In the middle of the third century AD, while the state of Palmyra was still flourishing and radiant, new generations of Arabs appeared on the frontiers of Syria and Iraq: the state of the Lakhmids, or Mundhirids, in al-Hira, whom the Persians took as their allies to repel the raids of their kinsmen, the people of the desert, or to support them in the wars that broke out from time to time between the Persians and the Byzantines before Islam; and the state of the Ghassanids in Bosra (Eski Sham), whom the Byzantines took as their allies for the same reason. Thus the Persians' allies settled along the banks of the Euphrates, and the Byzantines' allies in the Hauran, and whenever war broke out between the Byzantines and the Persians, the Ghassanids were mustered for the Byzantines and the Mundhirids for the Persians, and each fought to the death in defense of its masters and allies. From this arose a bitter enmity between these two Arab Christian states, and that enmity persisted despite the conversion of both states to Christianity.

At the coming of Islam, the inhabitants of Syria and Iraq were for the most part remnants of the original Arameans in the north and east, the Jews and Samaritans in the south, and the remnants of the Nabataeans in the southeast, followed by the Ghassanid and Mundhirid Arabs, and then the tribes of Iyad, Namir, and Rabi'a in Mesopotamia. Interspersed among this whole were diasporas of other origins, such as the Jarajima in the Amanus (Jabal al-Lukkam) and the Jaramiqa in Mosul, and mixed populations of Greek and Roman descent along the coasts, and of Persian and Kurdish descent in the north.

There is no doubt that the Christian religion had spread widely in Syria, Palestine, the land of the Arabs, and western Iraq before the Islamic conquest, and most especially in Palestine. For in the wake of the persecution that arose against the apostles in Jerusalem before its destruction, and in the wake of the stoning of Saint Stephen, the disciples were scattered to many places in Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and the land of the Arabs, and wherever they went they preached the Gospel. Many of the people of those lands believed in Christ, and it was in Antioch that the word "Christians" was first applied to the followers of the Lord Christ.

It is well known that Simeon, bishop of Jerusalem, and the believers who were with him, in the year 70 AD, when the revolt of the Jews against the Romans began, took refuge in the city of Pella on the eastern bank of the Jordan, opposite Beisan. They remained there until the Romans set about rebuilding Jerusalem a second time under the name "Aelia Capitolina," after it had lain sixty years with owls hooting in its ruins. At that point they began to return to it, and that was in the year 134 AD. There is no doubt that during their stay in those lands they were engaged in preaching the Gospel, just as those of them who remained in the city of Pella continued in proclamation and evangelization. Likewise the bishops of Jerusalem, after their return to it, did not sit there with folded hands and muzzled mouths; rather, despite the successive persecutions against them, they would not slacken or weary of preaching and proclamation. This is why we hear of the establishment of several bishoprics in those ages in each of Syria and Palestine, and in the most famous and important cities, some of which still remain and others of which have become ruins. We read in the history of the Church that Hermon, bishop of Jerusalem, who ascended the see in the year 300 AD, ordained several bishops and sent them to preach the Gospel in various places in Syria, Palestine, Transjordan, Iraq, and the land of the Arabs. Likewise Saint Hilarion, the friend of Saint Anthony the Great, founded a monastery around that time near Gaza, in the place now known as Deir al-Balah, and it was the first monastery founded in Palestine. Through his preaching and his manner of life, he and his monks led many of the pagans, and whole tribes of the Arabs who used to encamp in those regions, to the faith. Given what befell Christianity of persecutions in the first three centuries, Church history is unable to give us a detailed account of who among the Arabs, or others, converted to Christianity and who did not in those dark days.

But after the conversion of Constantine and the lifting of persecution from the Christians, several bishoprics appeared in Palestine, Syria, and Transjordan, and among them appeared the names of bishops from among the Arabs, and history came to record the names of many of them on numerous occasions. At the Third Ecumenical Council, held at Ephesus in the year 431 AD, we see that among the two hundred members of whom the council was composed there were two Arab bishops: Peter, bishop of the Arab tribes whose dwellings were in the Ghor near the Dead Sea (Lake of Lot), and Sa'id al-Wafidi, bishop of Gadara (now known as Khirbat Umm Qais in Transjordan) (History of the scholar Chrysostomos, Metropolitan of Athens, page 159). This is apart from the rest of the bishops who attended this council and the two preceding councils, from among the Syrians and Palestinians, and we have been unable to determine for certain whether they were Arabs or not, owing to the changing of names. For just as Saul changed his name after his conversion and came to be called Paul, so it became customary among the ancient Christians to change their names upon embracing Christianity, and they always preferred the names of the prophets, saints, and martyrs who were martyred in the first three centuries, most of which were Hebrew, Greek, and Roman names. Thus we observe that Peter, bishop of the Arab tribes, a pure Arab, named his son and successor "Auxilaus" and his grandson "John." And we can confirm the truth of this from what [?] we see today in the Antiochian see and in the Arab Catholic Church, where we hear none but Hebrew, Greek, and Roman names, such as Gregorios, Gerasimos, Marinios, Michael, and Samuel, even though their bearers are Arabs in heart and mold.

Since names have a great bearing on nationality—as they say, "the name is a history"—we observe that the famous Greek historian Paulos Karolides, the deputy for Izmir in the Ottoman parliament, in the book he authored investigating the origin of the Christians in Syria and Palestine, denied the existence of Arab Christians, despite the appearance of the names of many of them in the history of the Church and among the members of the ecumenical councils themselves, basing his denial on the names of persons and cities. But despite this denial, we see that many Church historians, both early and late, openly affirm the existence of patriarchs, bishops, priests, solitaries, and ascetics from among the Arabs. Nor do they deny the existence of Arab churches that used the Arabic language in their prayers from the earliest times of Christian history. For Saint Theodosius, who flourished at the end of the fifth century, built a monastery—the one now known as the Monastery of Abu Ubaida—in which there were four churches, and each group of the monks of that monastery, numbering 700 souls, would offer the prayers in its own church in its own language, and among them were the Arab monks who prayed in their church in Arabic (see the Guide to the Holy Land by the Archimandrite Benjamin).

The Jerusalem patriarch Dositheus [?] says in his history that in the year 494 AD there ascended the see of the patriarchate of Jerusalem the patriarch Elias the Arab, who was originally from Najd, and it was he who founded the great Greek monastery that stands today. In the year 525 AD there ascended this see the patriarch Peter the Arab, from Bayt Jibrin. During that time the solitary Maren, brother of Peter the bishop of the Arab tribes mentioned above, was head of the Monastery of Saint Euthymius (which is the present shrine of the Prophet Moses).

In the year 513 AD there flourished the famous Saint Cyril, who set about writing the biographies of some of the saints renowned in these lands, such as Mar Saba, Euthymius, Theodosius, Gerasimos, and others. The one who supplied him with ample information about those saints was Tryphon, son of Peter the bishop of the Arab tribes. Al-Bustani mentioned, in the eleventh volume of his Encyclopedia (p. 355), regarding the monks of Mount Sinai, that they were Arabs of the Banu Salih. Likewise Chrysostomos, Metropolitan of Athens, mentioned in his history, concerning the Monastery of Bosra in the Hauran, that its monks were Arabs of the Banu Sadir.

In sum, from the year in which Constantine converted—the year 325 AD, when he made Christianity the official religion of the kingdom and lifted persecution from the Christians—until the year 614 AD, in Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and part of the land of the Arabs, most of the inhabitants had converted to Christianity, so that there remained only some Jews and Samaritans in Palestine and some idol-worshippers of the Greeks and Romans in some parts of Syria and Palestine. Palestine was distinguished from Syria by the abundance of its monasteries, churches, hermitages, refuges, and hospitals, and by the abundance of migrants to it from among the Greeks and Romans and from those who used to come to visit the holy places, who would soon settle there until they merged with its people. Among these migrants we read the names of many princes, kings, queens, princesses, and great men of wealth who made donations and established refuges and charitable institutions, and who built monasteries, churches, and schools from their own funds, and endowed a portion of their properties and wealth upon the churches, monasteries, and poor of Palestine. Thus we see that the Jerusalem see alone at that time was composed of sixty bishoprics, among them the bishopric of Eleutheropolis (Bayt Jibrin), Sharon (Saruna), Ascalon, Maiuma (now Khirbat [?] al-Minya near Gaza), Anthedon (now Lababukhiya near Gaza), Diocaesarea (Saffuriya), Caesarea of Palestine, Sebastia (near Nablus), Bethel (near Ramallah), Bosra in the Hauran, Jerash, Beisan, Petra (Wadi Musa), Gadara (Khirbat Umm Qais in Transjordan), Philadelphia (Amman), Nicopolis (Amwas), and Khirbat [?] Suq Mazin near Bani Suhaila in Transjordan, and other places, a large portion of which remains of unknown location to this day. This is apart from the bishoprics that are still thriving and contain a number of Christians, such as the bishoprics of Nazareth, Ptolemais (Acre), Jaffa, Lydda, Gaza, Bethlehem, Karak, Madaba, Ajloun, and Nablus.

But the famous Persian invasion, which preceded the Arab Islamic conquest by a short time, reduced most of the bishoprics to a trace after a presence. For while the Christians in Syria and Palestine were engaged in religious disputes and controversies, and the government sided at one time with this party and at another with that, and the kings and rulers interfered in ecclesiastical affairs, suddenly the Persians fell upon Syria and Palestine—an assault of raiding, plunder, and slaughter, not an assault of occupation. The government was unable to repel them, and they swept through the land from end to end, wrecking, destroying, plundering, and killing everyone whom his ill fortune drove to fall into their hands. When they reached Jerusalem, they demolished the Church of the Resurrection, which Constantine and his mother Helena had built when they converted, and they demolished the rest of the monasteries and churches and a large part of the city, and they slaughtered many of the monks and of the Christian inhabitants. Some have found Arabic and Georgian manuscripts, still preserved to this day in the library of the Greek monastery in Jerusalem, that tell of the horror of that invasion. The Arabic manuscripts estimate the number of the Christian dead in Jerusalem alone at 55,866 souls, while the Georgian ones estimate them at 67,314 souls, and these manuscripts record the number of the dead of each quarter separately. Their greatest violence was in the monasteries, churches, and against the monks and clergymen, and to this day the skulls of the monks who were killed at the Monastery of Mar Saba remain preserved in a cave in an old church there named for Saint Nicholas, heaped in a single pile that bears witness to the horror and cruelty of those invaders. Since the inhabitants of the coast had escaped the hands of these tyrants, so that the hands of killing and destruction did not reach them, we find that they did not stand with folded hands but rather extended hands of assistance to their stricken brethren and donated toward rebuilding the Church of the Resurrection and other churches and monasteries. This severe blow that befell the Christians of Palestine and Syria—besides the ruin and destruction it wrought and the setting back of the land hundreds of years—swept away a great deal of the records, relics, and manuscripts of those Christians.

To be continued in the next issue