ABSTRACT
It is well known that Christian hagiography, as a literary genre, has a checkered history; over the centuries it has served many purposes, well beyond the simple one of recounting the facts of the life and exploits of saints and martyrs. The real heroes of the piece are the monastery of Mar Saba, the see of Jerusalem, with its holy places, and the desert monks, who are presented as the guarantors of Christian orthodoxy in the Islamic milieu. In the Christian communities of the early Islamic period, hagiography readily came to serve the purposes of apologetics and interreligious polemic. The vita of Theodore of Edessa survives in whole or in part in the principal languages of the "Melkite" church of the early Islamic period: Greek, Arabic, and Georgian. A great concern of A. A, Vasiliev in his important study of "The Life of St. Theodore of Edessa" in the early 1940s was to establish the basic historicity of the narrative.
