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

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In the fourth century C.E., St. Jerome—the famed translator of the Bible into Latin—describes an encounter between the early Christian monastic St. Hilarion and the Arabs of Elusa (also known as Halutza), a trading center located southwest of the Dead Sea in the Negev desert. These “Saracens,” as he described them, were devoted to the cult of the Morning Star (Venus). According to the tale, St. Hilarion began to work miracles, which caused the Arabs to abandon their idols and come to him to receive blessings. St. Hilarion called them to worship God alone; then he christened a former pagan holy man as their priest and sent them on their way.

Until recently, literary sources such as this constituted our only evidence for the penetration of Christianity into Arabia. By the sixth century, however, Christianity seems 041042 to have been firmly established across the peninsula, most notably in the city of Najran in southern Arabia, more than 1,200 miles from Elusa. The Quran, our primary source for the religious landscape of early seventh-century Arabia, often speaks to and engages with an Arabian Christian community. Indeed, Jesus is one of the most referenced biblical figures in the Quran (e.g., Q Maryam 19).

While literary sources written by outside peoples attest to missionizing among the Arabians in the gap between the fourth century and the rise of Islam, there was until recently little evidence of Christianity in historical sources from pre-Islamic Arabia itself. In 2014, a Saudi-French epigraphic mission discovered a number of fifth- or sixth-century Arabic inscriptions from a site north of Najran bearing crosses that are no doubt expressions of Christian identity, while a recently published Christian inscription from Dumat al-Jandal, a major caravan city in North Arabia, dates to 548/549 C.E.¹

And indeed new monotheistic, possibly Christian, texts from western Arabia continue to be discovered. In fact, Arabia’s epigraphic record, which extends back to the early first millennium B.C.E., attests to a petering off of paganism in the fourth century C.E. across the peninsula. Could this reflect the success of Christian missionaries in Arabia? Until recently, attestations of the spread of Christianity dating to the period described by St. Jerome had yet to come forth. But remarkable new evidence from Jordan’s northeastern desert may change this.

East of the Hauran, a region situated east of the Golan, spanning from the Marj plain of Damascus in the north to the Jordanian steppe in the south, lies a basaltic expanse stretching from southern Syria into northern Saudi Arabia known as the Harra. The land was—and remains—home to nomadic pastoralists who hunted game, herded livestock, and raised camels. Its climate is harsh, with extremely hot summers and cold winters. Rainfall is little and concentrated between October and March with an annual average of 8–10 inches (200–250 mm) in the northern regions and as little as 2 inches (50 mm) in the south.²

The tribes that dwelt in this marginal environment left extensive archaeological remains, dating from the Neolithic to modern times. These include burial installations, animal enclosures, and campsites. But perhaps the most remarkable witness to the region’s past is its epigraphic record, including inscriptions and rock art.

Writing came to the nomads of North Arabia as early as the beginning of the first millennium B.C.E. By the turn of the Common Era, the nomads of the Harra had mastered the written word. They carved tens of thousands of rock inscriptions in their local vernacular, an early dialect of Arabic, using an indigenous, consonantal alphabet, which modern scholars 043 have called Safaitic.

Safaitic belongs to a family of alphabets labeled the South Semitic script. These were employed in the Arabian Peninsula from as early as the late second millennium B.C.E. to the rise of Islam. This script family is a sister of the Phoenico-Aramaic script, both descending from the Proto-Sinaitic script sometime in the second millennium B.C.E.^a The circumstances under which the South Semitic script spread from the Levant to Arabia remain shadowy, but by the middle of the first millennium B.C.E. varieties of the alphabet were used from Jordan to Yemen.

The Safaitic texts belong to many genres: funerary, commemorative, votive, etc. Some contain religious invocations, prayers for security and success, and curses upon enemies. Most texts, however, contain only personal names—commemorations of one’s presence in a place.

Most Safaitic inscriptions contain no absolute chronological information, but a minority employ a dating formula using the word sanat (“year”) followed by a description of an event, such as “the year the king of Nabatea died” or “the year Caesar announced the Province.” Inscriptions such as these could date as early as the second century B.C.E. and continue to the third century C.E. The end of Safaitic documentation is unclear, but many scholars have suggested that the inscriptions terminate before the fourth century C.E., as there are no references to Christianity among the writings.

In 2019, I led an epigraphic survey to the Harra with Dr. Ali Al-Manaser of the Queen Rania Institute for Tourism and Heritage at the Hashemite University (Jordan). During our campaign, in a remote area known as Wadi al-Khudari, we discovered a small footpath that led to a dry seasonal lake. Following the path, we came upon a small cairn abounding with inscriptions—more than a hundred texts covered its stones. It seems that those using the lake in ancient times would camp by this cairn, and people who knew how to read and write would pass the time by carving inscriptions. Most of them were Safaitic, but a few Greek texts were also recorded. Many of the Safaitic texts described giving drink to animals and circumstances of drought, indicating that this was perhaps one of the final places of water during the dry season.

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One text especially stands out. The inscription is carved in a slightly different script style and sits apart from the rest on a partially buried stone. Its author identifies himself as Wahb-El, that is, “gift of god” in Arabic. He gives nine generations of his genealogy and then adds a memorial text, grieving for his uncle whom he describes as belonging to the tribe of Ashlal (“and he grieved for his maternal uncle the Ashlalite”).

The inscription reads like a typical Safaitic composition, until we pay close attention to the wording of the closing invocation: h ʿsy nṣr-h m-kfr-k, “O Īsay (‘sy) help him against those who deny you.” In this sentence, the word ‘sy follows the vocative particle h (Arabic: hā), which is commonly used in Safaitic to begin an address to a deity. This shows then that ‘sy was understood as a divine name (perhaps pronounced Īsay in the Safaitic dialect), though one 045 previously unattested in the Safaitic inscriptions. The consonantal spelling of ‘sy (with the letters ayin-sin-yod) does correspond to the name of Jesus as found in the Quran (‘ysy, pronounced Īsē or Īsā, depending on the reading tradition). Could this be the first attestation of Jesus in Safaitic and our earliest reference within Arabia to Jesus?

Wahb-El calls upon Īsay to “help him” (nṣr-h) against “those who deny you” (kfr-k). Such a prayer seems quite out of place in a pagan Arabian context, where the “denial” of a deity has not been previously attested as an offense among thousands of recorded prayer texts. Both verbs, nṣr and kfr, are part and parcel of Christian vocabulary but virtually unattested in other Safaitic inscriptions. Indeed, the “denial” of Christ is a sin and established reproach in a Christian context.

If this interpretation is correct, then the present inscription may be the earliest attestation of Christ in Arabia, clearly predating the fifth- and sixth-century Arabic inscriptions discussed above. But how old is it? The text is undated, but if we consider that the latest Safaitic inscriptions date to the third century, it would seem likely that the present text was produced during the final phase of Safaitic documentation, perhaps dating to the same period as the tale of St. Hilarion.

The Safaitic context of ‘sy also helps us understand the enigmatic etymology of the name in Arabic. The seventh-century Quranic form of Jesus’s name, ‘ysy (Īsē or Īsā), has long puzzled scholars as it does not reflect a straight-forward adoption of the Hebrew-Aramaic Yeshua into Arabic. Scholars have offered various attempts at explaining ‘ysy, from confusion on the part 046 of Muhammed to far-fetched sound changes as the word passed from a hypothetical form of Aramaic into Arabic. The presence of ‘sy in Safaitic disqualifies all these explanations. In fact, within Safaitic texts, Īsay appears frequently as a regular personal name as well, though in inscriptions that were clearly written by pagan authors, as in the following text from the Syrian Harra, just north of our area:

So how did this pre-Islamic Arabian name become the name of Jesus in Arabic? Perhaps a clue lies in the way the nomads were initially converted to Christianity. If we return to Jerome’s account, St. Hilarion does not seem to have provided any theological instruction to the Saracens who accepted Christianity. Rather, conversion was often simply a matter of grafting the new onto the old.³ The nomads would have learned the basic elements of Christian monotheism and returned to their business in the desert, leaving a lot of room for religious syncretism.

While the pagan gods are frequently invoked for deliverance, Jesus would have been distinguished by the redemptive aspect of his salvation. This salient theological difference could have motivated the phonosemantic matching (a process of loaning a word by equating it with a similar sounding and meaning word in the adopting language) of the name Yeshua with a pre-existing Arabic name Īsay, which likely meant “ransomer” or “redeemer.” Indeed, the root ‘sy means “to purchase” or “to acquire” in several languages of ancient Arabia. A similar name is found in modern Arabic: Fadi (“ransomer”), derived from the root fdy, “to ransom.”

The grafting of the new upon the old is embodied in the inscription itself. The present text is a typical Safaitic composition, but the old gods and prayers are replaced by a Christian invocation. Wahb-El may therefore have been a convert who modified the Safaitic writing tradition to accommodate his new faith, invoking Jesus with the same formulaic structure used to invoke the old gods.

Wahb-El’s text may be precious evidence of the earliest penetration of Christianity into Arabia, but the exact circumstances that brought the faith to the basalt desert remain unclear. Wahb-El may have had close contacts with settled areas, such as Bostra in Syria or the cities of the Decapolis in Transjordan, which appear in other Safaitic texts. On the other hand, it is possible that his inscription reflects the efforts of missionaries to convert the nomads. Although we have no literary accounts describing such attempts in the Harra, the desert’s proximity to centers of Christianity would have certainly attracted proselytizers. Indeed, one finds strewn about the Harra isolated Greek graffiti, sometimes with clear expressions of Christianity. Are these the traces of ancient missionaries who preached to the local, Safaitic-writing nomads?

For now, the identification of Wahb-El’s text as the earliest witness to Arabian Christianity must remain a tantalizing possibility until future discoveries provide further examples of Christianity inscribed in Safaitic.⁴

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?