The Bible in Arabic

When the apostles spoke at Pentecost, the crowd in Jerusalem included visitors from many lands, and they said:

Cretans and Arabians: we hear them speaking in our languages the mighty works of God! (Acts 2:11)

Arabic-speaking Christians have long pointed to that verse. Yet the history of the Bible in Arabic is complicated. It is a history of many translations rather than one, made by Christians of several churches and by Jews, from several source languages, over more than a thousand years. Today Arabic is spoken by hundreds of millions of people, including millions of Christians in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine and elsewhere.

Was there an Arabic Bible before Islam?

There were Christian Arabs well before the seventh century: tribes on the borders of the Roman and Persian empires, and communities in places such as Najran in southern Arabia. Some scholars have argued that parts of the Bible must already have been translated into Arabic for them. But no Arabic Bible text survives from before Islam, and no early writer clearly describes one. Sidney Griffith, whose study The Bible in Arabic is the standard account, concludes that before Islam, Arab Christians most likely heard scripture in Syriac or Greek, explained orally in Arabic, and that written translation began only after Arabic became the language of government and learning under Islam.

Others think some oral or written versions may have existed and simply not survived. The evidence is too thin to settle the question.

The monastery translations

What is certain is that by the eighth and ninth centuries, Christians living under Muslim rule were translating the Bible into Arabic in earnest. Arabic was becoming the everyday language of Christians across the Middle East, and fewer of them could follow Greek or Syriac.

Many of the oldest surviving Arabic Bible manuscripts come from monasteries in Palestine and Sinai, such as Mar Saba in the Judean desert and St Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai, whose dry climate and long continuity have preserved an extraordinary library. One manuscript at Sinai, known as Sinai Arabic 151, contains Paul’s letters, Acts and the Catholic letters, and carries a date corresponding to 867 CE. It was translated from Syriac, with explanatory notes. Other early manuscripts contain the Gospels, Psalms and prophets.

These translations were not made from a single source. Some were translated from Greek, some from Syriac, and later ones in Egypt from Coptic. Hikmat Kashouh’s survey of some two hundred Arabic Gospel manuscripts groups them into many families, reflecting different source texts and revisions. In thirteenth-century Cairo, the Coptic scholar al-As’ad ibn al-‘Assal produced a careful revision of the Gospels, comparing Arabic versions with Greek, Syriac and Coptic, and marking differences in the margins. It is an early example of something like textual criticism in Arabic.

Choosing words in a shared language

Translating the Bible into Arabic raised special questions, because Arabic was also the language of the Qur’an. Christian translators had to decide how far to use vocabulary that Muslims also used. The ordinary Arabic word for God, Allah, was used by Arab Christians and Jews as well, and still is. For the name of Jesus, Christians generally used Yasu’, close to the Syriac form, rather than the Qur’anic ’Isa.

Some translators wrote in a style that echoes Islamic religious language, and some even used rhymed prose. Griffith argues that the Arabic Bible was shaped from the start by conversation, and sometimes argument, with Muslim neighbours. Muslim scholars, in turn, sometimes quoted the Bible in Arabic in their own writings.

Saadia Gaon and the Jewish translations

Jews in Muslim lands also adopted Arabic as their everyday language. The most famous Jewish translation was made by Saadia Gaon (882–942), born in Egypt and later head of the academy of Sura in Iraq, one of the great scholars of medieval Judaism.

Saadia translated the Torah, and other books, from Hebrew into Arabic. His translation is usually called the Tafsir, an Arabic word meaning “interpretation” or “explanation,” and the name suits it. Saadia aimed at clear, idiomatic Arabic rather than word-for-word rendering, and he often interpreted the text, for example avoiding expressions that seemed to give God human features. Like most Jewish Arabic writing of the time, it was written in Hebrew letters, a form known as Judeo-Arabic.

Saadia’s Tafsir became the standard Arabic Torah for many Jewish communities, especially in Yemen, where it was read alongside the Hebrew and the Aramaic Targum for centuries. Karaite Jewish scholars made their own, often more literal, Arabic translations, and Samaritans produced an Arabic version of their Pentateuch.

A lost translation by Hunayn?

The ninth-century Christian physician Hunayn ibn Ishaq was the most famous translator of the Abbasid age, renowned for putting Greek medical and philosophical works into Arabic and Syriac. The tenth-century historian al-Mas’udi reports that Hunayn also translated the Greek Old Testament into Arabic. No manuscript has been securely identified as his, and some scholars doubt the report. It is a reminder that many early translations may simply be lost.

The first printed Arabic Bibles

Printing in Arabic began in Europe, not the Middle East. The Medici press in Rome printed the Arabic Gospels in 1590–91, partly with the aim of reaching Eastern Christians. Arabic texts were included in the great Paris and London polyglot Bibles of the seventeenth century.

In 1671 the Catholic missionary congregation in Rome, the Propaganda Fide, published a complete Arabic Bible in three volumes. It was prepared over decades, beginning under the Maronite archbishop Sarkis al-Rizzi, and was revised to agree with the Latin Vulgate. For about two centuries it was the most widely available printed Arabic Bible, though many readers found its Arabic stiff.

Beirut: Smith–Van Dyck and the Jesuit Bible

The two Arabic Bibles that dominated the twentieth century were both produced in Beirut in the nineteenth.

The first was begun around 1847 by the American Protestant missionary Eli Smith, working with two leading Lebanese scholars, Butrus al-Bustani and Nasif al-Yaziji. After Smith’s death in 1857, Cornelius Van Dyck, an American physician and missionary, completed the work, with the scholar Yusuf al-Asir checking the Arabic style. The New Testament appeared in 1860 and the whole Bible in 1865. Unlike the Rome Bible, it was translated from Hebrew and Greek, using the printed Greek text of the time. Usually called the Smith–Van Dyck or simply Van Dyck Bible, it became the standard Bible of Arabic-speaking Protestants and was widely used by Orthodox Christians too. It remains much loved for its dignified style, which some compare to the King James Version’s place in English. Historians have also noted that its Arab collaborators’ contribution was long underplayed.

Catholic scholars responded with their own translation. The Jesuit Bible, prepared at the Jesuit university in Beirut and published between 1876 and 1880, was also translated from the original languages, with the scholar Ibrahim al-Yaziji (son of Nasif) as its language editor. Both versions contributed to the nineteenth-century Arabic literary revival known as the Nahda.

Modern Arabic versions

Since the mid-twentieth century, several new translations have tried to reach readers for whom the classical style of Van Dyck feels distant. They include a new Jesuit translation in the later twentieth century, a version in more contemporary Arabic sometimes called the Book of Life (Kitab al-Hayat), and an interconfessional Common Arabic Translation published by the Bible Societies in 1993, produced by Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox scholars working together. There are also translations into spoken dialects, such as Egyptian Arabic, a sensitive matter in a culture that prizes the classical language. Debates continue over how closely Christian translations should follow Qur’anic vocabulary, and how literal they should be.

Why it matters for Open Word Bible

Open Word Bible is not translating into Arabic. But the Arabic story shows clearly why it matters which text a translation starts from. Many early Arabic versions were translations of translations, made from Syriac, Coptic or Latin, and the Rome Bible of 1671 was conformed to the Vulgate. The nineteenth-century Beirut translators went back to Hebrew and Greek. Open Word Bible does the same for every language it works in: each is translated from the Hebrew and Greek texts, not from English.

The Arabic story also shows that every translation involves choices of vocabulary that carry history with them. Open Word Bible tries to make such choices visible, recording the reasons for each decision so that readers can see them and disagree. See Showing our work.

Sources

• Griffith, Sidney H. The Bible in Arabic: The Scriptures of the “People of the Book” in the Language of Islam. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
• Kashouh, Hikmat. The Arabic Versions of the Gospels: The Manuscripts and Their Families. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012.
• Vollandt, Ronny. Arabic Versions of the Pentateuch: A Comparative Study of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Sources. Leiden: Brill, 2015.
• Polliack, Meira. The Karaite Tradition of Arabic Bible Translation. Leiden: Brill, 1997.
• Staal, Harvey, ed. Mt. Sinai Arabic Codex 151. Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium. Leuven: Peeters, 1983.
• Binay, Sara, and Stefan Leder, eds. Translating the Bible into Arabic: Historical, Text-Critical and Literary Aspects. Beirut: Orient-Institut; Würzburg: Ergon, 2012.
• Grafton, David D. The Contested Origins of the 1865 Arabic Bible: Contributions to the Nineteenth Century Nahda. Leiden: Brill, 2015.
• Metzger, Bruce M. The Early Versions of the New Testament: Their Origin, Transmission, and Limitations. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.
• Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain), except where the article quotes a historic translation or gives its own literal rendering.