanks.

Shirley Paulson

Wow. It’s hard to think about the armies and the divine revelations in the same breath, but yeah. Thank you. Okay, Joy, what about you?

Joy Dryden

I’m kind of still back at the process of the Councils. So the Chalcedonian Council in 451. I thought I heard you say that this is where they were trying to come to an agreement between whether the spirit and the human are combined in an entity or separate, or I’m not quite sure what their argument was that they were trying to resolve.

Christine Luckritz Marquis

They were still trying to resolve how Jesus’s human and divine natures interacted in his body. So Jesus is supposed to be fully human and fully divine. How does one do that?

Joy Dryden

Okay, and so, can you say what the two arguments were that they never resolved?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

So yeah, there are three arguments.

And there are East Syrian, Church of the East, Christians who were forced to flee from Syria in the last decade that are Dyophysites. So Dyophysite is shorthand in two natures: human and divine. So the human and the divine have a relationship alongside one another, but they don’t contaminate one another.  Dyophysite—which literally means two natures, from the Greek Dyophysite—two natures. And then you have the Caledonian view, which is what we have in the West, which is also in two natures. But it’s built on Latin. So it didn’t have the same problems as Greek created for our counterparts. Human and divine working like synchronized swimmers— like, utterly in community alongside one another. But there’s not this worry about them contaminating each other. They’re seen as separate things working synchronously for lack of a better description. And then you have the Miaphysite, which means one phusis, one nature, and that is from one nature ( human and divine), or from two natures, but they’re now one hypostatically joined mysterious union. That’s Cyril of Alexandria.

So, there are two things that became one. This is confusing. I told you guys, and it seems like a small thing. But this idea that Jesus’ human and divine nature is somehow mysteriously unified is all the Oriental Orthodox churches: so, Coptic Christians, Syriac Orthodox Christians, Malankara Syriac, Christians in India… so the Tewahedo in Ethiopia, you have a lot of Christians in our contemporary moment who you may not know about who believe this, coming out of Chalcedon. We have a handful of Dyophysites, and then Chalcedonian Christians make up most of Western Christianity.

Joy Dryden

So they were not resolved in the Chalcedon Council. And so they kind of split and became separate practices that just operated in different areas.

Christine Luckritz Marquis

Yes, yes. So this is a good question. So Miaphysite and Chalcedonian Christians kept arguing with one another. So Dyosphite Christians had largely been pushed to the Persian empire, not exclusively, but Miaphysite and Chaledonian Christians kept arguing with each other and the emperor would support one, and then the emperor would support the other. We have attempts under Emperor Zeno, for example, in 462. He has his bishop at the time offer this reunion formula that basically rolls back Chalcedon. It’s such a problem, like a decade later. But the reason why these two groups end up staying separate is because of the rise of Islam. All of those Miaphysite Christian regions, Egypt, Syria, the Arabian Peninsula, all of them end up under Muslim rule, with the rise of the Islamic Commonwealth. And so they just are Christianity of the east that fall out of the story for Christianity in the west.

Joy Dryden

I get it. Thank you.

Shirley Paulson

Absolutely. Yeah, and thank you for those questions, Joy. I think that’s helpful for everybody to get a picture of what’s going on with the Councils, and what difference it makes ,and what we’ve inherited, why we’ve inherited what we have ,and why we’re different from the East ,and what we don’t even know about. So those were good questions. Joy. Thank you. Okay. Helen, over to you.

Helen Mathis

I’m not even sure how to ask this question, and I tried to reduce all of those differences that came out of these councils for some college students. I thought I would try to simplify it, and it didn’t work. That’s really confusing. But I actually was interested in your comment about how the Jewish and Christians sort of melded together, or not even coexisted, but you really couldn’t tell the difference between them in the Eastern Orthodox tradition and that you had this Jewish community that you were talking about as well. And this is not the rabbinic Judaism. So I wondered if you could describe the Judaism at this time and what happened to it when Islam sort of took over that area.

Yeah, no, this is a great question. So what I was saying was John Chrysystom complains about some of his congregants going to synagogue. That is, it seems like people felt like there could be equal opportunities, like going to the synagogue for one festival, and coming to church for his sermon. And he found that really troubling that they didn’t see the strong distinction. So that’s that piece. But then with Judaism on the Arabian Peninsula, we have beliefs in the Jewish God in short inscriptions. The evidence is hard here, but part of the problem is rabbinic Judaism, as we know it, is forming at the same time that these things are happening on the Arabian Peninsula. Especially if you take seriously that the Jerusalem Talmud— which doesn’t become the dominantly used one for rabbinic Judaism—ultimately it’s like forming in the fourth century, but into the fifth century.

The Babylonian Talmud is what most rabbinical situated Jews lean into. That’s forming in the late fifth to early sixth centuries, precisely when these things are happening further down in the Arabian Peninsula. So a Talmud around which rabbinical Judaism would be built isn’t fully formed yet. So what it means to be Jewish in this period is actually really hard to say, right? You have engagement with the Hebrew Bible scriptures, however they’re formed. So sometimes scholars talk about the Karaite Jewish movement, which is non rabbinical Judaism that lasts into the medieval period, and we hear the rabbinical head figures of the Gaon of the academic academies arguing against Karaite Jews who don’t engage the Talmud at all. And that’s the major distinction, not the sole distinction. So there was some sense that you could be a Jew and believe in God as a Jew without recourse to the Talmud interpreting the Hebrew scriptures for you.

Helen Mathis

So the Ebionites are sort of an example of that in a way, wouldn’t you say?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

Could be; I mean, yeah.

Helen Mathis

And I would think that if they were half Jewish and half Christian, or maybe Jewish in identity and Christian in practice maybe, or in theology, that they would be more inclined towards the very human Jesus, which comes out in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Jesus is much more human in the Orthodox tradition. And I’m just wondering about, it might’ve been some Jewish influence there.

Christine Luckritz Marquis

I mean, it’s certainly possible because there’s far more interaction because there are far more Jew, if you go all the way back to someone like Iran, the bishop of Leon in second century, he makes lots of really horrible anti-Jewish statements periodically, but it’s not clear he ever met a Jew in his whole life. So that just wasn’t where the diaspora went, right? You had Jews on the Arabian Peninsula, you had Jews in the Persian Empire, you had Jews in the Eastern Roman Empire, but not a lot of Jews, as best we can tell for the,

Helen Mathis

Yeah. Okay. Thank you. That was very interesting.

Shirley Paulson

Thank you so much for that. Good question too, Helen. So I have a question I want to ask you too. This question about conversion. I think you helped us to understand why there’s a power play going on in terms of the military power, and also maybe economically and politically. And I think in our world today, we think of people converting others because they want to save your soul. Is that the reason for conversion then? Or were there other reasons for converting for this intense desire to convert others? What was that about then?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

I think I mean some of what I’m going to say is sort of speculation based on things we know. This is like trying to divine the minds of early Christians or early Jews, but I do think that conversion was about wanting to save people—and save them in the afterlife, because your life in the world was so awful. So this sort of interest in the afterlife we see with the emergence of Christianity at all was also happening in some of what are often called ‘mystery religions.’ In the Greco-Roman world, you had this interest in an afterlife. You have this uncertain Jewish movement with the Pharisees, but maybe not the Sadducees. You have this interest in the afterlife and in saving people and them having a better experience because their real lives are so awful. But I also think that that precarity piece, drought, famine was a thing that they didn’t have a global food economy. We know doctors like Galen in the second century, were doing live vi-sections on the street to make a name for himself as a doctor. Things were just far more fragile in every way. And so saving for the afterlife and also proving my God, because he’s powerful and helping us in this life are not separate. They’re both about responding to that precarity. Does that make sense?

Shirley Paulson

Yeah. And of course, I know there were pandemics going on there too.

Christine Luckritz Marquis

Oh yes.

Shirley Paulson

So I’m also curious about that question that you had to speak about so quickly—this hurting someone to heal them. That just seems like a very difficult concept, especially today. What was, again, the motive for hurting somebody to heal someone was to prove that you can heal, or what was the point of that?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

So that’s what got me interested in this whole topic. Holy men regularly heal people, but they don’t. In all these stories that tell of the miracles they do, they don’t tend to hurt the person first. And that makes this story weird, even for other stories of its time. And so my instinct is that extra layer of violence is reflective of the culture it’s coming from with these martyrdoms and all of this political turmoil that I think is because it’s a sixth-century Syriac manuscript telling about this moment right after these massacres happened by the mite king, I think that actually being able to do violence to her and then take it away is a claim for power that probably wasn’t true. That is, I am less convinced. It’s not that I don’t think gendered violence really happened to women or that there were never martyrs.

I absolutely want us to reclaim those moments when we can because they’re horrifying and erasing them doesn’t help us when we think about our history. But I think that it was mostly male Christian authors thinking with images of violence to sort out their own precarity. So the author of this text was this Miaphysite Christian, which was the wrong type of Christian on a peninsula with Jews and Dyophysite Christians and others and Zoroastrians, because there were, of course Persians we haven’t even talked about, but there were also Zoroastrians in the mix. And so they were so marginalized that they imagined this violence. And then taking it away, because that was the idiom of how they felt powerful in the ancient world.

Shirley Paulson

Well, that’s very curious then about where does this habit of healing fit in with this kind of other desire to be in control or to save yourself or whatever. I mean, healing just seems like your motive would be to help somebody, but it doesn’t seem like if you’re hurting to heal is a motive of wanting to help somebody. Am I right?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

I mean, I think the question is whether or not healing was for helping someone. I mean, I think it was a nice benefit that it helped someone. I think, like Jesus, when he healed, wanted to help people. But you could rarely uncouple that from, if you think about Jesus, even in relation to other holy figures of his time, right? Healing was about proving you were powerful.

Shirley Paulson

Okay.

Christine Luckritz Marquis

I mean, I hear what you’re saying that we want to decouple them, but I actually think in the logics of Paul and John’s text, they are helping her by hurting her, which is horrifying to us. I’m not enjoying this, just to be clear. I’m not suggesting this is the way we go forward, but in the logics of their test, hurting her helps her because it converts her whole people to Christianity, and then they’re saved. If they don’t hurt her, how’s she going to know their God is the right God?

Shirley Paulson

Okay. It’s awful. It’s

Christine Luckritz Marquis

Awful.

Shirley Paulson

I’ll keep thinking about that. Okay. Meanwhile, Karen, go ahead. What is your thought?

Karen Hagen

I think I heard you said that it was all the infighting between Christians and Christians, and then Christians and Jews, that made an opportune time for Islam to flourish. If I heard that right, or if I didn’t hear it, tell it to me differently. And if so, how come? How’d that work?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

Thank you. So no, I think I’ve understood your question. So it’s Christian infighting with one another, but also the Romans and the Persians, the Sasinate Persians are primarily Zoroastrians. And just like I wish we could talk about Zoroastrianism and the ways in which their canon is formed in response to the canonization of the Christian Bible. There are interesting sort of monotheistic impulses happening there. So it was both political and religious infighting of Jews on the Arabian Peninsula, various Christian groups, Roman and Ethiopian, and then Zoroastrian Persians. They were also busy struggling over this small stretch of land, especially around the Tigris-Euphrates region, but also the Arabian Peninsula because of trade and because they wanted to be the ultimate power, and that would prove that God was right. And I think where this is helpful for us to think of is this as kingdoms, right?

The notion of democracy and nation states as we talk about them is really very recent in history. And kings—the way you knew that God favored you was because you stayed on the throne, and you were successful. And so in a world where there are multiple religious traditions competing for the same space, that sort of constant instability. It’s not that that’s why Islam was successful solely, but you have the Arabian peoples constantly being pressed on by the Romans and the Persians, and then they have somebody who says, “God has actually come to speak to us, to us as a people.” And so people rally around that because that feels like they’re not just being force-fed religions of other regions, right? God is actually among them. And so that is the reason that the religious piece of Islam is so powerful. And then when they were able to take over the lands, first in Persia, and then in the Roman Empire. It’s because their militaries are weakened, and there have been plagues and there has been a lot of cross-contamination because of this ongoing fighting. That was a slightly longer answer, but I hope that sort of clarified.

Karen Hagen

That helps. Yes.

Shirley Paulson

Thank you. Yeah, I have to say, you have stretched us. We often get stretched during these meetings, but this one, I think, is making us think more about what is religion, what is it for? What do we do with it? How are we abusing it? How are we being abused by it? There are lots of big questions that you bring to mind with this whole topic. So I just want to thank you so much for all the work you’ve done. My goodness, you’ve opened up a world of things that we just have not known much about at Lisa. I haven’t. So I really want to thank you so much for this, and I want to thank everybody for joining us for our once a month Bible and beyond discussion. We usually do meet on the fourth Monday of the month from eight to 9:00 PM on Eastern time.

And our next meeting will be on Monday, June 23rd. Each Bible and Beyond Discussion is led by a knowledgeable scholar who provides a thoughtful overview of the text, and then we provide an opportunity for participants to ask their own questions. Before we wrap up tonight, I do want to remind you that your Patreon support is extremely important for us to keep providing these terrific opportunities to hobnob with great scholars like Dr. Luckritz Marquis. And don’t forget paying members of Patreon also get discounts on all of our Bible and Beyond courses. So please join us at patreon.com/BibleAndBeyond.

And now what’s coming next month? Dr. Katherine A. Shaner will be our guest scholar and she’ll be talking about enslavement in antiquity and particularly how we should understand it in the context of the Bible. So this will be another thought provoking topic, and I look forward to seeing you on Monday June 23rd. So now please just join me in a special thanks for Christine for coming tonight to be with us with a bit of food for thought and concerning the ancient attempts to convert people.

Christine Luckritz Marquis

Thank you guys so much for the opportunity to talk about things that probably are pretty new. And let me just say, Dr. Shaner is awesome and you guys should come back and listen to her. Her work is amazing.

Shirley Paulson

Well, this is great. Well, thank you so much. What a treat to have you with us tonight.

Shirley Paulson

Hello everyone and welcome. This is welcoming you to the May, 2025 Bible and Beyond Discussion. And I’m your host Shirley Paulson, and I’m so pleased to introduce our guest scholar this evening, Dr. Christine Luckritz Marquis. The title of our Discussion tonight is “Christian-Jewish Relations on the Eve of Islam.” Well, I have to say that Christine is going to bring us into some thought provoking stories about the relations between the Jews and Christians after they had made a separation from each other pretty clearly. I have to say that what I’ve learned so far from Christine is not what I had expected to hear about these things. So I’m appreciating your being with us to guide us into a territory probably most of us don’t know much about.

Anyway, let me offer a brief introduction here. Dr. Luckritz Marquis is assistant professor of church history at Union Presbyterian Seminary where she explores early Christian communities and their practices, especially those from Egypt, Syria, and the Arabian Peninsula, which is where we’ll be tonight. She’s especially interested in memory and spatial practices, the role of violence and understanding the body. So her forthcoming book is Death of the Desert, Monastic Memory and Loss of Egypt’s Golden Age. Well, welcome Christine. So glad you’re with us tonight.

Christine Luckritz Marquis

Thank you. Thank you so much. And I will just say the book is no longer forthcoming, and it sounds like we have to update. No, it’s fine. So it’s all good, but if you read it, the Death of the Desert exists and is out there!

Shirley Paulson

I’m so glad to know that. That’s great news then. Okay, thank you.

Christine Luckritz Marquis

Absolutely.

Shirley Paulson

All right, so you are introducing us to a topic that’s frankly kind of a stretch for those of us who have been educated almost entirely from the Bible. Because I think we’re all interested in understanding more about Christian-Jewish relations during the early Christian years, but your specific stories are quite startling. You picked a specific time and location for us to reflect on. So maybe you could start by telling us why you picked the Arabian Peninsula and around the end of the fourth century. Why not Israel or Rome, or somewhere with more dominant Christian holdings? And then can you describe just where you’re talking about?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

Yeah, so I will give a very short version of how I got here, which was that I got interested in Coptic Christianity and early extra canonical biblical texts. So I started in the Bible like many of you, and then I ended up doing Syriac as part of my PhD. And I helped translate a text that I’ll talk perhaps a little bit about where it references this conversion on the Arabian Peninsula that happened in the early sixth century. And so when I finished my first book on Egypt and I was sort of thinking about where I wanted to go next, it seemed very timely to think about Jewish Christian relations on the eve of Islam. So that’s sort of how I came to have an interest in this topic because my first book was also very interested in violence. So as I was explaining to you in our prep, the thing is about violence, you have to occasionally step away. So I’m just going to share a screen for a minute for you all. Let’s put you down here if that’s okay. So you guys can all see the map because I think this is important.

This is the area right here, Jerusalem, Damascus. This is the area we tend to think about right over into Egypt. And so what I’m going to do tonight is suggest that we are missing an important piece of early interfaith conversations when we don’t talk about what happened on the Arabian Peninsula in the fifth and sixth centuries. So this map, is really reflecting different Christian groups after the Council of Chalcedon that happens in 451. So one of the things that I’m certainly not the only scholar, but I am a big proponent of, we tend to talk about Nicaea when we think about Christianity as this watershed moment. And it is, but what frames Christianity in our global world today is actually more Chalcedon. And Chalcedon was originally envisioned not to happen at Chalcedon, but actually at Nicaea and be a Nicaea 2.0 that’s meant to sort of correct confusion that had happened in the intervening 125 years.

Shirley Paulson

Can I stop you for just a second here? Yes. I have a feeling that maybe some people don’t know that there were more councils than one.

Christine Luckritz Marquis

Oh yes.

Shirley Paulson

When you’re talking about Chalcedon, tell us why we have another council? When was that again?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

In 451. So I will tell you all about that in just one second.

It’ll make sense. But I just wanted you to know what you’re seeing on the map.

Christine Luckritz Marquis

So there are different types of Christians –  is what you need to know for the moment. And I’ll explain what all of these mean in a moment, I promise. So here’s Chalcedonian, and here are the Miaphysites and the Dyophysites, and then various Jewish groups all the way down here. Okay?

This is like Ethiopia, modern day Eritrea. Here are parts of Egypt. Here is the kingdom we’re going to be talking about tonight (Himyar). Here is Mecca, where Mohammed will come from. So that’s just sort of where we are. So now I’m going to take the map away because it’s distracting. So Nicaea  we have it really figured out right in 325 we’re so clear that we’re not clear that there are lots of other councils attempting to correct it. And so one of the things to know is if you say the Nicene creed in church, it’s not the creed that was approved at Nicaea. The creed that was approved at Nicaea includes all these anathema, right? We anathematized Arius and his believers. And so that sort of theological struggle that was happening about the relationship of the father to the son and the Trinity. The Holy Spirit doesn’t get much play. So in 381 you have the first council of Constantinople, and that’s where you really start to see more of the Holy Spirit. The Cappadocian fathers who were three very important bishops are very informative in that. And so what we say at church is more like a Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed.

So that’s the first piece, right?  It’s what we think of as the Nicene creed in church isn’t just the Council of Nicaea even itself. But the problem was once you’d figured out the relationship of the father and the son and the Holy Spirit, suddenly folks started realizing they weren’t sure what the relationship between the human and the divine parts of Jesus were. And so that opens up a whole other set of arguments. And what I’m going to explain really briefly can just sound like people arguing about prepositions, but what was at stake was how you were saved. So when I teach at the seminary, I do intro to history one, I actually make my students game Chalcedon, this later Council, with all of this background material because only when you embody it does it in some ways make sense because the idea is Jesus from two natures or is he in two natures?

And these represent two different bishops, Cyril of Alexandria and Nestorius who was bishop of Constantinople. So they’re having this fight in 431, so just a little over a hundred years, 106 years after Nicaea. And they have this argument and Nestorius is deemed a heretic and he’s exiled and many of his followers end up in the Persian empire to the east. So this is important for us, because these strong “in two natures” people say that they don’t want the divine natures sullied by its contamination with the human nature. These folks get derogatorily called Nestorian Christians, but a more accurate or respectful name would be Dyophysite, which is one of the names you saw on the map. And I can show you guys that again, then there are still boring factions because Cyril is made to write a letter two years after the council making nice with the bishop of Antioch John.

So now there’s Cyril who says from two natures in some letters and in two natures in the other. And so what this leads to is this continued argument, and there had actually been another council in Ephesus in 449 CE. So we’re talking mid-fifth century. This is sometimes referred to as the “Robber Council,” because by this time the Bishop of Rome, Leo has been involved in it. And so it becomes this, like Nicaea, a very political affair. And the emperor Theodosius dies and his son-in-law Marcian takes over. And so in 451 he calls this council to Nicaea, and it’s supposed to be a Nicaea 2.0. We’re going to all come together; we’re going to unify, ala Constantine; we’re going to get it right this time. And he’s also fighting sort of encroaching peoples on his northeastern front. And Marcian is getting distracted. And so in the months leading up to the council, the bishops descend out of Nicaea and they start fighting in the streets and their supporters start fighting in the streets. And so actually the council gets moved. So we call it the Council of Chalcedon, and we don’t always realize it had this intimate history and relationship to the first council of Nicaea that we do now because Marcian has to move them closer, to imperial oversight. So he puts them in Chalcedon across the Bosphorus so he can have imperial power shadowing over them while he deals with military attacks. And so what happens at Chalcedon is they try to make a compromise that pleases everyone and it pleases no one.

Shirley Paulson

Oh gosh, this is a little bit mind boggling for people who may not know those names and all that, but I think we got the idea that we’re fighting over how to understand Jesus, whether there’s from two natures or in two natures of being divine and human. So the whole question is how do you know Jesus basically and anything with people fighting over that in a very serious way. Great. Okay, so what an introduction to Christian history. But anyway, so now what about Jews and Christians have been pretty distinct by now, is that right?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

So I mean we have folks like John  Chrysostom of the fourth century who’s still complaining about some of his congregants going to synagogue sometimes. And so that’s in the fourth century and the east. So we have a stronger sense of a split between Christians and Jews in Western Christianity. But the further you get to the east, it’s less clear.

Shirley Paulson

Interesting. Okay. I hadn’t known that. Okay. So then would you say that there were more Jews or more Christians in the Arabian Peninsula then, by now?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

Neither. So what’s really interesting is can I share the map again? Is that all right?

Shirley Paulson

That would be helpful. Yeah.

Christine Luckritz Marquis

I am sorry. I know that I look at your beautiful faces, but I also want to make sure we’re clear. So what’s interesting here is, so this is the ‘C’ is for Chalcedonian Christians. Christians that liked what came out of Council, they’re sometimes derogatorily referred to by other Christians as Melkites – or king-lovers. This is the type of Christianity we are used to in the West, even if we don’t know, that’s our trajectory. This is all, whether you’re a Roman Catholic or you’re Protestant. And what’s interesting about this story is that there’s a little blip in the corner there, but this represents the Byzantine empire that does have a lot of influence. Good so far? And these are the areas that we think about. Well, some of these Dyophysite Christians had ended up in Persia near the capital, Seleucia-Ctesiphon.

Some of them had been converted, some Arabian tribes near al-Hira. And so what’s interesting is Chalcedon, in the immediate aftermath, you had a lot of folks who didn’t buy into it. And these Miaphysites, or “from two natures,” more strongly Christians were in Egypt and Syria, and they started proselytizing. So they proselytized to several Arabian tribes here. So this is important because you have folks living on the Arabian Peninsula who are Miaphysite or Dyophysite Christians, and then we know that there were some Jews. So we know that there is evidence for Jews in Himyar, and there are Jews at Yathrib, because we hear, by the time of Mohammed, that there were long established Jewish tribes.

Shirley Paulson

Okay, that’s helpful. I appreciate the map again, to get a picture of who’s where.

Christine Luckritz Marquis

You, but most of this is not Jewish or Christian, right?

Shirley Paulson

Yeah, that’s what I’m seeing on your map. That’s really helpful to see. But you’ve also told me a couple of terrible stories about Jews persecuting Christians and then Christians attacking a young Arab girl and they’re doing this to assert their religious authority and to dominate others by their religious allegiance. Is that right so far?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

Yeah. The story of how Christianity comes to the Arabian… to the Himyars,in particular. So you’ll see there’s an ‘M’ here for Miaphysite. This city, Najran, is the top of the Himyar kingdom, right? So if you imagine, I actually think I have a slide in this set. Here we go. This will help you guys have a sense of what we’re talking about.Okay, so this is the little kingdom of Himyar here—this is where we’re talking about. We’re talking about the southern most tip of the Arabian Peninsula, and right across is the port of Adulis, and the capital of the Ethiopian kingdom at the time, Axum. So we have mostly various types of local tribal gods and goddesses worshiped until probably most scholars think around the fourth century. There seems to be this increased interest in what scholars call some sort of proto-Monotheism. It seems like it’s Judaism, but it’s not necessarily always clearly Rabbinical Judaism.

So we’re talking in the fourth century—sort of this moment that we’re coming up to. But what is interesting and important is that this Ethiopian kingdom is Christian. It has been… Athanasius of Alexandria, the famous bishop, has Chalcedon, this will eventually become the Coptic Christian Church (in the contemporary moment). But they continue to have this relationship with Ethiopia because they’re supplying bishops. So the king of Axum is a Miaphysite Christian, and they occasionally try to take over and often claim that they rule the kingdom of Himyar, even when they don’t. And so the point is, you have this very small Jewish ruling elite in the kingdom Himyar, and then you have these ruling Miaphysite Christians. So you have Christians and Jews fighting, and that’s what leads to this persecution that you were starting to ask me about. Does that help orient?

Shirley Paulson

So I guess I don’t understand what is the violence about now, if they’re not fighting over the meaning of Jesus? Or is that what the fight is about? Are they fighting over winning converts or are they trying to fight over territory or being saved or what’s the fight about?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

My short answer is yes, which is helpful. But we have a tendency to want to neatly separate political and religious motivations. And as I’m sure you guys have had other speakers… that doesn’t fully work in the ancient world. And so political success equals your god’s success. And so one of the things I always say when I’m talking about this, is you have the kingdom of Himyar you guys have never heard of. But the kingdom of Himyar was very influential and actually very powerful. And in the moments leading up to this violence we were talking about, they had taken over most of the Arabian Peninsula north. And so they were threatening to both the Romans and the Persians, the two main powers of the day before the rise of Islam. This matters because they get totally wiped out and they don’t end up being important. And so we forget them in history, but at their own moment, they are a powerhouse and they’re a powerhouse kingdom that has identified as Jewish. So it’s a proof that Judaism is the correct religion because look how successful they are.

Shirley Paulson

Okay. So what about this story then you told me about this girl’s face getting hit with arrows. I mean, what is that about?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

Yes, so that story comes from a sixth century hagiography, the sort of imagined life of these two monks, Paul and John. It’s set in the fifth century, a century early, but we have these sixth century Syriac manuscripts, and there’s a translation of them. It’s a good story of them wandering around and various things happen to them. But what is interesting for our purposes is they pick up a thread that has been important in other sources, contemporary to them, that’s making claims for Christianity coming to Himyar. So they want to make a claim that there are Christians there because there are, if you remember my map, there are some at the bottom there and there are some up in Najran at the top of the kingdom. And so in this story, Paul and John are wandering and they want to go to Mount Sinai and have a holy experience.

And their fellow brothers tell them, if you go, you’re going to be attacked by the Midianites. So they make this sort of biblical echo, but then what happens is they get there and they’re kidnapped by some Arabs, and so they’re taken to Himyar, these Arabs, right? This sort of derogatory language should flag for us that we need to listen with a little suspicion to their story. They’re taken to them and they’re in this tent and they’re bound, and they’re going to be sacrificed. And overnight this young girl starts screaming and she’s like, “They’re shooting fiery arrows in my face!” like spiritual warfare of some kind.

This is a big deal because holy men are supposed to heal. They’re not supposed to harm and then heal. So this is kind of an unusual story for Himyar, and this is why I got interested in this story. What are we doing when a holy man actually inflicts the harm that he will then take away? So they tell her, “Hey, if you convert, we’ll stop shooting the fiery arrows at your face.” And of course this poor young girl is like, “Yes!  Yes, I will convert to whatever god makes this pain go away.” And so she converts, they take away the pain. All the people in her local community see this and are amazed and they convert. And then the story actually continues that the king of Himyar, who’s supposed to be a Jew, gets wind of this, and then they have it out underneath a palm tree, all of First kings 18 in a very sort of similar way. So they have these biblical echoes in similar lands, but that’s the sort of claim to conversion that happens in that particular monastic story. It’s not true.

Shirley Paulson

Why are we even hearing this story then if it’s not true? I mean, how does this relate to actual conversion ideas?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

So what is interesting is that in almost every version of conversion, you have Christianity with this sort of violent edge around it, and it’s because of the political violence that was happening in the moment. This is my argument.

Shirley Paulson

I see. Alright. Is there’s something about the girl’s face. Why would Christian men be sending arrows to a girl’s face? How does that work just to heal her, and she was able to be healed or what was the point of that?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

So the fire often represents divine warfare. It can represent heresy. So she is being attacked, but the face is important in the ancient world because it’s communal locus, right? And I think women, in particular, there’s another set of stories, the Martyrs of Nazran, which are the stories of this Jewish king killing some Dyosyphite Christians, different subgroup of Christians in 523. And you have a lot of beheading and violence to women’s faces because sort of head/face logic says that women’s heads are especially sacred. This is a culture that still probably has a fair bit of veiling happening. You don’t just go out in public. So women in their faces are a very sort of special site that’s communally owned. This is a very uncomfortable thing to talk about, as a woman. But in a world of patriarchy… So attacking a young girl’s face in particular is to attack her. It is this symbolic move in the text to attack the wrong religiosity that her people represent?

Shirley Paulson

Okay, you’re right. This is very difficult. Tell us a little bit about why you think it’s important to think about this.

Christine Luckritz Marquis

So thank you for that question. Why tell you weird stories from the past. First, I think this moment is important for us because other parts of the world still remember it. So I’ve encountered Jews and Muslims and Christians in the Middle East who are like, wait, you teach that? So I have just in the last year we had a Palestinian scholar visiting where I work and I was telling him what I teach and he was like, you know that story. And so we in the West are missing an important piece of the history of interfaith dialogue and what’s happening in the Middle East now is rooted in this shared and contested history. So the important piece for us is when this king of Nazran martyrs a bunch of Christians, the Ethiopian king sends over some troops and he ultimately is killed and Judaism is squashed in Himyar. And he sends over elephants, this Ethiopian king sends over elephants. That seems like a silly weird thing to tell you unless you’ve ever read any biographies of Muhammad. Muhammad is purported to have been born in the year of the elephants. The chronology is wrong, but the Islamic historiography is pointing back to this big political fight, this big religious fight that happened in 523 to 525. So that’s one reason: it plays an important role.

The other piece, and this is where I always want us to be sensitive, is it’s not an implicit invitation to antisemitism, right? It’s not like, oh, look at this horrible Jewish king who offed a bunch of Christians. But it does invite us to think about how when we are in a minority group or when we are engaging a minority group and we have the power, how do we frame one another? It creates an othering that I think is very relevant for our political moment and that we have this tendency to flatten and homogenize the idea of who that other is. And these more intricate histories are complicated to follow. I just talked way too long. But the complexity is actually for me where the richness comes from, right? Because it’s not like you can just go, oh, good guys, bad guys that make a much cleaner talk for you. But actually most of the world is really messy because we’re messy and humans have always been messy. And I like to tell my students history is differently  wonderful, differently awful.

Shirley Paulson

Yeah. Okay. So thank you for explaining to us why we need to be thinking about that. So let’s go back to the girls again. You made an interesting case about the girls’ faces or the women’s heads. Is that why girls and women are at the forefront of these attacks from both Jews and Christians? Were they actually martyrs?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

So there are women martyrs, so it’s two different Christian subgroups who hate each other, and that’s important to know, but this girl is in a Miaphysite Christian text, and the martyrs that King Yusef—the Jewish king who is purported to have killed—we have these martyrologies, which again are not necessarily the way we think of history, just like detailed stories. They’re meant to be inspirational. But there are lots of women who are killed very violently and in particular have facial violence done or beheading, which was a very common practice both for the Romans and the Persians for poorer people. But these are wealthy women in some cases being beheaded.

I know, I’m sorry.

Shirley Paulson

Well, it’s okay. We need to know the story here. So the title of your talk here is about the Christian Jewish relations on the eve of Islam. So tell us the Islam part then. What is happening then when Islam comes to see what’s going on, what happens then?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

So Yusef is purported to have killed all of these Christians at Najran in 523. And we get these…and we know because we have extant inscriptions in this language, Sebaic (?), in stone. So he brags about them, that he killed some people, but he doesn’t say, “oh, I martyred these women.” It’s Christians who write stories of violence about themselves, just like earlier Roman martyrdoms. It’s Christians reflecting their sense of persecution and minoritization through this lens of violence is being done to me. And these letters get sent to those Arabian tribes that have converted to Christianity that I pointed to in the north. And so on the eve of Islam, you have a lot of Roman and Persian interference all up and down the Arabian Peninsula in the aftermath. So when Mohammed is purported to be born in 570, that’s later than 525, but it’s not in loose understandings of time historically. It’s a generation or so. He’s born in this moment where we remember a great deal of instability on the Arabian Peninsula.

And so Rome and Persia are fighting these proxy wars on the Arabian peninsula up in Armenia and Georgia as well with one another. And most good Islamic historiography points out that part of what happens is Arabs get tired of being told to believe this one thing or this other thing. And so when they have their own prophet, that ends up having a powerful momentum force. And it’s, in fact, Jewish tribes that Muhammad has the most trouble with once he gets to Medina. Initially he allies with them and then he has all this difficulty if we take those stories seriously. But then Muhammad is able to take over large swaths of both the Roman and the Persian empires because of all this infighting for the decades before. So this sort of historical instability of Himyar becoming powerful and then them interfering to press it back with both political and religious connotations sets the stage for Islam success. It is not the sole reason, and again, this is not a moment to be anti-Islamic and say, “oh, well that’s the only reason it happened,” but it is the historical world in which that became a possibility.

Shirley Paulson

It’s interesting that we’re talking about these religious communities as if they’re just simply fighting over things that have nothing to do with inspiration or the reason you have religion in the first place. I guess I’m trying to say that the religious story doesn’t sound like the kind of inspired ideas that Jesus tells us about loving our neighbors or the Hebrew shema, a commitment to loving God wholeheartedly. So you’ve explained really helpfully, I think that history has its positive things and its negative things. What is your takeaway from this that we can maybe dwell on to do something about?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

That’s a great question. So I think for me, what is most interesting is to think about, and I would just add, well before I respond to that question, that Islam also has this care for the poor. Like you tithe, so all three traditions have that impulse, but that impulse can get lost in the realities and politics of the day. So that actually is what I think the takeaway is, is all of these folks are responding to precarity, whether or not their situation is actually precarious. They experience themselves as they’re being threatened and they need to protect themselves. And this should sound very familiar to us, right? Regardless of where you find yourself on the religious or the political spectrum, there’s a tendency for us when we feel threatened to double down and say, well, I’m being hurt. You caused this. And that is the entire sort of situation that results in Christianity and Judaism and Islam having these complicated, sometimes good, sometimes bad interactions for the next thousand plus years.

Shirley Paulson

That’s a very, very helpful overview of the whole situation, and it’s helpful to hear the history to put some meat to this. So we will continue thinking. I want to stop here and prepare our community here for participating in this conversation. So we’re ready for everyone else to hop in and ask you some questions. But before I hand over the mic, I would like to pause and ask if you please consider becoming a Bible and Beyond supporter on Patreon. For those of you already Bible and Beyond supporters, a huge thank you to you. If you’ve offered support through Patreon before, it’s quite simple. You just go to patreon.com/bible and beyond and it will show you how to make a monthly donation at any amount that’s just right for you. And that will be just right for the rest of us too. We benefit from when you help us. So thank you for that. And I want to turn over the mic to anybody who has questions. So it helps me if you are able to find the electronic hand raising so I can find you. If not, raise your hand and I’ll hopefully find you. So while you’re thinking about that, Okay, go ahead, Peggy.

Peggy Williams

It’s a quick thing. In case you didn’t memorize what Shirley just said in the chat you’ll find the Patreon information as well as alternatives, what you need.

Shirley Paulson

Good. Thank you, Peggy. Appreciate that. So

Peggy Williams

It’s in writing.

Shirley Paulson

It’s in writing. Very good, thank you. Okay, so while people are thinking of this, maybe could you tell us a little bit more about, and I see we have a, I say, well, let’s go ahead with Katie’s question first and then we’ll come back to mine. Katie, go ahead.

Katie Grigg-Miller

Oh, thanks. I lost track of what the council was in 381, so I’m curious about what that council was, but I did write down that this was at least somewhat in regards to bringing back the Holy Spirit into the conversation. And I wondered if that was seen as a feminine side of God or not, something else.

Christine Luckritz Marquis

So the first council of Constantinople…so it was held in Constantinople in 381, and it was less a bringing back the Holy Spirit than in incorporating the Holy Spirit in the Nicene creed. So in the original Nicene Creed, when we say, “And I believe in the Holy Spirit”, it was period. And there was no articulation of what that meant. By the time you get to the Council of Constantinople where it is elaborated, it’s not necessarily a particularly feminized version, unfortunately. So the Holy Spirit has off and on, been read as sort of a more feminine component of the Trinity, but sadly at this Coun, that was not the thing being redeemed.

Shirley Paulson

What’d you say, Katie?

Katie Grigg-Miller

So you just said that they elaborated on the Holy Spirit as opposed to bringing it back in.

Christine Luckritz Marquis

Yes. So there wasn’t a strong notion of what the Holy Spirit did in the whole situation. And that’s strange because you have folks like the New Prophecy movement in North Africa who are prophetesses, who are speaking in tongues, and so we have people who think they are taken by the Holy Spirit. But articulating how the Holy Spirit relates to the Father and the Son has not actually been done very clearly at that point.

Shirley Paulson

Okay, yeah, thank you for that. Okay, pat, go ahead.

Pat Nester

Okay, thank you. This is kind of a military question. You mentioned that the kingdom of Himyar, which I had never heard of before, came to be very powerful, and from all the taking of the Latin classes and Caesar’s Gallic commentaries, and the theory at the time was that the Romans were by far the most potent military power that had ever existed. So how did Himyar become a military power as compared to the Persians and the Romans?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

Great question. So the reason is because it was on the trade routes. So Persia and Rome had both discovered spices in India, had discovered silks further to the east in what we think of as modern day China. And so there was a lot of movement by this period, and most of that went through the Arabian Peninsula one way or the other. And Himyar, which is basically modern day Yemen, was very lush and a great sort of agricultural location. It wasn’t desert and it wasn’t like the, what’s often called the empty quadrant further to the northwest on the Arabian Peninsula. If it’s helpful for me to share that map one more time. Sorry, you guys are going to get lots of maps instead of my face, but as you can see, it’s right here on the Red Sea where it connects out. And so it was in fact a strategically placed location for a kingdom on the water because it prevented anything that was shipping through there to get sort of trapped before it got to the Romans or the Persians. And similarly on the land routes when they expanded to the north, all of those smaller kingdoms were kind of okay with coming under Himyarite rule. So it was an alliance of different peoples on the Arabian Peninsula in order to have some autonomy and muscle to counter the Romans and the Persians.

Pat Nester

And was the population dense enough to support armies to go out and do the fighting?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

It seems to have been. I mean, they were successful. They took large swaths of the Arabian Peninsula, and then a couple of decades later when Muhammad received his revelation from the Archangel Gabriel, when people began to convert, he had an army to take with him. So it would seem so.

Pat Nester

Thanks.

Shirley Paulson

Wow. It’s hard to think about the armies and the divine revelations in the same breath, but yeah. Thank you. Okay, Joy, what about you?

Joy Dryden

I’m kind of still back at the process of the Councils. So the Chalcedonian Council in 451. I thought I heard you say that this is where they were trying to come to an agreement between whether the spirit and the human are combined in an entity or separate, or I’m not quite sure what their argument was that they were trying to resolve.

Christine Luckritz Marquis

They were still trying to resolve how Jesus’s human and divine natures interacted in his body. So Jesus is supposed to be fully human and fully divine. How does one do that?

Joy Dryden

Okay, and so, can you say what the two arguments were that they never resolved?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

So yeah, there are three arguments.

And there are East Syrian, Church of the East, Christians who were forced to flee from Syria in the last decade that are Dyophysites. So Dyophysite is shorthand in two natures: human and divine. So the human and the divine have a relationship alongside one another, but they don’t contaminate one another.  Dyophysite—which literally means two natures, from the Greek Dyophysite—two natures. And then you have the Caledonian view, which is what we have in the West, which is also in two natures. But it’s built on Latin. So it didn’t have the same problems as Greek created for our counterparts. Human and divine working like synchronized swimmers— like, utterly in community alongside one another. But there’s not this worry about them contaminating each other. They’re seen as separate things working synchronously for lack of a better description. And then you have the Miaphysite, which means one phusis, one nature, and that is from one nature ( human and divine), or from two natures, but they’re now one hypostatically joined mysterious union. That’s Cyril of Alexandria.

So, there are two things that became one. This is confusing. I told you guys, and it seems like a small thing. But this idea that Jesus’ human and divine nature is somehow mysteriously unified is all the Oriental Orthodox churches: so, Coptic Christians, Syriac Orthodox Christians, Malankara Syriac, Christians in India… so the Tewahedo in Ethiopia, you have a lot of Christians in our contemporary moment who you may not know about who believe this, coming out of Chalcedon. We have a handful of Dyophysites, and then Chalcedonian Christians make up most of Western Christianity.

Joy Dryden

So they were not resolved in the Chalcedon Council. And so they kind of split and became separate practices that just operated in different areas.

Christine Luckritz Marquis

Yes, yes. So this is a good question. So Miaphysite and Chalcedonian Christians kept arguing with one another. So Dyosphite Christians had largely been pushed to the Persian empire, not exclusively, but Miaphysite and Chaledonian Christians kept arguing with each other and the emperor would support one, and then the emperor would support the other. We have attempts under Emperor Zeno, for example, in 462. He has his bishop at the time offer this reunion formula that basically rolls back Chalcedon. It’s such a problem, like a decade later. But the reason why these two groups end up staying separate is because of the rise of Islam. All of those Miaphysite Christian regions, Egypt, Syria, the Arabian Peninsula, all of them end up under Muslim rule, with the rise of the Islamic Commonwealth. And so they just are Christianity of the east that fall out of the story for Christianity in the west.

Joy Dryden

I get it. Thank you.

Shirley Paulson

Absolutely. Yeah, and thank you for those questions, Joy. I think that’s helpful for everybody to get a picture of what’s going on with the Councils, and what difference it makes ,and what we’ve inherited, why we’ve inherited what we have ,and why we’re different from the East ,and what we don’t even know about. So those were good questions. Joy. Thank you. Okay. Helen, over to you.

Helen Mathis

I’m not even sure how to ask this question, and I tried to reduce all of those differences that came out of these councils for some college students. I thought I would try to simplify it, and it didn’t work. That’s really confusing. But I actually was interested in your comment about how the Jewish and Christians sort of melded together, or not even coexisted, but you really couldn’t tell the difference between them in the Eastern Orthodox tradition and that you had this Jewish community that you were talking about as well. And this is not the rabbinic Judaism. So I wondered if you could describe the Judaism at this time and what happened to it when Islam sort of took over that area.

Yeah, no, this is a great question. So what I was saying was John Chrysystom complains about some of his congregants going to synagogue. That is, it seems like people felt like there could be equal opportunities, like going to the synagogue for one festival, and coming to church for his sermon. And he found that really troubling that they didn’t see the strong distinction. So that’s that piece. But then with Judaism on the Arabian Peninsula, we have beliefs in the Jewish God in short inscriptions. The evidence is hard here, but part of the problem is rabbinic Judaism, as we know it, is forming at the same time that these things are happening on the Arabian Peninsula. Especially if you take seriously that the Jerusalem Talmud— which doesn’t become the dominantly used one for rabbinic Judaism—ultimately it’s like forming in the fourth century, but into the fifth century.

The Babylonian Talmud is what most rabbinical situated Jews lean into. That’s forming in the late fifth to early sixth centuries, precisely when these things are happening further down in the Arabian Peninsula. So a Talmud around which rabbinical Judaism would be built isn’t fully formed yet. So what it means to be Jewish in this period is actually really hard to say, right? You have engagement with the Hebrew Bible scriptures, however they’re formed. So sometimes scholars talk about the Karaite Jewish movement, which is non rabbinical Judaism that lasts into the medieval period, and we hear the rabbinical head figures of the Gaon of the academic academies arguing against Karaite Jews who don’t engage the Talmud at all. And that’s the major distinction, not the sole distinction. So there was some sense that you could be a Jew and believe in God as a Jew without recourse to the Talmud interpreting the Hebrew scriptures for you.

Helen Mathis

So the Ebionites are sort of an example of that in a way, wouldn’t you say?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

Could be; I mean, yeah.

Helen Mathis

And I would think that if they were half Jewish and half Christian, or maybe Jewish in identity and Christian in practice maybe, or in theology, that they would be more inclined towards the very human Jesus, which comes out in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Jesus is much more human in the Orthodox tradition. And I’m just wondering about, it might’ve been some Jewish influence there.

Christine Luckritz Marquis

I mean, it’s certainly possible because there’s far more interaction because there are far more Jew, if you go all the way back to someone like Iran, the bishop of Leon in second century, he makes lots of really horrible anti-Jewish statements periodically, but it’s not clear he ever met a Jew in his whole life. So that just wasn’t where the diaspora went, right? You had Jews on the Arabian Peninsula, you had Jews in the Persian Empire, you had Jews in the Eastern Roman Empire, but not a lot of Jews, as best we can tell for the,

Helen Mathis

Yeah. Okay. Thank you. That was very interesting.

Shirley Paulson

Thank you so much for that. Good question too, Helen. So I have a question I want to ask you too. This question about conversion. I think you helped us to understand why there’s a power play going on in terms of the military power, and also maybe economically and politically. And I think in our world today, we think of people converting others because they want to save your soul. Is that the reason for conversion then? Or were there other reasons for converting for this intense desire to convert others? What was that about then?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

I think I mean some of what I’m going to say is sort of speculation based on things we know. This is like trying to divine the minds of early Christians or early Jews, but I do think that conversion was about wanting to save people—and save them in the afterlife, because your life in the world was so awful. So this sort of interest in the afterlife we see with the emergence of Christianity at all was also happening in some of what are often called ‘mystery religions.’ In the Greco-Roman world, you had this interest in an afterlife. You have this uncertain Jewish movement with the Pharisees, but maybe not the Sadducees. You have this interest in the afterlife and in saving people and them having a better experience because their real lives are so awful. But I also think that that precarity piece, drought, famine was a thing that they didn’t have a global food economy. We know doctors like Galen in the second century, were doing live vi-sections on the street to make a name for himself as a doctor. Things were just far more fragile in every way. And so saving for the afterlife and also proving my God, because he’s powerful and helping us in this life are not separate. They’re both about responding to that precarity. Does that make sense?

Shirley Paulson

Yeah. And of course, I know there were pandemics going on there too.

Christine Luckritz Marquis

Oh yes.

Shirley Paulson

So I’m also curious about that question that you had to speak about so quickly—this hurting someone to heal them. That just seems like a very difficult concept, especially today. What was, again, the motive for hurting somebody to heal someone was to prove that you can heal, or what was the point of that?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

So that’s what got me interested in this whole topic. Holy men regularly heal people, but they don’t. In all these stories that tell of the miracles they do, they don’t tend to hurt the person first. And that makes this story weird, even for other stories of its time. And so my instinct is that extra layer of violence is reflective of the culture it’s coming from with these martyrdoms and all of this political turmoil that I think is because it’s a sixth-century Syriac manuscript telling about this moment right after these massacres happened by the mite king, I think that actually being able to do violence to her and then take it away is a claim for power that probably wasn’t true. That is, I am less convinced. It’s not that I don’t think gendered violence really happened to women or that there were never martyrs.

I absolutely want us to reclaim those moments when we can because they’re horrifying and erasing them doesn’t help us when we think about our history. But I think that it was mostly male Christian authors thinking with images of violence to sort out their own precarity. So the author of this text was this Miaphysite Christian, which was the wrong type of Christian on a peninsula with Jews and Dyophysite Christians and others and Zoroastrians, because there were, of course Persians we haven’t even talked about, but there were also Zoroastrians in the mix. And so they were so marginalized that they imagined this violence. And then taking it away, because that was the idiom of how they felt powerful in the ancient world.

Shirley Paulson

Well, that’s very curious then about where does this habit of healing fit in with this kind of other desire to be in control or to save yourself or whatever. I mean, healing just seems like your motive would be to help somebody, but it doesn’t seem like if you’re hurting to heal is a motive of wanting to help somebody. Am I right?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

I mean, I think the question is whether or not healing was for helping someone. I mean, I think it was a nice benefit that it helped someone. I think, like Jesus, when he healed, wanted to help people. But you could rarely uncouple that from, if you think about Jesus, even in relation to other holy figures of his time, right? Healing was about proving you were powerful.

Shirley Paulson

Okay.

Christine Luckritz Marquis

I mean, I hear what you’re saying that we want to decouple them, but I actually think in the logics of Paul and John’s text, they are helping her by hurting her, which is horrifying to us. I’m not enjoying this, just to be clear. I’m not suggesting this is the way we go forward, but in the logics of their test, hurting her helps her because it converts her whole people to Christianity, and then they’re saved. If they don’t hurt her, how’s she going to know their God is the right God?

Shirley Paulson

Okay. It’s awful. It’s

Christine Luckritz Marquis

Awful.

Shirley Paulson

I’ll keep thinking about that. Okay. Meanwhile, Karen, go ahead. What is your thought?

Karen Hagen

I think I heard you said that it was all the infighting between Christians and Christians, and then Christians and Jews, that made an opportune time for Islam to flourish. If I heard that right, or if I didn’t hear it, tell it to me differently. And if so, how come? How’d that work?

Christine Luckritz Marquis

Thank you. So no, I think I’ve understood your question. So it’s Christian infighting with one another, but also the Romans and the Persians, the Sasinate Persians are primarily Zoroastrians. And just like I wish we could talk about Zoroastrianism and the ways in which their canon is formed in response to the canonization of the Christian Bible. There are interesting sort of monotheistic impulses happening there. So it was both political and religious infighting of Jews on the Arabian Peninsula, various Christian groups, Roman and Ethiopian, and then Zoroastrian Persians. They were also busy struggling over this small stretch of land, especially around the Tigris-Euphrates region, but also the Arabian Peninsula because of trade and because they wanted to be the ultimate power, and that would prove that God was right. And I think where this is helpful for us to think of is this as kingdoms, right?

The notion of democracy and nation states as we talk about them is really very recent in history. And kings—the way you knew that God favored you was because you stayed on the throne, and you were successful. And so in a world where there are multiple religious traditions competing for the same space, that sort of constant instability. It’s not that that’s why Islam was successful solely, but you have the Arabian peoples constantly being pressed on by the Romans and the Persians, and then they have somebody who says, “God has actually come to speak to us, to us as a people.” And so people rally around that because that feels like they’re not just being force-fed religions of other regions, right? God is actually among them. And so that is the reason that the religious piece of Islam is so powerful. And then when they were able to take over the lands, first in Persia, and then in the Roman Empire. It’s because their militaries are weakened, and there have been plagues and there has been a lot of cross-contamination because of this ongoing fighting. That was a slightly longer answer, but I hope that sort of clarified.

Karen Hagen

That helps. Yes.

Shirley Paulson

Thank you. Yeah, I have to say, you have stretched us. We often get stretched during these meetings, but this one, I think, is making us think more about what is religion, what is it for? What do we do with it? How are we abusing it? How are we being abused by it? There are lots of big questions that you bring to mind with this whole topic. So I just want to thank you so much for all the work you’ve done. My goodness, you’ve opened up a world of things that we just have not known much about at Lisa. I haven’t. So I really want to thank you so much for this, and I want to thank everybody for joining us for our once a month Bible and beyond discussion. We usually do meet on the fourth Monday of the month from eight to 9:00 PM on Eastern time.

And our next meeting will be on Monday, June 23rd. Each Bible and Beyond Discussion is led by a knowledgeable scholar who provides a thoughtful overview of the text, and then we provide an opportunity for participants to ask their own questions. Before we wrap up tonight, I do want to remind you that your Patreon support is extremely important for us to keep providing these terrific opportunities to hobnob with great scholars like Dr. Luckritz Marquis. And don’t forget paying members of Patreon also get discounts on all of our Bible and Beyond courses. So please join us at patreon.com/BibleAndBeyond.

And now what’s coming next month? Dr. Katherine A. Shaner will be our guest scholar and she’ll be talking about enslavement in antiquity and particularly how we should understand it in the context of the Bible. So this will be another thought provoking topic, and I look forward to seeing you on Monday June 23rd. So now please just join me in a special thanks for Christine for coming tonight to be with us with a bit of food for thought and concerning the ancient attempts to convert people.

Christine Luckritz Marquis

Thank you guys so much for the opportunity to talk about things that probably are pretty new. And let me just say, Dr. Shaner is awesome and you guys should come back and listen to her. Her work is amazing.

Shirley Paulson

Well, this is great. Well, thank you so much. What a treat to have you with us tonight.

Christine Luckritz Marquis

Absolutely.

Absolutely.