A NEW PERIODIZATION | 81parently does not indicate loss of text. (The sole surviving manuscript, in the
British Library, may be Elias’s own copy.^93 ) Then the chronicle proper begins
with King Abgar of Edessa, Tiberius, Pontius Pilate, and Christ, initiating a
sequence extending down to the year 1018. And if this account of the mono-
theist First Millennium—featuring Rome and the Caliphate on a roughly
equal footing, and Iran too albeit more summarily—had not actually been
produced by a Church of the East prelate living in Nisibis soon after the year
1000, the modern student could still have collaged it together from the
Greek ecclesiastical historians plus Ibn Ishāq and Tabarī, by appealing to the
example of Evagrius who adumbrated—even if he did not execute—just
such a composite and, indeed, potentially universal history based on the
works of a catholic selection of his predecessors.^94
One can see now why Theophanes, the only East Roman historian who
provided a serious narrative of the Umayyad and early Abbasid Caliphates,
got it from a Syriac source—apparently the early Abbasid Chalcedonian
polymath Theophilus of Edessa, whose chronicle recorded events in both the
East Roman Empire and the Caliphate.^95 One ought in fairness, though, to
underline that Elias was a simple chronicler not an ecclesiastical historian, far
less an historian of religions. Therefore he was happily free of the need to
offer a coherent account of the working of divine providence through the
prophets. Not that it would have been easy for a bishop under Islam to write
such a book, and not just because of Muhammad. The task was made even
harder because unlike Eusebius, who had before him in the Gospels and Acts
a detailed narrative of beginnings to build on, Muslims like Ibn Ishāq and in
his wake Tabarī had to fit an almost entirely nonnarrative scripture round a
massive, ahistorically organized stock of traditions about the events of Mu-
hammad’s life. On the other hand, Ibn Ishāq was writing much closer in time
to Muhammad’s life than Eusebius was to Jesus’s, and could feel surer of his
sources, some of which were no doubt oral. Eusebius had to reconstruct the
whole transmission of narrative and authority—a process beset by error and
heresy—from the crucifixion to his own day, three whole centuries.
Thanks not least, though, to their respect for scriptural issues—the New
Testament canon for Eusebius, the historicity of the Qurʾān for Ibn Ishāq,
and commentary on the Qurʾān for Tabarī—these historians managed to
produce narratives that became authoritative in their communities and were
therefore preserved. The separation and hostility of the communities has
meant not only that their different versions of prophetic history have never
been reconciled, but also that even their either more or less “secular” histori-
ans have scarcely been compared. In the present, programmatic book all that
93 Pinggéra, in Wallraff (ed.), Julius Africanus [3:63] 276, 282.
94 Van Nuffelen in Liddel and Fears (eds), Historiae mundi [3:47] 168–70.
95 R. G. Hoyland, Theophilus of Edessa’s Chronicle (Liverpool 2011).