Scholarship
“Scriptures Beyond Words: ‘Islamic’ Vocabulary in Early Christian Arabic Bible Translations”
By Miriam L. HJÄLM, Collectanea Christiana Orientalia
This article discusses the use of “Islamic” vocabulary in Christian Arabic Bible translations composed around the 9th century. It suggests that there is a link between such use and the translation’s Vorlage dependence, function, and the general translation technique attested in it. The article further proposes that a function of translations containing a notable and seemingly deliberate use of Islamic-sounding vocabulary was to show that the Christian Scriptures were able to absorb the message of Islam, just like early Christian Arabic theologians promulgated the idea that Christian dogmas permeated the Qurʾān. Thus, instead of shielding their Scriptures from a competing religion by dressing them in a more neutral linguistic register, these translators and authors presented a Christianity essentially elevated beyond words and contexts and therefore portrayable in any of them.
“The Philosophy behind the Arabic Translation The True Meaning of the Gospel of the Messiah”
By Ekram Lamie Hennawie and Emad Azmi Mikhail, Evangelical Review of Theology
This article presents a discussion of the True Meaning between two native Arabic-speakers from Egypt. The authors are professors of Theology who have previously worked in the same theological seminary and have known each other for decades. One of them, Professor Lamie, serves on the committee that oversaw the creation of the True Meaning Translation.
The Arab Christian: A History in the Middle East, 1991, Louisville KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, p.284-285
By Dr. Kenneth Cragg
“But for present purposes the main lesson in the complex story of the Christian scriptures in Arabic is their distance from Islam. In literary shape they enshrine the same otherness that characterizes traditional attitudes on the personal level and in society. There is a deep-seated distinctiveness both in the terms they use and the consciousness they evoke. Phrases in the Qur’an that might conceivably carry the Christian meaning in Christian texts have been ignored or suspected by translators intent on pure transmission and fortified by convictions relating to revelation, its limits and securities. It is precisely in the most vital areas of meaning and its [p.285] vocabulary form that this reluctance for mutual terms, this will against any “vacant possession” of terms earmarked as “private,” is most insistent. There has been a greater readiness, on the part of some, to colloquialize the language of Arabic translation -despite strong opposition- than to facilitate Muslim understanding by recourse to Islamic terminology. There are limits to how far one can take the risks that ease comprehension by the outsider.
“The issues bristle with difficulty. Perhaps, all in all, they are insurmountable. What is not in doubt is that Christian Arabic scriptures speak in one theological dialect and the Qur’an in another. Christian Arabic, in all versions, reads incongruously to literate Muslims. It is not a text “to the manner born.” To Muslim ears it offers from its Greek and Hebrew originals what needs a running targum to translate anew what does not alienate the ear or obfuscate the mind. It still has to mediate beyond the tensions of thought in the incidence of vocabulary. It has to do so within a context in which, reciprocally, Muslims will a reservation of Islamic terms from currency elsewhere. Such reciprocal segregation of expression in a single language and a single national Arabness hampers both faiths in the art of language itself and prejudices their role in contemporary life.”