Abraham Mitrie Rihbany

Abraham Dimitri Rihbany known as Abraham Mitrie Rihbany (Arabic: أبراهام متري الرحباني; sometimes spelled Rahbany; August 27, 1869 – July 5, 1944) was an American theologian, philologist and historian of Lebanese descent.

"In debt and nearly penniless on his arrival in New York, he went on to become a respected clergyman and nationally recognized community leader." His best-known book, The Syrian Christ (1916), was highly influential in its time in explaining the cultural background to some situations and modes of expression to be found in the Gospels. It is still cited in both Biblical Studies and Sociolinguistics.

Life and Works

Rihbany was born in Shweir, in the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate to a Greek Orthodox family. At 9 years old he was apprenticed to a stone-cutter, but at the age of 17 he managed to attend the American Presbyterian School in Souk El Gharb, catching up on his secondary education in two years of study and briefly becoming a teacher himself. It was here that he became a Presbyterian, in spite of his family's long adherence to the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch.

In 1891 Rihbany emigrated to the United States, in the first instance to New York City, where he briefly edited Kawkab Amirka (The Star of America), North America's first Arabic-language newspaper. He left New York in 1893 and travelled through the Mid-West, funding short stints of study at Manchester University (Indiana) (1894) and Ohio Wesleyan University (1895–96) by giving lecture tours to churches on the culture of the Holy Land as a key to the Scriptures. He indefinitely postponed his studies after being offered a position as a resident Congregationalist minister in Morenci, Michigan. Thereafter he served as minister for two years in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, and for nine in Toledo, Ohio, ending up at the Church of the Disciples, a Unitarian church in Boston, Massachusetts.