Philip the Arab and Christianity that appear—save for one reference to Ishmael—figure in the political history of the first three centuries of the Christian era. To Eusebius, the Saracens of the 4th century are direct-line descendants of the biblical Ishmaelites, descendants of the handmaid, Hagar, and the patriarch, Abraham. They are thus outcasts, beyond God's Covenant with the favored son of Abraham, Isaac. The twin images of the Ishmaelite and the Saracen—outcasts and "latrones", raiders of the frontiers—reinforce each other and give Eusebius' portrait of the Arab nation an unhappy color. He may have been reluctant to associate the first Christian emperor with a people
Son of the Morning (novel) L. Dean commented that the narrator's shifting voice allowed Nathan to "write both an objective account of his past and the past surrounding him, much as the Biblical prophets wrote about Christ, and a personal, extended prayer to an absent God." Son of the Morning (novel) Son of the Morning is a 1978 novel by American author Joyce Carol Oates. The book was first published on August 1, 1978 through Vanguard Press. Elsa Vickery, daughter of agnostic small town doctor and his pious wife, is gang-raped at the age of seventeen. Her father cannot obtain legal abortion. The boy Nathan