fallen Persian Empire.
Jacob of Edessa, Chronological Charts (691/92 CE)
Jacob of Edessa was a prolific author of the later seventh century, of whom it has been said that his importance in Syriac Christian culture is equivalent to that of Jerome in Western Christendom.48 Jacob’s contributions to the medieval West Syrian (that is, “miaphysite”) church are extensive. In his day he was particularly renowned, or perhaps more accurately, notorious, for his work in canon law: in addition to producing a number of important works on the subject, he famously burned a copy of the ecclesiastical regulations while bishop of Edessa to protest the laxity of their observance in the church, after which he (perhaps wisely) withdrew to a monastery. Jacob was also instrumental in standardizing aspects of Syriac grammar, and the West Syrian tradition of indicating vocalization was his invention. Like Jerome, he labored to produce a more accurate version of the biblical text, and he wrote numerous biblical commentaries in addition to various theological and philosophical works. In his youth Jacob had gone to Alexandria to undertake advanced study of Greek, which enabled him to translate, among other things, the works of Severus of Antioch from Greek into Syriac and the Categories of Aristotle. He also authored a number of liturgical texts, and his extensive correspondence with people across Syria also survives.49 But our primary concern in the present context is Jacob’s Chronicle, or his Chronological Charts as the text is perhaps more accurately named: these present a somewhat complicated, but nevertheless important, witness to the tradition of Muhammad’s leadership during the invasion of Palestine.
Jacob’s Chronological Charts were prepared with the intent of covering the interval from the end of Eusebius’s Church History up until the end of the seventh century by presenting “in brief the events of the time and the years of empires … placed facing each other so that it might be for those coming to it [to see] who were at a certain time the kings, generals, scholars, writers.”50 Unfortunately, much of this chronicle is lost: only a series of extracts has survived, preserved in a single manuscript from the tenth or eleventh century. Among the missing sections is Jacob’s record of events from 631 until 692, the year that he composed the chronicle. Ordinarily, this would considerably limit the text’s value for assessing the date of Muhammad’s death, since it breaks off just before the traditional date of his death in 632. Nevertheless, in this case we are the beneficiaries of a rare and fortunate error in Jacob’s chronology. According to Jacob’s charts, in 620/21 “the first king of the Arabs, Muhammad, began to reign for seven years.”51 Seven years later, the chart records in 627/28 the beginning of Abū Bakr’s reign as the second king of the Arabs, which lasted for two years and seven months.52 This of course places Muhammad’s death in 627/28, four to five years before the traditional date. Jacob’s lapse in chronology here is surprising, given the fact that Jacob’s chronicle is otherwise highly regarded for its accuracy.53 Nonetheless, a list of caliphs compiled between 705 and 715 gives the same dates for Muhammad’s reign, perhaps having followed Jacob’s charts, as does the Hispanic Chronicle of 754, discussed below.54
At first glance, one would hardly think that Jacob’s report could strengthen an argument for extending the time of Muhammad’s death beyond its traditional date, since according to Jacob, it occurred even earlier. No doubt this is why Cook, Crone, and Hoyland do not include this witness among the Christian sources identifying Muhammad as still alive during the campaign in Palestine. While Jacob may have had erroneous knowledge of the length of Muhammad’s reign, he nevertheless is in complete harmony with these other sources in recording the onset of the Islamic conquest of Palestine while Muhammad was still alive and leader of the Muslims. Beginning with Muhammad’s reign, Jacob’s chronological charts are ordered into four columns that count the years of the various Roman, Persian, and Islamic leaders, alongside a count of the years since Jacob’s charts began in the twentieth year of Constantine’s reign. On both sides of these charts are comments noting important historical events that coincide with the regnal years tabulated in the charts. Beside the year 625/26, on the left side of the chart, Jacob records that “the Arabs began to make raids in the land of Palestine.”55 The sentence begins next to 625/26 and ends on the following line, beside the year 626/27, but it is clear that this comment identifies the beginning of the Islamic campaign in Palestine with the fifth year of Muhammad’s reign, two years before his death.
Conceivably, one could interpret this notice as possibly referring to the first minor skirmish between a small Muslim force and an army of Arab tribes allied with the Byzantines at Muʾta in 629, if one were determined to bring this report more in line with the traditional chronology. But this solution does not seem very likely, at least according to the traditional understanding of this early confrontation between Muhammad’s followers and the “Romans.”56 Although Muʾta was technically in Palestina tertia, about twenty-five miles south of the province of Arabia in what is today Jordan, it was certainly very much on the margins of the Byzantine Empire. There is no evidence of any Roman troops at Muʾta during the sixth and seventh centuries, and the forces that actually would have engaged the Muslims were from a variety of Arab confederates. The battle itself was rather minor: it consisted of a single engagement in which the Muslims were soundly defeated. A small skirmish on the fringes of the empire between Christian and Muslim Arabs at a minor outpost hardly seems worthy of Jacob’s notice of Islamic raids in Palestine. Perhaps more importantly, the conflict at Muʾta is unattested in the Syriac historical tradition, or in any Syriac text at all to my knowledge. The sole reference to the battle of Muʾta outside of the Islamic historical tradition is the Greek Chronicle of Theophanes, written in the early ninth century, and Theophanes almost certainly relied on Islamic sources for his account of this battle.57
By contrast, the initial phase of the Islamic conquest of Palestine sounds very much like the “raids” that Jacob envisions. In 633–34, the Islamic army moved into southern Palestine, in the province of Palestina prima, and made a number of smaller engagements, mostly with local garrison forces in the countryside. But initially there were no major confrontations with the Byzantine army, and the towns and cities remained under Byzantine control.58 These circumstances more credibly reflect the events that Jacob describes as “raids” in Palestine, two years, according to his count, before Abū Bakr succeeded Muhammad as the leader of the Muslims after the latter’s death. Therefore, even though Jacob is mistaken in the length he assigns to Muhammad’s reign, his chronicle provides yet another witness to the tradition that Muhammad was still alive as the conquest of Palestine began. We do not know the source of Jacob’s information in this instance, although we can assume that an individual in Jacob’s position would have had access to a number of different sources, both written and oral. His general reliability in sifting through these sources makes Jacob’s error concerning the precise date and number of years that Muhammad ruled quite surprising. There are moreover no signs of any apologetic agenda or totalizing explanation in the terse outlines of these charts, which rather dryly signal the beginnings of the Palestinian conquest before Muhammad’s death.
The History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria: The Life of Patriarch Benjamin (before 717 CE)
The History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria is a rather complex text that was first compiled in late antiquity, but over the centuries it has continually been augmented, revised, and updated as new patriarchs have sat on the throne of St. Mark: the most recent update was added in 1942.59 Most of the material covering the first millennium was originally composed in Coptic, and in the tenth century this was all translated into Arabic, which has been the language of composition ever since. Through a careful analysis of editorial notes scattered throughout the earliest extant versions of this text, David Johnson has been able to identify various redactional layers from the first thousand years of its history.60 The earliest portion of the text derives from a Coptic History of the Church that today is known only in fragments. This first segment covers the period from the founding of the Egyptian church up to the reign of Dioscorus (first century–451).61 This section is followed by a second redactional unit that was composed by a certain George the Archdeacon, who
