ABSTRACT
This paper explores the special attractions and challenges that Mount Sinai's Old Testament associations presented to Christian imaginations in Late Antiquity. Compared to other late antique holy land sites, Mount Sinai has received little attention either as an early pilgrimage destination or as the background for an evolving hagiographic tradition. l Perhaps the most interesting testament to both is the Narrationes, traditionally ascribed to the monk Nilus of Ancyra (t c.430).2 This first-person narrative purports to be an autobiographical account of a father who travels with his son, Theodoulos, to the Sinai in search of tranquility with monks living below God's Mountain. They find mayhem instead: a week after Epiphany, 'barbarian' nomads raid the settlement, kill many monks, and take Theodoulos captive, to be sacrificed to their own god, the Morning Star, at dawn. The father escapes, but his experience makes him question God's failure to act, question divine Providence, and question the point of pursuing righteousness at all. The rest of the narrative tells how father and son reunite. Having slept past the time for sacrifice, Theodoulos's nomadic captors turn north to sell him in the settled regions of the Negev. Failing to attract a buyer in a village called Sobata, they sell him as a slave to the bishop of the city of Elusa. Here his father eventually finds him. The story ends as the two set off to fulfill vows of ascetic
1 An exception is R. Solzbacher, Monche, Pilger und Sarazenen. Studien zum Friihchristentum auf der siidlichen Sinaihalbinsel, Altenberge: Telos, 1989; see also P. Maraval, Lieux saints et pelerinages d'Orient, Paris: Cerf, 1985, pp. 119-20. The literary sources are few and (like the Narrationes) problematic. See, besides Solzbacher (1989), R. Devreesse, 'Le christianisme dans la peninsule sinai'tique, des origines a l'arrivee des Musulmans', Revue biblique 49, (1940), pp. 205-23; and P.-L. Gatier, 'Les traditions et l'histoire du Sinai' du IVe au VIle siecle', in T. Fahd (ed.), L'Arabie prtiislamique et son environnement historique et culturel, Leiden: Brill, 1989, pp. 499-523.
