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Anthony David of Baghdad, Scribe and Monk of Mar Sabas: Arabic in the Monasteries of Palestine

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Sidney H. Griffith
Affiliation:
associate professor of Semitic Languages in The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C.

Extract

Forty years ago George Every called the attention of the scholarly world to the likelihood that in the oriental patriarchates after the time of John of Damascus the Arabic language increasingly became the language of the Melkite, or Roman (rūmī), community of Christians in the caliphate. They came to use Arabic, Every suggested, not only for scholarly purposes, but even for the divine liturgy, at least for the Scripture lessons.1 In the years since Every made these observations it has become increasingly clear that not only was there such an increase in the use of Arabic in the church during the first Abbasid century, but that the crescendo in the use of Arabic went hand in hand with the diminishment of Greek as a language of church scholarship in the monasteries of the Holy Land from early Abbasid times, perhaps even until the Ottoman period, when the so-called “Rūm Millet” reintroduced the control of Greek speakers in the Jerusalem patriarchate.2 Accordingly, one might speak of the first flowering of Christian life in Arabic in the Holy Land as having occurred during the three centuries stretching from 750, the beginning of the Abbasid caliphate, to around the year 1050, the eve of the crusader period in Near Eastern history.3 And the documentary evidence for the literary activity of the Holy Land monks who wrote in Arabic during this period is largely the archive of “old south Palestinian texts” which Joshua Blau studied for his Grammar of Chrtstian Arabic.4

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1989

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References

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2. See remarks, Every's in “Syriac and Arabic,” pp. 236237.Google Scholar On the diminishment of Greek and the growth of Arabic, see the remarks of Griffith, S. H., “Greek into Arabic: Life and Letters in the Monasteries of Palestine in the Ninth Century, the Example of the Summa Theologiae Arabica,” Byzantion 56 (1986): 117138;Google Scholaridem, “The Monks of Palestine and the Growth of Christian Literature in Arabic,” The Muslim World 78 (1988): 1–28.

3. Rachid Haddad has studied the works of the writers of this period in his La Trinité divine chez les théologiens arabes (750–1050) (Paris, 1985).Google Scholar

4. Blau, Joshua, A Grammar of Christian Arabic, vols. 267, 276, 279 (Louvain, 19661967).Google Scholar See the list of “old south Palestinian” texts in volume 267, pp. 2133.Google Scholar Additional manuscripts, to which Blau had no access in earlier catalogs, are listed in Meimarēs, J.J., Katalogos tōn neōn Arabikōn Cheirographōn tēs hieras monēs hagias aikaterinēs tou orous Sina (Athens, 1985),Google Scholar Greek and Arabic.

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22. See the English translation and introduction in The Ascetical Homilies of St. Isaac the Syrian [trans. Dana Miller] (Brookline, Mass., 1984).Google Scholar For a general orientation to Isaac of Nineveh, see Brock, Sebastian, “St. Isaac of Nineveh and Syriac Spirituality,” Sobornost 7 (1975): 7989;Google Scholaridem, “Isaac of Nineveh: Some Newly-Discovered Works,” Sobornost 8 (1986): 28–33.

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25. See S. H. Griffith, “Stephen of Ramlah,” and “Greek into Arabic.”

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29. Seen. 10 above.

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31. Seen. 12 above.

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35. On Cyril and his work, see particularly Flusin, Miracle et histoire.

36. See Fleischer, H. L., “Über einen griechisch-arabischen Codex rescriptus der Leipziger Universitäts-Bibliothek,” in Fleischer, Kleinere Schriften, pp. 378388.Google Scholar The manuscript is now in Leningrad. See Graf, Georg, Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur, 5 vols. (Rome, 19441953), 1:407.Google Scholar

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39. Ibid., p. 380.

40. Ibid., p. 380 n. 2. For other instances of the use of forms of the verb tafsīr to mean “to translate,” see Griffith, S. H., “The Arabic Account of cAbd al-Masīh an-Nağrānī al-Ghassānī,” Le Muséon 98 (1985): 338339.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

41. Graf, G., Die christlich-arabische Literatur bis zurfränkischen Zeit (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1905), pp. 13, 16;Google Scholaridem, “Die arabische Vita des hi. Abramias,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 14 (1905): 509.

42. Graf, , Geschichte, 1:407Google Scholar n. 1.

43. See Esbroeck, van, “Le Codex Rescriptus Tischendorf 2,” pp. 8191.Google Scholar

44. The Arabic text of the life of St. Abramios was first published by Graf, G., “Athar nasrānī qadim,” pp. 258–265. Graf also published a German translation of the text in “Die arabische Vita des hl. Abramios,” pp. 509518.Google Scholar A Latin version appears in Peeters, P., “Historia S. Abramii ex apographo arabico,” Analecta Bollandiana 24 (1905): 349356.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See the remarks of Vailhé, S., “Saint Abraham de Cratia,” Échos d'Orient 8 (1905): 290294.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Finally, what is preserved in Arabic is incorporated into the French version of the life of Abramios in Festugiére, A. J., Les moines d'orient, vol. 3, part 3, Les moiaes de Palestine (Paris, 1963), pp. 6979.Google Scholar

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