Resumen de The History of the 'Slave of Christ': From Jewish Child to Christian Martyr by Aaron Michael Butts, Simcha Gross (review)
In addition to an exhaustively footnoted critical edition and translation of the two streams of the Syriac text—both the early version and a later, but regrettably fragmentary, literary and theological elaboration—the authors provide the reader with an eighty-page introduction in which they discuss, among many other things, the development of the text, its literary devices and use of the Old Testament, and its connection to related literature in Greek and Latin, such as the legend of the Judenknaben recounted by Gregory of Tours, Evagrius Scholasticus, and others. When ʿAb̠da da-Mšiḥā hears the story of Babylas from the other Christian boys (they had heard it from their parents, who, in turn, had heard it when it was recited at a nearby monastery on the martyr’s feast day), the young convert prays that he, too, “might be worthy of the crown of confession” (104). According to the text, a group of Arab merchants first discovered the shepherd boy’s body, thanks to the rays of light streaming from it, and took it back with them to the West where they established a shrine in his honor.
