Christian Arabic

Abstract

Christian Arabic literature represents an enormous corpus of biblically affiliated lore which remains remarkably underexploited by most modern scholars of Jewish apocryphal and pseudepigraphical literature. The present chapter focuses primarily on some textual examples culled from the popular and influential universal histories produced by Christian writers Eutychius (Sa‘īd b. Biṭrīq) of Alexandria (d. 940), Agapius (Maḥbūb b. Qusṭanṭīn) of Manbij (d. c. 950), and the Arabic version of the so-called secular history of the justly celebrated Bar Hebraeus (Abu’l-Faraj b. al-‘Ibrī, d. 1286). It is hoped that the present chapter will stimulate further comparative work and contributions to this important field of study.