The Trinity in Qur’anic Idiom: Q 4.171 and the Christian Arabic Presentation of the Trinity as God, his Word, and his Spirit

ABSTRACT

Since the early centuries of Islam, the Qur’an’s deep imprint on Arabophone Christians has been evident, not only in their evocation of qur’anic language, but also in their creative employment of the text in constructing their own orthodox Christian Arabic theology. This article investigates the presentation of the Trinity as ‘God, his Word, and his Spirit’ in Christian Arabic theological tracts in the early centuries of Islam. It argues that Q 4.171 played a foundational role in constructing a distinct Christian Arabic Trinitarian theology and that Arabophone Christian writers discerned in it the nucleus of what could be developed as an orthodox Trinitarian theology. It traces the development of the Christian Arabic Trinitarian formulation in four works by Arabophone authors: John Damascene’s On Heresies 100; On the Triune Nature of God; the interreligious disputation in the court of the ʿAbbāsid Caliph al-Maʾmūn attributed to the theologian Theodore Abū Qurra; and the apologetic letter by ʿAbd al-Masīḥ al-Kindī. This article also makes observations on the implications of the Christian Arabic theological project for interreligious encounter in the early Islamic centuries.

KEYWORDS:

• Arab Christianity
• theology
• Trinity
• Qur’an

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Gabriel Said Reynolds, Mun’im Sirry, Alexander Treiger and Thomas Burman for their feedback and constructive criticism on various stages of this article. I am particularly thankful to the two anonymous reviewers whose insights benefited me considerably.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Mourad Takawi http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1987-793X

Notes

1 On Heresies 100 has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. The text introduces Islam as a confluence of Muḥammad’s supposed Arian influences with Arabian astral religion, and goes on to discuss what the author considers key Islamic doctrines. Most importantly for our purposes, the chapter presents one of the early reactions to the new faith in the Greek Christian tradition, and one of the early evocations of the Qur’an in a Christian text. For further references, see Glei (2009, 297–301). On John’s knowledge and use of the Qur’an, see Sahas (1972, 67–95), and more recently Schadler (2017, 113–119) and Awad (2018, 210–231).

2 Having been recently securely dated to 754 CE (Treiger 2016, 11–12), this treatise is the oldest extant Christian Arabic text. It is preserved in a single manuscript, Ms. Sinai Arabic 154, over 41 folios (99r-137r), with some of the last pages missing. The composer is likely a Melkite monk who was affiliated with the Monastery of St Catherine, where the manuscript was preserved, or the monasteries of the Judean desert such as Mar Saba or Mar Chariton. Apart from the edition and translation by Margaret Dunlop Gibson (1899, 74–107 ed., 2–36 trans.), the text received little attention until Samir Khalil Samir (1990) brought it to the fore almost a century after Gibson’s edition. The text has since attracted a great deal of scholarly attention, especially given the author’s evocation of the Qur’an, which he seamlessly interweaves into his Christian apologetic tract. While Gibson’s title Fī tathlīth Allāh al-wāḥid/On the Triune Nature of God has long been considered somewhat misleading, given the treatise’s concerns with a broader array of theological issues, which include the Trinity among others (see Harris 1901), it nevertheless remains widely used. Accordingly, the naming convention will be maintained in the present study. For further discussion and references, see Swanson (2009). For a thematic breakdown of the treatise see Swanson (2007, 114–115) and Samir (1994). The translations of Ms. Sinai Arabic 154 in this article are my own.

3 Flourishing in the ninth century, Theodore Abū Qurra is one of the most prolific Arabophone Christian writers, and the earliest known Christian theologian to write in Arabic. In addition to his numerous Arabic writings, he appears to have written in Greek and Syriac. He was reportedly born in the city of Edessa in Upper Mesopotamia, and was at one time appointed as bishop of Ḥarrān until he stepped down from his episcopal office in the 810s (Treiger 2016, 12). It is probably during his episcopal years that he disputed with the Muslim theologians in the court of al-Maʾmūn, who was en route to a war campaign on the Byzantine frontier, with one external source dating the disputation to the year 829 (Griffith 1992, 15). The literary text of the Mujādala is probably composed by a ninth-century Melkite author who was familiar with Theodore and his works, and who purported to record the events of the historical debate conducted in Arabic, and perhaps even relied on first-hand recollections. For further study and references on the Mujādala and its recension history, see Bertaina (2009). On the history of the scholarly debate on the authenticity of the Mujādala, see Nasry (2010, 13–52). More generally on Theodore and his works, see Lamoreaux (2009).

4 Virtually nothing is known about the author, with the only reliable information available being deduced from his apologetical letter Risālat ʿAbd al-Masīḥ b. Isḥāq al- Kindī, his only known work. The author’s name and his confessional identity remain shrouded in mystery, although there seems to be a scholarly tendency to associate him with the Church of the East. Al-Kindī’s Risāla is written as an apology for the Christian faith in response to a shorter letter by a Muslim author, ʿAbd Allāh b. Ismāʿīl al-Hāshimī, which extends an invitation to embrace Islam. The two pen names are pseudonyms used to distinguish genealogically Christians and Muslims, and in particular Arab Christians and Arab Muslims, with the Christian, a descendant of Isaac, belonging to the Arab Christian tribe of Kinda (whom al-Kindī proudly describes as the kings of the Arabs), and the Muslim, from the stock of Ishmael, belonging to the Banū Hāshim of the tribe of Quraysh, the de facto ruling clan. The exchange is reported to have taken place during the reign of the Caliph al-Maʾmūn, which dates the author’s activity to the early ninth century. Although the two letters are preserved in Christian recensions, they seem to have been written by different authors, who in all likelihood appear to have known each other. Al-Kindī’s Risāla has attracted significant scholarly attention, especially given its spread in the Latin Christian West (e.g. Burman 1991). More importantly for our purposes, the author’s formidable knowledge of the Islamic faith in general and of the Qur’an in particular presents an invaluable witness to the reception of the sacred text at the time. For further study and references, see Bottini (2009). The translations of Kindī’s Risāla in this article are my own.

5 See Q 2.87, 253; 5.110. The fourth instance, in Q 16.102, associates the Holy Spirit with the divine revelation.

6 Here, John may have been alluding to the presentation of God in Q 112, in particular the hapax legomenon ṣamad in v. 2, which entails indivisibility – and which for a Christian may have been seen as denoting a material god who is compact or massive. For a brief account on the meaning of ṣamad in the early Islamic period and Greek Christian understandings, see van Ess (1988) and more recently Simelidis (2011).

7 John’s apologetic here can be traced back, first to Pseudo-Cyril’s On the Trinity (Migne 1864, 77: cols 1128–1129), perhaps all the way back to Gregory of Nyssa’s Catechetical Oration 1–2 (Schaff and Wace 1995, 471, 474–477). I am indebted to the anonymous reviewer for this note and the references therein.

8 On the face of it, the part on God ‘Creator of the angels and the spirit’ may be seen as contradictory to the author’s otherwise consistent insistence on the divinity of the Holy Spirit. However, the text here may be echoing the language of Q 16.2 and 78.38, in particular the conjunction of the angels with the spirit, in which case the spirit in this passage may be understood as a created angelic being. Elsewhere, Q 17.85 maintains the creation of the spirit, which comes from the command/word (amr) of God. Q 97.4 has the spirit along with the angels as bearers of revelation, which may be seen as further corroborating the angelic status of the spirit in the Qur’an. His Trinitarian glossing notwithstanding, the author is evidently mindful of qur’anic usage as well as Muslim interpretations of the term. On the various meanings of spirit (rūḥ) in the Qur’an, see al-Suyūṭī (2005, 3:982–983). See also O’Shaughnessy (1953).

9 The concluding sentence presents a rather tamed version of John Damascene’s retort that Muslims are mutilators of God in response to their accusations of Christians as polytheists.

10 While the author preserves the divine plural form, his rendition adds the first-person plural pronoun, which is not used in the textus receptus.

11 Throughout the tract, the author uses the verb ‘arsala’ to refer to God’s sending Jesus. In one instance, he maintains that Jesus was the expected prophet (nabī): ‘The prophet (nabī) is Christ, God’s Word and His Spirit, whom God sent (arsala) from heaven as mercy and guidance to the offspring of Adam and his salvation’ (Ms. Sinai Ar. 154, fol. 104v). While the two locutions ‘to believe in God and His messengers (rusulih)’ and ‘to believe in God and His messenger (rasūlih)’ are well attested in the Qur’an, the latter is more frequent. See Q 3.179; 4.152, 171; 57.19, 21 for the former; and Q 4.136; 7.158; 24.47, 62; 48.9, 13; 49.15; 57.7, 8; 58.4; 61.11; 64.8 for the latter.

12 This usage stands in sharp contradistinction to early Muslim glosses of the qur’anic locution, which unequivocally gloss the unnamed messenger in the qur’anic verses with Muḥammad in early inscriptions as well as in post-reform Umayyad coinage.

13 In his letter, al-Maʾmūn asks his deputy to run an inquiry (imtiḥān) on the judges in his sphere of jurisdiction to ensure their adherence to the caliphal rationalist position maintaining the createdness of the Qur’an. The caliph minces no words in his presentation of the Traditionists and their followers: ‘The Commander of the Faithful has realized that the broad mass and the overwhelming concentration of the base elements of the ordinary people and the lower strata of the commonalty are those who, in all the regions and far horizons of the world, have no farsightedness, or vision, or faculty of reasoning by means of such evidential proofs as God approves along the right way which He provides, or faculty of seeking illumination by means of the light of knowledge and God’s decisive proofs’ (al-Ṭabarī 1966, 632; al-Ṭabarī 1987, 200).

14 Al-Hāshīmī describes himself as a careful reader of the Old and New Testaments and invokes some examples in support. From the Old Testament he lists, ‘the Torah, the Book of Joshua son of Nun, the Book of Judges, the Book of Samuel the Prophet, the Book of the Psalms of David, the Wisdom of Solomon son of David, the Book of Job the Righteous, the Book of the Twelve Prophets, the Book of Jeremiah the Prophet, the Book of Ezekiel the Prophet, and the Book of Daniel the Prophet’. From the New Testament he further adds, ‘the Gospel, which is in four parts, the first is the Good News of Matthew the Publican, the second is the Good News of Mark the nephew of Simon known as Peter, the third is the Good News of Luke the Physician, and the Fourth is the Good News of John son of Zebedee … and the Book of the Acts of the Apostles and their sayings and chronicles after the ascension of Jesus into heaven that was written by Luke, one of the disciples of Christ [sic.] as well as the fourteen letters of Paul’ (Tartar 1977, 8–9).

15 In addition to al-Lāt and Manāt, al-ʿUzzā is among the prominent pre-Islamic Arabian deities mentioned in the Qur’an (Q 53.19–20).

16 The term ḥanīf appears in the Qur’an twelve times in twelve verses, ten in the singular and two in the plural. Of the ten singular occurrences, eight directly refer to Abraham: Q 2.135; 3.67, 95; 4.125; 6.79; 6.161; 16.20, 123.

17 It is noteworthy that al-Kindī employs this sacred genealogical categorization for establishing spiritual, and not physical, progeny. Indeed, while later in his Risāla al-Kindī concedes that, as an Arab himself, he is a descendent of Ishmael in the flesh, he nonetheless affirms ‘religion for me is more honourable than noble descent … for I too am from the sons of Ishmael and to him I trace my lineage. But I am a Christian man, and in this religion I have precedence in my noble linage and honour’ (Tartar 1977, 139).

18 The Arabized form of the divine utterance in Exodus 3.14 follows the Hebrew text ‘אהיה אשׁר אהיה’ as well as the Peshitta’s rendition ‘ܐܗܝܗ ܐܫܪ ܐܗܝܗ’.

19 The word uqnūm (pl. aqānīm) employed in the second case is an Arabization of the Syriac qnūmā. While the term is typically used to denote the three divine hypostases in Christian Arabic, the Syriac term also denotes a true existence such as a subsistent individual or person, which is the meaning intended here. Indeed, in a similar syllogism shortly after, al-Kindī uses ‘entities’ (dhawāt) in lieu of aqānīm as those that a species comprises. See Tartar (1977, 44).

20 Al-Kindī here uses the classic kalām argument structure that has been employed in Christological argumentation since the fourth/fifth century. On the chronology of this format, see Benevich (2015, 181–201).

21 Here, al-Kindī seems to echo the reasoning of the East Syriac Patriarch Timothy I (r. 780–823), who in the course of his dialogue with the ʿAbbāsid Caliph al-Mahdī (r. 775–785) in the caliphal court in Baghdad similarly argues that ‘the number three is both complete and perfect and all numbers are included in a complete and perfect number’ (Mingana 1928, 63). Notably, Timothy’s assertion comes in response to al-Mahdī’s dismissal of Timothy’s earlier rationalization that the number three is the cause of one, and one of three. Such rationalizations may have had some persuasive power in light of the Greaco-Arabic translation movement at the time. Dimitri Gutas (1998, 68) in fact notes that the Timothy–al-Mahdī debate itself ‘presents an excellent example of the application of the rules of disputation laid down in the Topics’.

22 Al-Kindī traces these claims to well-known Muslim figures such as the tābiʿī Wahb b. Munabbih, who hails from a Jewish family, as well as the ṣaḥābī ʿAbd Allāh b. Sallām and the tābiʿī Kaʿb al-Aḥbār, both of whom were Jewish converts to Islam.

23 See Q 14.45; 37.34; 77.18.

24 See Q 6.94; 7.11, 18; 15.26, 27, 85; 17.70; 18.48; 19.67; 20.55; 21.16; 22.5; 23.12, 14, 17, 115; 25.49; 36.42, 71, 77; 37.11, 150; 38.27; 44.38, 39; 46.3; 49.13; 50.16, 38; 51.49; 55.3; 56.57, 59; 70.39; 76.28; 77.20; 78.8; 90.4; 95.4.

25 See Q 3.44; 4.163; 7.117, 160; 10.2, 87; 11.37, 49; 12.3, 15, 102, 109; 13.130; 16.43, 123; 17.73, 86; 20.38, 77; 21.7, 25, 73; 23.27; 26.52, 63; 28.7; 35.31; 42.7, 52.

26 See Q 6.6; 7.4; 8.54; 10.13; 14.13; 15.4; 17.6, 17; 18.59; 19.74; 19.98; 20.128, 134; 21.6, 9, 95; 22.45; 26.139, 208; 28.43, 58; 32.26; 36.31; 38.3; 43.8; 44.37; 46.27; 47.13; 50.36; 54.51; 77.16.

27 See Q 7.137; 17.16; 25.36; 26.172; 27.51; 37.136.

28 Al-Kindī presents a near verbatim quotation of the verse, the only difference being his rendering of ‘messenger’ in the singular, as opposed to ‘messengers’ in the textus receptus. While this may be an interpretative gloss on al-Kindī’s part, the author may have been quoting a variant such as that by Ibn Munādhir – a more likely possibility, given his overall close engagement with the Qur’an and his otherwise verbatim or near-verbatim rendering of its verses.