Obscure Text, Illuminating Conversation: Reading the Martyrdom of 'Abd Al-Masih (Qays Al-Ghassani)‪.‬

Dedication My offering to this Festschrift in honor of Ralph Klein may be perceived by some readers as a bit obscure. It's a story about a nearly forgotten ninth-century martyr, preserved in the Arabic language in a few leaves of a tenth-century manuscript belonging to the Monastery of St. Catherine at Mount Sinai. It is not a text on which one will preach or from which one will learn the fundamentals of Lutheran theology. One of my tasks, then, is to make an argument for how it fits into a volume dedicated to "Scholarship in the Service of the Church."