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IV

THE CROSS OF CHRIST IN THE EARLIEST ARABIC MELKITE APOLOGIES1

MARK N. SWANSON

I. INTRODUCTION

A. "A Stumbling Block to Jews and Folly to Gentiles" "A stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles" is the way the apostle Paul described the preaching of Christ crucified ( 1 Cor. 1:23). With these words he identified the cross of Christ as that which for many people in the first-century Mediterranean world was the great obstacle to serious consideration of Christian claims. For the sake of their missionary effectiveness, Christian preachers and teachers had no choice but to address the paradox that the one whom the worshipped as Lord and God CTohn 20:28) died, and that by the hideous, and to Jews accursed, means of crucifixion. The attempt to explain or mitigate the paradox begins in the New Testament itself, and it was a central concern of the Fathers of the Church, who brought great erudition, imagination and energy to the problem. They searched the scriptures, developed new exegeti­ cal methods, and compiled impressive catalogues of testimonia to Christ's passion and death.2 They developed a variety of strategies for interpreting the cross, paradoxically, as a sign of God's power and victory, 3 a project made considerably easier by Constantine's conquests "in this sign", and the establishment of as the official faith of the Roman Empire. They specu­ lated on ways in which the very shape and placement of the cross

1 For abbreviations used in this article, see end. 2 See for example, Gregory T. Armstrong, "The Cross in the Old Testament According to Athanasius, Cyril of and the ," in: Carl Andresen and Giinter Klein (eds.), Theo/ogia Crucis-Signum Crum: Festschrift for Erick Dinkier zum 70. Geburtstag, Tiibingen: J.C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1979, pp. 17-38. 3 See, for example, Danielou, pp. 294-303, and Stockmeier, pp. 44-51. 116 M.N. SWANSON betokened its cosmic significance. 4 As Christian teachers pondered the scriptures, speculated, engaged Jews and pagans in debate, and carried on their work of evangelism, and preaching, they produced a rich and complex body of cross-centred rhetoric and the­ ology, iconography and , the intricacy of which is made clear in Peter Stockmeier' s excellent thesis on the cross in the teaching of St. . 5 With the Muslim conquest of much of the Christian East, a new group of people was added to those who, like "the Jews and the Gen­ tiles" of St. Paul's letter, found the cross a "stumbling-block" and "folly". That this was so is not surprising. To the extent that the cross retained any of the imperial/military significance that it had gained since the vision of Constantine, within the new Islamic order it was a symbol of a hostile and despised power. Also, it was the sym­ bol of a community of persons from among the ahl al-kitah who, to a Qur)~mic way of thinking incredibly, turned down the invitation to join their new rulers in their confession and worship. 6 Further­ more, the fact that Christians kissed and prostrated themselves be­ fore this symbol no doubt convinced many Muslims that it was little different from the idols which the pagan Arabs had worshipped be­ fore the coming of Islam. 7 Finally, the cross was the sign of an event, the crucifixion ofJesus Christ, which, according to the standard interpretation of Surat al­ Nisa) (4): 157, simply had not happened: i:,.n., ,_,..j.;. 1 1,., ,p t,., -~ ~. Now, it has been questioned whether Muslims had always interpreted this verse as denying the crucifixion of Christ. Louis Massignon, for example, suggested that this "docetistic" inter­ pretation of al-Nisa) (4): 157 had its origins in radical Shicite spe­ culations and that it made its way into Sunnite exegesis around

4 Danielou, pp. 303-15. 5 In addition to Stockmeier and Danielou, I would mention as a very helpful in­ troduction to the patristic material Andreas Spira and Christoph Kleck (eds.), The Easter Sermons of : Translation and Commentary. Proceedings of the Fourth International Colloquium on Gregory of Nyssa, Cambridge, England: 11-15 September, 1978 (coll. Patristic Monograph Series, No. 9), Philadephia: The Philadelphia Patristic Foundation, Ltd., 1981. For bibliography on the cross in the early church, see Stockmeier, IX-XVI, and also Maurizio Flick and Zoltan Alszeghy, Il mistero de/la croce: Saggio di teologia sistematica, Brescia: Queriniana, 1978, pp. 441-461. 6 See for example, Surat al-Mii.'ida (5): 82-83 for a description for what, Qurlani­ cally, was supposed to happen when Christians heard the Qurlan recited. 7 See below, section II, D,l.