A Plain Introduction to the Criticism of the New Testament, Vol. II.

by Frederick Henry Ambrose Scrivener

(6) The Arabic Version (Arab.).

Arabic versions (Arab.) are many, though of the slightest possible critical importance; their literary history, therefore, need not be traced with much minuteness. A notice is quoted from Bar-hebraeus (Assemani, Bibl. Or., ii. 335) to the effect that John, Patriarch of the Monophysites from 631-640, translated the “Gospel” from Syriac into Arabic; and some scholars have believed in the existence of a pre-Mohammedan version of parts at least of the New Testament on other grounds; from such a version (written in the “Hebrew” character) in the opinion of Sprenger (Das Leben und die Lehre Muhammads, i. 131) come the verses of St. John's Gospel (xv. 23-27, xvi. 1), cited by Ibn Ishaq (ob. 768) in his “Life of Mohammed” (ed. Wüstenfeld, i. 150)[133]. These verses are evidently translated from the (Jerusalem?) Syriac; but the translation of the Gospel, from the Syriac [pg 162] into Arabic, existing in a Leipzig MS. brought by Tischendorf from the East and described at length by Gildemeister (De evangeliis in Arabicum e simplici Syriaco translatis, Bonn, 1865) is shown by internal evidence to be posterior to Islam (pp. 30 sq.). The Arabic versions of the Gospel existing in MS. are divided by Guidi (Atti della R. Academia dei Lincei, classe di scienze morali &c., 1888, 1-30) into five sorts: (1) those made directly from the Greek; (2) made directly or corrected from the Peshitto; (3) made directly or corrected from the Coptic; (4) MSS. of two distinct eclectic recensions made in the Alexandrian Patriarchate in the thirteenth century; (5) MSS. (chiefly derived from the Syriac) which are distinguished by their style; being in rhymed prose or elegant Arabic. MSS. of the first sort can all, he says, be traced to the convent of St. Saba near Jerusalem, and are preceded by the lives of its founders, St. Eutimius and St. Saba; the version they contain is to be ascribed to the time of the Caliph Mamun (ninth century). Of the MSS. of class 4, one set represents a recension made by Ibn El-Assāl, circ. 1250; while another represents a less elaborate recension made shortly afterwards, in which the passages omitted in the other were restored, while marginal notes recorded their omission in other versions. Versions of the fifth class were made in the tenth, fourteenth, and seventeenth centuries. A list of MSS. containing the different recensions of all these classes is given by Guidi, l. c., pp. 30-33.

The printed texts all represent varieties of the second eclectic recension of class 4, of which five editions are enumerated by Gildemeister(l. c., pp. 42, 3, and iv). 1. Roman edition of the Gospels from the Medicean Press, 1591 (ar.r), edited by J. Baptista Raymundi, some copies having a Latin translation by Antonius Sionita. The MS. on which this edition was based is unknown. 2. Edition of Thomas Erpenius (1584-1624), Leyden, 1616, containing the whole New Testament (ar.e). This edition was based on the Leyden MS., Scaliger 217, written in Egypt in the year of the Martyrs 1059 (a.d. 1342-3); two other manuscripts also employed by Erpenius for the Gospels are now in the Cambridge University Library (G. 5. 33, and G. 5. 27, written a.d. 1285). A third MS. employed for this edition was in the Carshunic character. The Acts and Pauline Epistles, the Epistles of St. James, St. Peter 1 and St. John 1 in this edition are translated [pg 163] from the Peshitto; the remaining Catholic Epistles and the Apocalypse are from some other source; the latter shows some remarkable agreement with the Memphitic (Hug, Einleitung in das N. T., pp. 433-5). 3. Edition of the whole N. T. in the Paris Polyglott (ar.p), 1645, reprinted with little alteration in the London Polyglott (1657). Gildemeister, l. c., proves against Lagarde (l. c., xi) that this recension in the Gospels is not an interpolated reprint of the Roman edition, but is based on a MS. similar to Paris Anc. f. 27 (of a.d. 1619) and Coisl. 239 (new Suppl. Ar. 27) described by Scholz, “Bibl. Krit. Reise,” pp. 56, 58. The Acts, Epistles, and Apocalypse follow the Greek, but are by another translator. 4. Edition of the whole N. T. in the Carshunic character (Rome, 1703), edited by Faustus Naironus, for the use of the Maronites, from a MS. brought from Cyprus, reprinted Paris, 1827; the Acts, Epistles, and Apocalypse represent the same version as that of Erpenius, but in a different recension. 5. Edition of the four Gospels from a Vienna MS. (previously described by S. C. Storr, Dissertatio inauguralis critica de evangeliis Arabicis, Tübingen, 1875, p. 17 sq.), by P. de Lagarde (Die vier Evangelien Arabisch, Leipzig, 1864). The MS. contains various readings from the Coptic, Syriac, and Latin (according to Lagarde, Gildemeister more naturally renders rūmī by Greek). The editor has prefixed a table of variants between his text and that of Erpenius, but regards the relation of the former to the original as involving questions too complicated for immediate discussion (p. xxxi).

Extracts from MSS. of Arabic versions in French and Italian libraries are given by J. M. A. Scholz, Biblisch-Kritische Reise, Leipzig and Sorau, 1823; a description of several others, some of great antiquity, is to be found in Tischendorf's “Anecdota Sacra et Profana,” pp. 70-73 (2nd ed.); and Professor Rendel Harris, in “Biblical Fragments from Sinai” (Cambridge, 1890) has published a facsimile of a fragment of an Arabic version from a bilingual MS. of the ninth century; the version whence it is derived agrees with none of those that have been published, and was probably older than any of them.

The repeated revision and correction which these translations have undergone (Gildemeister, l. c., 1-3), while they give evidence of the industry and zeal of the Arabic-speaking Christians, have made scholars despair of employing them for critical purposes; [pg 164] “they rather serve,” says Gildemeister, “to illustrate the history of biblical and Christian studies.”