really meant, to escape from his former associations and determine his future policy. He mentions his visit not as a proof of his activity, but as helping to make clear the independence of his Christian convictions. "I conferred not with flesh and blood; neither went I up to Jerusalem, but I went away into Arabia; and returned again to Damascus."
The Apostle Bartholomew is said in tradition to have preached in India, and it is fairly generally conceded that India in these traditions means, or at any rate includes, the south of Arabia. But the traditions themselves are regarded as too legendary to be accepted as furnishing any historical information that can be relied on.

It would, however, take too long to examine the various notices of Arab Christians and of Christianity within the bounds of Arabia in the early centuries. The sum of the matter seems to be that the Church gained no really independent footing amongst the Arabs at all. What Harnack says of the first three centuries remains on the whole true down to the time of Muhammad "Churches are only to be sought in those districts in which there were citizens of mixed Arab, Greek, and Roman population, where a higher form of culture was to be found".1 Pere Cheikho has lately undertaken to show that practically the whole of Arabia was Christian in pre-Muhammadan times, and has collected a multitude of references from pre-Islamic poets and statements from Christian and Moslem historians to show that many tribes were Christianised. He

has succeeded in bringing together an impressive amount of material. But it does not suffice to show that Christianity had any deep hold upon the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula proper. Harnack's statement, that "there are no pre-Muhammadan translations of the Bible into Arabic—and that is strong proof that Christianity had not found any footing at all among the Arabs in early times", is fairly conclusive. It is borne out by study of conditions at a later period. The language of Christianity in the East was Aramaic (or Syriac), and there is no evidence of a Christian Church using Arabic in its services. The nature of Muhammad's own mission, which was to be the Prophet of his own people, and to give to them a Holy Book in their own language, is confirmation of that point of view. What we have to do with is not a native Arab Church, or any deep impression of Christianity upon the Arab tribes, though some of them were Christian in name, but rather with Christian Churches on the confines of Arabia exercising upon the ruder inhabitants of the Peninsula a certain amount of influence and attraction. In this way a certain knowledge of Christianity must have been diffused throughout Arabia.

This influence of Christianity upon Arabia came principally from three centres, viz. Syria in the north-west, Mesopotamia in the north-east, and Abyssinia in the west, which may have exercised its influence directly across the Red Sea, but did so principally, as we shall see, by way of Yaman in the south, which was for a time subject to an Abyssinian dynasty.