The history of Christianity in Syria is a story of how this burgeoning religious movement of Late Antiquity came to take on a distinctively regional dress. Effectively a large frontier zone between the Roman and the Parthian (and later the Persian) empires, Syria was exposed to ever-changing cultural and political influences. While Aramaic, with many regional variations, was the dominant language in this milieu, from the late fourth century BCE onward Greek language and culture also gained a powerful presence. From the last third of the second century BCE, local circumstances allowed the development of the semi-independent kingdom of Edessa. Here the cultivation of the native Aramaic dialect eventuated in the appearance of Syriac, an Aramaic idiom that facilitated the growth of a unique Christian identity in cultural terms, defined largely in reaction to and/or in tandem with Greek thought and religious expression. While inscriptions and other archaeological evidence document the beginnings, for the most part the historical evidence is literary.

Edessene Christianity

To the north and east of the Roman province of Syria, beyond the Euphrates and just within the borders of the province of Mesopotamia (Persian Osrhoene), lay the city of Edessa. Founded in 304 BCE by the Greek-speaking Seleucus I Nicator, the name Edessa recalled the city of the same name in Seleucus’s native Macedonia. Syriac-speaking locals, however, have persistently called the city Ûrhāy. In Parthian times, from around the year 132 BCE onward, the city and its associated territories became the kingdom of Edessa, a dignity it preserved until the year 214 CE, when it officially became a Roman colony. In the environs of Edessa, sometime in the early first century CE, developments in the writing of Aramaic began to take the form that in due course would come to be called Syriac. From about the middle of the second century CE until well into Islamic times, Syriac, the standard Aramaic of a large corpus of mostly Christian texts, was, together with Greek, one of the principal vehicles of Christianity in Syria and eastward. Indeed, by the fifth century Syriac and its associated ecclesiastical culture had extended its influence well to the west of the Euphrates.

The study of the Bible in Arabic is in its infancy. While there are literally hundreds of known manuscripts containing portions of the Bible in Arabic translation, they have up to now been of little interest either to biblical scholars or even to church historians. One nineteenth-century scholar is quoted as having said, ‘There are more Arabic versions of the Gospels than can be welcome to theologians, pressed as they are with other urgent tasks.’ Bible scholars have typically thought of the Arabic versions as being too late to be of importance for the textual criticism of the Bible, and the history of the intellectual and cultural lives of the churches in the Arabic-speaking world of Islam still awaits its modern-day Eusebius. Nevertheless, the relatively few recent studies of Arabic versions of portions of the scriptures do allow us to sketch the history of the Arabic versions in broad outline, and they have shown that the translations are a gold mine for those interested in the history of biblical interpretation, especially in the ever more important realm of the history of relations between Muslims and Christians. As we shall see below, in a number of instances the studies have shown that Arabic translations of some apocryphal and so-called ‘pseudepigraphical’ biblical works have in fact proved to be indispensable for the establishment of their texts. In its origins, however, the Bible in Arabic seems first to have been an oral scripture.

Origins and early translations

Biblical texts translated into Arabic first circulated orally among Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians in pre-Islamic times. The Arabic Qurʾān, in its canonical form a product of the mid- to late seventh century ce at the earliest, presents the earliest textual evidence for the circulation of the Bible in Arabic. The Qurʾān paraphrases biblical narratives, refers to biblical personae by name, alludes to and comments on biblical verses, but does not exactly quote from the biblical text, with the exception of one or two possible instances (e.g., Ps. 37:29 in Qurʾān 21:105).

By the year 732 CE, just one hundred years after the death of the prophet Muhammad, Arab military forces, in the name of Islam, consolidated their hegemony over a large stretch of territory outside of Arabia. This expanse of territory, embracing major portions of the Roman and Persian empires of Late Antiquity, included many indigenous Christian communities, in several denominations. They all came under Muslim rule, but demographically they made up the religious majority in many places until well into the eleventh century. There were strong Christian communities in Spain (al-Andalus) and in the territories of the former eastern patriarchates of the Roman Empire, as well as in Persian Mesopotamia. During the first four centuries of the hegira (i.e., the Islamic era) most of these Christian subjects of the Muslim caliph gradually adopted the Arabic language, while retaining to a greater or lesser extent, depending on local circumstances, their traditional, patristic, and liturgical languages for church purposes.

Christians in the Qur’ān and in early Islam

Arabic-speaking Christians were in the audience to whom the Qur’ān first addressed the word of God, as it claimed, in “a clear Arabic tongue” (Qur’ān 16.103 and 26.105). Indeed the Qur’ān presumes the priority of the Torah and the Gospel in the consciousness of its hearers, and insists that in reference to the earlier divine revelations it is itself “a corroborating scripture in the Arabic language to warn wrong doers and to announce good news to those who do well” (Qur’ān 46.12). In the Qur’ān, God advises the Muslims, “If you are in doubt about what we have sent down to you, ask those who were reading scripture before you” (Qur’ān 10.94).