ABSTRACT
On 24 December 633, at a monastery outside Damascus, a sumptuous Gospel manuscript was completed, miraculously to survive the turbulent events of the next few years, to give us some hint of the lack of awareness of the storm clouds over the horizon. On Christmas day, a year later, the Patriarch Sophronios preached in Jerusalem, and saw in the Arab occupation of Bethlehem a punishment for sin that could be easily remedied. An anecdote concerns precisely this transfer of power, from the Persians to the Arabs; it also says something of the attitudes of Christian Arabs. The term Tayy itself has no religious overtones, and could imply pagan, Christian or Muslim. Eschatological speculations seem indeed to have been rife in the late seventh and early eighth cen-turies, focusing on the recapture of Jerusalem among Christians, and on the destruction of Constantinople among Muslims and Jews.
