ABSTRACT
In Friedrich Pfister's influential essay on the role of Alexander the Great in the religious tradition of the Greeks, Jews, Muslims and Christians the Syriac Alexander tradition occupies a special place. In Noldeke's opinion also an apocalyptic poem, attributed to Ephrem Syrus, was directly dependent on the Legend8. Pfister, however, did not exclude the possibility, expressed by W.Bousset and A. R. Anderson, that the poem's sections dealing with the Arab conquest were due to interpolations of the seventh century. The postulating of some older “common source”, which is supposedly lost today, does not always form a satisfactory explanation of the differences between these texts and especially not, if the authors should completely ignore the specific literary and historical conditions under which each of these works came into being, conditions which may have led to certain reinterpretations, adaptations and modifications of the existing tradition. The textual tradition almost unanimously attributes the Poem to the bishop of Serugh.
