Conference Report: “The Bible and Arab Christianity: Translation, Interpretation, and Context” (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, 28-29 April 2023)

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by Bishara Ebeid 1. From 28 to 29 April 2023, a group of scholars in the field of Arabic Bible and Arab Christian studies gathered at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice to participate in a conference organized by myself in … Continued

Shiʿite Muslim Exegesis of the Bible in Early Modern Iran: Sayyid Aḥmad ʿAlavī and His Interpretation of Elijah

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by Dennis Halft OP The Imāmī (Twelver) Shiʿite scholar Sayyid Aḥmad ʿAlavī (d. between 1644 and 1650) is well-known for his Persian writings against Christianity.[1] Born in the Safavid capital of Isfahan, ʿAlavī was the intellectual spearhead of the local … Continued

Comparing the translated sections in Yaʿaqūb al-Qirqisānī’s Parashat Bereshit with those of R. Saʿadya Gaon

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by Rachel Hasson The Karaite Abū Yūsuf Yaʿqūb ibn Isḥāq al-Qirqisānī lived in the first half of the tenth century in Babylonia; he is indisputably considered knowledgeable and educated of stature. Unlike his contemporary R. Saʿadya Gaon, who composed a … Continued

The Qurʾānic Subtext of Early Arabic Bible Translations

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by Miriam Lindgren Hjälm In 2018, Gabriel Said Reynolds published a valuable reference work with the title The Qurʾān and the Bible: Text and Commentary.[1] In this book, Reynolds accumulates research on what is commonly known as the biblical subtext … Continued

Oriental Languages and Scholarly Collaboration in Seventeenth-Century Europe: Étienne Hubert and the Arabic Gospels

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by Nil Palabiyik Scholarly collaboration is important. It was as important in the seventeenth century as it is now. This blog post is about how I deciphered, almost by sheer coincidence, an arcane reference in an early modern letter and … Continued

The “Psalms of David” as reimagined and rewritten by Muslims

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by David R. Vishanoff The history of the Bible in Arabic includes not only the reception of its textual content, and the reworking of its stories and themes in various forms of “rewritten Bible,” but also the reimagining of the … Continued

Biblical translations into Christian Arabic preserved in the Cairo Genizah collections

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by Ronny Vollandt The presence of Christian Arabic texts in the Cairo Genizah corpus is well attested.[1] In her survey, Krisztina Szilágyi classes the compositions of Christian Arabic provenance which circulated among Cairene Jews into two groups. The first includes … Continued