The Bible in Arab Christianity

428 Pages·2006·2.81 MB·English

by  David Thomas

The Bible in Arab Christianity
The History of
Christian-Muslim
Relations
Editorial board
David Thomas
University of Birmingham
Tarif Khalidi
American University of Beirut
Gerrit Jan Reinink
University of Groningen
Mark Swanson
Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago
VOLUME 6
The Bible in Arab
Christianity
Edited by
David Thomas
LEIDEN BOSTON
•
2007
Photo front cover: f.14r of Codex Sinai Arabic NF 8, an early copy of the Gospels in Arabic, possibly eighth
century, written on re-used parchment. This composite folio contains the text of Matthew 7:21-8:4,
with Greek underwriting visible in the two right-hand portions.
Cover photo reproduced by kind permission of St Catherine’s Monastery
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Christians and Muslims have been involved in exchanges over matters of faith and morality since the
founding of Islam. Attitudes between the faiths today are deeply coloured by the legacy of past
encounters, and often preserve centuries-old negative views.
The History of Christian-Muslim Relations, Texts and Studiespresents the surviving record of past encounters
in authoritative, fully introduced text editions and annotated translations, and also monograph and
collected studies. It illustrates the development in mutual perceptions as these are contained in surviv-
ing Christian and Muslim writings, and makes available the arguments and rhetorical strategies that,
for good or for ill, have left their mark on attitudes today. The series casts light on a history marked
by intellectual creativity and occasional breakthroughs in communication, although, on the whole
beset by misunderstanding and misrepresentation. By making this history better known, the series
seeks to contribute to improved recognition between Christians and Muslims in the future.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
LC Control Number: 2006051757
ISSN 1570–7350
ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15558 9
ISBN-10: 90 04 15558 9
© Copyright 2007 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
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contents v
CONTENTS
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
The Arabic Versions of the Gospels: A Case Study of John 1.1
and 1.18
Hikmat Kachouh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Bible et liturgie chez les Arabes chrétiens (VIe–IXe siècle)
Samir Arbache . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Anti-Jewish Polemic and Early Islam
Shaun O’Sullivan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
The Use of Biblical Quotations in Christian Apocalyptic
Writings of the Umayyad Period
Harald Suermann . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
Beyond Prooftexting (2): The Use of the Bible in Some Early
Arabic Christian Apologies
Mark Swanson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
The Re-written Bible in Arabic: The Paradise Story and its
Exegesis in the Arabic Apocalypse of Peter
Emmanouela Grypeou . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
Biblical Exegesis and Interreligious Polemics in the Arabic
Apocalypse of Peter—The Book of the Rolls
Barbara Roggema . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
The Development of Testimony Collections in Early Christian
Apologetics with Islam
David Bertaina . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
The Bible and the Kal§m
David Thomas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
The Qur"anic Sarah as Prototype of Mary
Gabriel Said Reynolds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
Early Muslim Accusations of taÈrÊf: Muq§til Ibn Sulaym§n’s
Commentary on Key Qur"anic Verses
Gordon Nickel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Is There Room for Corruption in the ‘Books’ of God?
Clare Wilde . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
#Amm§r al-BaßrÊ on the Alleged Corruption of the Gospels
Mark Beaumont . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
thomas_HCMR6.indb v 13-11-2006 22:14:00
vi contents
The Use and Translation of Scripture in the Apologetic
Writings of Abå R§"iãa al-TakrÊtÊ
Sandra Keating . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257
Al-Radd al-JamÊl: al-Ghaz§lÊ’s or Pseudo-Ghaz§lÊ’s?
Maha El-Kaisy Friemuth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275
\anbalite Commentary on the Bible: Analysis of Najm al-DÊn
al-•åfÊ’s (d. 716/1316) Al-Ta#lÊq
Lejla Demiri . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295
Illustrating the Gospels in Arabic: Byzantine and Arab Christian
Miniatures in Two Manuscripts of the Early Mamlåk Period
in Cambridge
Lucy-Anne Hunt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315
A Nestorian Arabic Pentateuch used in Western Islamic Lands
Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351
Biblical Allusions and Citations in the Syriac Theotokia according
to MS Syr. New Series 11 of the National Library of
Russia, St Petersburg
Natalia Smelova . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 369
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 393
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415
thomas_HCMR6.indb vi 13-11-2006 22:14:01
introduction 1
INTRODUCTION
The spectacular growth of culture that followed the Muslim sei-
zure of former Byzantine and Sasanian territories in the seventh
and eighth centuries was as deeply indebted to the existing cultures
within which it took place as to its own native resources. And as
Muslims developed distinctive forms of thinking, articulation of faith
and systematization of belief, they did so in debate with Christians
and others around them. Thus, the first surviving Muslim religious
literature is replete with analyses of the beliefs of Christians, Jews
and dualists as attempts to demonstrate what is deficient or wrong in
them, and later works contain refutations of these beliefs alongside
expositions of Muslim beliefs themselves. Muslim authors were intent
on showing that any alternatives to the strict monotheism which
they themselves followed were incoherent and logically unviable,
with the obvious inference that any form that differed from Islam
could not be sustained.
In this theological endeavour, which can be witnessed in Muslim
writings from the earliest times through the tenth and eleventh cen-
turies and later, Muslims were, of course, giving systematic form to
suggestions in the Qur"an that religious communities which preceded
them had neglected and mishandled the truth revealed to them and
lapsed into error and confusion. A basic part of this accusation was
that they had not only departed from the revealed scriptures they
had been granted through the divinely appointed messengers sent
to them, but had also lost those scriptures themselves in their pris-
tine form. Thus, an important part of Muslim polemical literature
was occupied with showing that the scriptural texts of Christians
and others were no longer true to their revealed antecedents. Over
a relatively short period of time it became the accepted view that
these books were corrupt, often in the case of Christianity because
they were reconstructions of lost originals into which alien doctrines
from exotic places had been introduced, and so the teachings derived
from them were bound to be wrong. Muslim polemicists tended to
accept this as a norm and search for reasons to support it, and none
challenged its basic premises.
Christians for their part came under increasingly powerful influ-
ence in the early Islamic centuries to relate to, and to some extent
thomas_HCMR6.indb 1 13-11-2006 22:14:01
2 introduction
participate in, the distinctive cultural developments they experienced
around them. As communities within the Ahl al-dhimma they were, of
course, required to conform. But as bearers of their own traditions
of learning and belief, they often at first looked down on the people
who ruled them as inferior and religiously wrong. But their own
beliefs required them to make sense of the changes that took place
as rule by Christians (no matter how harsh) gave place to rule by
their opposites. And like it or not, it became increasingly necessary to
take seriously the language of their rulers and their ways of express-
ing their beliefs. Gradually, translations of Christian scripture were
made in response to popular needs and the practical necessities of
populations that employed Arabic in all areas of social intercourse.
And expressions of doctrines were attempted in the idiom of Muslim
theology, in part to make them accessible to Muslim interlocutors
and in part to express beliefs in forms that were becoming natural
for Christians who moved in Muslim theological circles and shared
the same conceptuality and methods as others within them.
For such Christians it became and remained a pressing necessity
to defend the integrity of the Bible and to show that it not only
contained all the beliefs that Christians followed but also anticipated
the events of history and particularly the challenge of Islam. Just
as anti-Jewish apologists and polemicists had collected texts that
showed incontrovertibly that their opponents were wrong, so anti-
Muslim apologists and polemicists did the same, often adopting the
same texts and even criticizing Muslims indirectly behind attacks
on Jews.
As might be expected, the Bible was central in Christian-Muslim
debates both as object and instrument. It provided a major source
of Christian polemical and apologetic arguments, and it was also
attacked and defended for its integrity and authenticity as a God-
given word. The study of the Bible in Arab Christianity under early
Islam is in great part the study of the experience of Arab Christians
in this period and of their constant awareness of having to defend
the origins and intellectual probity of their beliefs against the chal-
lenges of the vigorous new faith that sought to overthrow them.
The nineteen papers in this collection seek in many different
ways to portray the continuing centrality of the Bible in the eastern
Churches and in their relations with Islam. The first is an attempt
by Hikmat Kachouh to throw light on the basic question of Arabic
translations of the Bible. By sampling variant translations of two
thomas_HCMR6.indb 2 13-11-2006 22:14:01
introduction 3
test verses from the Gospel of John in manuscripts of the continu-
ous Arabic text of the Gospels he is able to suggest a preliminary
categorization into families and to give linguistic and ideological
reasons for the different renderings. This is a first step towards
providing a means of dating these translations.
Samir Arbache also broaches the issue of the earliest Arabic trans-
lations of scripture and liturgical texts, though from a wider histori-
cal point of view. From a consideration of a range of evidence he
finds nothing that points incontrovertibly to anything pre-Islamic or
early, and suggests that instead it was only after the Umayyad caliph
#Abd al-Malik had the Arabic alphabet fixed that written versions of
biblical and liturgical texts began to appear, and incidentally that
the Qur"an was finally set down.
In his study of four apparently anti-Jewish texts from the latter
seventh century, Sean O’Sullivan discerns implicit and oblique ref-
erences to Islam that suggest many of the elements of the classical
form of the faith were in place by this time. These very early texts
show that even before 700 Christians were acutely aware of the
religion under whose laws they lived.
Harald Suermann examines the use of scriptural references in a
group of Christian texts whose authors are aware of Islam that can
also be dated to the Umayyad period. He tabulates the verses they
use and discusses the ways in which they use them. He concludes
that the preferences for different books of the Bible they show de-
rive from their different perceptions of the significance of the new
Muslim rule.
Mark Swanson centres his examination on one Melkite text that
may also come from the Umayyad period, known as On the Triune
Nature of God, and places this against other Melkite literature. He
shows that the series of biblical quotations, testimonia, which they
each incorporate at various points are not used simply as proof texts
in support of the validity of Christianity for Muslim consumption,
but are rather intended for Christians in order to remind them of
the truths of their faith at a time when their experience pointed to
the contrary.
Emmanouela Grypeou makes the first of two studies of the Apoca-
lypse of Peter, which, she argues, is a re-writing of biblical history in
a Muslim context. Although the work is difficult to date accurately,
it focuses on the scriptural origins and character of the Christian
community in such a way that believers who are beset with uncer-
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