Jesus in Arabia: Tracing the Spread of Christianity into the Desert

Home > Magazines > BAR > Spring 2022

Our project may have found the earliest reference to Christian belief among the ancient Arabs. Likely dating to the fourth century, a desert inscription written in a peculiar script appears to invoke the name of Jesus. What does this unique text reveal about Christianity’s first spread to the Arabian tribes?

You have already read your free article for this month. Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.

Join the BAS Library!

Already a library member? Log in here.

Institution user? Log in with your IP address or Username

Footnotes

1. See Orly Goldwasser, “How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs,” BAR, March/April 2010; Matthieu Richelle, “A Very Brief History of Old Hebrew Script,” BAR, Summer 2021.

Endnotes

1. Christian J. Robin, Ali Ibrahim Al-Ghabbān, and Sa‘īd F. Al-Sa‘īd, “Inscriptions Antiques de la Région de Najrān (Arabie Séoudite Méridionale): Nouveaux Jalons pour l’Histoire de l’écriture, de la Langue et du Calendrier Arabes,” Comptes Rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (2014), pp. 1033–1128; Laïla Nehmé, “New Dated Inscriptions (Nabataean and pre-Islamic Arabic) from a Site Near al-Jawf, Ancient Dumah, Saudi Arabia,” Arabian Epigraphic Notes 3 (2017), pp. 121–164.

2.
Peter Akkermans, “Living on the Edge or Forced into the Margins? Hunter-Herders in Jordan’s Northeastern Badlands in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods,” Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies 7.4 (2019), pp. 412–431.

3. Konstantin Klein, “How to Get Rid of Venus: Some Remarks on Jerome’s Vita Hilarionis and the Conversion of Elusa in the Negev,” in Arietta Papacostantinou, Niel Mclynn, and Daniel Schwartz, eds., Conversion in Late Antiquity (Surrey: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 241–266.

4.
For the complete publication of this inscription, see Ahmad Al-Jallad and Ali Al-Manaser, “The pre-Islamic Divine Name ʿsy and the Background of the Qur’anic Jesus,” Journal of the International Qur’anic Studies Association 6 (forthcoming).