of the Alexander romance called the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius was indeed written as a response to the Muslim invasions and was falsely attributed to St Methodius (?–311 AD); this Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius equated the evil nations of Gog and Magog with the Muslim invaders and shaped the eschatological imagination of Christendom for centuries. The Syriac Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius shows obvious borrowing from the Syriac Legend for its account concerning the barrier against Gog and Magog (especially its description of the Huns as chiefs of thirty escatalogical nations), while the Syriac Apocalypse of Pseudo-Ephrem (dated between 642 and 683 CE) shows borrowing from both the Syriac Legend and the Alexander Poem (i.e. the Metrical Homily). The manuscripts also contain evidence of lost texts. For example, there is some evidence of a lost pre-Islamic Arabic version of the translation that is thought to have been an intermediary between the Syriac Christian and the Ethiopic Christian translations. There is also evidence that the Syriac translation was not directly based on the Greek recensions but was based on a lost Pahlavi (Middle Persian) intermediary. One scholar (Kevin van Bladel) who finds striking similarities between the Quranic verses 18:83-102 and the Syriac legend in support of Emperor Heraclius, dates the work to 629-630 AD or before Muhammad's death, not 629-636 AD. The Syriac legend matches many details in the five parts of the verses (Alexander being the two horned one, journey to edge of the world, punishment of evil doers, Gog and Magog, etc.) and also "makes some sense of the cryptic Qur'anic story" being 21 pages (in one edition) not 20 verses. (The sun sets in a fetid poisonous ocean—not spring—surrounding the earth, Gog and Magog are Huns, etc.) Van Bladel finds it more plausible that the Syriac legend is the source of the Quranic verses than vice versa, both for linguistic reasons as well as because the Syriac legend was written before the Arab conquests when the Hijazi Muslim community was still remote from and little known to the Mesopotamian site of the legend's creation, whereas Arabs worked as troops and scouts for during the Byzantine–Sasanian War of 602–628 and could have been exposed to the legend. Stephen Shoemaker, commenting on the views of Reinink, van Bladel, and Tesei, argues it more likely that most of the text of the current version of the legend existed in a sixth century version, given the