The Bible in Arabic by Griffith Sidney H

Author:Griffith, Sidney H.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER IV

Christian Translations of the Bible into Arabic

AS WE HAVE SEEN, all the evidence points to the late seventh century and, with a greater degree of certainty, to the eighth century for the origin of Bible translations into Arabic done under Christian auspices. It was, however, the ninth century that counts as the heyday of the Christian translation movement more generally. Translations were now produced not only of biblical texts, but of all sorts of ecclesiastical literature, not excluding philosophical and logical works. Moreover, the ecclesiastical translation movement was not confined to the monasteries of the Judean desert where it seems to have begun already in the eighth century.1 By the beginning of the ninth century, the schools and monasteries of the largely Syriac-speaking communities of northern Syria and Mesopotamia and their associated scholars had already taken up their role in the now famous Graeco-Arabic translation movement on-going in Baghdad in early Abbasid times.2 Modern historians of the movement have usually concentrated only on the translation into Arabic of Greek philosophical, medical, scientific, and mathematical texts, to the exclusion of biblical or other ecclesiastical works, but translations of the Bible into Arabic were nevertheless done within the same time frame and sometimes even by the same translators. Biblical translations into Arabic were produced under the auspices of all the main Christian churches in the Islamic world, the Melkites, the Jacobites, the Copts, and the Nestorians. And to a greater or lesser extent in each community, translations were made principally from originally Greek, Aramaic/Syriac, and, later, Coptic originals; in Syria/Palestine, including the Judean desert, and in Mesopotamia, Aramaic/Syriac was a common idiom in all three communities. What is more, as we shall see, Arabic translations done by members of one community often found their way into the life of another of the churches, in spite of their confessional estrangements in the area of Christology.

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