Abstract
Arab Christianity has a long history, longer than the history Christianity has in many European countries, a fact we seem to have forgotten in the west. According to Acts 2:11, some Arabs together with several other people of different nationalities were present when Peter gave his address to the crowd on the first Pentecost day after the ascension of Christ. Even if this piece of information is not historically true, there is no doubt that Christianity spread to the Arab world fairly early, probably in the beginning with some Judaeo-Christians, who moved to Arabia, and later on as a result of a mission to the gentiles. Already in antiquity the Bible was translated from the Greek Septuagint into Arabic.
Highlights
Arab Christianity has a long history, longer than the history Christianity has in many European countries, a fact we seem to have forgotten in the west
The place names on the map are written in Greek and designate towns and holy places known from the Bible and early Christian sources
If you ask a Palestinian Christian, when her or his family converted to Christianity, thinking that they had been Muslims earlier, the normal answer will be, that they became Christians two thousand years ago. They subscribe to the idea that their forefathers were among the first generation of Christians. Whether this is true for that specific family or not is impossible to prove, but there is a nucleus of truth in the statement
Summary
One of the archaeological findings, which shows the extension of Christianity in part of what we today call the Arab world, is the famous map in the orthodox St George’s church in Madeba in Jordan (Piccirillo 1997:26-34, 8195). It is an important point that the map is found in a room, where a Christian congregation of today holds services. It is not a museum and the map is not an exhibited item; the map is still where it was found, and serves as the floor in a church room, and a Bible and liturgy books and other holy things are found in the room. There is probably no direct historical line from the map to the present church, but the presence of the antique map in a modern church is an image of Christianity and now. Christianity was present in these countries before Islam came into being, and there is a line from to now. It is not the aim of this paper to reconstruct this line, but just to stress that Christianity in the Arab countries has as long a history as Christianity itself
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