On Heresies (De Haeresibus)

On Heresies (De Haeresibus) is the second part of St. John of Damascus’s Fount of Knowledge: a catalogue of one hundred heresies, the great majority abridged from earlier heresiologists and the last entries his own. Its final long chapter, on “the heresy of the Ishmaelites,” is the earliest substantial Christian theological engagement with Islam — written from inside the Umayyad caliphate — and is treated here factually, in its historical context, with the polemical register of the age stated plainly and distinguished from contemporary Orthodox-Muslim engagement.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Structure of the Catalogue

On Heresies is a heresiological inventory in the established late-antique manner. Its first roughly eighty entries are abridged from earlier sources, chiefly the Anakephalaiosis (Recapitulation) attached to Epiphanius of Salamis’s Panarion (the “Medicine-Chest” against heresies, c. 375), supplemented from other heresiologists; the closing entries are later and, in part, original to John or his immediate milieu (Louth, St John Damascene, 2002, ch. 4; Sahas, John of Damascus on Islam, 1972, pp. 51–66). The catalogue runs to one hundred heresies; in Bonifatius Kotter’s critical edition (1981) the chapter on Islam is numbered 100, whereas in the older Patrologia Graeca text (reprinting Lequien) it appears as chapter 101, followed by a notice on the Iconoclasts — hence the work is often cited as “De Haeresibus 100/101.” Readers will meet both numbers in the literature.

The Chapter on “the Heresy of the Ishmaelites”

Its content, stated factually

The final long chapter treats what John calls the “heresy of the Ishmaelites” — his designation for Islam. He gives the community three names current in his Greek Christian world: Ishmaelites and Hagarenes (after Ishmael and Hagar) and Saracens, the last of which he derives, by a folk etymology, from Sarah’s having sent Hagar away “empty” (Sarras kenous) (De Haeresibus 100/101; trans. Chase, FOTC 37; analysed in Sahas, 1972, pp. 70–74). He locates the movement’s origin with “a false prophet named Mamed” (Muhammad), who, John writes, “having chanced upon the Old and New Testaments and, it seems, having conversed with an Arian monk, devised his own heresy” — the Arian-monk motif being a stock polemical explanation (later associated with the figure called Bahira) for the Christological content John finds in the new religion (trans. Chase, FOTC 37).

On the substance, John reports — with broad accuracy — that the Ishmaelites confess one God, “maker of all things, who has neither been begotten nor has begotten”; that they reckon Christ to be “the Word of God and His Spirit,” yet a creature and a servant, born without seed of Mary the sister of Moses and Aaron; and that they deny that Christ was crucified or died, holding that he was taken up to God (De Haeresibus 100/101; trans. Chase, FOTC 37; Sahas, 1972, ch. 4). He names four sūras by title — rendered in his Greek as “The Woman” (al-Nisāʾ, sūra 4), “The Table” (al-Māʾida, sūra 5), “The Heifer” or “The Cow” (al-Baqara, sūra 2), and a piece he calls “The Camel of God” (which has no exact counterpart in the canonical Qurʾān as we have it) — quoting and disputing their contents (De Haeresibus 100/101; trans. Chase, FOTC 37; on the sūra titles and “the Camel of God,” Sahas, 1972, pp. 84–95).

His arguments are those of a controversialist. He presses two challenges in particular: who witnessed that God gave Muhammad the scripture, when Moses received the Law on Sinai before all the people; and which prophet foretold that such a prophet would arise — contrasting an unattested private revelation with what he regards as the publicly attested and prophetically foretold revelation of Christ (De Haeresibus 100/101; trans. Chase, FOTC 37). He further turns the Muslim charge of Christian “associationism” back upon his interlocutors, and disputes the rites surrounding the Kaʿba and its stone. The register throughout is that of eighth-century inter-religious polemic — sharp, dismissive, and apologetic in aim. This is stated plainly here rather than softened: John writes to refute, and the text bears the marks of the genre and the age in which it was composed.

Its historical significance

For all its polemical edge, the chapter is a document of the first importance. It is the earliest substantial Christian theological engagement with Islam, written by a man who lived under Umayyad rule, whose family had served in the caliphal administration of Damascus, and who could observe the new faith at close range from within the Islamic polity (Griffith, The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque, 2008, ch. 2; Sahas, 1972, ch. 1). That vantage gives the text its value: it preserves an early outsider’s report of Muslim belief and practice, and it shows a Christian theologian beginning to work out the categories in which the encounter would be conducted for centuries — here, tellingly, by classing Islam as a Christian heresy rather than a separate religion, a framing that reflects both his polemical purpose and the genuinely contested theological space of the early Islamic Near East.

How scholarship reads it

The chapter is the subject of Daniel J. Sahas’s monograph John of Damascus on Islam: The “Heresy of the Ishmaelites” (Leiden: Brill, 1972), which edits, translates, and analyses it and remains the standard study. Sahas and others raise a genre question — how far the chapter is “heresiology” in the strict Epiphanian sense versus an early form of apologetic disputation — and an authenticity question, since some have doubted whether the Islam chapter (and the associated Disputation between a Saracen and a Christian transmitted under John’s name) is from John’s own hand. The manuscript evidence weighs in favour of an early date: Kotter pointed to a ninth-century manuscript and to extracts in a still earlier florilegium, making the text at the latest the work of a near-contemporary (Kotter, Die Schriften IV, 1981; discussed in Sahas, 1972, pp. 60–66). Sidney H. Griffith sets the chapter within the wider corpus of Christian writing in the world of early Islam and stresses both its informational value and the limits of John’s direct Qurʾānic knowledge — John’s acquaintance with the named sūras appears not to be detailed (Griffith, The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque, 2008). The text on the Greek side derives from Kotter’s critical edition; the older Chase translation (FOTC 37, 1958) is serviceable but, as Sahas notes, leans on the Latin of Migne and contains a few consequent inaccuracies.

A sober note: eighth-century polemic and contemporary engagement

This chapter must be read as what it is: an eighth-century work of religious controversy, framed in the heresiological idiom of its day, written to refute a rival confession. Its polemical vocabulary and its classification of Islam as a “heresy” belong to that historical setting and should not be flattened into either an endorsement or a model for present-day relations. Contemporary Orthodox engagement with Muslims proceeds on very different terms and in very different circumstances — as, for instance, the later Orthodox experience under Islamic rule shows: when St. Gregory Palamas was held as an Ottoman captive in the 1350s, his recorded exchanges with Muslim interlocutors, while still apologetic, were conducted in a markedly more conversational and personal register (see St. Gregory Palamas: Ottoman Captivity). To read John historically is neither to endorse the polemic of his age nor to pretend it was something other than polemic; it is to recognise the chapter’s real significance as the first Christian theological reckoning with Islam, from inside the caliphate, at the very dawn of that long encounter.

See Also

References

  • John of Damascus. On Heresies (Liber de haeresibus), in Saint John of Damascus: Writings. Translated by Frederic H. Chase, Jr. Fathers of the Church 37. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1958.
  • Kotter, Bonifatius, ed. Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos IV: Liber de haeresibus; Opera polemica. Patristische Texte und Studien 22. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1981. [Critical Greek text; Islam chapter numbered 100; cf. PG 94:677–780, where it is 101.]
  • Sahas, Daniel J. John of Damascus on Islam: The “Heresy of the Ishmaelites.” Leiden: Brill, 1972.
  • Griffith, Sidney H. The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.
  • Louth, Andrew. St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
  • Epiphanius of Salamis. Panarion (Adversus Haereses) with the Anakephalaiosis, the principal source for the catalogue’s earlier entries.