Episode 99: Interview with Laura Estes

This week's episode looks at something brand new for the podcast, the emergence of Islam from a Christian perspective. Laura Estes studies the period at Saint Louis University and is our guest. We focus on how Christians understood this new religious movement and what that meant for Syriac Christians in the 7th and 8th centuries. It is not exhaustive, but it is an important part of the history of the two major world religions.

Timestamps:

4:19- Syriac Christianity

14:40- Islam’s Relation to Christianity

40:25- Martyrdom

Charles Kim 0:00

Hello, and welcome to a history of Christian theology. My name is Chad Kim. With me this week will be Laura Estes, and we will be discussing the emergence of Islam from the Christian perspective. Laura Estes is a PhD candidate at St. Louis University. And I am fortunate to call her one of my friends. And we've been studying at SLU. For we were there for about four years together. She started a year after I did, and she's doing some really interesting research on how Christians received, interpreted and understood the emergence of Islam, in what today we might call the Middle East at the time, basically in cover a encompassed areas from the far eastern Mediterranean all the way almost to India. So we talked a little bit about this area, which is normally broadly referred to as Syriac Christianity. We talked a little bit about it in our episode with Dr. wicks. So if you'd like to hear about the emergence and the origins of Syriac Christianity, please go see that episode with Dr. wicks. This will be a continuation of that broader series, where we think about Islam and how Islam emerged and what that was like from a Christian perspective. So the purpose here is not necessarily to detail the full history of Islam or anything like that, but merely to see what it was like for Christians, how they received, how they understood what that interaction was, like from their perspective. So this is a history of Christian theology. And so we are dealing with it at from that perspective, I hope that you enjoy this conversation that I have with Laura, if you have any comments or questions, please do get in touch with us on Facebook, on Twitter. And we will continue to put out new content. I have a conversation coming up about Christianity in early Gaul, with Ross, Tweel, and we have a few other things lined up in the coming months. So stay tuned. And thank you for listening. Alright, so this week on the history of Christian theology, we have Laura lock Estes. And Laura is a PhD candidate at St. Louis University. I think she started one year after I did. And so we've gotten to know each other over the last several years. And her research is specifically on Syriac Christianity. And she studies with Dr. Wicks who we did an episode with a couple of weeks ago. So definitely check out that conversation. And Laura focuses a little bit more on the relationship between Syriac Christianity and Islam. And sort of a little bit later in history than Dr. wicks. His focus had been on FM, the cerium. So we talked a lot about FM. So fourth century figure, and Laura, Laura is competent in that area as well, but also has a lot of interests that are a little bit later. So I thought it would be fun to have her on because we haven't really discussed almost at all, Islam and this like later part of what's often called Late Antiquity. So there's there's been movements to suggest that this period of history should extend all the way to include the emergence of Islam. So I thought it would be interesting to have Laura Come on. And she I think a lot of her research deals specifically with like how, like the development of Islam from the perspective of Syriac Christian, so I think that will be kind of the direction that we go. So it's not necessarily a history of Islam, but it is what it was like for the Christians to see this emergence of another kind of, we'll just say, broadly religious movement, but we'll get into the particulars. So thanks for coming on, Laura.

Laura Estes 3:42

Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Chad.

Charles Kim 3:44

Did I get that all right. Is there anything that I need to correct there?

Laura Estes 3:47

No, I think that that's, that's a good summary of my studies.

Charles Kim 3:52

Okay. So, broadly speaking, you've studied and presented at conferences on the overlapping histories of Islam and Christianity. So we have discussed Syriac Christianity a little bit, but could you give us a little background on the the sort of theological and historical character of this, this form of sort of what may be called submitted Christianity, I guess, but, but yes, Syriac Christianity. Yeah.

Laura Estes 4:19

I'm really glad that you already had Jeff Lutz on the podcast to give a little bit of the background of the development of Syriac speaking Christianity, but I'll summarize really briefly bring you up to the time period that I study. So Syriac is an umbrella term, Syriac speaking Christianity are all of the Christians whose main liturgical language was Syriac. So Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic. It's related to languages like Hebrew, and Arabic. And it ended up being the main literary and liturgical language for Christians who live in what are now like modern day Syria. Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, even down into India. And so it's it includes a really wide range of Christians and Christian churches. And that's part of the reason why I enjoy studying to explicate Christianity so much. So I think the piece of history that's most relevant for my studies is that Syriac speaking Christianity includes at least three major churches or denominations. So there's a major council, the council of Cal Seaton in 451, where Christians get together and decide what the orthodox doctrine on Christology is going to be. How do Jesus Christ's divine and human natures relate to one another. And the thing that they decide and come up with is that Christ has two natures human and divine, but is one person. But even though this is what is decided at Cal Seton, there are lots of Christians who continue to disagree with this particular way of talking about Christ. And in the Syriac speaking churches, those Christians are a pretty significant percentage of the Christians. So you can, if there's a scale, you might think of Caledonian Christianity being in the middle. And on one side, you have Christians who are called me appetites. They prefer Cyril of Alexandria's side and try to talk about one nature of Christ, they want to emphasize the unity of the divinity and the humanity of Christ. And then on the other side of the scale, you have Christians who are kind of more extreme di opposites, or they sometimes get called and historians, that's maybe not the best term for them. But they really want to emphasize the distinction between the humanity and the divinity of Christ. So much so that sometimes people accuse them of talking about two different persons, Jesus Christ. So those are the three main groups of Syriac speaking Christian Christians, who all have really large churches that are still very, very active for centuries and centuries after calcium even on to this day. And it creates a really diverse field from which to draw and a lot of interest in interdenominational rivalry between these various churches. And that's even more heightened because through speaking Christians not only live in the Roman Byzantine Empire, but also live across the border in the Zoroastrian Persian Empire. And so we're interacting with a different religious group and a different political system there. So that's kind of the brief history of the major churches in the Syriac speaking tradition, up until the origins of Islam.

Charles Kim 8:17

Yeah, well, that's, I appreciate that. That's well said and important. You know, when we were talking with Jeff, we didn't do as much of the sort of Chris, what we might broadly call the Christological controversies of Cal Seton. And for those who are, you know, sometimes I'll hear people say Cal sit on. And then I always think of father McCone, I think, who said, we're not talking about a dinosaur. But, but yeah, so calcium, calcium ion, however, you want to say it, that this takes place in 451. This major, and that's not really not really a, like a creed or something. But it isn't a further explanation of what took place in the two councils of Nicaea. Constantinople. So So Laura is pointing out, which is helpful that this is a very broad movement. So we, we tended to speak about it a little, maybe, maybe, I think when I had the conversation with Jeff, because we were speaking about this early form of it, we talked about it a little bit more as one thing, but but especially the churches that still exist there, and the people that still exist, there have lots of different sort of expressions of the Christian faith being as you well point out the sort of myth is i which is sometimes also miss appropriately labeled mono fizz light in some of the older literature, I think. Right. Right. And so this, you know, so it's important to get on the table that we're talking about a lot of different Christians who kind of go under this umbrella term, Syriac, which is you know, received more interest I feel like in the last several decades, but but maybe didn't have a whole lot of people who studied it before. I don't know like is Sebastian Brock and who are the others that like since the 80s 70s? You know, when that really started to become, you know, were would Christians who are trying to tell the story of Christianity said, well, we need to include them. Right?

Laura Estes 10:13

Right. Yeah, there have always been sort of obscure Oxford dons who studied Christianity, and you know, about 20 Other Semitic languages. But sort of the two, the two grandfathers of English speaking Syriac studies are Sebastian Brock, over at Oxford, and then Sidney Griffith at Seaway. And yeah, I would say especially since the 70s, Syriac Christianity has been of interest more broadly, because people have been more interested in the study of the early history of Islam, and kind of basically doing like, what historical Jesus studies did for the New Testament are really questioning the traditional narrative about the origin of Islam, something similar happened, or of the origin of Christianity, something similar happened with the origins of Islam starting in about the 70s, where people really started to question the story that had always been told. And they used Syriac speaking Christian sources, since these were contemporary sources to the earliest days of Islam, they started using those to kind of re narrate this early story.

Charles Kim 11:28

Interesting, so can you give us just a couple different? I don't know what how did a lot of these Syriac Christians view the origins and the beginnings of Islam? So as I understand it, Mohammed is in a is in a cave when he starts to receive His revelation. And that's the story it's told, as it's told, and this is maybe in modern day Iraq, if I'm correct. So how was this phenomena received by the Christians?

Laura Estes 11:55

Yeah. So. So Mohammed lived on the Arabian Peninsula. And there's it's unclear whether he actually ever left the Arabian Peninsula. Certainly, there were early conquests, beyond like, what is modern day like Saudi Arabia. But Muhammad himself may not have ever left the left the peninsula. Now, in terms of the ways that that Christians understood the origins of Islam, there's really there's a variety of early responses. The very earliest Christians who met people that we would call this lens seem to have not even really noticed that they had a distinctive religion. They were more interested in the political and military changes that were happening. And they often wrote about these people whom they just called Arabs, in the same way that like the the Old Testament writers, talked about the Assyrians coming in to punish Israel for their unfaithfulness to God. So the Syriac speaking Christians sort of saw these Arabs as being new Assyrians, who were coming in to punish Christians for their various forms of unfaithfulness. So it's kind of the earliest strand. And then after a while, Christians did come to recognize that these people had distinctive religious beliefs. And I would say that they generally class them as being sort of Jewish, or being sort of like heretical Christianity. These are the two paradigms by which Christians tended to try and make sense of early Islam. So they noticed that there was a strong emphasis on monotheism, that these people didn't eat pork, that they circumcised their sons, and so therefore, saw them as being somehow influenced by Judaism. But then, they also recognize that these people had really high regard for Jesus and Mary, and that they had a new scripture, and so tried to understand them as maybe be deviant or heretical Christians that maybe Muhammad had learned some things from some Jews, and when some things from some heretical Christians sort of put all this together to create his own faith. And those are, I would say, kind of common understandings of Islam, then and even even today, you hear the sort of polemic from Christian writers who are trying to understand the origins of Islam.

Charles Kim 14:40

Well, and I think that's, that's helpful, you know, even this sort of maybe modern category of religion would have been foreign to a lot of the people you know, the people around him and even Muhammad himself, like, you know, you don't think like okay, there's this sort of discrete thing, that is religion, which is separate from politics. Separate from commerce or something like that, like, you know, and so I think your points well taken, you have to sort of use the the categories that you have. So it's interesting to think of, of the emergence of Muhammad as kind of maybe Jewish or I think is a John of Damascus, who's the one who sort of says that tries to tie him to areas and say he's just a sort of form of maybe basically just Christian heresy. So it's not even, quote unquote, another religion. It's just, oh, well, he's sort of talking like we talk except for he is just too close to areas than he is to us.

Laura Estes 15:33

Right? Yeah, there's a really, there's a really popular Christian story that's told, in which a monk living out in the Arabian Desert who is a, who's a, an Aryan or some sort of other heretical monk, thinks that he's received a vision from God where he needs to convert Muhammad to Christianity, but he really bungles it, he does a very bad job teaching Muhammad Christianity by virtue of both of his heresy, and just his incompetence. And so this is how Islam comes about. Then there's also a Jewish figure that comes on the scene who further twists the Christian teaching. All of this is very polemical, on the part of Christians, what they've actually done is taken a traditional Muslim story about the origins of Islam, and sort of turned it on its head. So early Muslims told a similar story in which a faithful Christian hermit, saw Muhammad and recognized him as the person that Jesus had had said, would come like the future prophet that was to come. And so for Muslims, this is a way of confirming that Muhammad is in the line of Prophets, which, which include Christian prophets and Jewish prophets. But that he's not some sort of like heretical version of them, he is restoring or giving the purest form of the same teaching that Christians and Jews once received.

Charles Kim 17:04

So is that a guess that for some reason, it just struck me that it's a little bit like in Manna key as a man, he believed that he was the prophet that was promised to come. Is that so in a sort of similar vein, some people thought that that was to Muhammad was,

Laura Estes 17:21

yeah, I mean, that's, that certainly seems to be an early Muslim understanding of Muhammad and how Muhammad seemed to understand himself that Islam was an ancient religion, like the the ancient religion, the religion of Adam, and that all of these prophets that God had sent over time, both biblical prophets that Christians would be familiar with, and some, some extra prophets had all been teaching the same message. But sometimes over time, that message was corrupted. And so a new prophet had to come along, who would restore the original message. And Muhammad understood himself to be restoring that same message that, that Jesus and Adam and Noah and Abraham had all preached a message of pure monotheism.

Charles Kim 18:08

And is the I feel like is the month monks name but Hera the one who's often identified as the one who taught Muhammad?

Laura Estes 18:15

Yes, yeah. But Hera is a is the name that's often given to him and all sorts of different versions, both the Muslim and the Christian stories.

Charles Kim 18:26

Okay. And so is it like, I guess that's one of those sort of tricky, quick questions of history. Can we say for certain that this Bahir a monk actually existed? And maybe there's not really a clear answer on that, but certainly he the name appears in all of these different sources. Is that fair?

Laura Estes 18:43

Yeah, it's certainly a common, a common story that's told across a variety of sources, whether or not there's an actual historical monk that Muhammad met is a question that I just don't think we could we could answer given the, the data that we have, because these sorts of these stories are, at least in the form that we had them later. They're not super early stories.

Charles Kim 19:11

So one thing that I was sort of I was doing a little bit of reading before we got on the line just to prepare for the interview. And it wrote called to me that oftentimes Muhammad is has sort of a polemic against the polytheists. So he's, you know, he speaks to the religions of the book, he speaks to Christians and Jews, but there's also this broad category of polytheists. And so if you are, I mean, I was trying to think like, Who are these polytheists sort of in history, like you mentioned early on Persians, who tend to be Zoroastrian, I guess, at this period. And then you have Christians and then you have Jews. And there's also just some other people who seem to be polytheists I was just trying to figure out exactly where, like who this category of people was. Let you hear about it. occasionally in the Koran and then just sort of in history in the history of the emergence of Islam that that Muhammad wanted to sort of call the polytheists to repentance is the idea of who those are.

Laura Estes 20:13

Yeah. So it can So Muhammad is living in like modern day, Saudi Arabia for most of his life. And in this area there, there are Christians, there are arabic speaking Christians, there are arabic speaking Jews. There may be Zoroastrians we have less evidence for that. But there are also a lot of more, I hesitate to use the word primitive, but like more primitive tribal polytheistic religions that are still alive and well, on the Arabian Peninsula. And so the stories that early Muslims tell about Muhammad is that he lived in a city where polytheism was very common, where there was a shrine to all sorts of various gods that was, visitors frequently came to, and that when he is talking about polytheists, he is first and foremost, talking about people who are polytheistic, in the traditional sense of worshipping many different gods who have some sort of power over various aspects of the world and human life. Now, there may also be, like tied into that sort of a little jab at Christians, whose monotheism that they claim, perhaps Muhammad says is a little too close to polytheism.

Charles Kim 21:46

Right, right, with the Trinity and what have you. So that's, that's interesting. And one of the things that I sort of recall from some of our classes and such is that a lot of the Syriac speaking Christians who had rejected or at least were uncomfortable with the settlements and the agreements of of Cao Seaton. We're, who are kind of at odds with with Byzantium, with the later parts of the Roman Empire, you know, some, many of them seem to have welcomed the influence of Islam. Is that right? And why would they welcome this emergence of a different kind of political and sort of political reality?

Laura Estes 22:28

Yeah, this, this is a pretty a pretty common claim, the the idea that some Christians welcomed the Arab conquests. I'm not sure that it's a claim that's, that's borne out in the evidence when it's looked at as a whole. So there are some later like, like 12th century documents, so the the conquests and the beginning of Islam happened in the seventh century, right. So centuries and centuries later, we do have some chroniclers who are compiling some documents that seem to suggest that maybe some Christians didn't mind Muslim rule, or saw it as being somehow superior to Byzantine rule. But more overwhelmingly, Christians, especially Christians living in formerly Byzantine lands that have now come under the rule of Muslims, they almost universally mourn the loss of Christian rule, even if the Christians that were ruling over them were Christians that they thought were heretical. And then Christians who are living in the Persian Empire. For them, the the change in rule really isn't a big deal. They've never been the political or the religious majority. They were living under Zoroastrian rule. And so this is just another ruler who's also not Christian. But there do seem to be times where certain Muslim rulers are particularly wise and benevolent, and Christians like them, at least more so than they did some of the Byzantine rulers who were perceived as being corrupt or particularly problematic for one reason or another. But I don't know that we can make like sweeping claims about certain groups of Christians being happy that Muslims are now in charge rather than the Byzantines.

Charles Kim 24:27

Interesting, yeah, that one of the things that was most so I think that's probably that's very well said. And this is going a little off from the questions that that I sent you. But I seem to recall when I did, I did a class with Kathleen McVeigh. Dr. McVeigh at Princeton seminary, and we talked a little bit about the oh, now I'm going to be able to forget the Arabic word but where there would be sort of debates among the Jewish, Arabic and sort of Syriac Christians about the nature of God. A mass no There's an Arabic word for this that I can't I'm not I'm forgetting now, but where they would gather and have these sort of like, debates?

Laura Estes 25:09

Oh, like in the in the monthlies Is that what's your

Charles Kim 25:12

word? Yeah. I guess that's the Sydney Griffith book too, right?

Laura Estes 25:16

Yeah. Yeah, there, there certainly seems to be a lot of opportunity for inter religious and like philosophical exchange in the courts of certain caliphs. So certain, like Muslim rulers seem to really enjoy bringing in religious and philosophical scholars to debate things and to translate texts and to discuss religion. But it's often really under this bigger umbrella of Aristotelian philosophy, which is king at this point. And so a lot of these discussions, while they're religious in nature are also like more broadly, philosophical, in nature about like, What is nature and what is substance? And what is like the difference between all of these metaphysical things that I'm I can't speak very intelligently about because I'm not much of a philosopher.

Charles Kim 26:17

Well, and this is kind of the eighth and ninth century, correct the these these kinds of conversations.

Laura Estes 26:24

Yeah, so it's going to be after Muslim rule is pretty firmly entrenched. And you have kind of different dynasties of Muslim Kailis. So the Maya kids are the the chaos who really expand Muslim rule, and establish government and power structures, and begins to facilitate some of this in a religious exchange. And then the boss said Caleb's, after that often continue this by bringing in various figures to court and having them translate things from Greek into Arabic so that they can read them.

Charles Kim 27:07

Well, I was I was just thinking that it's also probably interesting to note for those of us like me, who follow pretty strongly the Latin Western tradition, right? I mean, Aristotle doesn't come back to the west and force until the 12th and 13th centuries, much later. So So these conversations, these continuations of, of sort of classical philosophy are happening much earlier than that maybe they were, then they were in the same, the same emphasis as they come to be in Aquinas and, and you have st Victor in some of those other ones in the in the Latin West.

Laura Estes 27:45

Right. You sometimes hear you know, the the dark ages spoken about in Europe, whether or not there were dark ages, there, they're certainly not anything. Like the Dark Ages, in the early Islamic Caliphate. It's a time of really like flourishing in philosophical and mathematical and religious and astronomical and medical knowledge. There's really no break in that, in that tradition at all.

Charles Kim 28:16

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Laura Estes 30:43

Yeah. Well, I had never heard of Syriac Christianity until I started my master's program. But I guess sort of my origin story is that I was raised in and I'm still a member of churches of Christ, which are a very, very bookish tradition. There's a lot of emphasis on people knowing scripture, but then also sort of the historical context of the earliest church. And so I learned even though I was a biochemistry major, I learned Greek and Hebrew in undergrad so that I could read the scriptures and understand them better. So I thought, I now realize that scholars who know a lot more than I do about Greek and Hebrew have spent a lot of time translating the Bible. And while my knowledge of Greek and Hebrew is helpful, certainly not necessary, but that's what set me off on this, this path of studying obscure languages. So when I started my master's program, there was a professor there who specialized in Syriac, particularly Syriac versions of the New Testament, because we have some really important early Syriac manuscripts that are witnesses to the New Testament. So I learned Syriac, just because my adviser Jeff Childers, read Syriac, and in my early Christianity classes, because Jeff Childers taught those and he read Syriac, he made sure to emphasize the history not only of Western Christian churches, but also Eastern Christian churches, and not just like Greek Orthodox, but to recognize that there are Christians even further east, all the way into China, even during the first few centuries of Christianity. And I really, I really fell in love with these, these churches. And I've done a lot of thinking about why I enjoy learning about Syriac Christianity so much. And I think it does come back to my roots in churches of Christ. It's sort of a quirky tradition. It's it's somewhat evangelical in some ways, or it resembles evangelical churches in some ways. But one of the major differences is that churches of Christ tend to be extremely a political and have a strong pacifist streak and a sort of rejection of cooperation or participation with government. And so like there was no, there's no flag in my church growing up. I never heard any sermons that were like explicitly political. And I think that studying Syriac speaking Christians, I learned about Christians who would live living in places where they were never the religious or political majority of these Christians that lived in the Persian Empire, and then came under Muslim rule, and have never been able to wield a lot of power in a political arena. And I was really intrigued by them. And what that what that looked like, in this other this other context, as I was thinking about my own religious upbringing, so I think that's one of the reasons that I that I find these these questions, so interesting.

Charles Kim 34:10

Oh, that's yeah, I never, I guess I don't know so much about these. The Church, the Church of Christ, I got to know a few people in these denominations, mostly because for some reason SLU had a few different people in our graduate department who came from that, that movement. So it's become a little more familiar to me, but I didn't know about the past history. That's, that's interesting. And really good. Yeah.

Laura Estes 34:34

Well, and it's a it's it's a piece of the heritage that is certainly waning. And I think that troops of Christ are increasingly looking more and more like evangelical churches more broadly, but that is still like, deep down in the in the DNA, at least in certain certain corners of the EPA nomination.

Charles Kim 34:55

Well, one thing it strikes me just thinking about it, like you know, we because we live in this sort of globalizing and global world, you know, we we've reduced sort of dialects and languages and more and more people speak English or Chinese. And it's, it's, I feel like it's easier in those cases to, to sort of gloss over the differences or try to find a way to speak one sort of universal language. And it can have the sort of adverse effect of erasing the distinction and the uniqueness. And I wonder if there's something that can be said that sort of similar in like, the history of Christianity, like when we think about, like, the reason we characterize them as Syriac Christianity, Christians, and Syriac Christianity is because they speak this language, which was unknown, to a lot of and maybe most of Greek and Latin speaking, Christians have, let's say, a little further west. So it's, but it's sort of interesting and maybe important to have a language, which everyone can speak. And so you talk about, you know, there's still Syriac spoken as a liturgical language, but it seems like that can be pretty important in terms of, like, it's something to hold on to, and a way of, of even connecting all of those who are from maybe one sort of unique cultural tradition of Christianity.

Laura Estes 36:18

Yeah, I think that there's now so many Syriac speaking Christians, really just in the last couple of decades have left or sort of been forced to leave their, their traditional homelands and have resettled in places like the US, like the basically the leader of the Syrian Orthodox Church, I think lives in like New Jersey now. And then there's also a lot of Christians in scattered throughout Europe. And there's certainly a desire to preserve this ancient traditional worship, which is whose liturgy is just as ancient as, like the, like the Latin Roman, right, or more ancient than, than that, right? And keeping this as something that's like a touchstone while also translating it into a modern context and making their faith accessible to this new, you know, mostly Western Christian context where they're now living, to communicate with them. And there are a lot of Syriac speaking Christians who, in the last couple centuries, have engaged in a sustained dialogue, especially with a Roman Catholic Church, and have sometimes come into communion with the Roman Catholic Church and sometimes just established, meaningful inter religious dialogue. But it's a it's an ongoing process. And one that since I'm not a member of those churches, I'm not engaged in but I'm, I kind of like to watch on the wings to see how those those conversations take place. And what we can learn from these adherence of this, this really ancient faith that has the has roots in a much, much earlier time period than anything I can claim.

Charles Kim 38:17

Yeah, I think I've mentioned this before on the podcast, but I got I was able to go to a syriaca worship service in New Jersey when I lived there. And they, I guess, they you know, they were very proud of the fact that the the main part of the communion is still done in Aramaic. And so there's, you know, like that, that connection straight back to, to the, you know, first century so in some ways, older, I guess then the the Latin, right,

Laura Estes 38:45

right. There's a there's a Maronite cathedral here in St. Louis. So that Maronite Christians are Syriac speaking Christians who came into communion with the Roman Catholic Church, like several centuries ago, but they're mostly from like modern day Lebanon. And most of the like, traditional liturgy is now in Arabic, because that's the language that people spoke, but they still maintain the Syriac and certain parts of the, of the liturgy, which is it's interesting to see all of the, the translation and the the changes over time, and how you can have like English and Syriac and Arabic all living together in this this liturgy. That's in the middle of, of St. Louis, one of the most Catholic studies in the US.

Charles Kim 39:33

Yeah, that's pretty interesting. I'll have to check that church out. I've never been alright, so I'm gonna switch gears again a little bit. One of the things that I wanted to ask you a little bit about, which I'm not really sure how much this fits into your research, but, but like one of the things that was sort of interesting to me we've taught we've done a little bit of the persecutions talked a little bit about Phyllis perpetuate felicitous and And then just some of the general character of Christianity under the power of Rome, and what that looked like in Latin and Greek speaking communities. So what what was it like for some of these early Syriac Christians who were under, in some, in some cases under Persian rule and that kind of that there, the character of martyrdom there because as I recall from some of our classes, that was pretty different.

Laura Estes 40:25

Right? Yeah, martyrdom is, is definitely something that I have had touched on in the Islamic period. But I think that there's, you can see kind of a trajectory in the development of stories about martyrdom and persecution. So to go all the way back, like with perpetual infelicity, there's, the earliest Christians are perhaps, or at least the stories are told that they're persecuted by the Romans are the Byzantines. But then over time, as the Byzantine Empire becomes more and more Christian, there are fewer opportunities to become a murderer, or to be persecuted. But that's not the case in Persia, which is Zoroastrian. And there do seem to have been sporadic persecutions and martyrdoms of Christians in the Persian Empire, up until the fall of the Persian Empire, to the Islamic Caliphate. And so Christians who are living in the Byzantine Empire, where there's not a lot of opportunity for martyrdom anymore, often kind of look across the border. And imagine what life is like, in the Persian Empire. And so these stories about martyrdom, continue to flourish over there. About these these Christians that live in Persia, and a lot of times the stories, one of the most interesting differences, I think, it's something that my my friend, Tracy, who's also in the program, Tracy wrestle at St. Louis, and she's she's studying how conversations about virginity, and the importance of virginity and martyrdom really becomes paramount in these stories about Persian murders. There have always been virgin martyr acts, even in like Byzantine Christianity, but in a Zoroastrian context where marriage is an procreation is almost like religious imperative. Women who are consecrated virgins and who are murdered as part of that, that their commitment to their virginity, their commitment to their marriage to Jesus Christ plays a really, really important role in their martyrdom accounts. It's the reason why they're murdered. They're not even really martyred for their Christian faith. They're murdered because they refuse to get married. So that's an interesting trend. And then, to kind of bring it into the to the midpoint. Well, I'll stop here, and I'll let you.

Charles Kim 42:59

Oh, well, yeah. No, I mean, that was actually specifically. I mean, I just remember reading that and thinking like, because I think is it the martyrdom of Mary Martin, I think it's the murder of Mary where she they say, like, if you would just get married? We can we can, you know, like, it's it seemed like the, the way that the story is told the kind of ruler is like, I really don't want to do this. Can you just take a husband? Yeah. Yeah, it's like this very reluctant kind of persecution.

Laura Estes 43:27

Yeah, it's, it's an interesting trope, like the the reluctant reluctant persecutor. But it's one that that that comes up a lot, especially in Syriac Christian accounts. But yeah, the idea that if you would just get married, we wouldn't have to have to kill you. But since you insist on not getting married, we're going to be forced to it's very, very common in these in these stories.

Charles Kim 43:51

Which it's very different from like the sort of angry Emperor kind of thought that we tend to have in the West, it's like, they're just trying so hard to kill, although, as I think about it, I'm even Trajan in the letter to Trajan. It's, you know, there's sort of this, the same kind of reluctance. It's like, well, we don't really want to but if you're going to be a rabble rouser, I guess we should persecute you. So I guess there is actually even there really is a lot more reluctance than then maybe the popular conceptions would have you believe.

Laura Estes 44:23

Or even to go to the to the New Testament and you get this figure of Pilate who's very apathetic about Jesus and doesn't seem to be interested in executing him, but also doesn't want to upset the Jewish leaders. So yeah, that's definitely the that is one either either the persecutor is super angry and irrational and bitter and maybe has like a personal vendetta against the Christian or, like said they're sort of apathetic and unwilling to persecute them. Yeah.

Charles Kim 45:02

So you you I think you briefly mentioned that you spend, you know, because you do a little bit later than some of the Persian Persian martyrdom accounts. So is there a difference as we move into the Islamic kind of context? Or is that? Is that something you feel comfortable speaking to?

Laura Estes 45:19

Yeah, yeah. So, just as I mentioned how, like Byzantine Christians often like to look at East to Persian Christians to find some martyrs. Once Christianity is legal and becomes more and more common in Byzantine Empire, you also have Byzantine Christians looking to the Islamic Caliphate, for martyrs like kind of hoping to find stories there. But the reality of martyrdom, under Islamic rule is that there there actually weren't that many martyrdoms. So I think there's kind of a common narrative, that when the Arab conquests swept through Byzantine and Persian lands, there was this sort of convert or die mentality, which is just not supported by the evidence, there were certainly people that were killed. But this happened in the course of war. And for the most part, Muslim rulers, were quite content to let people keep, at least to let Christians and Jews keep their religious practices, so long as they weren't too obnoxious with them. But there were a couple of categories or a couple of crimes that could cause a Christian to be killed in a way that Christians would consider martyrdom. So the first is that it is illegal in the caliphate for a Muslim to convert to Christianity. And so if a Muslim converted to Christianity, they could technically be brought up on charges, and receive the death penalty and be martyred for that. And so we do get some stories of Muslims who become Christians and then are murdered. Another category would be if you were maybe the priest who, who converted that Muslim to Christianity. So if you were someone who was like consistently trying to seduce Muslims to become Christians, that could be punishable by death. And then a third category would be people who were extremely blasphemous about Muhammad. So you get a couple of stories where Christians who really, really, really want to become martyrs, go and say terrible, awful things about Muhammad very loudly in public to attract the attention of Muslim leaders so that they kind of have no force but have no choice but to bring charges against them, and murder them. But in terms of how often, any of these like death penalties were actually carried out, probably not terribly often. The ancient world didn't have a prosecutorial system like we do, like today. So like, in the US today, if you commit a crime, there's going to be police that are investigating and then like, your, your local prosecutor will bring charges against you in the ancient world, it didn't really happen that way. Someone had to, like your neighbor, or family member or someone, some interested party had to bring a case against you, in court. And so unless someone was personally very upset by you becoming a Christian, or had some sort of ulterior motive for bringing a charge against you in court, it was unlikely that you were going to be charged with any sort of capital crime. Interesting, at least in the early the first couple centuries of Islamic rule.

Charles Kim 48:58

Yeah, so yeah, so basically, I probably should put this at the beginning, but a lot of what we've been discussing can range anywhere from basically the fifth century to the maybe ninth and even 10th centuries. So we've we've discussed a broad swath of history in the in the last 50 minutes but but that's you know, it's like I say it's it's been it's been really interesting just because we haven't really done so much of this part of history and even you know, when I first took the courts with Dr. McVeigh are with with Dr. Wicks a little bit you know, never really considered what it looked like to what it looks like to Christians in the area for the rise of Islam like I've never thought about looking at that from Christians eyes. So Well, I think we're running short on time, and I think Charlie might be waking up here pretty soon. So I the last question that I wanted to ask is like, you know, from your from like, Your study of history and some of these things like what are what are what are the things that you think can be sort of takeaways for modern day Christians, broadly Protestant American Christians or whoever, you know, whoever might be listening to this in English? Like, what are you things, one of the things that you think that we can take away from a study of this kind of, of this period?

Laura Estes 50:21

Yeah. So I was 11, when the Twin Towers fell, so all of my, like young adulthood has been shaped by anxiety about Islam and the threat that Muslims might pose, to, to Christianity to the American way of life to the west, etc. And so it was, was really helpful for me to recognize that we today 21st century American Christians are not the first Christians to meet Muslims. There's a really rich legacy of Christian Muslim interaction that we can draw upon and look to, we don't have to reinvent the wheel when we are thinking about Islam. And although there's certainly going to be differences between, you know, Islam today and Islam, in, say, the seventh or eighth or ninth century, just like there's going to be differences between Christianity today and Christianity, then I think that there are some principles that that are there in common, and having examples of times and places where Christians and Muslims coexisted for the most part, rather peacefully, and found that their respective faiths could really sharpen the other, and help them to understand their own positions better and to articulate them more clearly, these are really helpful resources to draw on, as we're thinking about modern contemporary, Christian Muslim in a religious dialogue today.

Charles Kim 52:01

Hopeful Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. I guess we also took that course with eau de Dr. Renard. And he does a little bit of this kind of stuff as well. So there Yeah, I guess I've done this a few times. Now that think about it.

Laura Estes 52:16

keeps popping up. It's almost as though these are the two largest faiths in the world.

Charles Kim 52:28

Well, thank you very much, Laura, I really appreciate it and look forward to maybe having you on again, as you do some maybe finish your doctorate. I don't remember. I was trying to think you are you doing? What is the what is the title? Do you have a title for your dissertation? Like so what is that specific research that you're doing for that?

Laura Estes 52:49

Yeah. We'll say the working title is something like, you know, Christian portrayals of Muslims. But to kind of recall what I said the things I talked about before, I'm especially interested in the ways that Christians reused existing like tropes or stereotypes about other religious groups and applied them to Muslims. So the ways that they used stereotypes and tropes about Jews or about heretics about pagans and tried to kind of repackage them and make them apply to Muslims so that they could kind of understand Islam better, or easily dismiss it as something that they didn't have to worry about.

Charles Kim 53:29

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