Translating the Bible into Arabic: Historical, Text-Critical and Literary Aspects.

• Author: Grafton, David
• Position: Book review

Translating the Bible into Arabic: Historical, Text-Critical and Literary Aspects. Edited by SARA Binay and Stefan Leder. Beiruter Texte und Studien, vol. 131. Beirut: Orient-Institut, 2012; distributed by Ergon Verlag, Wurzburg. Pp. 150 + 127 (Arabic). 59 [euro].

Research into the Arabic Bible has traditionally been considered of little value to the history and analysis of biblical manuscripts, and textual studies of the Arabic Bible have been relegated to little more than footnotes in biblical textual studies. In 1954 Arthur Voobus (Early Versions of the New Testament, 288) remarked that the origins of the Arabic Bible are "shrouded in darkness" and that the texts have been modified, combined, contaminated, and adapted from a variety of other linguistic translations. Bruce Metzger (The Early Versions of the New Testament, 1977, 265) called the existing Arabic texts "minor Eastern versions" whose printed editions of the sixteenth century have "very little value for critical purposes."

Among scholars of Islamic studies the origin, development, and translation of the Arabic Bible have generally been dismissed as part of Christian-Muslim apologetic or polemical debates. Voobus's argument that the "Quran does not help us here and must be left out of the discussion" (p. 275) has been commonly adhered to in inter-religious and inter-cultural historical studies, and the presence of biblical quotations and allusions in the Quran, as in much of early Islamic literature, has been ignored in most Western research. This has meant that research into the role of the Arabic Bible has often been subject to polemical positions--either Christians attempting to prove a pre-Islamic heterodox Arab Christianity from which the Quran assumed Gnostic and Docetic views of Jesus or Muslims seeking to expose the corruption of Christian scriptures.

As rightly noted in Stefan Leder's foreword to Translating the Bible into Arabic, the origin of the Arabic Bible is at the nexus of not only Biblical Studies, but also Arabic Studies, Syriac Studies, Islamic Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies. Perhaps this inevitable overlapping of disciplines has kept such investigations stinted by what has traditionally been left to specialized areas of scholarship. The current acceptance of inter-disciplinary work in other fields of the academy, however, has opened up opportunities for a new generation of scholars of the Near East to ask questions across disciplines, and there have...