Agapius of Hierapolis

Agapius, in Arabic, Mahbub ibn Qustantin, was the Melkite bishop of Manbij in northern Syria, the city the Greeks had called Hierapolis. He was writing in the 940s and is thought to have died some time after 942. Nothing of his personal life is recorded: no birth date, no family, no account of his election or his death.

Melkite meant that his community held to the faith of the Byzantine councils, Chalcedon and the rest, while living entirely under Islamic rule and increasingly speaking and writing Arabic rather than Greek or Syriac. That is the situation his book comes out of.

The Kitab al-'Unwan, the Book of the Title, is a universal history in Arabic. It begins at the creation of the world and runs forward through the biblical narrative, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the life of Christ, the apostles, the councils and the emperors, and on into the Islamic centuries. The surviving text breaks off in the second year of the caliph al-Mahdi, around 776.

He wrote for readers who no longer had Greek. That alone makes him important: he is part of the generation that carried Christian learning across into Arabic, in the same years and the same region where Christian translators were carrying Greek philosophy and medicine into Arabic for the caliphs of Baghdad.

His sources are the real prize. Agapius drew on Syriac chronicles that no longer exist, above all the lost world chronicle of Theophilus of Edessa, who died in 785. For the seventh and eighth centuries, the Arab conquests, the fall of Byzantine Syria, the early caliphate, Agapius is one of a small handful of Christian witnesses, and historians reconstruct the lost material by comparing him against Theophanes the Confessor and the Syriac chroniclers.

He also preserves quotations from very early Christian writers, including a notice about Papias of Hierapolis, the second-century bishop of the same city, four hundred years before him, reporting what Papias had written about the Gospels.

For the earliest periods he was uncritical, folding in apocryphal and legendary material without much sifting. He said in his preface what he was doing: gathering.

The Arabic text was edited and translated into French by Alexandre Vasiliev and published in the Patrologia Orientalis between 1909 and 1915, which is where most readers meet him.

Sources: Agapius of Hierapolis, Kitab al-'Unwan, ed. and trans. A. Vasiliev, Patrologia Orientalis, vols. 5, 7, 8, 11; Robert Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It; Georg Graf, Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur.