Theōdūrus Abū Qurrah

Theōdūrus Abū Qurrah (born c. 750, Edessa, Mesopotamia [now Şanlıurfa, Turkey]—died c. 825) was a Syrian Melchite bishop, theologian, and linguist. He was an early exponent of cultural exchange with Islamic and other non-Christian peoples, and the first known Christian writer in Arabic.

Although Theōdūrus had long been reputed by historians as a principal advocate of orthodox doctrine in Christology, later scholarship showed him also to have been a pioneer in relating irenically with the independent Eastern Christian churches, Muslims, and non-Christians throughout Asia Minor. Specific data on Theōdūrus’s life appeared only after his extant Greek works had been published in the West with Latin translations during the 16th and 17th centuries. A biography was reconstructed with elements from 9th-century Syriac, Arabic, and Armenian chronicles.

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Having become a monk at the renowned monastery of St. Sabas near Jerusalem, he steeped himself in the Greek ascetical spirituality of the early 8th-century Byzantine monk John of Damascus. At St. Sabas Theōdūrus began his Syriac and Arabic writings, including tracts on philosophic theology arguing for monotheism, the possibility of revelation, human freedom, divine justice, and retribution for sin. His theism possibly influenced the Muʿtazilites, the early 9th-century Muslim theological school that produced the first rational exposition of Islamic doctrine and reacted against its prevalent fatalism.

Toward the close of the 8th century, Theōdūrus was named bishop of Harran, near Edessa, and engaged in discussion with the diverse elements of its population, including the heterodox monophysites who believed the nature of Christ to be exclusively divine, Muslims, Jews, Manichaeans (members of a dualist cult claiming rival deities of good and evil), and Sabaeans. He wrote Greek theological works, dedicated to Byzantine rulers, on the Iconoclastic Controversy (on the destruction of sacred images). In the first years of the 9th century, however, he was deposed as bishop by Theodoret, patriarch of Antioch, possibly because of Theōdūrus’s advocacy of the orthodox Christological teaching enunciated by the Council of Chalcedon (451) and his sympathies toward papal leadership of Christendom.

Returning to the monastery of St. Sabas, Theōdūrus resumed an intense ascetical and literary activity, composing in 813 his noted “Letter to the Armenians” in support of the orthodox stand against the Iconoclasts and monothelites (who denied Christ’s human choice, affirming only divine will). On the same questions he addressed a tract (now lost) to Pope Leo III. Shortly after 815 he began a series of journeys to Alexandria and Armenia to encourage orthodox Christology. At the court of the Armenian prince Ashot Msaker he composed his longest Greek treatise, an explanation of terms used by the philosophers. After a sharp polemic with Syrian monophysite prelates and theologians, he held vigorous discussions with the Muslim caliph at Baghdad on Islamic and Christian monotheism.

Theōdūrus’s Greek works are contained in the series Patrologia Graeca edited by J.-P. Migne, vol. 97 (1866). His Arabic works were first edited by P. Constantin Bacha in 1905.