Rob Turnbull on Arabic Manuscripts and New Testament Textual Criticism

Rob talking about something important

Over at Biblia Arabica, Rob Turnbull has written a post about Arabic manuscripts, titled “Do Arabic Gospel manuscripts matter for Textual Criticism?” The article is an abridged version of a longer paper Rob presented at the 11th Birmingham Colloquium last year, and the full version is forthcoming in a volume of the papers from the Colloquium. I’ve always found Rob to be an engaging speaker and an even better person. I have vivid memories of looking around the room a couple of SBLs ago to see other people’s minds blown as much as mine was when Rob presented on some of the amazing software he had developed.

Arabic manuscripts can be classified into families, and Rob’s post is about the text-critical value of one of them, Family B. This family is composed of three manuscripts from the New Finds of St. Catherine’s Monastery: Sinai ar. Parch. N.F. 24, Sinai ar. Parch. N.F. 44, and Sinai ar. Parch. N.F. 8+28 (which are two parts of the same codex). Sinai ar. Parch. N.F. 8+28 has been written about here (but unfortunately, the downloadable pdf does not at present match what the content should be; it looks like this article was skipped in the digitisation of this issue of NovT).

Rob begins by mentioning that Arabic manuscripts are often overlooked because they are assumed to be more or less Byzantine. However, as he demonstrates, Family B is surprisingly non-Byzantine. Rob worked with the Text und Textwert volumes and took into consideration the way Greek was translated into Arabic and arrived at some nice graphs that show how Family B compares to Greek witnesses to the New Testament. One in particular is this chart of agreement with the majority text over time, where Family B is represented by the big red star in the middle:

[Caption quoted from the article:] Fig. 2. The similarity of manuscripts with the Majority Text over time. Data are combined across all the test locations used in the Four Gospels. Manuscripts are labeled with the category assigned to them by the Alands. [link removed] The approximate dates of Greek manuscripts are taken from the Kurzgefasste Liste.[link removed] For clarity, the only credible interval (expressing the uncertainty of the calculation) shown is for ar^b. This graph combines data from all four Gospels. The equivalent graphs broken down for all four Gospels are found on my Github page.

With Rob’s permission, I quote his conclusion here in full:

In conclusion, probing the character of Family B of the Arabic Gospels using Text und Textwert gives similar results to Kashouh’s earlier study from Luke. Family B is consistently non-Byzantine throughout the four Gospels and with high credibility would rank together the top 25 manuscripts of the Greek tradition in terms of dissimilarity with the Majority Text. The text of ar^b in Luke and the latter half of Matthew shows a high proportion of similarity with the ‘Ancient’ (UBS) Text though more test passages are necessary to demonstrate this with greater certainty. In particular, there are a very high number of ‘special’ readings which disagree with both the Majority and Ancient texts. This potentially makes ar^b of great value in explaining poorly understood branches of the transmission of the Gospels. This Arabic version is of high significance and it would be appropriate for it to be cited in the apparatus of future critical editions of the Gospels. It is hoped that through further study of this version, it can be precisely related to other manuscripts in the Greek tradition to illuminate the history of transmission of the Gospels.

Do be sure to check out the article here for a fuller argument and more charts and data: “Do Arabic Gospel manuscripts matter for Textual Criticism?”

New, Open Access Book on the Arabic Text of Paul

I just noticed this week that there’s a new book on the Arabic text of Paul. Included is a list of Arabic manuscripts of Paul and info about the digital edition of the main manuscript focus (Vat. Ar. 13). The digital edition includes a French translation of the manuscript. For background on that, see here. Wonderfully, it’s open access so it’s free. It’s part of Brill’s Biblia Arabica series.

Les manuscrits arabes des lettres de Paul: État de la question et étude de cas (1 Corinthiens dans le Vat. Ar. 13)

Author: Sara Schulthess
Series: Biblia Arabica, Volume: 6

Cet ouvrage ouvre une fenêtre sur la transmission des lettres de Paul en arabe. Il s’interroge sur le manque d’intérêt depuis le début du 20ème siècle pour les manuscrits arabes du Nouveau Testament et apporte une contribution à la récente reprise scientifique de ce champ, en étudiant le corpus largement inexploré des manuscrits arabes des lettres de Paul. Après un état des lieux établi à l’aide d’un répertoire de manuscrits, l’étude se concentre sur un manuscrit, le Vaticanus Arabicus 13. L’édition de la Première lettre aux Corinthiens de ce document du 9ème siècle est suivie d’une analyse linguistique et philologique pointue ; elle permet de dégager des éléments exégétiques qui mettent en lumière l’intérêt théologique du texte.

This work provides an insight into the transmission of the Letters of Paul into Arabic. It aims to understand the lack of interest since the beginning of the 20th century for the Arabic manuscripts of the New Testament and to contribute to the current scholarly rediscovery for this field by studying the largely unexplored corpus of the Arabic manuscripts of the Letters of Paul. After a broad overview with the help of a list of witnesses, the study focuses on a specific manuscript: Vaticanus Arabicus 13. The edition of First Corinthians of this 9th century document is followed by a close analysis of linguistic and philological aspects, while the underlining of interesting exegetical points reveals the theological interest of the text.

Bibliography of the Arabic Bible

Fresh from the Biblia Arabica project comes a new bibliography of the Arabic Bible which is said to be a classified and annotated history of scholarship. 

You can find it at biblia-arabica.com/bibl and read more about it on the introductory blog post. Here’s a snippet of that:

The bibliography aims to include all Arabic Bible prints and all secondary literature on Arabic versions of the Bible, regardless of language. Currently we have entries in Arabic, English, Hebrew, French, German, Italian, Latin, and (coming soon) Russian. Translations made by three different communities––Jewish, Christian, and Samaritan––as well as citations by Muslim authors are all within scope. For more about this, see the Introduction.

That said, what we are releasing today is the first 200 of about 1500 entries we have drafted. These published entries make up part or all of the following subject collections: Generalia (edited by Ronny Vollandt), Gospels (edited by Robert Turnbull and Vevian Zaki), Pauline Epistles (edited by Vevian Zaki), Qaraite Translations (edited by Ronny Vollandt and Michael Wechsler), and Quotations in Christian Arabic Writings (edited by Peter Tarras).

Our plan is to upload new entries fortnightly, so stay tuned!

This looks very helpful. 

“PAVONe” – Platform of the Arabic Versions of the New Testament

The Digital humanities Center at the University of Balamand has just launched “PAVONe”, Platform of the Arabic Versions of the New Testament. Here is the news piece with pictures of the launching event. The Platform contains a huge number of Arabic manuscripts of the four gospels and lectionaries and a number of modules:

Description:

Since 2012 our Digital Humanities Centre at the University of Balamand has been developing an online database for the Arabic text of the Gospels. The database is accessible online and it’s open for scholars.

The database contains the following sections/services:

1. The “About” section: It includes a presentation of the project and the methodology used. 
2. The “Manuscripts” section: It allows the user to browse the Gospels manuscripts transcribed in the database. Two browsing modalities are offered: the first one allows the scholar to visualize the manuscripts in their geographical location using a geotagging feature; the second one allows the filtration of the manuscripts by a variety of parameters (date, language...). Both modalities lead to the same resources and give the researcher the possibility of displaying some codicological and paleographical properties of the manuscripts and their content as well. 
3. The “Lectionary” section: It gives the liturgical structure of the lectionary as used by the Rum Orthodox Church and allows the researcher to browse the corresponding pericopes in the lectionary manuscripts. All the transcribed texts are published with a copy of the manuscript containing the reading. This allows the scholar to examine the original digital photo of the text and to compare it with our reading. 
4. The “Citations” section: In this section, we identified all the citations and allusions of the Gospels verses in the literature produced by Christians and Muslims in the first millennium. We limited our sources to the works mentioned in the monumental work: “Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History”. This section enables the researchers to browse all these citations and allusions and to compare them with their parallels in the lectionaries and/or continuous texts of the Gospels. 
5. The “Search” section: this module allows the researcher to look for a specific verse in all the contents of the database regardless of the type of the source. The user can search, for example, for a verse in the “Muslim-Christian citations” and lectionaries at the same time...

Birmingham Thesis on Arabic Versions of the Gospels

The Center for New Testament Textual Studies (New Orleans) is pleased to have received Hikmat Kachouh's thesis entitled "The Arabic Versions of the Gospels: The Manuscripts and their Families."

The thesis was submitted to the University of Birmingham in fulfillment of the PhD, and was supervised by D.C. Parker.

At first glance, what impresses the reader is the sheer size of the thesis. In three volumes, it comes to 1012 pages.

• Vol. 1: Thesis
• Vol. 2: The Abridged List of the Arabic Gospel Manuscripts and the Collation of the Test Passages
• Vol. 3: Textual data and stemmas