The Arabs possess in their ancient literature a body of narrative material well worth study and reading, which scholars have divided each according to his own inclination. I divide it as follows: chronicle tales, heroic tales, reli-gious tales, philological tales, and philosophical tales. These narra-tive kinds all fall under genuinely Arab storytelling. As for bor-rowed or adapted storytelling, the Arabs have two literary narrative monuments rich in material for lovers and connoisseurs of the story — I mean the Thousand and One Nights and Kalila and Dimna.

We do not intend, in this article, to expand upon any one of these nar-rative kinds, but rather to take up the religious tales: to touch briefly on religious storytelling and then to sketch a picture of Christ the Lord as he appears in these tales.

By religious storytelling we mean every tale whose essential subject is religion, and the messengers and the prophets. Certain men of letters in the Abbasid age took up the lives of these messengers and prophets for study, and recounted their history in their own narrative style, so that we have two valuable story-books: the Kitab al-'Ara'is of al-Tha'alibi (A.H. 427, or 437?) and the Qisas al-Anbiya' of al-Kisa'i (fifth century A.H.).

The Arabic sources name for us certain religious story-books other than those we have mentioned, such as the Tale of the People of the Cave; the Tale of the Prophet Samson, by al-Nisaburi; the Tale of our Lord Jesus and his Mother Mary; the Tale of our Lord Moses, who spoke with God, son of Amram; the Tale of our Lord Jacob, son of our Lord Abraham; and the Tale of our Lord Joseph the Truthful. But most of these tales have not come down to us, either because they were never published or because they are lost. The greatest of these religious story-books, however — the long-est, and the most closely bound to the art of religious storytelling — are the book of al-Tha'alibi and the book of al-Kisa'i.

In them the two authors treated the lives of all the prophets mentioned in the Holy Quran, and it is on them that we have relied in drawing this picture of Christ the Lord.

We must hasten to say that the Jesus of the storytellers is other

than the Jesus of the Gospel; for his mother Mary's pregnancy with him lasted eight months according to some, six months according to others, and three hours — or a single hour — according to a third group.

Jesus is born without a father, the angel Gabriel breathing into the neck-opening of Mary's shift. And the birth of Jesus was a great historical event that threw the devils into an uproar. They held meeting after meeting and consulted with Iblis, "seated upon his throne in a green abyss," telling him that a mighty thing had befallen the idols and bowed their heads down to the ground. Iblis set out to discover the matter and flew off, "and surveyed the whole earth in three hours, its east and its west, its land and its sea, the two horizons and the air," until he passed the place where Jesus was born — and behold, he found it surrounded by angels, keeping watch over him on every side. He returned defeated and told his company of the matter, saying: "No female womb ever held a child but with my knowledge, nor gave birth to one but that I was present at her side. And never was there a prophet harder upon me and upon you than this newborn."

The storytellers would have it that Jesus went to the writing-school to learn, when he was nine months old; and behold, the schoolmaster asks him to say: In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate — and behold, Jesus repeats the sentence word by word. The master takes courage and asks him to say "abjad," whereupon Jesus lifts his head and says to his teacher: "Do you know what abjad is?" And when the master could not find the correct answer, Jesus set about explaining to him the meaning of abjad hawwaz hutti sa'fas qarashat — an explanation containing a great deal of drollery, and containing, beyond that, much

of the storytellers' naïveté and their want of scholarly and historical scrutiny.

The Wonders of Christ the Lord

The Holy Quran affirmed the won-ders of Christ, or some of them, as they appear in the Gospels (1); why then should the transmitters of these religious tales not affirm them, when such storytelling was originally composed to expound the Quran? Indeed, why should they not go further, and attribute to Christ the Lord wonders and miracles mentioned neither in the Gospels nor in the Quran? Thus Jesus was able to know the characteristics of a certain king's son before he was born, saying to his father: "In your wife's womb is a beautiful boy; one of his ears is longer than the other; on his chest is a black mole, and on his belly a white beauty-mark... etc...."

And he can change the colors of dyes whenever he wishes into whatever he wishes... exactly like the sorcerers!!

And in confirmation that he raises from the dead, he raised Shem son of Noah, who leapt up from his grave — though four thousand years had passed since his death!! And Shem spoke after his rising from the dead

(1) The Quran — Surat Al 'Imran, verses 28, 29, and 40; Surat al-Ma'ida, verse 109; Surat al-Zukhruf, verses 62 and 63.

and said: "When I heard the cry of Jesus I thought it was the cry of the Resurrection, and my head and my beard turned white from the terror of it."

These miracles are adapted, for the most part, from the Gospels, or from Jewish transmitters who had embraced Islam and had some acquaintance with the Christian and Jewish religions; and in some of these miracles — such as the miracle of raising Lazarus from the tomb — there is a great resemblance, in the telling, to the Gospel account, which shows