[1][2] Jacob's letter may be contextualized by the interest of the Miaphysite Church in the kingdoms of Pre-Islamic Arabia[3] and also reflects the wide and non-elite readership that his writings would sometimes draw.
The letter opens, in the salutation, as follows:[7]To the chosen athletes, the friends of true victory, the astonishing and the powerful, the servants of God, the truly faithful, our Christian brothers, and the tested confessors, in the city of Najran of the Himyarites, the lowly Jacob, who is from the region of Edessa, the faithful city of the Romans, in Jesus, the light of the gentiles and the hope of the worlds, and the judge of the dead and the living: Peace.Jacob rejoices in the faith of the Christians in Himyar and informs them that the Church is praying for them; for the victory of Christ and the trampling of Satan.
Jacob asserts equality between the Father and the Son, and then describes the incarnation of Jesus and his virgin birth.
In turn, the semantic and stylistic form of how Jacob expressed his and the Christology of the Christians of Najran in this letter looks as though it was engaged with (in terms of being addressed and/or responded to) in Surat Al-Ikhlas of the Quran.
The traditional date comes from a well-known text known as the Martyrdom of Arethas, which places the persecution as beginning in the year 835 according to the Seleucid era, which corresponds to 523 AD.