Abraha’s Christology (Prof. Segovia)

Article

1. CIH 541 (Sadd Maʾrib): 1 b-ḫyl w-[r]dʾ w-rḥ— 2 mt Rḥmnn w-Ms¹— 3 ḥ-hw w-Rḥ [q]ds¹ … Translation: With the power, the aid, and the mercy of Rḥmnn, of his Messiah and of the Holy Spirit.

(Around 525, or 531 (Robin 2012b: 283-4), Ǝllä Aṣbǝḥa Kaleb (Greek Hellestheaios), king of Aksūm, defeated the self-proclaimed (in 521 or 522) Jewish king of Ḥimyar Yūsuf As’ar Yaṯ’ar (Greek Dounaas, Arabic ḏū Nuwās), who following his rise to power had the Aksumite garrison in Ẓafār killed, Ẓafār’s church destroyed, the coastal regions of the Red Sea facing Aksūm seized, and the Miaphysite community of Naǧrān massacred. Thus Aksumite authority, which had gained prominence in the region in the 500s and the 510s, and Christianity with it (after a longue durée of Jewish supremacy), were imposed in Ḥimyar – an event from which Byzantium benefited, for it implied controlling with the help of a victorious ally the trade routes through the eastern and western shores of the Read Sea against its own rival empire: Persia (Bowersock 2012, 2013). Yet Kaleb did not annexed Ḥimyar. Instead, he maintained the Himyarite throne and placed on it a Himyarite prince called Sumyafa‘ Ašwa‘ (Greek Esimiphaios). Very likely, Esimiphaios was of Jewish origin but had converted to Christianity after Kaleb’s successful campaign in Ḥimyar (Gajda 2009: 115, after Procopius). Be that as it may, two extant, if fragmentary, official inscriptions in Sabaic bear witness to his Christian faith, namely Istanbul 7608 bis, and Wellcome A 2 103664.

1. http://dasi.humnet.unipi.it/index.php?id=dasi_prj_epi&prjId=1&corId=0&colId=0&navId=800877863&recId=2410
2. http://dasi.humnet.unipi.it/index.php?id=dasi_prj_epi&prjId=1&corId=0&colId=0&navId=800877863&recId=2459
3. The last segment of this inscription has this mainstream trinitarian formula (“God, his Son, and the Holy Spirit”). This other inscription does not need to be read in the same way, as it could simply mention God and his Son (see Abraha’s formula below). Where it just mentions 2 persons (Pace Gajda (2009: 115).

Esimiphaios’s reign was short-lived. Around 535, his army commander, Abraha, deposed him and assumed the throne of Ḥimyar. Upon receiving this news, Kaleb sent two military expeditions against Abraha, but the king managed to negotiate and agreement with Kaleb’s soldiers the first time, and then crushed Kaleb’s second expedition. Judging from what we know of his reign between the 540s and the 550s (Gajda 2009: 118-49; Robin 2012b: 284-8), Abraha brought stability to Ḥimyar and successfully extended his rule to several neighbouring regions of the Arabian peninsula including Saba’, ḏū Raydān, Ḥaḍramawt, Yamanat, Ṭawd and Tihāma. More interestingly, he refused to act as a vassal king of Aksūm, as can be fairly deduced from the way in which his official inscriptions display his “will to maintain, if not to restore, the brilliance of the cradle of South Arabian civilisation and thus to consolidate a contested legitimacy by acting as an indigenous sovereign” (Robin 2012b: 285; cf. Gajda 2009: 119). He died c. 565 (allegedly after a frustrated expedition against Mecca) and was succeeded by his two sons Aksūm and Masrūq, who ruled successively until the mid-570s; then his dynasty came 8 to an end and the Christian kingdom of Ḥimyar collapsed with the help of Persia. On Abraha’s expedition against Mecca and its supposed allusion in sūra 105 of the Qur’ān (“The Elephant”), see Ro 9 – bin 2012b: 285-8.

1. Inscriptions of Abraha: Among other minor inscriptions of that period, we have several official inscriptions by Abraha himself, in particular for our purposes here CIH 541 and DAI GDN 2002-20, both from 10 11 548, and Ry 506 from 552. 12 CIH 541 is the longest of Abraha’s extant inscriptions and consists of 136 lines. It opens with a trinitarian thanksgiving formula (ll. 1-3) followed by a reference to Abraha’s name (l. 4), titles (ll. 4-6), [55] and dominions (ll. 6-8). It then reports a rebellion that the king suffocated (ll. 13 10-55) prior to having the inscription set up (l. 9). This report is followed by another one mentioning the king’s reparation of the Ma’rib dam (ll. 55-61), which is alluded to again in ll. 68-71; the celebration of a mass in its church (ll. 65-7); and a plague (ll. 72-5). http://dasi.humnet.unipi.it/index.php?id=dasi_prj_epi&prjId=1&corId=0&colId=0&navId=389874095&recId=2382 http://dasi.humnet.unipi.it/index.php?id=dasi_prj_epi&prjId=1&corId=0&colId=0&navId=800877863&recId=2391 http://dasi.humnet.unipi.it/index.php?id=dasi_prj_epi&prjId=1&corId=0&colId=0&navId=800877863&recId=2447
2. CIH 541 is the longest of Abraha’s extant inscriptions and consists of 136 lines. It opens with a trinitarian thanksgiving formula (ll. 1-3) followed by a reference to Abraha’s name (l. 4), titles (ll. 4-6), [55] and dominions (ll. 6-8). It then reports a rebellion that the king suffocated (ll. 13 10-55) prior to having the inscription set up (l. 9). This report is followed by another one mentioning the king’s reparation of the Ma’rib dam (ll. 55-61), which is alluded to again in ll. 68-71; the celebration of a mass in its church (ll. 65-7); and a plague (ll. 72-5). Next we find more details about the king’s military campaigns in Arabia (ll. 76-80); the indication that he returned to Ma’rib after them (ll. 80-7); and a report concerning the subsequent organisation of a diplomatic conference in which delegations from Ethiopia, Byzantium, Persia, and the Arab vassal kingdoms of the Romans and the Sassanians participated (ll. 87-92). Some supplementary information on the plague mentioned in ll. 72-5, the rebuilding of the Ma’rib dam, and the mass alluded to in ll. 65-7, is then given in ll. 92-117, as well as a detailed list of provisions (ll. 118-36).(edited)
3. Three different religious formulas w/ holy spirit, etc:

Why did Abraha choose the term Ms¹ḥ (“Messiah”)?

Several explanations have been provided so far. In 1960, Alfred Beeston – who was also the first to notice this quite remarkable singularity – suggested that Abraha might have inclined towards Dyophysitism rather than Miaphysitism out of his distaste for Kaleb (Beeston 1960: 105). In turn, Irfan Shahid contended that he probably converted to the Chalcedonian faith in order to obtain support from Byzantium (Shahid 1979: 31). More recently, Iwona Gajda has discussed Beeston’s (and implicitly Shahid’s) view(s) and proposed an alternative one: “Abraha précise bien qui sont le Père et le Fils: « Raḥmānān et son Messie ». Il s’agit probablement d’un usage local” (Gajda 2009: 122); “[i]l ne nous paraît pas possible d’avancer une [autre] hypothèse en se fondant sur les données dont nous disposons” (Gajda 2009: 122 n.456). Conversely, Christian Robin highlights the apparent Jewish-Christian nature of Abraha’s formula (Robin 2012c: 540). Lastly, Jonn Block argues that “it is not inconceivable that Abraha allowed ambiguity in his presentation of the faith in order to gain Byzantine support for his action against the Persians, but an official conversion from Monophysitism to Nestorianism is very unlikely. It is more likely that Byzantium still had Monophysite leanings, and was on friendly terms with Abyssinia. Beeston’s conviction on the matter [58] seems lower than that of Shahîd, who proposes the possibility that Abraha changed his faith from Monophysite to Chalcedonian” (Block 2014: 21).

1. If compared to Dyophysite Christology, the Qur’ān’s Christology operates on a different level, for it does not address 19 the question of the relationship between Christ’s divinity and his humanity, i.e. between Christ’s divine and human hypostases, as Guillaume Dye insightfully pointed to me in a private communication of August 12, 2015. Nonetheless, it reflects its premises in so far as it takes the earthly Jesus to be a man and labels him the Messiah, son of Mary, instead of son of God. It must also be mentioned that the Dyophysites developed a “theology of the indwelling Logos. Colossians 2:9 [REB: ‘For it is in Christ that the Godhead in all its fullness dwells embodied’] was paraphrased to mean: ‘In him the Logos dwells perfectly.’ The man whom the Logos had assumed as his temple and dwelling was the Second Adam, made sinless by the grace of God. It was this assumed man, and not the indwelling Logos, who had been crucified” (Pelikan 1974: 41); cf. the reference to Jesus’s death in Q 4:153-9, which may be read in this way contra its traditional interpretation in Islam (cf. Robinson 2003: 17-20; Reynolds 2009).
2. Also, in contrast to Chalcedonian orthodoxy, the Dyophysites saw Jesus more as a teacher and example, so that Christ-believers could effectively imitate the pattern that the man assumed by the Logos had set (Pelikan 1974: 46); otherwise, they argued, humanity would be deprived of the hope of salvation. Yet, normally, the Dyophysites gave the name Christ to the person of the union of both hypostases, the human and the divine, rather than to Jesus the human teacher alone; this, in turn, raised among their opponents the objection that they endorsed the view of a double sonship, one divine and the other human (Pelikan 1974: 48). It was only with Babai the Great (c. 551-628) that an effort was made on the part of the Dyophysites both to solve this and other related ambiguities (Pelikan 1974: 42-3) and to counter the threat of a growing Miaphysite influence in Nisibis between 571 and 610, which in turn must be seen as one of the reasons that led Khusraw II to temporarily suppress the catholicate in 609 (Reinik 2010; see further Greatrex 2003). Thus it is fair to ask what knowledge of such problems and conflicts might certain peripheral groups more or less inclined towards Diophysitism have had around that time, and if any of such groups might have eventually striven to uphold an even more radical distinction between Christ’s divinity and humanity by stressing Jesus’s exclusively human condition. The possibility that the Qur’ān reflects their hypothetical views cannot be excluded, either. On the eventual connections between Dyophysites and Unitarian Christians (i.e. Christians who refused to see Jesus as anything else than a man and thus reserved the title “God” for the Father alone) in the late-6th- to mid-7th century Arabian peninsula and Iraq, see further Wood 2015, whose references to the Acta Arethae, Išō‘yahb I, and Thomas of Marga are particularly helpful in this respect.
3. Whatever Abraha’s intent, his Christological formula evinces that South-Arabian Christians in the 6th century (even mainstream Christians!) were not totally unfamiliar with the representation of Jesus as the Messiah instead of God’s son – a feature that we also find in the Qur’ān from the viewpoint of the Jesus himself, who is repeatedly called there “the Messiah, son of Mary” instead of “son of God”. See Q 2:87, 253; 3:45; 4:57, 159, 171-2; 5:17, 46, 72, 78, 110, 112, 114, 116; 7:58; 9:30-1; 17:57, 104; 18:102; 18 19:34; 21:26, 91, 101; 23:50; 25:17; 33:7; 39:45; 43:57, 61; 57:27; 61:6, 14; 66:12. The fact that Abraha’s formula (“Raḥmānān and his Messiah”) is paralleled in the quranic corpus (“al-Raḥmān” [passim] + “the Messiah” ± “Jesus, the son of Mary”) has not escaped Robin’s attention (Robin 2012c: 540). See also Shahid 2006: 20-21, who, albeit he adduces no evidence thereof, interprets the quranic phrase “Jesus son of Mary” as a Dyophysite expression circulating in Mecca in Muḥammad’s lifetime; and van der Velden’s interpretation of Q 5:116 (2008).