Ближний Восток и его соседи

g 119 h Arabs and Arabia in the Byzantine Sources: Hagiographical Testimonies challenges that Jews, heretics, and Saracens — now regularly described as demons — posed for Christians in this era”. 20 The Passio of Bacchos the Younger belongs to the Passions of the Abbasid period. The hero of the Passio was a young man, converted to Islam with his father and the whole family, seven children and the wife. With the support of his mother, the young Bacchos returned to Christianity and convinced his mother and brothers to return as well. He was decapitated on 16 December (787 or 788). His Passio must have been written in the ninth century. 21 The Passio of Bacchos is important from different aspects: It is one of the rare existing testimonies, form the so-called ‘darks ages” which was composed in Constantinople to celebrate a Saint who lived in Palestine; the region where the events are deployed in conjunction with its composition in the capital produce some features which are not common in other works of the iconoclast era. In fact it reflects two different realities: one in Palestine, when the Christians where living already for a century under Muslim domination and the confrontation with Islam and the second the situation in the capital, with the introduction of a new state doctrine, the Iconoclasm. The author strove to create a balance between these two different realities and antagonisms. 22 The Life of Gregory Decapolites , composed by Ignatios the Deacon and included in our data base, represents a different kind of hagiographical literature. 23 Ignatios’ works represent again the hagiographical genre and are composed during iconoclast times; “in spite some attempts to elucidate it”, Ignatios’ “biography remains something of a puzzle”. 24 Gregory, whose life 20 Caner, Ibid.; B. Flusin, “Démons et sarrasins”, TM 11(1991), 381–409; Hoyland, Seeing Is- lam , 99–103; for the Christian reaction to ‘Abd al-Malik’s policies more generally, see Hoyland, Ibid., 545–59; G. J. Reinink, “Following the Doctrine of the Demons: Early Christian Fear of Conversion to Islam”, in: Cultures of Conversions , ed. W. J. van Bekkum, J. N. Bremmer, and A. L. Molendijk, Louvain 2006, 127–38. 21 BHG 209–209b; Synax . CP 310–12. On the date of its composition extensively, André Binggeli et Stéphanos Efthymiadis, Les nouveaux martyrs à Byzance, I, 46–62; Detoraki, Greek Passions , 83. 22 André Binggeli et Stéphanos Efthymiadis, Les nouveaux martyrs à Byzance, I, 8f. 23 BHG 711. Cf. St. Efthymiadis , ed., The Life of Patriarch Tarasios (BHG 1698), Introduc- tion, Text Translation and Commentary ( Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Monographs 4), Birmingham 1998, 37ff. Some aspects of Ignatios’ works are discussed by St. Lampakis, “Παρα- τηρήσεις σχετικὰ μὲ τὶς ὄψεις τῆς ἀρχαιογνωσίας στὸ ἔργο τοῦ Ἰγνατίου Διακόνου”, in: The Dark Centuries of Byzantium, ed. E. Kountoura-Galake, Athens 2001, 109–132. On the transmission of such texts and their significance for the local Christian communities, cf. the important contribution by Ch. Sahner, “Martyrdom and Conversion”, in: Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History , vol 15. Thematic Essays (600–1600), eds. Douglas Pratt, Charles Tieszen, David Thomas, John Chesworth, Leiden-Boston, 2020, 389–412, about Bacchos 408. 24 C. Mango and St. Efthymiadis, eds., The Correspondence of Ignatios the Diacon, Text, Transla- tion and Commentary (CFHB 39), Washington D. C., 1997, 3; Ignatios Deacon, Life of Gregorios