Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 1 (2013) 723

brill.com/ihiw

When Did the Bible Become an Arabic Scripture?

Sidney H. Griffith
The Catholic University of America
griffith@cua.edu

Abstract
While the circumstances were favorable to the translation of the Jewish and Christian
scriptures into Arabic in writing in pre-Islamic times, there is no compelling evidence
to support the conclusion that such a translation was ever made. Rather the evidence
of the Qurn along with other considerations suggests that prior to the rise of Islam,
Jewish and Christian scripture texts circulated orally in Arabic and that the earliest
Arabic translations in writing appeared first among the Christians in the monastic
communities in Palestine and probably in part at least in response to the appearance
of the Arabic Qurn itself in writing at the turn of the seventh and eighth centuries.
Keywords
Bible, Qurn, Arabic script, oral transmission, translation, Palestine

The study of the Bible in Arabic is in its infancy. There are hundreds of extant
manuscripts containing portions of the Bible in Arabic translations produced
by Jews and Christians in early Islamic times and well into the western Middle
Ages. Unfortunately, they have been of little interest to biblical scholars, most
of whom are of the opinion that the Arabic versions are too late to reward the
attention of those interested in the history of the text of the Hebrew Bible or of
the Greek New Testament. One nineteenth-century scholar is even quoted as
having said, There are more Arabic versions of the Gospels than can be welcome to theologians, pressed as they are with other urgent tasks.1 Happily, this
disinterest among scholars has begun to wane in recent years, if not yet among
theologians, at least among those who are interested in Judaeo-Arabic and socalled Christian Arabic, the stages of Middle Arabic appearing textually in
early Islamic times that Joshua Blau and his colleagues have studied so helpfully
since the mid-1960s.2 During the ensuing fifty years a number of scholars have
published detailed studies of the texts of Arabic translations of various books
1)

De Lagarde, Die vier Evangelien arabisch, p. iii, as paraphrased in Metzger, Early Versions, p. 260.
One thinks in particular of Blau, Emergence and Linguistic Background; idem, Grammar of
Christian Arabic.
2)

Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013

DOI: 10.1163/2212943X-20130102

Sidney H. Griffith / Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 1 (2013) 723

of the Bible, including not just the canonical books but of a number of apocryphal and pseudepigraphical works as well.3 And it is against the background
of these accomplishments that in the present essay I wish to call attention to a
broader range of related areas of interest, beyond the strictly philological, that
one might think of as the historical horizon within which the study of the Bible
in 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 are
particularly the following: the circulation of the Bible in Arabic in pre-Islamic
and pre-Qurnic times; the Bible in the Qurn; the earliest written translations
of biblical books into Arabic by newly Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians after
the 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 Abbsid 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 and
Christians and their scriptures in Late Antiquity follows their progress into the
Arabic-speaking milieu from before the first third of the seventh century ce,
that is to say from before the appearance of the Arabic Qurn and the rise of
Islam. He looks for the earliest evidences of Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians in the early seventh century first on the periphery of Central Arabia, where
he finds abundant traces of their presence all around the heartland,4 and finally
he looks for them in the ijz, in the environs of Mecca and Medina. But the
evidence there is meager, except for the Arabic Qurn itself (if one may still
think of the 7th century ijz as its homeland), the so-called Constitution of
Medina, and a few references preserved in the early Muslim adth collections.
The matter calls for some careful hermeneutical consideration, especially in
the matter of the Christian presence in pre-Islamic Arabia. And because our
concern is with the Bible in Arabic, we look first for how it was present among
Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians prior to the rise of Islam.
The Bible in Pre-Islamic Arabia
Even a brief perusal of the Arabic Qurn will suffice to convince even the firsttime reader that the Muslim scripture presumes a high degree of awareness
of 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 the
Bible in Arabic that is immensely helpful, The Bible in Arabic: An Annotated Bibliography, to be
published 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), Juifs
et chrtiens en Arabie.

Sidney H. Griffith / Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 1 (2013) 723

from both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament. What is more,
there are numerous echoes in the Qurn of non-biblical, Jewish and Christian traditions. For more than a century now, modern scholars have been busy
calling attention to the high quotient of this feature of the Islamic scriptures
contents. It is so striking that in the 1930s it prompted Louis Massignon somewhat exaggeratedly to speak of the Qurn as a truncated, Arabic edition of
the Bible.5 And already a century earlier, noticing the high incidence of biblical reminiscences and Jewish lore in the Qurn, in 1833 Abraham Geiger wrote
his still important book, Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen.6 Given this state of affairs, for those interested in the Bible in Arabic the
question immediately arises, was the Bible or any significant portion of it in fact
circulating in Arabic in the first third of the seventh century ce? I should say at
the outset that in my opinion the answer is both yes and no; yes, the Bible
and a large amount of Jewish and Christian lore was in oral circulation in Arabic
by that time, but no, there is no convincing evidence for concluding that there
was an Arabic Bible in writing prior to the rise of Islam. And in my opinion, the
Qurn itself furnishes the best documentary evidence for this answer. How so?
It seems highly unlikely that the Qurn could be as biblically savvy as it
is without a significant presence of Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians in
its immediate milieu, indeed even in its audience and that it is furthermore
unlikely that those Jews and Christians themselves would not have been familiar with their own scriptural narratives and traditions in their own Arabic language. Otherwise, how can we reasonably account for the Bible in the Qurn?
But how did they have the Bible in Arabic? All the available evidence seems to
point to the conclusion that Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians heard their
scriptures interpreted and commented on orally in Arabic after their liturgical proclamation in their original languages, Hebrew and Aramaic for the Jews,
and Greek and Aramaic for the Christians. The hypothesis presupposed here is
that written copies of these scriptures remained in their canonical languages
and were not translations into Arabic. They would have been in synagogues,
churches, and monasteries, in the possession of rabbis, priests and monks, and
not in general circulation in the Arabic-speaking milieu.
During the lifetime of Muammad, the Arabic Qurn itself was an oral phenomenon. There is no evidence of its collection in writing during his prophetic
career, with the possible exception of some notes as aides de mmoire, until
after Muammads death, and then probably only in the second half of the

5)

Massignon, Les trois prires dAbraham, p. 89.

Geiger, Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen? (1st edition: Bonn: Baaden,
1833).
6)

10

Sidney H. Griffith / Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 1 (2013) 723

seventh century in the form in which it has become canonical.7 It seems to have
been the case, as Beatrice Gruendler has pointed out, that the Arabic script was
readily available at the time of the Prophet,8 and that people were certainly
at least taking notes in Arabic, as Gregor Schoeler has argued. Moreover, as
Schoeler says, Le premier livre de l Islam et en mme temps de la littrature
arabe est le Coran.9 And as I shall argue, the appearance of the Qurn in writing
was itself one of the factors that prompted the earliest translations of the Bible
into Arabic in writing.
In spite of the efforts of a number of scholars to find evidence for the existence of portions of the Jewish and Christian Bibles in writing in Arabic translation prior to the rise of Islam,10 their arguments, sometimes in the form of
extrapolations from much later texts,11 are in the end based on what seems to
them to have likely been the case. Jews and Christians, they reason, would have
wanted to have the Bible in Arabic in writing. But in the absence of any more
concrete evidence, not to mention any discovery of writing in Arabic at all prior
to the seventh century, save for a handful of inscriptions and the likelihood of
writing for business purposes and as an aid to memory, and given the way in
which we actually find the Bible in the Qurn, as we shall see, the presumption
would seem to be warranted that prior to the rise of Islam, the scriptures of the
Jews and Christians circulated for the most part only orally in Arabic.
The Bible in the Qurn
The curious thing is that the Bible is simultaneously both everywhere and
nowhere in the Qurn! There are virtually no quotations save for the wellknown passage from Psalm 37:29 evidently quoted in Qurn 21:105: We have
written in the Psalms after the reminder (min badi l-dhikr) that My righteous
servants will inherit the earth. For the rest, the Qurns author obviously presumes that those in its audience are familiar with the Bibles narratives of the
patriarchs and prophets. The text of the Qurn does not normally re-tell their
stories; rather it recalls them, comments on them, elaborates on certain motifs

7)

See Motzki, The Collection of the Qurn; Droche, La transmission crite du Coran; Sadeghi
and Bergman, The Codex of a Companion.
8) Gruendler, Arabic Script.
9) Schoeler, crire et transmettre, p. 26.
10) One thinks in particular of the work of Irfan Shahid, who has systematically searched out
every 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. 422429, 449 f.; idem, Byzantium and the Arabs
in 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.

Sidney H. Griffith / Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 1 (2013) 723

11

to be found in them, such as suits the Qurns own message. This feature of the
Qurns recollections of biblical narratives, which seems to many non-Muslim,
scholarly readers sometimes to garble and misrepresent the biblical accounts,
has caused them to declare the Qurnic readings to be confused, mistaken, or
even corrupted when compared with the presumed originals. But there are two
problems with this not unusual assessment: it confuses what is essentially an
oral intertextuality12 with a written-text interface between the Bible and the
Qurn; and it fails to take into account the Qurns own prophetic agenda in
recalling the biblical narratives in the first place.
Oral Intertextuality
The author of the Qurn furnishes the clue for what is going on in the Qurns
evocation of the stories of the Bibles patriarchs and prophets; it is not so much
a matter of citing written sources and influences but of recalling oral traditions,
motifs and histories retold within a different horizon of meaning. That different
horizon of meaning as we shall see is the Qurns own distinctive prophetology.
It determines what parts of which biblical stories, or of Jewish and Christian
lore, are to be recalled and how they are to be understood.
The first thing one notices about the Qurns interface with the Bible, as
mentioned above, is its unspoken and pervasive presumption that its audience
is thoroughly familiar with the stories of the biblical patriarchs and prophets
to whom and to whose exploits the Qurn refers, without any need for even
the most rudimentary form of introduction. The Qurn simply presents itself
as confirming the truth of the previous scriptures and as safeguarding it in its
proper understanding (cf. Qurn 5:44, 46, 48). These previous scriptures are
said to be principally the liturgical scriptures of the Jews and Christians, the
Torah, the Gospel, and the Psalms (Qurn 5:46; 4:163). But the matter does not
rest here, for while the Qurn recognizes the Torah as a scripture that God sent
down to Moses (Qurn 7:145), it presents the Gospel as similarly a scripture
God sent down to Jesus (Qurn 5:46; 57:27), just as the Qurn is a scripture
God sent down to Muammad. Here the author of the Qurn obviously intends
to criticize and correct what is regarded as a mistaken Christian view of its
own principal scripture. So the Qurns recollection of the earlier scriptures
is not only a matter of simple recall, it also includes moments of critique and
correction.
It is within this frame of reference that we read the Qurns record of Gods
word to Muammad:

12)

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

12

Sidney H. Griffith / Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 1 (2013) 723

We have sent out before you only men whom We have inspired,
so ask the People of remembrance (ahl al-dhikr) if you do not
know; [We have inspired them] with clear evidences and texts
(al-zubur) and We have sent down the remembrance (al-dhikr)
to you so that We might make clear to people what has been sent
down to them; perhaps they will reflect.
(Qurn 16:4344)

Clearly in this and other passages the author of the Qurn commends recalling
the message of the earlier scriptures. But what catches ones attention here is
the phrase People of Remembrance and the reference to what God sent down
to Muammad as the remembrance. One notices in the context the parallel
between the designations, the remembrance (al-dhikr) and the scripture
(al-kitb) in reference to the Bible and the Qurn, so in this context the Scripture People / People of the Book (ahl al-kitb) are also the People of Remembrance and what they remember or recall is Gods dealings with the patriarchs
and prophets, the very remembrance that is also recorded in the Qurn, a reason that the Qurn itself is referred to in its own text as a remembrance. And
this remembrance has all the marks of a distinctively oral phenomenon, albeit
that what is remembered is said to have been originally recorded in a scripture.
The Qurn remembers of course that although its words were spoken by
Muammad under divine inspiration, it is itself also a book (al-kitb), like
the earlier scriptures, which were inscribed in texts, scrolls, and copies, as the
Qurn itself says. Nevertheless, as an initially oral book as it was sent down
to Muammad, it is important to notice how inevitably in the Qurn when
the text evokes a biblical narrative or summons up the story of a patriarch or
prophet, it exhorts the addressees to remember or to recall (idhkur). In many
sequences of such narrative recall in the Qurn one finds a key term appearing after the initial imperative to remember; it is the simple word when (idh),
implying a preceding admonition to remember. Indeed translators often supply the imperative remember in brackets when they encounter a succession of
verses in a sra all beginning simply with the tell-tale idh, idh, or even lamm.
For example, in Qurn 2 (al-Baqara) the text goes on for a hundred verses and
more recalling Israelite salvation history through the remembrance of several
of the Major Prophets, Moses in particular, without once quoting the scriptures
but nevertheless employing the memory term idh and its synonyms some 25
times and more, to evoke the biblical scenes in details familiar not only from the
Bible, but from Jewish and Christian lore as well, as many recent studies have
shown.13 The remembrance is as if from memory alone, with no explicit textual

13)

Such studies are too numerous to list here. Suffice it to cite one that refers to many others in
bibliographical notes: Reynolds, The Qurn and Its Biblical Subtext.

Sidney H. Griffith / Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 1 (2013) 723

13

reference, freely phrased in the telling, or re-telling, of a biblical or prophetic

tale that features both narrative and dialogue on the part of both the narrator
and the dramatis personae.
The point is that as we find the Bible in the Qurn it is an oral affair, recalling or recollecting biblical narratives and their heroes, usually without reference to a text (Torah or Gospel, even for Joseph (Qurn 12) or Mary (Qurn
14)) and never in exact quotation, save in the one instance of Qurn 21:105:
We have written in the Psalms after the reminder that My righteous servants will inherit the earth (Ps. 37:29). One is drawn to the conclusion that
while the Torah, the Psalms, and the Gospel are known in the Qurn and
its Arabic-speaking milieu to be scriptures, i.e., books, writings, their contents as reflected in the Qurn seem to have circulated in Arabic only orally,
as they might have been heard in liturgical proclamations interpreted in the
vernacular and in homiletic commentaries, exercises in haggada and moral
admonitions. And even then, while the Qurn knows of a long list of biblical figures whom God inspired (cf. Qurn 4:163), it recollects only a relatively small portion of their stories and that much only in accord with its own
agenda.
The Typology of Qurnic Prophetology
It is the Qurns distinctive prophetology that determines its evocation of the
memory of individual messengers and prophets prior to Muammad, and particularly prophetic figures from the Bible. For the Qurn, the historical series
of Gods prophets (al-anbiy) and messengers (al-rusul) from Adam to
Muammad, Gods messenger, and the seal of the prophets (Qurn 33:40),
is the history of Gods renewed summons, in Gods own words, to people to
return to their neglected, but original state of awareness of the one God, the
Creator of all that is, and to the God-given rule of life. The sequence of messengers and prophets envisions the end-time, the resurrection of the dead, and the
consequent reward of the Garden for the just and the Fire for the sinner. The
Qurns prophetology, which envisions a sequence of messengers, into which
the biblical prophets are enfolded, some of whom (like Adam, Seth, Noah,
Abraham, Ishmael, Moses, Lot, and Jesus) are also messengers,14 is schematized in a recurring liturgical pattern of recall in Qurn 26 (al-Shuar).15 Here
the Qurnic view of messengership and prophethood is characterized as: universal (Gods messengers have come to every people not just to the people of

14)
15)

See Bijlefeld, A Prophet and More than a Prophet?

See the neglected but important article by Zwettler, A Mantic Manifesto.

14

Sidney H. Griffith / Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 1 (2013) 723

Israel); recurrent (the pattern of prophetic experience recurs in the sequence

of prophets and messengers); dialogical (the messengers and prophets interact 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 triumphant (God vindicates His prophets in their struggles against their adversaries).
The recognition of the typology of the Qurns prophetological recall enables
one to discern the corrective, even polemical dimension to the Muslim scriptures recollection of biblical and other narratives of the Jews and Christians
in its milieu. The author of the Qurn does not mean to retell the biblical stories but to recall them, and to recollect them within the corrective framework
of the Qurns own discourse. For this reason the Qurn does not quote the
Bible or even refer to it according to Jewish or Christian narrative patterns; the
Qurn provides a reminiscence of the stories of many of the Bibles major figures within the parameters of its own, distinctive prophetology, which is an
apologetic typology in support of Muammads mission.
These observations give rise to three hypotheses. First, the sources of the
Qurns biblical (and traditional) reminiscences were oral, not written. Second,
the Qurns recollections of the biblical patriarchs and prophets according to
the paradigm of its own distinctive prophetology highlight the Arabic scriptures corrective, even polemical stance toward Jewish and Christian understandings of the role of the biblical patriarchs and prophets. And third, the
presence of the Bible in the Qurn is principally by way of reminiscence and
not by way of quotation. In short, for the historian of the Bible in Arabic the
Qurn mirrors in writing the unwritten modes of transmission of the biblical
and traditional lore circulating among the Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians
in Arabia prior to the rise of Islam.
As far as the available evidence allows us clearly to see, Jews and Christians in
the Arabic-speaking milieu of Muammad and the Qurn were in possession
of the scriptures of their respective communities in their own liturgical languages, Hebrew and Aramaic for Jews, and Greek and Aramaic/Syriac for Christians. Most people in this era, including Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians,
would have encountered the narratives of their scriptures in their oral presentation and interpretation within the context of the liturgies of their respective communities. There is no convincing evidence for the existence of any
extended part of the Bible in written Arabic prior to the rise of Islam, just as
there is no real evidence for the existence of any extended writing in Arabic
prior to the mid-seventh century, as we have seen. The earliest time in which
the project to translate portions of the Bible into written Arabic would have
been feasible would have been the mid-to late seventh century, in tandem with,
or in response to the Muslim project after Muammads death to collect and

Sidney H. Griffith / Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 1 (2013) 723

15

to publish the Arabic Qurn as a fully written scripture. But more likely, as we
shall see, the first written translations of portions of the Bible into Arabic were
made in the eighth century and outside of Arabia.
Ironically, it now appears that the Arabic Qurn is a unique piece of surviving
documentary evidence not only for the currency of what we might call an Aramaic or a Syriac interpreted Bible circulating orally in Arabic in the preaching
and teaching of Arabian Jews and Christians prior to the rise of Islam. But also,
and perhaps more importantly, the Qurn itself now functions as evidence for
the presence and active participation of Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians
in the religious life of Muammads and the Qurns milieu (the ijz and its
environs?) in the first third of the seventh century. This evidence comes to the
fore in the Qurns bidding Muammad to refresh the memories of the Scripture People about what the Qurn presents as the real meaning and proper
interpretations of the signs and messages delivered by their own patriarchs and
prophets, 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 took
place, two important scriptural undertakings also came to fruition: the collection of the Qurn into the written form in which it became the holy scripture of
the Muslims; and during the same period or slightly thereafter Arabic-speaking
Jews and Christians living in the new World of Islam began to translate their
scriptures and other religious literature into Arabic, and to write original works
in the newly public language of the Levant.16
Here is not the place to discuss the intricacies of the history of the collection of the Qurn. Suffice it to say for our present purpose that recent scholarship dates the traditional Muslim reports about the collections undertaken
at the initiative of the caliphs Ab Bakr (632634) and Uthmn (644656) to
the last decades of the 1st century ah,17 i.e., around the year 700ce. On the
basis of these reports Harald Motzki then draws the conclusion that an official
written corpus must have already existed in the second half of the seventh century.18 Furthermore, recently available early manuscript copies of portions of
the Qurnic text dating from the mid-first century ah corroborate the hypothesis of the currency of some form of the written Qurn by the second half of the

16)
17)
18)

See Griffith, The Monks of Palestine; idem, From Aramaic to Arabic.

Motzki, The Collection of the Qurn, p. 31.
Motzki, Muaf, p. 464.

16

Sidney H. Griffith / Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 1 (2013) 723

seventh century.19 For reasons of the availability of the Arabic script for book
production as we have mentioned above, these findings by present-day Qurn
scholars allow the suggestion that a point in the middle of the seventh century ce might well serve as the likeliest terminus post quem for the appearance
of a written, Arabic translation of some portion of the Bible. And this raises
the question of which Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians, the descendants of
those already living among the Arabs in pre-Islamic times in Arabia, or those
who newly adopted the Arabic language after the conquest and living outside
of Arabia, were the more likely to have been the first to translate portions of the
Bible 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 written
translations of their scriptures already during the first third of the seventh century. But apart from reports of such translations in late Muslim sources,20 the
earliest manuscript evidence for Jewish translations comes from Karaite and
Rabbanite texts originating in the ninth century in Palestine and Mesopotamia.21 And similarly for Christian translations, the earliest dated texts were
copied in the mid ninth century, along with some that are dateable on other
grounds to the mid-eighth century; all of them done in locations outside of
Arabia in Syria/Palestine and Mesopotamia. For the record, one should point
out that the earliest text written in Arabic by a Christian that carries an attestation to the date of its composition is a work preserved in an old parchment
manuscript from Sinai (MS Sinai Arabic 154), which also contains an Arabic
version of the Acts of the Apostles and the Seven Catholic Epistles. The original editor and translator, Margaret Dunlop Gibson, called this work, On the
Triune Nature of God.22 What makes it significant for our purposes is that at one
point in the text the now unknown author provided an indication of the date
of his composition of the treatise. Speaking of the stable endurance of Christianity against all odds, even up to his own day, he wrote: If this religion were
not truly from God it would not have stood so unshakably for seven hundred
and forty-six years.23 If we reckon the beginning of the Christian era from the
beginning 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 in
the Making.
22) See Gibson (ed.), An Arabic Version.
23) See this portion of the text, unaccountably left out by Gibson, published in Samir, The Earliest
Arab Apology for Christianity (c.750).

Sidney H. Griffith / Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 1 (2013) 723

17

of the Alexandrian world era, which Palestinian scribes were likely to use prior
to the tenth century, we arrive at a date not too far removed from 755ce
for the composition of the treatise. An interesting feature of this treatise, to
which we will return below, is that it contains eighty-some quotations from the
Bible in Arabic translation, from both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New
Testament!
So far New Testament texts translated into Arabic seem to be the earliest biblical books for which dated manuscripts survive,24 including the Gospels and
the Pauline Epistles. The so far earliest known, dated manuscript containing
an Arabic translation of a Christian biblical text is a copy of the four Gospels in
Arabic 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 the
year 859 ad.25 Sinai Arabic MS 151 contains an Arabic version of the Epistles
of St. Paul that according to its colophon was copied in Damascus in the year
867.26 For the rest, the earliest dated manuscripts cluster in the second half of
the ninth century. But it is clear from numerous studies that the earliest dated
manuscripts are not in fact the earliest manuscripts, nor are the translations of
the Bible they contain in fact the earliest translations.
The most expeditious way to conduct our search for the earliest known, written translations of the Bible into Arabic, starting from early texts actually in
hand, is very briefly here to consult the current scholarship on the Gospels
in Arabic. For this inquiry we have the benefit of the very recent and most
helpful work of Dr. Hikmat Kachouh, whose now published Ph.D. dissertation for the University of Birmingham in the UK, provides detailed descriptions of the available Arabic Gospel manuscripts and their families.27 Having
accomplished the Herculean task of examining and describing the numerous
manuscripts, Kachouh turns to one of them in particular, which he takes to
contain the earliest known Arabic Gospel manuscripts, and which he argues
contains the text of an Arabic version that on his view can reasonably be
thought to have been originally produced on the Arabian periphery in preIslamic times.

24)

Ronny Vollandt and Miriam Lindgren note in their contribution to this volume that the text
of the Pentateuch translated from Syriac in Sinai-Arabic 2, dated 328 ah (939/40 ce) contains the
earliest dated representative of the Pentateuch and a very early version of the Book of Daniel in
Arabic.
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. 166167, 274275.
26) See Staal, Mt. Sinai Arabic Codex 151.
27) Kachouh, The Arabic Versions of the Gospels and Their Families; Kashouh, The Arabic Versions
of the Gospels.

18

Sidney H. Griffith / Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 1 (2013) 723

Kachouhs candidate for the earliest Arabic Gospel is the version of the
Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and a portion of Luke, translated from Syriac, as
he says, and now preserved in MS Vatican Arabic 13.28 On the basis of paleographical considerations scholars have agreed, and Kachouh concurs, that the
undated portion of the manuscript that contains the Gospel texts was copied
around the year 800 ce, in all probability at the monastery of Mar Saba in the
Judean desert. But as Kachouh has very convincingly argued, evidently the text
of the Gospels had been edited and copied from an earlier exemplar before
being copied into the existing MS Vatican Arabic Arabic 13. He further mentions what he calls the phenomenon of phrasal transposition in the Arabic
translation of what he supposes to have been the original Syriac. Kachouh says
that this feature of the Arabic version suggests the influence of orally transmitted wording, just what one would expect in a text used in the liturgy and
quickly translated into the vernacular language of the congregation for which
it 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 even
as early as sometime in the eighth or even the seventh century? Then as one
is caught up in the swift current of extrapolation ones thoughts race back
to the sixth century and pre-Islamic times. Could the translation have been
originally made by Arabic-speaking Christians of Arabia, who had for the most
part inherited their Christianity from Syriac-speaking Christians, such as the
Christians of al-r on the Iraqi periphery of central Arabia, or those of the
Ghassnid confederation on the Syrian periphery, or even the Christians of
Najrn in south Arabia? Kachouhs reasoning follows this path, going back and
forth from the sixth century to the early eighth century and finally settling for
a pre-Islamic date, and surmising that the original translation may even have
been done in Najrn.29
Hikmat Kachouh finds corroborating evidence for his hypothesis in the
Arabicity of the translated text. Corroboration comes from his supposition
that Syriac would not have been a current language in a place like Najrn,
hence the need for an Arabic translation, and from his further perception
that there is no evidently Qurnic phrasing in the translated Gospel text.
He concludes, The evidence of the language itself permits us to suggest a
pre-Islamic date for the origin of Vat. Ar. 13 (in the Gospels only).30 But there are
28)

But see now Monferrer-Sala, An Early Fragmentary Christian Palestinian Rendition [forthcoming].
29) See Kachouh, The Arabic Versions of the Gospels and Their Families, vol. 1, pp. 140146, 364370.
30) Kachouh, The Arabic Versions of the Gospels and TheirFamilies, vol. 1, p. 372.

Sidney H. Griffith / Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 1 (2013) 723

19

a number of problems with this line of reasoning that consists of a long series
of extrapolations stretching back some two hundred years from the early ninth
century manuscript actually in hand. What is more, there is an alternate line of
reasoning 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 Qurn is in
all likelihood itself the earliest Arabic book. In its recollections of the Bible,
the manner of the Qurns biblical recall is also evidence, as we have argued,
for the oral currency of the Jewish and Christian scriptures in Arabic in the
early seventh century. Kachouhs evidence of the language, as he calls it, is
insufficient in my view to make his case for the pre-Islamic origin of the Gospel
text, especially since it is meager and the text in MS Vatican Arabic 13 fits just
as well in the Palestinian milieu in which it was copied. What is even more
to the point is the fact that the supposed original Syriac turns out actually to
be Christian Palestinian Aramaic,31 an Aramaic at home in the very place in
which MS Vatican Arabic 13 was copied. So what alternative hypothesis can
we put forward for the earliest, written Arabic Bible translations, based on the
evidence we actually have in hand?
On the basis of the textual details that he examines very carefully, Kachouhs
point about the Gospel text in MS Vatican Arabic 13 being a copy of an earlier
exemplar seems well taken. There are other instances of that being the case in
the transmission of a version of the Gospels in Arabic. For example, in a family
of manuscripts that transmit a version of the Gospels translated from Greek,
via Christian Palestinian Aramaic, into Arabic, while the dated manuscript, MS
Sinai Arabic 72, has a colophon stating that the manuscript was copied by one
Stephen of Ramleh in the year 897 ce, the paleographically earliest manuscript
in the family of manuscripts that transmits this Arabic version, MS Sinai Arabic
74, can be dated on the basis of the scribal hand of the copyist with some
confidence to the late eighth century.32 In fact, its so-called Kufic script is not
unlike that of MS Sinai Arabic 154, the manuscript that contains the above
mentioned treatise, On the Triune Nature of God, which its author says he
composed some seven hundred and forty-six years after the establishment of
Christianity, that is somewhere between 755 and 775 ce.33 Scholars have dated
MS Sinai Arabic 154 to around the year 800 ce,34 therefore to just about the same
time as MS Vatican Arabic 13 was copied, with its Arabic version of the Gospels
of Matthew, Mark, and a portion of Luke.
31)
32)
33)
34)

See Monferrer-Sala, An Early Fragmentary Christian Palestinian Rendition.

See Arbache, Une ancienne version arabe. See also Griffith, The Gospel in Arabic.
See the discussion of the dating in Swanson, Some Considerations.
See Samir, The Earliest Arab Apology, pp. 5861.

20

Sidney H. Griffith / Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 1 (2013) 723

When one puts all this information together, remembering that MS Sinai
Arabic 154 contains an Arabic version of the Acts of the Apostles and the Seven
Catholic Epistles translated from Greek, in addition to the treatise, On the Triune Nature of God, and one recalls that this treatise itself contains more than
eighty quotations in Arabic from a number of biblical books, including Genesis, Deuteronomy, Job, the Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, Micah,
Habakkuk, Zechariah, Malachi, and Baruch, along with the Gospels of Matthew,
Luke, and John,35 one can confidently suppose that we have evidence in hand
that by the mid-eighth century there were already written translations of portions 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 early
eighth century, if not already in the late seventh century. Furthermore, it is
clear that all of these early manuscripts that we actually have in hand come
from Syria/Palestine, and specifically from the monasteries of Jerusalem and
the Judean desert, where the Christian Arabic translation movement had its
first beginnings.36 It is not unreasonable to suppose that these same monasteries, with their well attested capabilities in Greek, Christian Palestinian Aramaic,
and Syriac, were also the places where the first written, Christian Arabic translations 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 in
the conquered areas outside of Arabia to take cognizance of the religion of the
Arabs and even to show some awareness of the Qurn.37
Speaking of the Qurn, one recalls that it was certainly circulating in writing
by the turn of the seventh into the eighth century, and given the fact that
Anastasios of Sinai was already taking cognizance of it at the time, and in the
720s and 730s John of Damascus was complaining about how it garbled the
scriptures,38 it may well have been the case that one reason why the monks
of Palestine were beginning to translate biblical texts into Arabic at the same
time was to set the biblical record straight in the public language of the new
polity. Of course, as Arabic increasingly became the daily language of most
people 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 naturally
arises about the source of these quotations in Arabic. Did the author make his own translations as
he required them or did he take them from existing translations? The matter has yet to be studied.
Suffice it to say for the moment that there is no evidence that all the books mentioned had Arabic
translations 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 Damascne.

Sidney H. Griffith / Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 1 (2013) 723

21

century both Jews and Christians were actively in need of the Bible in Arabic for
both liturgical and academic purposes, so it is no surprise that from that time
on the translations became more numerous everywhere Arabic was spoken.
But my hypothesis of the moment is that the Bible first became an Arabic
scripture, i.e., in writing, due to the industry of the monks of the monasteries
of Jerusalem and the Judean desert in the early eighth century ce. As for the
no doubt bilingual, Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians in Arabia in the first
third of the seventh century, with their ties to Hebrew and Aramaic in the one
instance, and to Greek and Aramaic/Syriac in the other, the need for the Bible
in Arabic, especially in the absence of a book culture in that language at that
time, was simply for the oral interpretation of the scripture portions already
proclaimed in the proper liturgical languages, from books in Hebrew, Aramaic,
or Syriac.
Bibliography
Arbache, Samir, Une ancienne version arabe des vangiles: langue, texte et lexique,
PhD dissertation, lUniversit Michel de Montaigne, Bordeaux, 1994.
Beaucamp, Jolle, Franoise Briquel-Chatonnet and Julien Robin (eds), Juifs et chrtiens
en Arabie aux Ve et VIe sicles: Regards croiss sur les sources, Paris: Association des
amis du Centre d Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance, 2010.
Bijlefeld, W.A., A Prophet and More than a Prophet? Some Observations on the Qurnic
Use of the Terms Prophet and Apostle, The Muslim World 95 (1969), pp. 128.
Blau, Joshua, The Emergence and Linguistic Background of Judaeo-Arabic: A Study in the
Origins of Middle Arabic, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965.
, A Grammar of Christian Arabic, Based Mainly on South-Palestinian Texts from the
First Millennium, Louvain: Peeters, 19661967.
Brown, Michelle P. (ed.), In the Beginning: Bibles before the Year 1000, Washington, DC:
Smithsonian Institution, 2006.
de Lagarde, P.A., Die vier Evangelien arabisch, Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1864.
Droche, Franois, La transmission crite du Coran dans les dbuts de lislam, Leiden:
Brill, 2009.
Geiger, Abraham, Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen? Bonn:
Baaden, 1833.
Gibson, M.D. (ed.), An Arabic Version of the Acts of the Apostles and the Seven Catholic
Epistles from an Eighth or Ninth Century MS in the Convent of St Catherine on Mount
Sinai, with a Treatise on the Triune Nature of God, with translation, from the Same
Codex, Cambridge/London: Cambridge University Press, 1899 [facsimile reprint, Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2003].
Griffith, Sidney H., Anastasios of Sinai, the Hodegos and the Muslims, Greek Orthodox
Theological Review 32 (1987), pp. 341358.
, From Aramaic to Arabic: The Languages of the Monasteries of Palestine in the
Byzantine and Early Islamic Periods, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 51 (1997), pp. 1131.
, The Bible in Arabic, in The New Cambridge History of the Bible. Volume Two:

22

Sidney H. Griffith / Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 1 (2013) 723

From 600 to 1450, eds Richard Marsden and E. Ann Matter, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2012, pp. 123142.
, The Bible in Arabic: The Scriptures of the People of the Book, in the Language of
Islam, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013 [in press].
, The Gospel in Arabic: An Inquiry into its Appearance in the First Abbasid
Century, Oriens Christianus 69 (1985), pp. 126167.
, The Monks of Palestine and the Growth of Christian Literature in Arabic, The
Muslim World 87 (1988), pp. 128.
Gruendler, Beatrice, Arabic Script, Encyclopaedia of the Qurn. Volume One: AD, ed.
Jane Dammen McAuliffe, Leiden: Brill, 2001, pp. 135142.
Hainthaler, Theresia, Christliche Araber vor dem Islam, Leuven: Peeters, 2007.
Kachouh, Hikmat, The Arabic Versions of the Gospels and Their Families 12, PhD Dissertation, Birmingham, UK: University of Birmingham, 2008.
Kashouh, Hikmat, The Arabic Versions of the Gospels: the Manuscripts and their Families,
Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012.
Le Coz, Raymond (trans.), Jean Damascne, crits sur lIslam, Paris: Les ditions du Cerf,
1992.
Massignon, Louis, Les trois prires dAbraham, Paris: ditions du Cerf, 1997.
McCollum, Adam C. and Ronny Vollandt, The Bible in Arabic: An Annotated Bibliography, Leiden: Brill [forthcoming].
Metzger, B.M., The Early Versions of the New Testament: Their Origin, Transmission, and
Limitations, Oxford: Clarendon, 1977.
Monferrer-Sala, Juan Pedro, An Early Fragmentary Christian Palestinian Rendition of
the Gospels into Arabic from Mr Sb (Vat. Ar. 13, 9th c.), [forthcoming].
Motzki, Harald, The Collection of the Qurn: A Reconsideration of Western Views in
Light of Recent Methodological Developments, Der Islam 87 (2001), pp. 134.
, Muaf, Encyclopaedia of the Qurn. Volume Three: JO, ed. Jane Dammen
McAuliffe, Leiden: Brill, 2003, pp. 463466.
Ong, Walter J., Orality and Literacy, London: Methuen & Co., 1982.
Pohlmann, Karl-Friedrich, Die Entstehung des Korans: Neue Erkenntnisse aus Sicht der
historisch-kritischen Bibelwissenschaft, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2012.
Polliack, Meira, The Karaite Tradition of Arabic Bible Translation: A Linguistic and Exegetical Study of Karaite Translations of the Pentateuch from the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries C.E., Leiden: Brill, 1997.
Reynolds, Gabriel Said, The Qurn and Its Biblical Subtext, London: Routledge, 2010.
Ricks, Thomas W., Developing the Doctrine of the Trinity in an Islamic Milieu: Early
Arabic Christian Contributions to Trinitarian Theology, Ph.D. dissertation, Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America, 2012.
Sadeghi, Behnam and Uwe Bergman, The Codex of a Companion of the Prophet and
the Qurn of the Prophet, Arabica 57 (2010), pp. 343436.
Samir, Samir Khalil, The Earliest Arab Apology for Christianity (c.750), in Christian
Arabic Apologetics during the Abbasid Period (7501258), eds Samir Khalil Samir and
Jrgen S. Nielsen, Leiden: Brill, 1994, pp. 57114.
Schoeler, Gregor, crire et transmettre dans les dbuts de lIslam, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002.

Sidney H. Griffith / Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 1 (2013) 723

23

Shahid, Irfan, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1984.
, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century, Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks,
2002.
Staal, H., Mt. Sinai Arabic Codex 151: I Pauline Epistles, Louvain: Peeters, 1983.
Steiner, Richard, A Biblical Translation in the Making: The Evolution and Impact of Saadia
Gaons Tafsr, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Center for Jewish Studies | Harvard
University Press, 2010.
Swanson, Mark N., Some Considerations for the Dating of F tathlth All al-wid (Sinai
Ar. 154) and Al-Jmi wujh al-imn (London British Library Or. 4950), in Actes du
quatrime congrs international dtudes arabes chrtiennes, ed. Samir Khalil Samir =
Parole de l Orient 18 (1993), pp. 117141.
Zwettler, Michael, A Mantic Manifesto: The Sra of The Poets and the Qurnic Foundations of Prophetic Authority, in Poetry and Prophecy: The Beginnings of a Literary
Tradition, ed. James L. Kugel, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.