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In the seventh and eighth centuries CE, Christians across the Mediterranean were experiencing the consequences of the rise of Islam and its expansion. With this challenge to Christian hegemony in the eastern Mediterranean, Christian writers began to ask about the effect of Islamic expansion on their own lives, practices, and worlds to come. In this article, I aim to contextualize two examples of how late ancient Christians questioned their ability to remain Christian in the face of both Islamic captivity and assimilation: 3 Apocryphal Apocalypse of John (3 Apocr. Apoc. John) and Anastasius of Sinai's (d. ca. 700) Questions and Answers (Questions). I divide this article into three sections. First, I place Christian anxiety over Islamic rule in conversation with Stephanie Camp's concept of the "geography of containment" to explore how some late ancient Christians understood themselves to be geographically and spatially limited by imprisonment or enslavement. I also provide an overview of recent scholarship on Christian responses to early Islamic expansion and anxiety over enslavement, imprisonment, captivity, and assimilation to Islam. Finally, I turn to 3 Apocr. Apoc. John and Anastasius's Questions to analyze how late ancient Christians turned to monks and patriarchs to find answers regarding the uncertainty of Christian identity under Islamic rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The depiction of the apocryphal infancy stories of Christ is an important subject in the history of western art, and yet it is rarely investigated. This paper reveals the unidentified subject of an early sixteenth-century drawing at Erlangen by an artist from Albrecht Altdorfer's circle. It represents the apocryphal stories of Christ gathering pools, animating clay birds, and reviving a fallen child named Zeno. In this paper, the context of this drawing is discussed, along with the history of depicted apocryphal infancy stories in German art and the reception of the Apocrypha in early sixteenth-century Germany around Altdorfer's circle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Research objective: The idea has already been expressed that the eschatological image of the Mongols of Russian annalists, recorded in the Tale of the Battle on the Kalka River of 1223, after some time, through the reports of Dominican Julian and testimony of Archbishop Peter at the Council of Lyons in 1245, influenced the apocalyptic character of the Mongols’ Great Western Campaign in Latin Europe. However, it remains unstu­died why the Russians turned to the terrifying eschatological apocrypha. In the presented study we are going to deal with this question. Research materials: The research is based on a wide range of published original and translated sources of the thirteenth–fourteenth centuries, written in Russian, Latin, French, Arabic, Persian, Syriac and Armenian, as well as the opinions of scholars expressed in literature on related fields. Results and the novelty of research: The appeal of Russian chroniclers to eschatological apocrypha is extremely rare. Before the Tale of the Battle on Kalka, the chronicler refers to the Revelations of Pseudo-Methodius only once, in a chronicle entry about the plundering of Kiev monasteries by the Cumans in 1096. Comparison of these messages, the historical background of the described events, evidence of literary texts, travel reports, chronicles and diplomatic material shows that the Russian writers took upon themselves the responsibility to make a comparison with the Last Times only when a complex of causes formed such a mosaic that it left no other explanation. At the same time, the most important role in the eschatological character of the Tale of the Battle on Kalka was not only caused by the bitterness of the defeat, the demise of many princes and warriors and the desolation of Novgorod Svyatopolchich, but also by the diplomatic rhetoric carried by the Mongol conquerors “from sea to sea”, the warlords of the khan and the people who came from the deep depths of Inner Asia to rule the whole world.