Incarnation/Taǧassud Lexicon in Ninth-Century Arabic Christian Controversy: A Gender Issue

Ninth-century Arab Christian apologists, i.e. the first known Christian theologians who wrote in Arabic: the Chalcedonian (‘Melkite’) Theodore Abū Qurra (d. ca. 820‒825), the Syrian-Orthodox (‘Jacobite’) Ḥabīb ibn Ḫidma Abū Rāʾiṭa (d. probably soon after 830), and the East Syrian (‘Nestorian’) ʿAmmār al-Baṣrī (d. ca. 840), composed their works to defend their teachings challenged by Muslims, particularly the doctrine of the Trinity and divine filiation, or to contrast other denominations, especially in the field of Christology. In this apologetic literature and the intra-Christian dogmatic debates, they used a wide range of words, terms or appellatives, to refer to a variety of concepts and notions of ‘body’. While there is a hierarchy of forms based on the meanings, i. e. whether a physical body, a bestial, or a human one is intended, most bodily terms appear in discussions about the Messiah, His body, Incarnation, (in)dwelling, and humanisation. When the notions of Incarnation and humanisation are elaborated on, it is often done with the help of the analogy of human generation and reproduction, or that of a human being born from his mother, in the unified form of body and soul.
The paper briefly presents and classifies the “body-incarnation” lexicon of the Christian Arab authors, then examines the depiction of the birth, Incarnation, and humanisation of the Son against the background of previous tradition.