The Converted Saracens: Aspebetos, the Healing of Terebon, and the Bishopric of the Parembole

One of the major episodes of Cyril’s Life of Euthymius is the conversion of the nomadic Arabs of the steppe through Euthymius. The Saracen phylarch Aspebetos — a Persian-Arab commander who had fled the persecution of Christians in Persia and entered Roman service — brought his paralyzed son Terebon to the desert father; the boy was healed, and the chief and his people believed and were baptized, Aspebetos taking the name Peter. A camp of converted Saracens, the Parembole (“the Camp” of the tent-dwellers), grew up near the lavra, and at the people’s and Euthymius’s instance Peter was consecrated its first bishop by Juvenal of Jerusalem. Bishop Peter of the Parembole later subscribed among the fathers of the Council of Ephesus (431) — the point at which this desert episode is anchored in the firm conciliar record.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; father of Palestinian monasticism)

The Saracens of the Steppe

The desert in which Euthymius lived was not an empty waste but a frontier, and it was peopled. Across the steppe of the Jordan rift and along the edges of the Roman limes moved the nomadic Arabs whom the Greek sources call Saracens (Sarakenoi) — tent-dwelling pastoralists, organized under chiefs, some of them in Roman federate service as auxiliary cavalry guarding the desert frontier against Persia and against other nomads (Cyril, Life of Euthymius §10; Binns 1994; on the federate Arabs of late antiquity, the wider scholarship summarized in Binns 1994 and Chitty 1966). These were the people among whom Euthymius’s mission would unfold. The encounter between the holy man of the desert and the nomads of the desert is one of the recurring patterns of late-antique hagiography, and in Cyril’s Life of Euthymius it produces one of the work’s most consequential and best-documented episodes — consequential because it issued not in a passing conversion but in a settled Christian people with its own bishop, and documented because that bishop appears, by name and see, in the acts of an ecumenical council.

Aspebetos: The Persian Phylarch Who Fled Persecution

The central figure of the episode is the chief whom Cyril calls Aspebetos. The name is in fact a Persian title or rank (Middle Persian spāhbed, a military commander) used by Cyril as a personal name, which already tells us something of the man’s origin (Cyril, Life of Euthymius §10; Binns 1994). According to Cyril, Aspebetos was a Persian — or a chief of Arabs under Persian overlordship — who had been set by the Persian authorities to prevent the Christians of his region from fleeing westward into Roman territory during a persecution of the Church in Persia. Moved by pity, and secretly inclined toward the Christians, Aspebetos did the opposite of his charge: he helped the persecuted Christians escape. When his sympathy was discovered and he himself fell under suspicion, he fled with his people across the frontier into Roman Arabia and Palestine, where he was received and given command, becoming a phylarch — the Roman title for a chief of federate Saracens — over the Arab auxiliaries of the province (Cyril, Life of Euthymius §10; Binns 1994).

Aspebetos thus came to the borders of Euthymius’s desert already a man disposed toward the Christian faith and already in Roman service, but not yet a Christian. The decisive turn would come through his son.

The Healing of Terebon

Aspebetos had a son, Terebon, who had been struck with paralysis: Cyril describes the boy’s right side as withered and his hand and foot as useless, an affliction that the father’s recourse to Persian magi and physicians had wholly failed to cure (Cyril, Life of Euthymius §10). Hearing of the holy man of the desert and of the wonders reported of him, Aspebetos brought his paralyzed son to Euthymius’s lavra and begged for healing. The episode that follows is, in Cyril’s telling, the hinge of the whole conversion — and it must be received with the care the methodology of this guide requires.

What Cyril reports is this: that Euthymius, after some hesitation born of humility, prayed over the boy and signed him with the sign of the Cross in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and that Terebon was immediately and completely restored, rising up whole before the eyes of his father and his people (Cyril, Life of Euthymius §10). This healing is reported here as Cyril’s testimony, pinned to the Life of Euthymius, and not asserted as an independently established fact (per the repository’s methodology for hagiographical and miraculous material, METHODOLOGY §3.5). Cyril is, by broad scholarly consensus, the most reliable of the hagiographers of the Christian East — he wrote within living memory, named his informants, and is checkable against the conciliar and imperial record — and Bernard Flusin’s study of his work shows how carefully he handles his miracle accounts (Flusin 1983). But reliability of transmission is not the same as historical verification of a miracle: what the historian can affirm is that Cyril attests the healing, and that the result of the episode — the conversion of a Saracen people and the rise of their bishopric — is firmly attested. The cure is the source’s claim; the Christianized camp and its bishop are the documented outcome (Cyril, Life of Euthymius §10; Binns 1994; and below on the Council of Ephesus).

It is worth noting that Terebon himself became one of Cyril’s ultimate sources for the early life of Euthymius: the convert’s family preserved the memory of these events within the very communities Cyril later drew upon, so that the healing-narrative comes to us, in part, from the line of those who claimed to have witnessed it (on Cyril’s informants and method, see Cyril of Scythopolis’s Life and Flusin 1983).

The Baptism of Aspebetos as Peter

The effect of the healing, in Cyril’s account, was immediate and corporate. Aspebetos, overwhelmed, professed faith in Christ; and not he alone, but his whole following — his household, his kinsmen, and the Saracens under his command — believed and asked for baptism (Cyril, Life of Euthymius §10). Euthymius instructed them in the faith and they were baptized, and Aspebetos, the phylarch, received in baptism the new and deeply significant name Peter (Cyril, Life of Euthymius §10; Binns 1994). The taking of the name of the chief of the apostles is not incidental: it marks the man out, and as the sequel shows, it marks him for a foundational and quasi-apostolic role among his own people. The conversion of a chief carrying his whole people with him is a characteristic pattern of late-antique and early-medieval mission — the people follow the prince — and it is precisely this pattern that produced, at a stroke, not a handful of individual converts but a Christian nation in miniature on the edge of the desert.

The Parembole: The Camp of the Tent-Dwellers

The converted Saracens did not scatter. A community of them settled near Euthymius’s lavra, on the desert plain, and this settlement is what Cyril calls the Parembole — Greek parembolē, “the Camp” or “encampment,” the very word for a military camp or a nomads’ camp of tents (Cyril, Life of Euthymius §§10, 15; Binns 1994). The name is apt and almost literal: this was a camp of tent-dwellers, a settled body of nomad converts living the Christian life under the spiritual shadow of the desert father who had brought them to the faith. The Parembole became a permanent Christian community of Arabs on the Palestinian frontier — one of the earliest such — bound to Euthymius’s foundation and growing in numbers as further Saracens came in (Cyril, Life of Euthymius §15; Binns 1994). The desert mission, in other words, did not remain a private affair between a holy man and a chief; it became an institution, a peopled Christian camp with a continuing life.

The existence and continuity of the Parembole as a recognized ecclesiastical entity is, importantly, not a matter of Cyril’s testimony alone. A parembolē with its own bishop appears in the external conciliar record, which gives the whole episode a documentary anchor that pure hagiography would lack (see below; Binns 1994; Perrone 1980).

Peter, Bishop of the Parembole

A Christian people requires a shepherd, and the natural shepherd of the converted Saracens was the man who had led them to Christ. Cyril reports that at the request of the people themselves, and at the instance and recommendation of Euthymius, the newly baptized Peter was consecrated bishop of the Parembole — bishop of the Camp, bishop of the Saracens — by Juvenal, archbishop of Jerusalem (Cyril, Life of Euthymius §10; on Juvenal and the Jerusalem see, Perrone 1980; Binns 1994). Peter thus became, in effect, the first bishop of the Tents — a bishop not of a city but of a mobile and settled nomad people, an unusual and striking figure in the episcopate of the fifth-century Church. The creation of the see is itself significant for the history of the Jerusalem patriarchate: it shows the desert monasticism of Euthymius and the patriarchal church of Juvenal working together to incorporate the frontier Arabs into the ecclesiastical structure of Palestine, with the holy man supplying the conversion and the patriarch supplying the canonical consecration. The alliance of desert and patriarchate that runs through Euthymius’s whole career is here visible in its missionary form.

That Euthymius should have urged the consecration, rather than holding the convert close to his own lavra, is consistent with the larger logic of his work: he was a maker of communities and of fathers, and the proper completion of the Saracen conversion was a self-standing Christian people with its own bishop, integrated into the Church’s hierarchy. The Parembole would continue as a bishopric after Peter, its later bishops appearing in the record of the Palestinian church (Binns 1994; Perrone 1980).

The Council of Ephesus (431): The Documentary Anchor

The episode finds its firmest external confirmation at the Council of Ephesus in 431 — the Third Ecumenical Council, which condemned the Christology of Nestorius. Among the bishops who attended and subscribed at Ephesus was Peter, bishop of the Parembole — that is, bishop of the Saracen camp, the very see created for Euthymius’s convert (the subscriptions of the Council of Ephesus, 431; Binns 1994; Perrone 1980). This is the crucial point at which the desert narrative of Cyril touches the hard ground of the conciliar record: the bishop whose making Cyril describes as the fruit of a desert healing is independently attested, by name and see, in the acts of an ecumenical council. Whatever a historian concludes about the miracle that Cyril places at the origin of the conversion, the outcome — a converted Saracen people with a recognized bishopric whose bishop sat among the fathers of Ephesus — is documented outside the Life altogether. The episode is thus a model case of the kind that makes Euthymius unusually well-attested: a hagiographical narrative whose institutional result can be checked against the independent record and is confirmed by it (on this method, see the historical Euthymius).

[Disputed: the precise dates of the healing of Terebon and of the consecration of Peter follow Cyril’s relative chronology in the Life of Euthymius, which sequences the episode in relation to the other events of Euthymius’s career rather than by an exact dated annal; the firm chronological fixed point is the subscription of Peter, bishop of the Parembole, at the Council of Ephesus in 431, which requires that the conversion and consecration precede that year, but the exact year of the healing is not independently established.]

The Significance of the Saracen Mission

The conversion of Aspebetos-Peter and the founding of the bishopric of the Parembole are not a marginal anecdote in the Life of Euthymius but one of its major episodes, and they secure Euthymius a real place in the history of Christian mission. He stands among the earliest agents of the Christianization of the nomadic Arabs of the Roman East — a process that would continue through the fifth and sixth centuries and that the Life lets us see at one of its springs. The pattern Euthymius established here is telling: conversion through the witness and wonder of the holy man; the bringing-in of a whole people through its chief; the settling of the converts into a permanent community; and the completion of the work by the creation of a native bishopric, integrated into the patriarchal church. It is mission that ends not in dependency but in a self-standing local church with its own shepherd — exactly the shape, in the missionary key, of Euthymius’s monastic work, which likewise aimed at making fathers and founding communities that could stand on their own. The Saracen mission is therefore of a piece with the whole of Euthymius’s life: the desert father who drew solitaries into the discipline of the cell drew also the tent-dwellers of the steppe into the Church, and in both cases his aim was not to gather a crowd around himself but to found something that would last (see the monastic pattern; on the wider veneration and assessment, legacy and assessment).

References

Cyril of Scythopolis. Life of Euthymius, esp. §10 (Aspebetos’s flight from Persia, the paralysis and healing of Terebon, the baptism of the Saracens, Aspebetos baptized Peter, and his consecration as bishop of the Parembole by Juvenal of Jerusalem) and §15 (the growth of the Parembole). In R. M. Price, trans., Cyril of Scythopolis: The Lives of the Monks of Palestine (Cistercian Studies 114). Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1991. (Cited by the section numbering of Eduard Schwartz’s critical edition, Kyrillos von Skythopolis, TU 49.2, Leipzig 1939.)
The Council of Ephesus (431), Third Ecumenical Council, subscriptions of the bishops — including Peter, bishop of the Parembole (the Saracen camp). (The external documentary anchor for the bishopric.)
John Binns. Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ: The Monasteries of Palestine 314–631. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. (The Parembole, the federate Saracens, Aspebetos-Peter, and the bishopric of the Camp in the conciliar record.)
Bernard Flusin. Miracle et histoire dans l’œuvre de Cyrille de Scythopolis. Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1983. (Cyril’s method, his informants, and the handling of the miraculous, including the healing of Terebon.)
Lorenzo Perrone. La chiesa di Palestina e le controversie cristologiche. Brescia: Paideia, 1980. (Juvenal of Jerusalem, the see of the Parembole, and the Palestinian episcopate at the councils.)
Derwas J. Chitty. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The desert frontier, the Saracens, and Euthymius’s mission in the broader narrative of Palestinian monasticism.)