Gregentios in the Land of the Homerties

The paper concentrates on the last section (ch. 9) of the Greek Life of St Gregentios, bishop of Zafar (nowadays Yemen), in the first half of the 6th century A.D., and tryes elucidate the historical parts of this middle-Byzantine narrative, and to understand it within the broader context of the dossier (Life, Laws of the Homerites and Disputation with the Jew Herban) bound with the saint’s name and featuring a sort of continuation to the well-known “saga” of the Martyrs of Najran. Such questions are dealt with as Gregent­ios’ identity, his life’s chronlogy, his mis­sion to South Arabia, the consecration of several churches by him together with the Ethiopian king Kaleb, and then his activity as a bishop at the side of Abramios, the newly appointed Ethiopian viceroy, in restoring Christian orthodoxy all over the country. The account on the Ethiopian expedition and its aftermath contains the only clear historical information scattered through the entire dossier. A few at least of the sources used here by the author seem to have escaped the arbitrariness of further elaborations, and hark definitely back to local sixth-century materials through an Arabic intermediary ultimately familiar with the eighth/ninth-century Palestinian or Sinaitic milieus.