The Death of a Prophet. Stephen J. Shoemaker
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year that he composed the chronicle. Ordinarily, this would considerably limit the text’s value for assessing the date of Muhammad’s death, since it breaks off just before the traditional date of his death in 632. Nevertheless, in this case we are the beneficiaries of a rare and fortunate error in Jacob’s chronology. According to Jacob’s charts, in 620/21 “the first king of the Arabs, Muhammad, began to reign for seven years.”51 Seven years later, the chart records in 627/28 the beginning of Abū Bakr’s reign as the second king of the Arabs, which lasted for two years and seven months.52 This of course places Muhammad’s death in 627/28, four to five years before the traditional date. Jacob’s lapse in chronology here is surprising, given the fact that Jacob’s chronicle is otherwise highly regarded for its accuracy.53 Nonetheless, a list of caliphs compiled between 705 and 715 gives the same dates for Muhammad’s reign, perhaps having followed Jacob’s charts, as does the Hispanic Chronicle of 754, discussed below.54
At first glance, one would hardly think that Jacob’s report could strengthen an argument for extending the time of Muhammad’s death beyond its traditional date, since according to Jacob, it occurred even earlier. No doubt this is why Cook, Crone, and Hoyland do not include this witness among the Christian sources identifying Muhammad as still alive during the campaign in Palestine. While Jacob may have had erroneous knowledge of the length of Muhammad’s reign, he nevertheless is in complete harmony with these other sources in recording the onset of the Islamic conquest of Palestine while Muhammad was still alive and leader of the Muslims. Beginning with Muhammad’s reign, Jacob’s chronological charts are ordered into four columns that count the years of the various Roman, Persian, and Islamic leaders, alongside a count of the years since Jacob’s charts began in the twentieth year of Constantine’s reign. On both sides of these charts are comments noting important historical events that coincide with the regnal years tabulated in the charts. Beside the year 625/26, on the left side of the chart, Jacob records that “the Arabs began to make raids in the land of Palestine.”55 The sentence begins next to 625/26 and ends on the following line, beside the year 626/27, but it is clear that this comment identifies the beginning of the Islamic campaign in Palestine with the fifth year of Muhammad’s reign, two years before his death.
Conceivably, one could interpret this notice as possibly referring to the first minor skirmish between a small Muslim force and an army of Arab tribes allied with the Byzantines at Muʾta in 629, if one were determined to bring this report more in line with the traditional chronology. But this solution does not seem very likely, at least according to the traditional understanding of this early confrontation between Muhammad’s followers and the “Romans.”56 Although Muʾta was technically in Palestina tertia, about twenty-five miles south of the province of Arabia in what is today Jordan, it was certainly very much on the margins of the Byzantine Empire. There is no evidence of any Roman troops at Muʾta during the sixth and seventh centuries, and the forces that actually would have engaged the Muslims were from a variety of Arab confederates. The battle itself was rather minor: it consisted of a single engagement in which the Muslims were soundly defeated. A small skirmish on the fringes of the empire between Christian and Muslim Arabs at a minor outpost hardly seems worthy of Jacob’s notice of Islamic raids in Palestine. Perhaps more importantly, the conflict at Muʾta is unattested in the Syriac historical tradition, or in any Syriac text at all to my knowledge. The sole reference to the battle of Muʾta outside of the Islamic historical tradition is the Greek Chronicle of Theophanes, written in the early ninth century, and Theophanes almost certainly relied on Islamic sources for his account of this battle.57
By contrast, the initial phase of the Islamic conquest of Palestine sounds very much like the “raids” that Jacob envisions. In 633–34, the Islamic army moved into southern Palestine, in the province of Palestina prima, and made a number of smaller engagements, mostly with local garrison forces in the countryside. But initially there were no major confrontations with the Byzantine army, and the towns and cities remained under Byzantine control.58 These circumstances more credibly reflect the events that Jacob describes as “raids” in Palestine, two years, according to his count, before Abū Bakr succeeded Muhammad as the leader of the Muslims after the latter’s death. Therefore, even though Jacob is mistaken in the length he assigns to Muhammad’s reign, his chronicle provides yet another witness to the tradition that Muhammad was still alive as the conquest of Palestine began. We do not know the source of Jacob’s information in this instance, although we can assume that an individual in Jacob’s position would have had access to a number of different sources, both written and oral. His general reliability in sifting through these sources makes Jacob’s error concerning the precise date and number of years that Muhammad ruled quite surprising. There are moreover no signs of any apologetic agenda or totalizing explanation in the terse outlines of these charts, which rather dryly signal the beginnings of the Palestinian conquest before Muhammad’s death.
The History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria: The Life of Patriarch Benjamin (before 717 CE)
The History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria is a rather complex text that was first compiled in late antiquity, but over the centuries it has continually been augmented, revised, and updated as new patriarchs have sat on the throne of St. Mark: the most recent update was added in 1942.59 Most of the material covering the first millennium was originally composed in Coptic, and in the tenth century this was all translated into Arabic, which has been the language of composition ever since. Through a careful analysis of editorial notes scattered throughout the earliest extant versions of this text, David Johnson has been able to identify various redactional layers from the first thousand years of its history.60 The earliest portion of the text derives from a Coptic History of the Church that today is known only in fragments. This first segment covers the period from the founding of the Egyptian church up to the reign of Dioscorus (first century–451).61 This section is followed by a second redactional unit that was composed by a certain George the Archdeacon, who narrates the interval between Patriarch Cyril (d. 444) and the reign of the caliph Sulaymān (715–17).62
As a part of his contribution to the History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria, George the Archdeacon includes a life of Patriarch Benjamin (626–65), during whose lengthy reign the Muslims conquered Egypt along with the rest of the Byzantine Near East. George begins his account of the Islamic conquests with a dream of Heraclius, which warned him, “Truly, a circumcised nation will come upon you, and they will defeat you, and they will take possession of the land.”63 Mistakenly thinking that the dream warned against the Jews, Heraclius ordered all the Jews and Samaritans in the Roman Empire to be baptized. The narrative then explains his mistake with the following account of the rise of Islam:
And after a few days, there arose a man among the Arabs, from the southern regions, from Mecca and its vicinity, named Muhammad. And he restored the worshippers of idols to knowledge of the one God, so that they said that Muhammad is his messenger. And his nation was circumcised in the flesh, not in the law, and they prayed toward the south, orienting themselves toward a place they call the Ka‘ba. And he took possession of [وملك] Damascus and Syria, and he crossed the Jordan and damned it up.64 And the Lord abandoned the army of the Romans before him, because of their corrupt faith and the excommunication that was brought against them and because of the Council of Chalcedon by the ancient fathers.65
This passage identifies Muhammad as leading the conquest of “Damascus and Syria,” crossing over the river Jordan with his followers and into Palestine, where the Roman armies fell before him. We do not know the source of the information, since the various biographies that comprise the History of the Patriarchs generally draw on earlier, individual vitae while adding some supplementary material.66 In view of this fact, it is quite likely that this report of Muhammad’s involvement in the conquests antedates George the Archdeacon’s addition to the History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria: George probably has taken this information from an earlier vita of Benjamin. Muhammad’s capture of Damascus and Syria and his crossing into Palestine are reported here in a direct, matter-of-fact manner that is in no way polemical. While there are references to broader historical narratives, particularly the Council of Chalcedon (which is unsurprisingly condemned), there is no trace of any anti-Islamic