Justified True Belief

(●) The patriarch who argued the Christian case in the caliph’s own reception room, and then wrote down what both men said. + He had come to pay his respects, which was the ordinary business of a church leader with the ruler he lived under, and he had just finished the usual courtesies about God and God’s eternity. Then the caliph, the man who ruled the Muslim empire from Baghdad as Muhammad’s successor at its head, did something he had never done before. A man like you, he said, who knows all this and speaks so well about God, has no business saying that God took a wife and had a son by her. Timothy of Baghdad was the head, or patriarch, of the Church of the East, the great church that lay beyond the Roman frontier and prayed, argued and copied its books in Syriac, a later form of Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke. He held that office from 780 until his death in 823. The conversation that opened that way ran for two days, and afterwards he set the whole of it down in Syriac in a long letter to a friend. What survives is among the earliest full-length Christian answers to Islam that we have, and the fullest the eighth century has left us from a man who lived under Muslim government and expected to go on living under it. Nothing in it is shouted. He concedes what is true, refuses what is false, quotes the other man’s book accurately, and never once sneers. That is the first reason to read him, and for most readers it would be reason enough. But there is a second one, and it is the kind of fact that lodges in the mind and stays there. From Baghdad he consecrated metropolitans, the senior bishops of whole regions, for Damascus, for Armenia, for the shores of the Caspian, for the Turks of Central Asia and for China. In his lifetime the church he governed reached further across the map than any other church in the world.

(●) c. 728 AD: Born at Hazza in Adiabene, into a church that had lived under Muslim rule for nearly a century. + The year is a convention, not a record. The traditional date of birth is 727 or 728, and other scholars prefer a date around 740; no ancient writer states it. Only the end of his life is fixed, and fixed to the day: 9 January 823. Hazza lay in Adiabene, the district around modern Erbil in northern Iraq, and it had been Christian ground for centuries before he was born there. The Arab armies had taken Mesopotamia in the 630s and 640s, roughly ninety years earlier, and the arrangement that followed was the one Timothy grew up inside. Christians, Jews and a few others were dhimmi, protected communities: they kept their churches, their law courts and their bishops, paid a poll tax called the jizya, a yearly sum reckoned by the head rather than by the harvest, and accepted a settled second rank in exchange. The arrangement was liveable, and it had edges you learned early. You could not build a new church without leave. You could not win an argument with a Muslim in a way that looked like winning. It is worth holding on to that, because it changes how his later courtesy reads. He was not a bishop with an empire behind him, negotiating from strength. He was the head of a tolerated minority, and every word he said to a caliph was said by a man whose people could be squeezed for it.

(●) c. 750s AD: He learned Scripture and Greek logic at a mountain school, and was in time made bishop of a mountain diocese. + As a young man he studied under Abraham bar Dashandad at the school of Bashosh, in the highlands of the Aqra district north of Mosul. The East Syrian schools taught the Bible alongside the commentaries of Theodore of Mopsuestia, who was bishop there from 392 until his death in 428 and whom these schools knew simply as the Interpreter, and they also taught Aristotle’s logic in Syriac translation: the categories, the terms, the rules that tell you when an argument has quietly slid from every to some. That second half of the curriculum is all over his later writing. When he takes an objection apart in front of the caliph he does it in small numbered steps, each one a claim a hostile listener could grant on its own. He was made bishop of Beth Bgash, a mountain diocese in the province of Adiabene, at some point the sources do not date. What they do record is that while he held it he earned the regard of two men who would matter a great deal later: Abu Musa ibn Musab, the Muslim governor of Mosul, and Abu Nuh al-Anbari, the governor’s Christian secretary. Friendship across that line was normal in the world he moved in, and it was also, as things turned out, useful.

(●) 780 AD: He won the patriarchate by methods nobody has ever defended. + The patriarch Hnanisho II died in 778, and the election that followed was ugly. One likely rival, the elderly Ishoyahb of the monastery of Beth Abe, was warned that a man of his years might not survive the intrigues of the office, and was then offered the metropolitan see of Adiabene instead. A second, Giwargis, had the backing of Isa ibn Quraysh, the caliph’s Christian physician, and died suddenly before the vote. Timothy then secured his majority by promising his electors handsome rewards, and after his consecration he gave them nothing. To those who complained he said: "The priesthood is not sold for money." The story comes from Bar Hebraeus, a bishop of another Syriac church writing nearly five centuries later, and a reader is entitled to ask how much of it is hostile memory. What is not in doubt is that the election left a wound, and that the wound stayed open for years. An opposition party formed under Joseph, the metropolitan of Merv, far out on the eastern road into Central Asia. They gathered at the monastery of Beth Hale and excommunicated him, which is to say they declared him cut off from the church and barred from its sacraments. Timothy deposed Joseph in return. Joseph took his case to the caliph, got nothing there, and converted to Islam. After that the excommunications ran back and forth between the two parties until Christians were rioting in the streets of Baghdad, and it took the intervention of that same court physician, Isa ibn Quraysh, to stop it. The line about the priesthood was true. He had also made the promises. Both things are his, and the forty-three years that follow do not erase the way they began.

(●) 781 AD: Two days of argument with the Caliph al-Mahdi, set down afterwards in his own hand. + The debate with al-Mahdi, the third caliph of the Abbasid house, is the thing he is remembered for. The Abbasids had taken the empire in 750 and built Baghdad to govern it from, so the city Timothy crossed to reach the palace was younger than he was. The two men spoke in Arabic, and Timothy wrote the exchange up in Syriac as a letter to a friend, which is why it survives at all: it is Letter 59 of his collection, and it circulated afterwards under its own name as the Apology. The year is usually given as 781, following the first English translator, who put the two days at the end of 781 or at the latest in 782. The modern critical edition places them in 782 or 783 instead. A year or two either way, the setting is the same. It reads like a real conversation rather than a set piece. The caliph interrupts, changes the subject, presses again on a point he thinks was dodged, and repeatedly gets the better of an analogy. Timothy loses ground, recovers it, and concedes small things gracefully. Nobody is converted at the end. The caliph rises, goes into his audience chamber, and Timothy walks home. The relationship did not end with the debate, either. Al-Mahdi required of him an Arabic version of Aristotle’s Topics, the handbook of how to conduct a disputation, and two of his letters describe the work: the hunt for commentaries and a decent manuscript, the Syriac version they rendered it from, and the share taken by his old friend Abu Nuh, who by Timothy’s own account did the greater part of it. A Christian patriarch translating the pagan art of argument for a Muslim court is a fair picture of Baghdad in those years, and of the part his church played in it.

(●) 790s AD: He redrew his church’s map and sent metropolitans east along the trade roads. + Timothy held synods, formal assemblies of bishops that make binding rules, in 790 and again in 804, and out of them came a reform that looks dry and was decisive. The provinces of the mission field, the ones he called the exterior provinces, were given a free hand to run their own affairs at a distance of months of travel; in exchange, their metropolitans lost their vote in the election of a patriarch. A bishop in Central Asia no longer had to wait on Baghdad to act, and Baghdad no longer had its own succession decided by men it could not reach. Then he used it. He consecrated metropolitans for Damascus, for Armenia, for Dailam and Gilan on the Caspian, for Rai, for Sarbaz, for the Turks of Central Asia and for China, and declared his intention of appointing one for Tibet. He detached India from the province of Fars and made it a province in its own right. In a letter usually dated to 792 or 793 he reported that a king of the Turks had left his ancient idolatry with nearly all his people, had written asking for a metropolitan, and had been given one. It was not a safe business. Mar Shubhalisho, the metropolitan he sent to Dailam and Gilan, was killed for the work, and Timothy writes in a letter that the man had won a martyr’s crown. (Mar is the Syriac title that goes in front of a bishop’s name, and it means something close to my lord.) In another he writes of monks crossing the sea to the Indians and the Chinese with nothing but a staff and a beggar’s bag. That is the whole equipment of the enterprise, and it went four thousand miles.

(●) c. 800 AD: He heard that books had been found in a cave near Jericho, and wrote to find out what was in them. + In a letter to Sergius, metropolitan of Elam, he passes on a report he has had from some Jews who had recently become Christians and whom he judged trustworthy. About ten years earlier, they said, an Arab out hunting near Jericho lost his dog down a cleft in the rock. He went in after it and found a chamber inside the mountain full of books. They turned out to be books of the Old Testament, and other writings in Hebrew script besides. What he does with the report is the interesting part. He does not treat it as a marvel. He wants to know whether certain passages the New Testament quotes as Scripture, which nobody can find in the Hebrew Bible as it now stands, might be sitting in those manuscripts, and he writes asking for the question to be put to people who could go and look. In the same letter he is chasing a copy of Origen’s Hexapla, the six-column comparison of the Greek and Hebrew texts, from a monastery library. This is a working textual scholar, in a palace, in the year 800. Nobody knows which cave it was. Eleven and a half centuries later, in 1947, a Bedouin shepherd in the same stretch of desert threw a stone into a cleft above the Dead Sea and heard pottery break.

(●) 823 AD: He died on 9 January, after forty-three years in the office, and was buried across the river from the caliph. + He was laid in the Monastery of the Catholicos on the western bank of the Tigris. The monastery carries the title the Church of the East gave the man at its head: catholicos, the general or universal bishop, which is the office Timothy had just held for forty-three years. The man who followed him in it was Isho bar Nun, who had been one of his critics. He had written, by the reckoning of the old Syriac book-lists, around two hundred letters, gathered into two volumes. Fifty-nine of them have come down to us, and they cover roughly the first half of his time in office: rulings on marriage and inheritance, arguments about a verse, instructions to a metropolitan six months’ travel away, a complaint about the cost of copying a manuscript. Nothing in them was written to be admired later, which is exactly why they are worth reading now.

What He Taught

(T1) God has never been without his Word and his Spirit, so confessing the Trinity is not counting three gods. + The caliph’s opening objection was the one Muslims had been making since the beginning: you people say God married a woman and fathered a son. It is a fair thing to object to, and Timothy agreed at once that it would be blasphemy. Nobody, he said, has ever uttered such a thing. Then he made the move that shapes the whole two days. He did not begin from three and try to talk his way back to one. He began from the one God his questioner already believed in, and asked what a living God must have. Light and heat do not get added to the sun; take them away and there is no sun left. Reason does not get added to a soul; a soul without it is not a soul. In Syriac the word he uses for the Son, meltha, means both "word" and "reason," and the pun does real work: to say God was ever without his Word is to say God was ever without his reason, which is not devotion but insult. So the Word and the Spirit are not two more beings standing beside God, one and one and one adding up to three. They are what it is for this God to be God at all. A God who has his Word is a God who speaks and thinks; a God who has his Spirit is a God who lives and breathes; and a God stripped of the two of them would be neither. That argument gets a reader to a God who is not a bare solitary point, and Timothy knew it did not by itself get to three persons. For that he went to the texts, to the Word by which the heavens were made (Psalm 33:6), to the Word who was with God and was God (John 1:1), and to the baptismal command of Matthew 28:19.

(Q) "As it is impossible to conceive a pearl without lustre, or a sun without light, or a soul without reason and mind, so it is never possible that God should be without Word and Spirit." + Source: Timothy I, Apology before the Caliph Mahdi, second day (Mingana translation, 1928, p. 75). Timothy had just conceded that every image he was using falls short, and that there was a real danger of his being understood to believe in a plurality of gods. The caliph agreed that the danger was real. This is the answer: subtracting from God is as much a blasphemy as adding to him, and a God without his Word and his Spirit would be the subtraction (T1).

(T2) The Christian books were never doctored, and if Muhammad had stood in them his name would be standing there still. + Partway through the first day the caliph plays the card that every later Muslim controversialist would play. There were many testimonies to Muhammad in your books, he says, and you took them out. The charge has a name in Arabic, tahrif, corruption of the scriptures, and it is still the standard Muslim account of why the Bible does not say what the Qur’an says it should. Timothy answers it three ways, and the three have held up remarkably well. First, produce the uncorrupted copy. If ours is the doctored version, there must be a sound one somewhere that you are comparing it against; put it on the table between us and we will both learn something. Second, what would we have gained? Even if Muhammad had been named in the Gospel, deleting him was never the obvious move; the easy move was to say he had not come yet. Third, look at what people actually do with a text they dislike. The Jews did not cut the name of Jesus out of the prophets. They argued that he had not arrived, which Timothy compares to a blind man standing in the noon sun insisting it has not risen. And then he says the thing that gives the whole answer its weight, which is that he would have gone the other way if the evidence had gone the other way. He had already left the Torah and the Prophets for the Gospel once, when he judged that the Gospel was where they led.

(Q) "To tell the truth, if I had found in the Gospel a prophecy concerning the coming of Muhammad, I would have left the Gospel for the Kur’an, as I have left the Torah and the Prophets for the Gospel." + Source: Timothy I, Apology before the Caliph Mahdi, first day (Mingana translation, 1928, p. 36); the older spelling "Kur’an" is the translator’s. Said in answer to the charge that Christians had cut Muhammad out of their scriptures (T2). It is a costly sentence to say in front of a caliph, because it stakes the faith on the evidence rather than on loyalty.

(T3) Muhammad turned his people from idols to one God, and that much deserves honour. + On the second day the caliph asks him straight out: what do you say about Muhammad? There was no safe answer and Timothy did not look for one. He said that Muhammad was worthy of praise from all reasonable people, and gave his grounds in a list, each one a thing the prophets of Israel had also done. The prophets taught one God, and Muhammad taught one God. The prophets drove men from bad works toward good ones, and so did he. The prophets pulled men away from idols, and he pulled his people away from idols. That is a generous judgment, and it is worth being clear about what it does and does not grant. It grants that a man can be right about something enormous, that God is one and shares his glory with no partner, without being a prophet in the sense the Bible means. It does not grant the office. Across the same two days Timothy refuses to find Muhammad in the Christian scriptures, refuses the claim that he is the Comforter Jesus promised, and holds the Trinity and the crucifixion against sustained pressure. Christians have read the compliment in two ways ever since, and the reading is still argued in print. One sees a tolerated minority’s courtesy, offered because the alternative in that room was unthinkable. The other sees a serious theological judgment about what God is doing outside the church, closer to Paul at Athens granting the altar to the unknown God than to flattery. The words themselves will carry either reading, which is part of why they have never stopped being quoted.

(Q) "He walked in the path of the prophets, and trod in the track of the lovers of God." + Source: Timothy I, Apology before the Caliph Mahdi, second day (Mingana translation, 1928, pp. 61–62). His answer to the caliph’s direct question about Muhammad (T3). The sentence that follows in the text is the reason he gives: all the prophets taught one God, and Muhammad taught one God.

(T4) The Comforter that Jesus promised is the Spirit of God, and no man born five centuries later can be that. + In John’s Gospel, on the last night, Jesus promises his disciples another Helper who will be with them forever, the Spirit of truth (John 14:16–17, 26). The Greek word is parakletos, usually left untranslated in English as Paraclete: an advocate, someone called in to stand beside you. Muslim readers had identified that promised figure with Muhammad, and the caliph puts the identification to Timothy directly. All these passages, he says, refer to Muhammad. Timothy answers with a chain of small steps, each one built the same way: if this were so, that would follow; that does not hold; so this is not so. Logicians call the move modus tollens, denying the consequent, and it is the ordinary reasoning of the man who says that if the dog had known the burglar it would not have barked. So: if Muhammad were the Paraclete, then since the Paraclete is the Spirit of God, Muhammad would be the Spirit of God, and so uncircumscribed, invisible, without a body. He had a body. He was a man from the earth and of the nature of Adam. And there is the calendar. Jesus told the disciples that the Comforter was already with them and among them as he spoke; the Spirit came on them ten days after the ascension, in a room in Jerusalem, and Muhammad was born more than five hundred years after that. None of this touches whether Muhammad did good in the world, which Timothy had already granted and would grant again. It is aimed at one claim only, and it is the claim the identification actually makes.

(Q) "The Paraclete is from heaven and of the nature of the Father, and Muhammad is from the earth and of the nature of Adam." + Source: Timothy I, Apology before the Caliph Mahdi, first day (Mingana translation, 1928, p. 34). One link in the chain of arguments he sets against the claim that the Comforter of John 14 was a prophecy of Muhammad (T4).

(T5) In the dark everyone believes he holds the pearl, and the daylight will settle who does. + Near the end of the second day, with neither man giving ground, Timothy reaches for a picture. Imagine a house at midnight, full of people, and a precious pearl dropped in the middle of the floor. Everyone hears it fall, everyone gropes for it, and every hand closes on something. One hand has the pearl. The others have glass, or a stone, or a bit of packed earth, and not one of them knows it. Every single person in that room is happy, and proud, and certain. Then the sun comes up. Modern readers often take this for a piece of early tolerance, the patriarch admitting that nobody can really know. It is the exact opposite, and he says so in the next breath. The caliph asks the obvious follow-up question: in that case, how would anyone know who has the pearl? Timothy does not answer that nobody can. He answers that a pearl gives off some light even at night, and names what that light is: good works, and the wonders God works through true faith, confirmed first through Moses and then in the Gospel. Then he prays that the caliph may come to share the pearl with him, which is not the prayer of a man who thinks the glass will do. The picture grants one thing and denies another. It grants that sincerity proves nothing, his own included, since everyone in the dark house is sincere. It denies that the pearl is therefore unfindable. Jesus told a story about a merchant who found one pearl of great value and sold everything he had to buy it (Matthew 13:45–46), and a merchant who thought all the pearls were the same would not have sold anything.

(Q) "In this world we are all of us as in a dark house in the middle of the night. If at night and in a dark house a precious pearl happens to fall in the midst of people, and all become aware of its existence, every one would strive to pick up the pearl, which will not fall to the lot of all but to the lot of one only, while one will get hold of the pearl itself, another one of a piece of glass, a third one of a stone or of a bit of earth, but every one will be happy and proud that he is the real possessor of the pearl." + Source: Timothy I, Apology before the Caliph Mahdi, second day (Mingana translation, 1928, pp. 88–89). The most quoted passage he ever wrote, and the most misquoted (T5). What follows it in the text is the daylight: when morning comes, every man stretches out his hand toward the light, and the light alone shows what each one is holding.

(Q) "This belief in one God, O my Sovereign, I have learned from the Torah, from the Prophets and from the Gospel. I stand by it and shall die in it." + Source: Timothy I, Apology before the Caliph Mahdi, second day (Mingana translation, 1928, p. 62). The caliph had just told him that he ought, then, to accept the words of the Prophet, beginning with the oneness of God. Timothy’s reply concedes the doctrine and refuses the source of it in the same sentence, and it is as close as the two days come to a confession of faith. Everything that made him useful to the church afterwards is packed into the last seven words.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) His two days at court became the pattern for Christian argument with Islam. + The Apology was copied and recopied in Syriac, translated into Arabic, and read by both communities for centuries; it survives in more manuscripts than anything else he wrote. What came after it looks like it on purpose. The Arabic Risalah of al-Kindi, written in the next generation, answers a Muslim friend point by point in the same register, and its title is nothing grander than the Arabic word for a letter. Theodore Abu Qurrah, bishop of Harran, argued before the caliph al-Mamun and had the exchange written down. Two and a half centuries later Elias, the East Syrian metropolitan of Nisibis, sat down with the vizier Abu al-Qasim al-Maghribi for seven sessions and published them. A genre had been started, and its founding text was a letter written to tell a friend how a conversation had gone. What made it worth imitating was never its cleverness. It was the discipline. He answers the objection that was actually made instead of an easier one nearby. He quotes the Qur’an accurately, and often, because he had read it. He concedes real ground where the ground is real, and holds the rest without raising his voice. A modern church historian, writing about him in 2006, put the judgment in his title: still a valuable model. That is a warmer verdict than most eighth-century apologists get, and the text earns it. What 1 Peter 3:15 asks of a Christian who is pressed for an answer is exactly what he did: give the reason for the hope you hold, and give it with gentleness and respect.

(†) The provinces he organised carried the gospel from Damascus to the Chinese capital. + In the same years that Timothy was arguing with al-Mahdi, a stone slab was set up in Chang’an, the Tang capital, carved in Chinese with a long panel of Syriac along the bottom. It was raised in 781 and it records a century and a half of the Church of the East in China, beginning with a missionary who reached the capital in 635. It was buried for centuries, dug up again in the 1620s, and still stands in Xi’an. Timothy did not put it there. He is the reason the mission it describes had a structure behind it that could keep going. That is what the reform of the exterior provinces was for. A metropolitan half a year’s journey from Baghdad could ordain, judge and appoint without waiting for a reply that might never come, and could not be dragged back into the politics of a patriarchal election. Under that arrangement the Church of the East kept bishops in Central Asia, in Tibet’s direction, in China, and in an Indian province he created by separating India from Fars. For several centuries afterwards it was, by sheer extent of ground, the largest church in the world, and its later story on the steppe and in Mongol Persia runs on the frame he built.

(†) Western Christians only met him in the twentieth century, and mostly liked what they found. + For a very long time he was invisible outside the Syriac churches. The Latin West had never had much idea that the Church of the East existed, and what little it had heard it filed under the name of Nestorius, the archbishop of Constantinople condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431 for the way he spoke about the union of God and man in Christ. Nestorian was the label, heretic was what it was taken to mean, and for centuries the label did the West’s reading for it. Oskar Braun published the Syriac letters with a Latin translation in 1914 and 1915. Alphonse Mingana put the Apology into English in 1928, and every English quotation of Timothy in general circulation still goes back to him. From the middle of the century the historians of Asian Christianity, Samuel Hugh Moffett among them, began writing him back into the general story, and missiologists, the scholars whose field is how the church crosses from one culture into another, started recommending the debate as a training text. Two later developments sharpened the interest. In 1947 the Dead Sea Scrolls came out of the caves at Qumran, in the desert south of Jericho, and made his letter about the hunter and the dog suddenly famous, since he had described the same kind of find in the same desert eleven and a half centuries earlier. And in 1994 the Roman Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East, the modern continuation of Timothy’s church, signed a common declaration stating that they confess the same faith in Christ and that the old quarrel had been largely about language. That matters for reading him, because it means the tradition he spoke for is no longer heard by most Christians as a foreign one.

(†) Where his own record will not bear defending: the election, a formula that flinched at the cross, and praise that went further than praise. + Three things, and all three are his own, taken from his own words or from the record of what he did. - The election of 780. He bought votes with promises he had no intention of keeping, and the frightening off of one rival and the convenient death of another sit in the record beside it. His answer to the men he had cheated, that the priesthood is not sold for money, is a true sentence used as a door slammed in their faces; he had been perfectly willing to trade on their expectation that it was. Simon of Samaria, who offered the apostles money for the power to give the Holy Spirit, tried to buy the gift of God and was told where that road ends (Acts 8:18–23). Timothy sold nothing, but he ran the auction. - Who died on the cross. Asked whether God can die, he answered that the Son of God died in our nature but not in his divinity, and compared it to the tearing of a king’s robes, where the dishonour reaches the king through the cloth. Later in the same debate he charges the kingdom of the Romans, by which he means the Byzantine empire and the Greek church inside it, with attributing suffering and death in the flesh to the one who cannot suffer or die in any way. He is guarding something every Christian guards, that God’s own nature is not mortal. But most of the church has held that the robe image gives away too much, because Scripture does not say that a man belonging to the Son of God died; it says the Lord of glory was crucified (1 Corinthians 2:8), and that God obtained the church with his own blood (Acts 20:28). If the one who died is not the Son himself, in person, then the cross is a man’s death that God watched. The 1994 declaration judged this difference to be mostly one of vocabulary, and it is fair to say his church has always meant to confess one Christ. It is also fair to say the phrasing kept giving that impression away. - How far the praise went. Honouring what Muhammad did against idolatry is defensible, and Christians have long honoured reasoning that reaches toward God without a Bible on the shelf. What is harder is the sentence a little further on, where Timothy tells the caliph that God honoured Muhammad exceedingly and laid the Persian and Roman empires beneath his feet. That reads the Arab conquests as divine endorsement, and it was said to the man who ruled the resulting empire. He may have believed it; he may have owed his church’s safety to saying it. Either way it goes beyond what he could show, and it is the one place in the two days where a reader can feel the weight of the room. None of this is the whole man, and it is not meant to be. He answered the hardest questions his century could ask him, in the language of the people asking, without shouting and without lying, and then he wrote it all down including the parts where he was pressed hard. The record of a life is allowed to hold both columns.