EXEGETICAL CULTURES 2 | 187the Qurʾān their own edifice of interpretation, expressed in a distinctive Ara-
bic vocabulary. Recent research on Theodore and other eighth- and ninth-
century writers has shown something unexpected, anticipating developments
we already noticed among ninth- and tenth- century Jewish intellectuals:
namely that Christian theologians came over time, not merely to offer a gen-
eral response to the challenge presented by Islam, but actually to express even
such distinctively Christian doctrines as Trinitarianism in the concepts and
language of the Qurʾān and Qurʾanic scholarship.^110 They did this in part sim-
ply because that was the air they breathed, but also to facilitate dialogue and
polemic, for between “oneness” and “associating (partners with God)” (tawhīd
and shirk) the Qurʾān offered no room for maneuver, and three is not one.
Note the attention they give to those parts of the Old Testament—the Proph-
ets and Psalms—to which the Qurʾān also frequently alludes, and which had
long been debated by Christian and Jewish exegetes from their own angles.
There was no end to the fertility of what started out as the Jewish Bible.
Given the durability of Islam, and the alienation brought about by the
failure of almost all the other Christian traditions to engage with it, in both
East and West, it is perverse to ignore this evidence of patristic Arabic Chris-
tianity’s (and Judaism’s) adaptability under Muslim influence. It is germane
to the periodization issue too, since it makes the full maturation of patristics
in the light of Islam virtually coterminous with the First Millennium. The
recognition by mainstream patristics of Muslim- influenced Arabic patristics
as an authentic mode of expression for a Christian mind would be an example
of late Antiquity taking on new dimensions when viewed through the First
Millennium lens, from the multicultural and multiconfessional perspective
of the Caliphate.^111 And finally it is germane to the present- day dialogue of
religions, and the need to build on what Judaism, Christianity and Islam hold
in common, most of all the oneness of God, mediated to mankind (but also
tragically obscured) through the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation.
This open- minded, even risk- taking aspect of Christianity’s patristic phase
can be observed earlier, in the willingness of Origen, or the fourth- century
Cappadocian Fathers, or Ps.- Dionysius the Areopagite, to engage with Pla-
tonism.^112 But, as we have noticed, there were other, equally patristic tenden-
110 S. H. Griffith, “Faith and reason in Christian kalām,” in S. K. Samir and J. S. Nielsen (eds),
Christian Arabic apologetics during the Abbasid period (750–1258) (Leiden 1994) 1–43; Griffith, Church
in the shadow of the Mosque [5:119] 53–57, 60–63, 93–99; R. G. Hoyland, “St Andrews MS. 14 and the
earliest Arabic Summa theologiae,” in van Bekkum and others (eds), Syriac polemics [5:138] 159–72; D.
Bertaina, Christian and Muslim dialogues (Piscataway, N.J. 2011) 212- 28.
111 Compare an interesting recent attempt to contextualize Maimonides (d. 1204) against an Is-
lamic rather than an exclusively Jewish background: S. Stroumsa, Maimonides [4:14].
112 Thus betraying the “real essence” of Plato, complains N. Siniossoglou, “Plato Christianus: The
colonization of Plato and identity formation in late Antiquity,” in P. Hummel (ed.), Pseudologie (Paris
2010) 145–76. This is a diatribe against “the fanciful, dominant and convenient line of argument adopted