The connection between hagiographical and biographical texts and projects of communal self-fashioning is by now well known and well attested. When, for example, we read the accounts of Ahmad b. Hanbal's life authored by the scholar's son 'Abd Allah and cousin Hanbal b. Ishaq b. Hanbal, or the narratives of Ahmad's deeds and character that appear in later tabaqat texts, it seems clear that these texts were constructed in part for the purpose of defining the effective boundaries, both social and intellectual, that came to enclose the Hanbali madhhab in the years and decades after Ibn Hanbal's death in 241/855. Similarly, in the Christian bishop Thomas of Marga's history of the monastery at Beth 'Abhe near Mosul and certain superstar ascetics from neighboring parts of Mesopotamia, the protagonists of the texts are recollected, evoked and deployed by the author in service of a memory project whose aim is to draw into a single, integrated narrative of descent and inheritance not only the monks of Beth 'Abhe, but ascetic personalities with no formal affiliation with the monastery going back to the fourth century CE as part of an ongoing project whose object was to emplot current theological and Christological positionings within a larger, primordialist narrative of Christian and monastic origins. What is fascinating, however, is the shared strategies and resources with which members of the very early Hanbali community undertook their commemoration of their communal founder, and those with which Thomas narrated his own community's foundational heroes. While one might attribute this to "borrowings" or "cultural influences," I will argue that this phenomenon might much more productively be understood as the result of a seldom noted but crucially important cultural koine shared among Abbasid Christians and Muslims, and will advance a preliminary explanation for the origin of this multi-communal idiom for commemoration and veneration.