The Arab Christian - A History in the Middle East.

• Author: Cook, Harry T.

The subtitle of this very helpful and enlightening work speaks volumes about the author's knowledge and intentions--"A history in (rather than of) the Middle East." Cragg's point is that Arab Christians and their presence in that part of the world is itself history--and of considerably more antiquity than the Arab Muslims and their history. Cragg does not mean by pointing out that obvious fact to denigrate Islam, but he does make it clear that Islam was a late-comer to the region by some six or so centuries. He also concedes that Islam fits the Middle Eastern Arab temperament better than Christianity, which itself is theologically and otherwise a mutant of its parent, Judaism, to which in many ways Islam is closer.

Acknowledging that there are two historically integral factors among Arabs--the Christian and Islamic, both with long and respected traditions--affords the possibility of explanation of the smoldering wreckage of Lebanon, for example. Cragg isolates and examines what, because it is so obvious, may have missed the more focused attention of scholars: Islam and Judaism posit the one God--the God that is One with an upper-case "O." Christianity, on the other hand, affected by Greek thought, sees the deity as diffused into two or even three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

As Cragg observes, "At stake was the very nature of Christianity as Hebraic in its messianic quality and Greco-Roman in its christological expression. Islam brought an imperious theism, reasserting a Semitic faith that had been not only subtilized but betrayed--as Islam saw it--by Christian theology." Cragg sees in the early development of Christian theology among Arabs a "de-Semiticized Jesus," one who was torn away from the prophetic tradition of Judaism (and later of Islam) into the world of Greek mythology. That, Cragg says, is in part what set Islam against Christianity.

Such a clear-headed historical analysis is exceedingly helpful to such folk as this reviewer who cherishes friends of both the Arab and Jewish, of both the Arab and non-Arab, of both the Arab/Islamic and Arab/Christian persuasions.

Cragg, an Anglican priest whose orthodoxy is nowhere in question, is willing in this work to point out that the Christian doctrine of the incarnation of God in Christ is "a travesty of the divine," in so far as Muslims are concerned. The transcendence of God (Allah) is of first importance to Arabs, Cragg says. Even, perhaps, to Arab Christians who proceed from...