Once Again on the Earliest Christian Arabic Apology: Remarks on a Palaeographic Singularity

Author(s): Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala

Source: Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 69, No. 2 (October 2010), pp. 195-197
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/597764 .
Accessed: 26/01/2011 15:15
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at .
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress. .
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal
of Near Eastern Studies.

http://www.jstor.org

Once Again on the Earliest Christian

Arabic Apology: Remarks on a
Palaeographic Singularity*
JUAN PEDRO MONFERRER-SALA, University of Cordoba

Some years ago Samir Khalil Samir presented a

Christian Arab apologetic text contained in the codex
sinaiticus arabicus 154 during the Third Congress of
Christian Arabic Studies held at Louvain-la-Neuve.1
The text of this Melkite Arabic apology was not totally
unknown to scholars since it was edited by Margaret Dunlop Gibson in the last year of the nineteenth
century.2
This ancient parchment, cataloged by the expedition to Mount Sinai,3 was dated to the end of the
eighth century or the beginning of the ninth century

by Atiya,4 and to the ninth century by Kamil.5 This

dating was considered by Samir to be correct in a
broad sense.6 Although he could not give a precise
date for the manuscript due to the unknown system
used in the treatise,7 he ventured three possible dates
based on the starting point of the Christian religion
according to this Melkite author: 737/738 C.E.,
767/768 C.E., and 770/771 C.E.8 Only one of the
three possible dates proposed by Samir has been ixed,
by Swanson: the year 738 C.E.9 Griith, for his part,
has proposed the year 755 as the terminus post quem

*This is a study done in the framework of research project

HUM200764961 (Study and Edition of Biblical and Patristic
Greco-Arabic and Latin Manuscripts) subsidized by the Spanish
Ministry of Education and Science.
1
Samir Khalil Samir, Une apologie arabe du christianisme
dpoque umayyade? in Actes du troisime congrs international
dtudes arabes chrtiennes, ed. Samir Khalil Samir, Parole de lOrient
15 (1990): 85105.
2
Margaret Dunlop Gibson, Studia Sinaitica (London, 1899), 7:
74107 (in Arabic), 236 (English translation). On the peculiarities
of this edition, see Samir Khalil Samir, The Earliest Arab Apology
for Christianity (c. 750), in Christian Arabic Apologetics during
the Abbasid Period, 7501258, ed. Samir Khalil Samir and Jrgen
S. Nielsen (Leiden, 1994), 58.
3
On this mission, see Aziz Suryal Atiya, The Monastery of
St. Catherine and the Mount Sinai Expedition, Proceedings of

the American Philosophical Society 96 (1952): 57886, especially

58286 for the manuscripts.
4
A.S. Atiya, A Hand-List of the Arabic Manuscripts and Scrolls
Microilmed at the Library of the Monastery of St. Catharine, Mount
Sinai (Baltimore, 1955), 6, n. 154.
5
Murad Kamil, Catalogue of All Manuscripts in the Monastery of
St. Catharine on Mount Sinai (Wiesbaden, 1970), 16, n. 111 (154).
6
Samir, Earliest Arab Apology, 59.
7
Ibid., 61.
8
Ibid., 6264.
9
Mark N. Swanson, Some Considerations for the Dating of f
Talth Allh al-wid (Sinai ar. 154) and al-mi wu al-mn
(London, British Library or. 4950), Parole de lOrient 18 (1993):
11541, and Beyond Prooftexting: Approaches to the Qurn
in Some Early Arabic Christian Apologies, The Muslim World 88
(1998): 297319.

[JNES 69 no. 2 (2010)] 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 02229682010/6902003$10.00.

195

196

Journal of Near Eastern Studies

for the date of the manuscript.10 Whatever the case

may be, there is absolutely no doubt that, as Samir
stated, this manuscript . . . is a very old parchment.11
The antiquity of the codex is also conirmed by
the handwriting through some graphological features
that have been set out by Samir.12 All the graphological features he put forward are acceptable with only
one exception: the alleged phenomenon of beginning
a word at the end of one line and continuing it at
the beginning of the next is documented not only in
the early Christian Arabic manuscripts (eighthninth
centuries), but in manuscripts of later periods. For
instance, Suppl. grec 911 of the Bibliothque nationale de France, a manuscript dated in the year 6551
of the creation of the world13 (that is, 1043 C.E.),14
contains a number of examples of split words.15
The purpose, however, of the present article is not
to critique the assessments of one of the foremost
scholars in the ield of Christian Arabic studies, manuscript editions included. Rather, my intention is to
revisit the request of Samir, which reads as follows:
The way the qf is written seems to be absolutely
unique in the Arabic script. It is always written
like this []. This is in fact the Maghribi f. I irst
thought it was a mistake, but it is undoubtedly a
qf. And here is a double mystery: irst, the fact
that we ind in the Mashriq this kind of f, which
is normally only attested in the Maghrib; second,
Sidney H. Griith, From Aramaic to Arabic: The Languages
of the Monasteries of Palestine in the Byzantine and Early Islamic
Periods, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 51 (1997): 25. Cf. S.H. Griith,
The Monks of Palestine and the Growth of Christian Literature
in Arabic, The Muslim World 78 (1988): 18. For a summary of
Griiths contributions to this discussion, see his recent The Church
in the Shadow of the Mosque (Princeton, 2008), 8990.
11
Samir, Earliest Arab Apology, 58.
12
Ibid., 60.
13
In accordance with the preference of the Melkite scribes to
date their works or copies, see Sebastian Brock, The Use of Hidjra Dating in Syriac Manuscripts: A Preliminary Investigation, in
Redeining Christian Identity: Cultural Interaction in the Middle
East since the Rise of Islam, ed. J.J. van Ginkel, H.L. Murrevan
den Berg, and T.M. van Lint (Leuven, 2005), 276.
14
Cf. ngel Urbn and Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala, Some Regards on Textual Criticism in a Greek-Arabic MS (BnF Suppl. Grec
911, A.D. 1043), Parole de lOrient 30 (2005): 80, n. 3, and a
photo of the colophon on p. 102.
15
J.P. Monferrer-Sala, Descripcin lingstica de la columna
rabe del Suppl. Grec 911 BnF (ao 1043), Collectanea Christiana
Orientalia 2 (2005): 99 1.1.
10

the fact that in the manuscript it is a qf and not

a f. I would be very grateful if somebody could
ofer me an explanation or produce another
example of these two peculiarities.16
The aforementioned peculiarities as framed by
Samir will be explained by following the order of the
two questions he posed. At the outset, let me start
with a short remark about the question of the dots17 in
connection with both f and qf. An idea commonly
accepted among some scholars is that writing the f
and qf with a dot below and above the grapheme,
respectively, is a palaeographic feature of the Marib
script. However, such a phenomenon is also attested
in Eastern manuscripts, both Christian and Muslim.18
In any case, the writing of the f and the qf in the
Middle East was not only limited to the morphology as
just referenced, but it changed between the eighth and
the ninth centuries, as has been stated by Imamuddin:
Towards the end of the irst and beginning of
the second century one dot of qaf was placed
in Egypt sometimes above and at other times
beneath the letter and in Palestine it was put below
while fe was given no dot. In the second century
fe was given one dot beneath the letter fe and later
above it and thereupon qaf was given two dots.
The Maghribi still retains the old punctuations of
qaf = fe and fe with one dot below.19
Therefore, the graphological peculiarities exhibited
by f and qf in the codex sinaiticus arabicus 154
fall within the context of the Palestinian handwriting
type of the eighth and ninth centuries, that is, the
geographical and chronological context to which this
Melkite codex has been assigned.20
Regarding the second question connected with qf,
a series of examples of this grapheme written with
Samir, Earliest Arab Apology, 60.
For the dots, see E.J. Revell, The Diacritical Dots and the
Development of the Arabic Alphabet, Journal of Semitic Studies
20 (1975): 17890. Cf. Beatrice Gruendler, Arabic Script, in
Encyclopaedia of the Qurn, ed. Jane Dammen McAulife, 10 vols.
(Leiden, Boston, 20032006), 1:13544, esp. 140.
18
See, e.g., Nabia Abbott, An Arabic Papyrus in the Oriental
Institute: Stories of the Prophets, Journal of Near Eastern Studies
5 (1946): 170b.
19
S.M. Imamuddin, Arabic Writing and Arab Libraries (London, 1983), 1011.
20
Samir, Une apologie arabe, 85105.
16

17

Earliest Christian Arabic Apology

a dot below are attested in some plates of the new

inds from St. Catharine cataloged by Meimaris. This
is the case, for example, with MS Sinai ar. NF perg.
17 in transitional Kf handwriting. This manuscript
contains Antiochuss questions together with the corresponding answers by Athanasius,21 in which the following readings, containing a qf written with a dot
below, are documented:22
qidds (recto, line 14)
al-qiddsn (recto, line 16)
r al-qudus (recto, line 18).
These, however, are not the only examples from old
Sinaitic materials in St. Catharine. In fact, examples
occur in the oldest manuscript containing Old Testament books in Arabic from the Pet codex sinaiticus
arabicus 1, dated circa ninth century A.D.,23 although
examples of qf written with two dots above are also
attested:24 for example, alaqa for the correct alaqa
(Job 28:24b; fol. 1r, line 4), inalaqa (Dan. 1:1, fol.
21
Yiannis E. Meimaris,
(Athens, 1985),
27 (Greek) and 25 (Arabic).
22
Ibid., 83, pl. 22.
23
Atiya, Hand-List of the Arabic Manuscripts, 3, n. 1; Kamil, Catalogue, 11, n. 1; Russell A. Stapleton, An Edition of the Book of
Daniel and Associated Apocrypha in Manuscript Arabic 1 (Ph.D.
diss., Brandeis University, 1989). The irst chapter of the book of
Daniel, together with linguistic observations, has been transliterated
by Joshua Blau, A Handbook of Early Middle Arabic (Jerusalem,
2002), 9596.
24
See J.P. Monferrer-Sala, Liber Iob detractus apud Sin. Ar. 1:
Notas en torno a la Vorlage siriaca de un manuscrito rabe cristiano
(s. 9), Collectanea Christiana Orientalia 1 (2004): 123.

197

11v, line 18). Here is a small sampling of instances in

which qf is written with one dot below:25
uruq (Job 28:23a; fol. 1r, line 2)
qla (Job 28:28; fol. 1r, line 8)
qla (Dan. 1:3; fol. 11v, line 19)
anqaa (Dan. 3:88; fol. 17r, line 1 )
inalaqna (Ezek. 1:21, 24; fol. 96r, lines 15,
23)
qul (Ezek. 2:4; fol. 96v, line 19).
One interesting feature is that, sometimes, a single
grapheme contains two distinct diacritics marking it as
a qf, but in diferent fashions. Such a feature occurs,
for instance, in Ezek.1:3 with the noun qawl in the
sentence kna qawl min al-Rabb al fam azkiyl f
ar al-kaldniyyn al nahr bar [there was a word
from the Lord on Ezekiels mouth in the land of the
Chaldeans by the river bar]. Perhaps a later hand
added the two dots above the qf without deleting the
earlier dot below, as can be inferred from the aforementioned example. This hypothetical explanation of
the interference of a later hand could also be applied
to the translation of Jeremiah contained in this codex.
To conclude, it seems obvious that the position
of the dot below the qf represents a palaeographic
feature characteristic of early South Palestinian texts
from the end of eighth and beginning of the ninth
centuries as shown in a number of examples from the
oldest codices of St. Catharine on Mount Sinai.

25
The foliation given by the expedition to Mount Sinai is
followed.