when did the bible become arabic

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/2212943X-20130102

Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 1 (2013) 7–23 brill.com/ihiw

When Did the Bible Become an Arabic Scripture?

Sidney H. GriffithThe Catholic University of America

[email protected]

AbstractWhile the circumstances were favorable to the translation of the Jewish and Christianscriptures into Arabic in writing in pre-Islamic times, there is no compelling evidenceto support the conclusion that such a translation was ever made. Rather the evidenceof the Qurʾān along with other considerations suggests that prior to the rise of Islam,Jewish and Christian scripture texts circulated orally in Arabic and that the earliestArabic translations in writing appeared first among the Christians in the monasticcommunities in Palestine and probably in part at least in response to the appearanceof the Arabic Qurʾān itself in writing at the turn of the seventh and eighth centuries.

KeywordsBible, Qurʾān, Arabic script, oral transmission, translation, Palestine

The study of the Bible in Arabic is in its infancy. There are hundreds of extantmanuscripts containing portions of the Bible in Arabic translations producedby Jews and Christians in early Islamic times and well into the western MiddleAges. Unfortunately, they have been of little interest to biblical scholars, mostof whom are of the opinion that the Arabic versions are too late to reward theattention of those interested in the history of the text of the Hebrew Bible or ofthe Greek New Testament. One nineteenth-century scholar is even quoted ashaving said, “There are more Arabic versions of the Gospels than can be wel-come to theologians, pressed as they are with other urgent tasks.”1Happily, thisdisinterest among scholars has begun to wane in recent years, if not yet amongtheologians, at least among those who are interested in Judaeo-Arabic and so-called “Christian Arabic”, the stages of Middle Arabic appearing textually inearly Islamic times that JoshuaBlau andhis colleagueshave studied sohelpfullysince the mid-1960’s.2 During the ensuing fifty years a number of scholars havepublished detailed studies of the texts of Arabic translations of various books

1) De Lagarde,Die vier Evangelien arabisch, p. iii, as paraphrased inMetzger, Early Versions, p. 260.2) One thinks in particular of Blau, Emergence and Linguistic Background; idem, Grammar ofChristian Arabic.

8 Sidney H. Griffith / Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 1 (2013) 7–23

of the Bible, including not just the canonical books but of a number of apoc-ryphal and pseudepigraphical works as well.3 And it is against the backgroundof these accomplishments that in the present essay I wish to call attention to abroader range of related areas of interest, beyond the strictly philological, thatonemight think of as the historical horizonwithin which the study of the Biblein Arabic finds an immediate relevance.The broader areas of interest for the historian of Judaism and Christianity

within the historical horizon of the origins and early efflorescence of Islam areparticularly the following: the circulation of the Bible in Arabic in pre-Islamicandpre-Qurʾānic times; the Bible in theQurʾān; the earliestwritten translationsof biblical books intoArabicbynewlyArabic-speaking Jews andChristians afterthe rise of Islam; and finally the use of the Bible in Arabic among the Jews,Christians, and Muslims in the World of Islam up to ʿAbbāsid times.Unlike the historian of Islam who looks back to pre-Islamic history from

the vantage point of early Islam itself, the student of the history of Jews andChristians and their scriptures in Late Antiquity follows their progress into theArabic-speaking milieu from before the first third of the seventh century ce,that is to say from before the appearance of the Arabic Qurʾān and the rise ofIslam. He looks for the earliest evidences of Arabic-speaking Jews and Chris-tians in the early seventh century first on theperiphery ofCentralArabia,wherehe finds abundant traces of their presence all around the heartland,4 and finallyhe looks for them in the Ḥijāz, in the environs of Mecca and Medina. But theevidence there is meager, except for the Arabic Qurʾān itself (if one may stillthink of the 7th century Ḥijāz as its homeland), the so-called “Constitution ofMedina”, and a few references preserved in the earlyMuslim ḥadīth collections.The matter calls for some careful hermeneutical consideration, especially inthe matter of the Christian presence in pre-Islamic Arabia. And because ourconcern is with the Bible in Arabic, we look first for how it was present amongArabic-speaking Jews and Christians prior to the rise of Islam.

The Bible in Pre-Islamic Arabia

Even a brief perusal of the Arabic Qurʾān will suffice to convince even the first-time reader that the Muslim scripture presumes a high degree of awarenessof biblical narratives and their dramatis personae on the part of its audience,

3) Adam C. McCollum and Ronny Vollandt are composing a comprehensive bibliography on theBible in Arabic that is immensely helpful, The Bible in Arabic: An Annotated Bibliography, to bepublished in the series “Biblia Arabica: Texts and Studies” (Leiden: Brill).4) See in this connection Hainthaler, Christliche Araber vor dem Islam; Beaucamp et al. (eds), Juifset chrétiens en Arabie.

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from both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament. What is more,there are numerous echoes in the Qurʾān of non-biblical, Jewish and Chris-tian traditions. For more than a century now, modern scholars have been busycalling attention to the high quotient of this feature of the Islamic scripture’scontents. It is so striking that in the 1930’s it prompted Louis Massignon some-what exaggeratedly to speak of the Qurʾān as “a truncated, Arabic edition ofthe Bible.”5 And already a century earlier, noticing the high incidence of bibli-cal reminiscences and Jewish lore in the Qurʾān, in 1833 AbrahamGeiger wrotehis still important book,Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenom-men.6 Given this state of affairs, for those interested in the Bible in Arabic thequestion immediately arises, was the Bible or any significant portion of it in factcirculating in Arabic in the first third of the seventh century ce? I should say atthe outset that in my opinion the answer is both “yes” and “no”; yes, the Bibleand a large amount of Jewish andChristian lorewas in oral circulation inArabicby that time, but no, there is no convincing evidence for concluding that therewas an Arabic Bible in writing prior to the rise of Islam. And inmy opinion, theQurʾān itself furnishes the best documentary evidence for this answer. How so?It seems highly unlikely that the Qurʾān could be as biblically savvy as it

is without a significant presence of Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians inits immediate milieu, indeed even in its audience and that it is furthermoreunlikely that those Jews and Christians themselves would not have been famil-iar with their own scriptural narratives and traditions in their own Arabic lan-guage. Otherwise, how can we reasonably account for the Bible in the Qurʾān?But how did they have the Bible in Arabic? All the available evidence seems topoint to the conclusion that Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians heard theirscriptures interpreted and commented on orally in Arabic after their liturgi-cal proclamation in their original languages, Hebrew and Aramaic for the Jews,and Greek and Aramaic for the Christians. The hypothesis presupposed here isthat written copies of these scriptures remained in their canonical languagesand were not translations into Arabic. They would have been in synagogues,churches, and monasteries, in the possession of rabbis, priests andmonks, andnot in general circulation in the Arabic-speaking milieu.During the lifetime of Muḥammad, the Arabic Qurʾān itself was an oral phe-

nomenon. There is no evidence of its collection in writing during his propheticcareer, with the possible exception of some notes as aides de mémoire, untilafter Muḥammad’s death, and then probably only in the second half of the

5) Massignon, Les trois prières d’Abraham, p. 89.6) Geiger, Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen? (1st edition: Bonn: Baaden,1833).


seventh century in the form inwhich it has become canonical.7 It seems to havebeen the case, as BeatriceGruendler has pointedout, that theArabic script “wasreadily available at the time of the Prophet,”8 and that people were certainlyat least taking notes in Arabic, as Gregor Schoeler has argued. Moreover, asSchoeler says, “Le premier livre de l’ Islam et en même temps de la littératurearabeest leCoran.”9Andas I shall argue, the appearanceof theQurʾān inwritingwas itself one of the factors that prompted the earliest translations of the Bibleinto Arabic in writing.In spite of the efforts of a number of scholars to find evidence for the exis-

tence of portions of the Jewish and Christian Bibles in writing in Arabic trans-lation prior to the rise of Islam,10 their arguments, sometimes in the form ofextrapolations from much later texts,11 are in the end based on what seems tothem to have likely been the case. Jews and Christians, they reason, would havewanted to have the Bible in Arabic in writing. But in the absence of any moreconcrete evidence, not tomention any discovery of writing inArabic at all priorto the seventh century, save for a handful of inscriptions and the likelihood ofwriting for business purposes and as an aid to memory, and given the way inwhichwe actually find the Bible in the Qurʾān, as we shall see, the presumptionwould seem to be warranted that prior to the rise of Islam, the scriptures of theJews and Christians circulated for the most part only orally in Arabic.

The Bible in the Qurʾān

The curious thing is that the Bible is simultaneously both everywhere andnowhere in the Qurʾān! There are virtually no quotations save for the well-known passage from Psalm 37:29 evidently quoted in Qurʾān 21:105: “We havewritten in the Psalms after the reminder (min baʿdi l-dhikr) that ‘My righteousservants will inherit the earth’.” For the rest, the Qurʾān’s author obviously pre-sumes that those in its audience are familiar with the Bible’s narratives of thepatriarchs and prophets. The text of the Qurʾān does not normally re-tell theirstories; rather it recalls them, comments on them, elaborates on certain motifs

7) See Motzki, “The Collection of the Qurʾān”; Déroche, La transmission écrite du Coran; Sadeghiand Bergman, “The Codex of a Companion”.8) Gruendler, “Arabic Script”.9) Schoeler, Écrire et transmettre, p. 26.10) One thinks in particular of the work of Irfan Shahid, who has systematically searched outevery hint of an Arabic Bible or a portion of one in the available sources. See, in particular, Shahid,Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, pp. 422–429, 449f.; idem, Byzantium and the Arabsin the Sixth Century, vol. 2, part 2, p. 295.11) See, e.g., the argument advanced by Kachouh [Kashouh], The Arabic Versions of the Gospels.


to be found in them, such as suits the Qurʾān’s ownmessage. This feature of theQurʾān’s recollections of biblical narratives, which seems tomany non-Muslim,scholarly readers sometimes to garble and misrepresent the biblical accounts,has caused them to declare the Qurʾānic readings to be confused, mistaken, oreven corruptedwhen comparedwith the presumed originals. But there are twoproblems with this not unusual assessment: it confuses what is essentially anoral intertextuality12 with a “written-text” interface between the Bible and theQurʾān; and it fails to take into account the Qurʾān’s own prophetic agenda inrecalling the biblical narratives in the first place.

Oral Intertextuality

The author of the Qurʾān furnishes the clue for what is going on in the Qurʾān’sevocation of the stories of the Bible’s patriarchs and prophets; it is not so muchamatter of citingwritten sources and influences but of recalling oral traditions,motifs andhistories retoldwithin a different horizon ofmeaning. That differenthorizon ofmeaning aswe shall see is theQurʾān’s owndistinctive prophetology.It determines what parts of which biblical stories, or of Jewish and Christianlore, are to be recalled and how they are to be understood.The first thing one notices about the Qurʾān’s interface with the Bible, as

mentioned above, is its unspoken and pervasive presumption that its audienceis thoroughly familiar with the stories of the biblical patriarchs and prophetsto whom and to whose exploits the Qurʾān refers, without any need for eventhe most rudimentary form of introduction. The Qurʾān simply presents itselfas confirming the truth of the previous scriptures and as safeguarding it in itsproper understanding (cf. Qurʾān 5:44, 46, 48). These previous scriptures aresaid to be principally the liturgical scriptures of the Jews and Christians, theTorah, the Gospel, and the Psalms (Qurʾān 5:46; 4:163). But the matter does notrest here, for while the Qurʾān recognizes the Torah as a scripture that God sentdown to Moses (Qurʾān 7:145), it presents the Gospel as similarly a scriptureGod sent down to Jesus (Qurʾān 5:46; 57:27), just as the Qurʾān is a scriptureGod sent down toMuḥammad.Here the author of theQurʾān obviously intendsto criticize and correct what is regarded as a mistaken Christian view of itsown principal scripture. So the Qurʾān’s recollection of the earlier scripturesis not only a matter of simple recall, it also includes moments of critique andcorrection.It is within this frame of reference that we read the Qurʾān’s record of God’s

word to Muḥammad:

12) On the anomaly of such an expression, see Ong, Orality and Literacy.


We have sent out before you only men whomWe have inspired,so ask the ‘People of remembrance’ (ahl al-dhikr) if you do notknow; [We have inspired them] with clear evidences and texts(al-zubur) andWe have sent down the remembrance (al-dhikr)to you so that We might make clear to people what has been sentdown to them; perhaps they will reflect. (Qurʾān 16:43–44)

Clearly in this and other passages the author of the Qurʾān commends recallingthe message of the earlier scriptures. But what catches one’s attention here isthe phrase “People of Remembrance” and the reference to what God sent downto Muḥammad as “the remembrance”. One notices in the context the parallelbetween the designations, “the remembrance” (al-dhikr) and “the scripture’ ”(al-kitāb) in reference to the Bible and the Qurʾān, so in this context the “Scrip-ture People / People of the Book” (ahl al-kitāb) are also the “People of Remem-brance” andwhat they remember or recall is God’s dealings with the patriarchsand prophets, the very remembrance that is also recorded in the Qurʾān, a rea-son that the Qurʾān itself is referred to in its own text as a “remembrance”. Andthis “remembrance” has all themarks of a distinctively oral phenomenon, albeitthat what is remembered is said to have been originally recorded in a scripture.The Qurʾān remembers of course that although its words were spoken by

Muḥammad under divine inspiration, it is itself also a “book” (al-kitāb), likethe earlier scriptures, which were inscribed in texts, scrolls, and copies, as theQurʾān itself says. Nevertheless, as an initially “oral book” as it was sent downto Muḥammad, it is important to notice how inevitably in the Qurʾān whenthe text evokes a biblical narrative or summons up the story of a patriarch orprophet, it exhorts the addressees to remember or to recall (idhkurū). In manysequences of such narrative recall in the Qurʾān one finds a key term appear-ing after the initial imperative to remember; it is the simple word “when” (idh),implying a preceding admonition “to remember”. Indeed translators often sup-ply the imperative “remember” inbracketswhen they encounter a successionofverses in a sūra all beginning simply with the tell-tale idh, idhā, or even lammā.For example, in Qurʾān 2 (al-Baqara) the text goes on for a hundred verses andmore recalling Israelite salvation history through the remembrance of severalof theMajor Prophets,Moses in particular, without once quoting the scripturesbut nevertheless employing the memory term idh and its synonyms some 25times andmore, to evoke thebiblical scenes indetails familiar not only from theBible, but from Jewish and Christian lore as well, as many recent studies haveshown.13 The remembrance is as if frommemory alone, with no explicit textual

13) Such studies are too numerous to list here. Suffice it to cite one that refers to many others inbibliographical notes: Reynolds, The Qurʾān and Its Biblical Subtext.


reference, freely phrased in the telling, or re-telling, of a biblical or prophetictale that features both narrative and dialogue on the part of both the narratorand the dramatis personae.The point is that as we find the Bible in the Qurʾān it is an oral affair, recall-

ing or recollecting biblical narratives and their heroes, usually without refer-ence to a text (Torah or Gospel, even for Joseph (Qurʾān 12) or Mary (Qurʾān14)) and never in exact quotation, save in the one instance of Qurʾān 21:105:“We have written in the Psalms after the reminder that ‘My righteous ser-vants will inherit the earth’ (Ps. 37:29).” One is drawn to the conclusion thatwhile the Torah, the Psalms, and the Gospel are known in the Qurʾān andits Arabic-speaking milieu to be scriptures, i.e., books, writings, their con-tents as reflected in the Qurʾān seem to have circulated in Arabic only orally,as they might have been heard in liturgical proclamations interpreted in thevernacular and in homiletic commentaries, exercises in haggada and moraladmonitions. And even then, while the Qurʾān knows of a long list of bib-lical figures whom God inspired (cf. Qurʾān 4:163), it recollects only a rela-tively small portion of their stories and that much only in accord with its ownagenda.

The Typology of Qurʾānic Prophetology

It is the Qurʾān’s distinctive prophetology that determines its evocation of thememory of individual messengers and prophets prior to Muḥammad, and par-ticularly prophetic figures from the Bible. For the Qurʾān, the historical seriesof God’s “prophets” (al-anbiyāʾ) and “messengers” (al-rusul) from Adam toMuḥammad, “God’s messenger, and the seal of the prophets” (Qurʾān 33:40),is the history of God’s renewed summons, in God’s own words, to people toreturn to their neglected, but original state of awareness of the one God, theCreator of all that is, and to the God-given rule of life. The sequence of messen-gers and prophets envisions the end-time, the resurrection of the dead, and theconsequent reward of the Garden for the just and the Fire for the sinner. TheQurʾān’s prophetology, which envisions a sequence of messengers, into whichthe biblical “prophets” are enfolded, some of whom (like Adam, Seth, Noah,Abraham, Ishmael, Moses, Lot, and Jesus) are also “messengers”,14 is schema-tized in a recurring liturgical pattern of recall in Qurʾān 26 (al-Shuʿarāʾ).15Herethe Qurʾānic view of messengership and prophethood is characterized as: uni-versal (God’s messengers have come to every people not just to the people of

14) See Bijlefeld, “A Prophet and More than a Prophet?”15) See the neglected but important article by Zwettler, “A Mantic Manifesto”.


Israel); recurrent (the pattern of prophetic experience recurs in the sequenceof prophets and messengers); dialogical (the messengers and prophets inter-act in conversation with their people); singular in its message (the one God,who rewards good and punishes evil on the “the Day of Judgment”); and tri-umphant (God vindicates His prophets in their struggles against their adver-saries).The recognitionof the typology of theQurʾān’s prophetological recall enables

one to discern the corrective, even polemical dimension to the Muslim scrip-ture’s recollection of biblical and other narratives of the Jews and Christiansin its milieu. The author of the Qurʾān does not mean to retell the biblical sto-ries but to recall them, and to recollect them within the corrective frameworkof the Qurʾān’s own discourse. For this reason the Qurʾān does not quote theBible or even refer to it according to Jewish or Christian narrative patterns; theQurʾān provides a reminiscence of the stories of many of the Bible’s major fig-ures within the parameters of its own, distinctive prophetology, which is anapologetic typology in support of Muḥammad’s mission.These observations give rise to three hypotheses. First, the sources of the

Qurʾān’s biblical (and traditional) reminiscenceswere oral, notwritten. Second,the Qurʾān’s recollections of the biblical patriarchs and prophets according tothe paradigm of its own distinctive prophetology highlight the Arabic scrip-ture’s corrective, even polemical stance toward Jewish and Christian under-standings of the role of the biblical patriarchs and prophets. And third, thepresence of the Bible in the Qurʾān is principally by way of reminiscence andnot by way of quotation. In short, for the historian of the Bible in Arabic theQurʾān mirrors in writing the unwritten modes of transmission of the biblicaland traditional lore circulating among theArabic-speaking Jews andChristiansin Arabia prior to the rise of Islam.As far as the available evidence allows us clearly to see, Jews andChristians in

the Arabic-speaking milieu of Muḥammad and the Qurʾān were in possessionof the scriptures of their respective communities in their own liturgical lan-guages, Hebrew andAramaic for Jews, andGreek andAramaic/Syriac for Chris-tians. Most people in this era, including Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians,would have encountered the narratives of their scriptures in their oral presen-tation and interpretation within the context of the liturgies of their respec-tive communities. There is no convincing evidence for the existence of anyextended part of the Bible in written Arabic prior to the rise of Islam, just asthere is no real evidence for the existence of any extended writing in Arabicprior to the mid-seventh century, as we have seen. The earliest time in whichthe project to translate portions of the Bible into written Arabic would havebeen feasiblewould have been themid-to late seventh century, in tandemwith,or in response to the Muslim project after Muḥammad’s death to collect and


to publish the Arabic Qurʾān as a fully written scripture. But more likely, as weshall see, the first written translations of portions of the Bible into Arabic weremade in the eighth century and outside of Arabia.Ironically, it nowappears that theArabicQurʾān is auniquepieceof surviving

documentary evidence not only for the currency of what we might call an Ara-maic or a Syriac “interpreted Bible” circulating orally in Arabic in the preachingand teaching of Arabian Jews and Christians prior to the rise of Islam. But also,and perhaps more importantly, the Qurʾān itself now functions as evidence forthe presence and active participation of Arabic-speaking Jews and Christiansin the religious life of Muḥammad’s and the Qurʾān’s milieu (the Ḥijāz and itsenvirons?) in the first third of the seventh century. This evidence comes to thefore in the Qurʾān’s bidding Muḥammad to refresh the memories of the “Scrip-ture People” about what the Qurʾān presents as the real meaning and properinterpretations of the signs andmessages delivered by their ownpatriarchs andprophets, as recorded in their Bibles.

The Earliest Translations of the Bible into Arabic

At some point along the temporal spectrum between the years 632 and 750ce,during which time the Arab conquest of the Fertile Crescent and beyond tookplace, two important scriptural undertakings also came to fruition: the collec-tion of theQurʾān into thewritten form inwhich it became the holy scripture oftheMuslims; and during the same period or slightly thereafter Arabic-speakingJews and Christians living in the new World of Islam began to translate theirscriptures and other religious literature into Arabic, and towrite original worksin the newly public language of the Levant.16Here is not the place to discuss the intricacies of the history of the collec-

tion of the Qurʾān. Suffice it to say for our present purpose that recent schol-arship dates the traditional Muslim reports about the collections undertakenat the initiative of the caliphs Abū Bakr (632–634) and ʿUthmān (644–656) to“the last decades of the 1st century ah,”17 i.e., around the year 700ce. On thebasis of these reports HaraldMotzki then draws the conclusion that “an officialwritten corpusmust have already existed in the second half of the seventh cen-tury.”18 Furthermore, recently available early manuscript copies of portions ofthe Qurʾānic text dating from the mid-first century ah corroborate the hypoth-esis of the currency of some formof thewrittenQurʾān by the second half of the

16) See Griffith, “The Monks of Palestine”; idem, “From Aramaic to Arabic”.17) Motzki, “The Collection of the Qurān,” p. 31.18) Motzki, “Muṣḥaf,” p. 464.


seventh century.19 For reasons of the availability of the Arabic script for bookproduction as we have mentioned above, these findings by present-day Qurʾānscholars allow the suggestion that a point in the middle of the seventh cen-tury ce might well serve as the likeliest terminus post quem for the appearanceof a written, Arabic translation of some portion of the Bible. And this raisesthe question of which Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians, the descendants ofthose already living among the Arabs in pre-Islamic times in Arabia, or thosewho newly adopted the Arabic language after the conquest and living outsideof Arabia, were themore likely to have been the first to translate portions of theBible into Arabic in the period after the mid-seventh century?Both Jewish and Christian scholars, as we have seen, have argued in behalf of

the likelihood that Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians in Arabia had writtentranslations of their scriptures already during the first third of the seventh cen-tury. But apart from reports of such translations in late Muslim sources,20 theearliest manuscript evidence for Jewish translations comes from Karaite andRabbanite texts originating in the ninth century in Palestine and Mesopo-tamia.21 And similarly for Christian translations, the earliest dated texts werecopied in the mid ninth century, along with some that are dateable on othergrounds to the mid-eighth century; all of them done in locations outside ofArabia in Syria/Palestine and Mesopotamia. For the record, one should pointout that the earliest text written in Arabic by a Christian that carries an attes-tation to the date of its composition is a work preserved in an old parchmentmanuscript from Sinai (MS Sinai Arabic 154), which also contains an Arabicversion of the Acts of the Apostles and the Seven Catholic Epistles. The orig-inal editor and translator, Margaret Dunlop Gibson, called this work, On theTriuneNature of God.22Whatmakes it significant for our purposes is that at onepoint in the text the now unknown author provided an indication of the dateof his composition of the treatise. Speaking of the stable endurance of Chris-tianity against all odds, even up to his own day, he wrote: “If this religion werenot truly from God it would not have stood so unshakably for seven hundredand forty-six years.”23 If we reckon the beginning of the Christian era from thebeginning of the year of the Incarnation, according to the computation system

19) See the aforementioned Sadeghi and Bergman, “The Codex of a Companion of the Prophet”.But see also Pohlmann, Die Entstehung des Korans.20) See Griffith, “The Bible in Arabic”; idem, The Bible in Arabic.21) See Polliack, The Karaite Tradition of Arabic Bible Translation; Steiner, A Biblical Translation inthe Making.22) See Gibson (ed.), An Arabic Version.23) See this portion of the text, unaccountably left out byGibson, published in Samir, “TheEarliestArab Apology for Christianity (c.750)”.


of the Alexandrian world era, which Palestinian scribes were likely to use priorto the tenth century, we arrive at a date not too far removed from 755cefor the composition of the treatise. An interesting feature of this treatise, towhich wewill return below, is that it contains eighty-some quotations from theBible in Arabic translation, from both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian NewTestament!So far NewTestament texts translated into Arabic seem to be the earliest bib-

lical books for which dated manuscripts survive,24 including the Gospels andthe Pauline Epistles. The so far earliest known, dated manuscript containingan Arabic translation of a Christian biblical text is a copy of the four Gospels inArabic now in the Library of the Monastery of St. Catherine at Mt. Sinai which,according to a scribal note, was completed on the feast of St. George in theyear 859ad.25 Sinai Arabic MS 151 contains an Arabic version of the Epistlesof St. Paul that according to its colophon was copied in Damascus in the year867.26 For the rest, the earliest dated manuscripts cluster in the second half ofthe ninth century. But it is clear from numerous studies that the earliest datedmanuscripts are not in fact the earliest manuscripts, nor are the translations ofthe Bible they contain in fact the earliest translations.Themost expeditiousway to conduct our search for the earliest known, writ-

ten translations of the Bible into Arabic, starting from early texts actually inhand, is very briefly here to consult the current scholarship on the Gospelsin Arabic. For this inquiry we have the benefit of the very recent and mosthelpful work of Dr. Hikmat Kachouh, whose now published Ph.D. disserta-tion for the University of Birmingham in the UK, provides detailed descrip-tions of the available Arabic Gospel manuscripts and their families.27 Havingaccomplished the Herculean task of examining and describing the numerousmanuscripts, Kachouh turns to one of them in particular, which he takes tocontain the earliest known Arabic Gospel manuscripts, and which he arguescontains the text of an Arabic version that on his view can reasonably bethought to have been originally produced on the Arabian periphery in pre-Islamic times.

24) Ronny Vollandt and Miriam Lindgren note in their contribution to this volume that the textof the Pentateuch translated from Syriac in Sinai-Arabic 2, “dated 328ah (939/40ce) contains theearliest dated representative of the Pentateuch and a very early version of the Book of Daniel inArabic.”25) See the beautiful photograph of the two pages from this MS, including an illustration of St.Luke, in Brown (ed.), In the Beginning, pp. 166–167, 274–275.26) See Staal,Mt. Sinai Arabic Codex 151.27) Kachouh, The Arabic Versions of the Gospels and Their Families; Kashouh, The Arabic Versionsof the Gospels.


Kachouh’s candidate for the earliest Arabic Gospel is the version of theGospels of Matthew, Mark, and a portion of Luke, translated from Syriac, ashe says, and now preserved in MS Vatican Arabic 13.28 On the basis of paleo-graphical considerations scholars have agreed, and Kachouh concurs, that theundated portion of the manuscript that contains the Gospel texts was copiedaround the year 800ce, in all probability at the monastery of Mar Saba in theJudean desert. But as Kachouh has very convincingly argued, evidently the textof the Gospels had been edited and copied from an earlier exemplar beforebeing copied into the existing MS Vatican Arabic Arabic 13. He further men-tions what he calls the phenomenon of “phrasal transposition” in the Arabictranslation of what he supposes to have been the original Syriac. Kachouh saysthat this feature of the Arabic version suggests the influence of orally trans-mitted wording, just what one would expect in a text used in the liturgy andquickly translated into the vernacular language of the congregation for whichit was intended.Given the premise that this Arabic version of the Gospels preserved in MS

Vatican Arabic 13 was copied from an earlier exemplar, the question arises,how much earlier was the original text written? Could it have been done evenas early as sometime in the eighth or even the seventh century? Then as oneis caught up in the swift current of extrapolation one’s thoughts race backto the sixth century and pre-Islamic times. Could the translation have beenoriginally made by Arabic-speaking Christians of Arabia, who had for the mostpart inherited their Christianity from Syriac-speaking Christians, such as theChristians of al-Ḥīrā on the Iraqi periphery of central Arabia, or those of theGhassānid confederation on the Syrian periphery, or even the Christians ofNajrān in south Arabia? Kachouh’s reasoning follows this path, going back andforth from the sixth century to the early eighth century and finally settling fora pre-Islamic date, and surmising that the original translation may even havebeen done in Najrān.29Hikmat Kachouh finds corroborating evidence for his hypothesis in the

“Arabicity” of the translated text. Corroboration comes from his suppositionthat Syriac would not have been a current language in a place like Najrān,hence the need for an Arabic translation, and from his further perceptionthat there is no evidently Qurʾānic phrasing in the translated Gospel text.He concludes, “The evidence of the language itself permits us to suggest apre-Islamic date for the origin of Vat. Ar. 13 (in theGospels only).”30But there are

28) But see now Monferrer-Sala, “An Early Fragmentary Christian Palestinian Rendition” [forth-coming].29) See Kachouh, TheArabic Versions of the Gospels and Their Families, vol. 1, pp. 140–146, 364–370.30) Kachouh, The Arabic Versions of the Gospels and TheirFamilies, vol. 1, p. 372.


a number of problems with this line of reasoning that consists of a long seriesof extrapolations stretching back some two hundred years from the early ninthcenturymanuscript actually in hand.What is more, there is an alternate line ofreasoning that seems to me to be more convincing.First of all, as we have noted earlier, there is no known evidence of any

extended writing in Arabic prior to the rise of Islam, and the Qurʾān is inall likelihood itself the earliest Arabic book. In its recollections of the Bible,the manner of the Qurʾān’s biblical recall is also evidence, as we have argued,for the oral currency of the Jewish and Christian scriptures in Arabic in theearly seventh century. Kachouh’s “evidence of the language”, as he calls it, isinsufficient inmy view tomake his case for the pre-Islamic origin of the Gospeltext, especially since it is meager and the text in MS Vatican Arabic 13 fits justas well in the Palestinian milieu in which it was copied. What is even moreto the point is the fact that the supposed original Syriac turns out actually tobe Christian Palestinian Aramaic,31 an Aramaic at home in the very place inwhich MS Vatican Arabic 13 was copied. So what alternative hypothesis canwe put forward for the earliest, written Arabic Bible translations, based on theevidence we actually have in hand?On the basis of the textual details that he examines very carefully, Kachouh’s

point about the Gospel text in MS Vatican Arabic 13 being a copy of an earlierexemplar seems well taken. There are other instances of that being the case inthe transmission of a version of the Gospels in Arabic. For example, in a familyof manuscripts that transmit a version of the Gospels translated from Greek,via Christian Palestinian Aramaic, into Arabic, while the datedmanuscript, MSSinai Arabic 72, has a colophon stating that the manuscript was copied by oneStephen of Ramleh in the year 897ce, the paleographically earliest manuscriptin the family ofmanuscripts that transmits this Arabic version,MS Sinai Arabic74, can be dated on the basis of the scribal hand of the copyist with someconfidence to the late eighth century.32 In fact, its so-called Kufic script is notunlike that of MS Sinai Arabic 154, the manuscript that contains the abovementioned treatise, “On the Triune Nature of God”, which its author says hecomposed some seven hundred and forty-six years after the establishment ofChristianity, that is somewhere between 755 and 775ce.33 Scholars have datedMSSinai Arabic 154 to around the year 800ce,34 therefore to just about the sametime as MS Vatican Arabic 13 was copied, with its Arabic version of the Gospelsof Matthew, Mark, and a portion of Luke.

31) See Monferrer-Sala, “An Early Fragmentary Christian Palestinian Rendition”.32) See Arbache, “Une ancienne version arabe”. See also Griffith, “The Gospel in Arabic”.33) See the discussion of the dating in Swanson, “Some Considerations”.34) See Samir, “The Earliest Arab Apology,” pp. 58–61.


When one puts all this information together, remembering that MS SinaiArabic 154 contains an Arabic version of the Acts of the Apostles and the SevenCatholic Epistles translated fromGreek, in addition to the treatise, “On the Tri-une Nature of God”, and one recalls that this treatise itself contains more thaneighty quotations in Arabic from a number of biblical books, including Gen-esis, Deuteronomy, Job, the Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, Micah,Habakkuk, Zechariah,Malachi, andBaruch, alongwith theGospels ofMatthew,Luke, and John,35 one can confidently suppose that we have evidence in handthat by the mid-eighth century there were already written translations of por-tions of the Bible into Arabic.Given this evidence, it would seem to be a not unwarranted extrapolation to

suppose that the translation efforts got underway at least as early as the earlyeighth century, if not already in the late seventh century. Furthermore, it isclear that all of these early manuscripts that we actually have in hand comefrom Syria/Palestine, and specifically from the monasteries of Jerusalem andthe Judean desert, where the Christian Arabic translation movement had itsfirst beginnings.36 It is not unreasonable to suppose that these samemonaster-ies,with theirwell attested capabilities inGreek, ChristianPalestinianAramaic,and Syriac, were also the places where the first written, Christian Arabic trans-lations of the scriptures were made. After all, the monks of this very milieu,including most notably Anastasios of Sinai (d. c. 700), were among the first inthe conquered areas outside of Arabia to take cognizance of the religion of theArabs and even to show some awareness of the Qurʾān.37Speaking of the Qurʾān, one recalls that it was certainly circulating in writing

by the turn of the seventh into the eighth century, and given the fact thatAnastasios of Sinai was already taking cognizance of it at the time, and in the720’s and 730’s John of Damascus was complaining about how it garbled thescriptures,38 it may well have been the case that one reason why the monksof Palestine were beginning to translate biblical texts into Arabic at the sametime was to set the biblical record straight in the public language of the newpolity. Of course, as Arabic increasingly became the daily language of mostpeople living under the rule of the Arabs, it is no wonder that by the ninth

35) I owe this information to Ricks, Developing the Doctrine of the Trinity. A question naturallyarises about the source of these quotations in Arabic. Did the authormake his own translations ashe required themor did he take them from existing translations? Thematter has yet to be studied.Suffice it to say for themoment that there is no evidence that all the booksmentioned had Arabictranslations by the mid-eighth century ce.36) See Griffith, “The Monks of Palestine”; idem, “From Aramaic to Arabic”.37) See Griffith, “Anastasios of Sinai”.38) See Le Coz (trans.), Jean Damascène.


century both Jews andChristianswere actively in need of the Bible inArabic forboth liturgical and academic purposes, so it is no surprise that from that timeon the translations became more numerous everywhere Arabic was spoken.But my hypothesis of the moment is that the Bible first became an Arabicscripture, i.e., in writing, due to the industry of the monks of the monasteriesof Jerusalem and the Judean desert in the early eighth century ce. As for theno doubt bilingual, Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians in Arabia in the firstthird of the seventh century, with their ties to Hebrew and Aramaic in the oneinstance, and to Greek and Aramaic/Syriac in the other, the need for the Biblein Arabic, especially in the absence of a book culture in that language at thattime, was simply for the oral interpretation of the scripture portions alreadyproclaimed in the proper liturgical languages, from books in Hebrew, Aramaic,or Syriac.

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