Search results for ""Author Sidney H. Griffith""

Theodore Abu Qurrah (c.750-c.825) was an intellectual heir of St. John of Damascus. Both became monks of Mar Sabas monastery in the Judean desert. Whereas John of Damascus was prominent among the generations of Greek writers in the Holy Land in early Islamic times, Theodore Abu Qurrah was the first Orthodox scholar whose name we know regularly to write Christian theology in Arabic. He spoke and wrote the Arabic language at a time when it was just becoming the cultural language of classical Islamic civilization, as well as the lingua sacra of the Qu'ran and of the new world religion. He was among the first Christians to exploit the apologetic potential of the new Arabic medium of public discourse. Abu Qurrah's Arabic tract in defense of the veneration of the holy icons was a response to the problem of the public veneration of the symbols of Christianity in an Islamic environment in which the caliph's policies since the time of 'Abd al-Malik (685-705) had been to claim the public space for Islam. In this treatise one finds arguments once expounded by earlier Greek writers, now deployed to meet the needs of a new generation of Arabic-speaking Christians, who were more evidently in contact and debate with Muslims.

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From the first centuries of Islam to well into the Middle Ages, Jews and Christians produced hundreds of manuscripts containing portions of the Bible in Arabic. Until recently, however, these translations remained largely neglected by Biblical scholars and historians. In telling the story of the Bible in Arabic, this book casts light on a crucial transition in the cultural and religious life of Jews and Christians in Arabic-speaking lands. In pre-Islamic times, Jewish and Christian scriptures circulated orally in the Arabic-speaking milieu. After the rise of Islam--and the Qur'an's appearance as a scripture in its own right--Jews and Christians translated the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament into Arabic for their own use and as a response to the Qur'an's retelling of Biblical narratives. From the ninth century onward, a steady stream of Jewish and Christian translations of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament crossed communal borders to influence the Islamic world. The Bible in Arabic offers a new frame of reference for the pivotal place of Arabic Bible translations in the religious and cultural interactions between Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

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