We cannot know if Ulfilas’s educational strategy was as ambitious as Mesrop’s. He lived a little earlier, his country was more remote and he may not have had the resources to match those available to Mesrop. Still, it is safe to assume that he did more than just invent the Gothic alphabet. For his alphabet to succeed, and for his Bible to become known, Ulfilas or one of his collaborators must have laid the foundations for some sort of educational system, even if it was confined only to the most learned segments of Gothic society.
Ulfilas’s translation was almost certainly made from the Greek. All that survives from his Old Testament are a few fragments of the book of Nehemiah. Although about half the New Testament is extant, the only complete book is the Second Epistle to the Corinthians. It is quite possible that the task that confronted Ulfilas was more challenging than that faced by any other biblical translator, before or after. Yet, like the nation for whom it was made, most of the Gothic Bible is now lost.
Mesrop’s Bible did survive, albeit greatly revised. Mesrop had used both the Syriac and Greek versions for his sources but when the thirteenth-century Armenian king Het’um became a vassal of the Pope, the Bible was revised, to bring it in line with Jerome’s Latin text.
Mesrop and Ulfilas stand out as the most innovative of early Bible translators. Many others also rose to the task. By the early Middle Ages the Christian Bible had been translated into nearly every language where a church had put down roots. The Jews, scattered by now across the world, held fast to their Hebrew version; they had little need of any other, their ancestral language was integral to their faith. But everything was about to change. In twenty-seven campaigns and ten short years, Mohammed and his followers changed the religious landscape of the East. By the year 632, as Tom Holland puts it in his entertaining book In the Shadow of the Sword, ‘paganism in Arabia had everywhere been put in shadow’.45 The Jews and Christians were no longer the only proponents of monotheism, nor the only faiths which laid claim to the messages of the Bible. A new culture, a new world force, had emerged. And a new language into which the Bible would be translated.
4
The Sublime Bible
Hunayn Ibn Ishāq
Islam’s rapid spread across the Middle East propelled the Bible into areas it had never previously reached. Not that the Mohammedan forces carried Bibles with them; far from it, they had their own holy text, the divine revelation mediated to Mohammed through the agency of the angel Jibril. But the Bible is ‘everywhere and nowhere’1 in the Qur’an, rarely quoted yet frequently acknowledged, its divine origin taken for granted.2 From the Bible’s point of view the emergence of the Qur’an, almost certainly the first book to be produced in Arabic,3 provided the stimulus for Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews in the new Muslim lands to create vernacular copies of their own scriptures. Thus the Arabic Bible was born, and a new controversy opened in the story of the translated Bible.
Up to now, the Bible had only been translated by people who wanted to use it for the sake of their religion. The Jews had made translations into Greek or Syriac for educational purposes and into Aramaic for the benefit of those in the synagogue who needed help in understanding the Hebrew readings. Christians who didn’t speak Greek used Latin or vernacular versions of the Old and New Testaments in their churches. But the Bible rarely extended beyond Jewish and Christian places of study or worship. Very few people outside of Judaism or Christianity were aware of it, and even those who were, paid little attention to it. The founding of Islam changed all that.
The Qur’an is familiar with both the Bible and with many of the stories, fables and folklore which the Jews and Christians span out of its narratives. It frequently refers to biblical personalities and it believes in the divine revelations afforded, among others, to Abraham, Moses and Jesus.4 But despite its frequent allusions to biblical topics, the Qur’an never quotes from the Bible directly, neither the Old nor the New Testament. The Qur’an takes it for granted that its readers are familiar enough with the biblical narratives not to have them recounted word for word. It retells, rather than repeats, the Bible’s stories. Sidney Griffith notes that the manner in which the Qur’an presents the Bible is similar to the style of ‘interpreted’ bibles that circulated among Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians prior to the birth of Islam.5
Although the Qur’an knows the Bible, and accepts that its key personalities were gifted with the spirit of prophecy, it does not slavishly accept everything that the Bible says. It subordinates the Bible to its own world view, insisting that what the early Jews and Christians believed needs to be reinterpreted in the new light of Islam. It frequently seeks to correct, or even polemicize against the Bible and at times it accuses the ‘People of Scripture’, by which it means the Jews and Christians, of deliberately falsifying their account.
Of course, this didn’t go down too well with the Jews and Christians. They may not have been concerned that the Qur’an had its own, idiosyncratic way of interpreting the Bible. But once they’d found themselves accused of deliberately falsifying the scriptures they held sacred, it’s more than likely that Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians would have wanted to set the record straight. One can imagine some very difficult conversations taking place between the adherents of the Bible and those of the Qur’an (although, since there was neither an Arabic Bible nor a Qur’an in any other tongue, such conversations would have been restricted to those few who could understand the language of each scripture). The Pact of Umar, an early agreement that non-Muslims would be protected in Islamic lands in return for certain conditions, stipulates that Christians and Jews will neither learn the Qur’an, nor teach it to their children.6 Given that the Muslims were the conquerors and the Jews and Christians their subordinates, this restriction could have been imposed by decree. The fact that it forms part of a pact to which both parties assented implies that the Islamic conquerors were more than keen to protect the Qur’an from examination.
Alternatively, the Pact of Umar’s ban on Jews and Christians studying the Qur’an may have been a defensive measure, to deter missionary activity. Muslim rulers would not have relished the idea of preachers from other faiths trying to destabilize Islamic belief by constructing arguments against the Qur’an. Far better to worry the non-Muslims by denying them access to it. The Jews and Christians knew that the Qur’an accused them of falsifying the Bible. They worried that their own people, living in an Islamic environment, might start to believe the accusation. But they could only deal with this if they could read the Qur’an, to find out what it actually said. It wasn’t as if the members of the different religions lived in isolation from each other. Contact between the communities was frequent, not least in the markets, streets and bathhouses. If adherents to the conquered religions couldn’t study the Qur’an there was only one thing they could do to protect adherence to their own faiths. Jews and Christians both needed to set up effective, educational programmes that would prop up their own religions in Muslim lands. And religious education begins with an understanding of the Bible.
With the exception of a few Jews who could still read Hebrew, and far fewer Christians with a command of Greek, everybody in the first lands that fell to the Arab armies read their scriptures in Aramaic or Syriac. But as Arabic became the dominant tongue in the conquered lands, the old languages turned out to be less and less useful. A bible that Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians could read became an imperative. It didn’t take long for the translators to get to work.
The first parts of the Bible to be rendered in Arabic were probably the Gospels. They were most likely translated in monasteries in Syria and Judea during the seventh and eighth centuries. The earliest surviving example, dating from around the year 800, resides in the Vatican.7 We know little of the story behind this translation, other than that it was probably inscribed in the Mar Saba monastery in the Judean desert, that it seems to have been copied from an earlier manuscript, and that it was translated from the Syriac, not from the Greek.8 The history of this particu
lar translation is, however, so shrouded in the fog of time that we have no idea how widely it circulated, or what impact it had.
By the time we are able to pick up the main thrust of the Arabic Bible’s story there had been a fresh impetus for its translation. It was now the eighth century and times were changing. Islam was established and confident, and a new age was dawning. It was an age which placed ideas, art, science and literature at its pinnacle, rather than the ideological quarrels of different belief systems.
The change began in the aspirational city of Baghdad, Islam’s pioneering capital founded by the Abbasid dynasty’s second caliph, al-Mansur. The Abbasids had come to power in 750, overthrowing the previous Umayyad dynasty. To mark the transition of power, al-Mansur built himself a new city with the ambition of making it the greatest the world had ever known. It was here in Baghdad that the process of translating the Bible into Arabic would flourish, as an offshoot of a project to make all the great mathematical, philosophical and scientific works of the Greeks available in Arabic.
The project was the brainchild of the caliph Harun al-Rashid. His influence on Islam’s emergence as the leading civilization of the early Middle Ages was profound. It extends far beyond his legendary cameos in the Thousand and One Nights.
Baghdad at the end of the eighth century assaulted the senses of its visitors as no city had ever done before. In its markets one could find every known herb, fruit and spice. The mingling of their rich scents all but neutralized the heavy odours steaming off the laden camels and donkeys reluctantly pressing their way along the thoroughfares. Bejewelled wives and daughters of wealthy merchants, decked in coloured satins and gold-embroidered silks, on rare excursions from the luxurious palaces in which their menfolk confined them, picked their way delicately over prone, pleading beggars, some maimed, some mad, some simply malingering. Important men in coloured turbans bestrode the streets, their servants hurrying behind, urging along porters weighed down by their burdens. Noise filled the air, the cries of merchants proclaiming their wares, of dogs fighting, children screaming, of masons hammering on the stones from which the House of Wisdom was being constructed.
Bayt al-Hikma, the House of Wisdom, was the flagship institution of what we now call the Translation Movement. Its seeds were sown by al-Mansur when he founded the city but it attained its greatest prominence during the reign of Harun al-Rashid’s son, al-Ma’amun. Inspired by his father’s vision of a Baghdad unmatched by any other in architectural, cultural and scientific grandeur, al-Ma’amun turned the dream into reality. The House of Wisdom was to be the city’s library, the place where all the books in the civilized world, now available in Arabic, were to be stored. The echoes of Alexandria a millennium earlier are not hard to discern.
The project to translate everything worth knowing into Arabic, realizing the caliphate’s ambition to elevate Islamic knowledge, culture and civilization above anything that had gone before, was greatly assisted by new paper-making technology from China. It made the manufacture of books cheaper and easier, allowed authors and scribes to work faster, and elevated the written word above memory as the medium in which to store knowledge.9
The Translation Movement lasted for over two centuries. It was made possible by generous subsidies and endowments from both public and private funds, and was supported by the elite of Baghdadi society.10 It underpinned the Golden Age of Islamic philosophy and medicine. But on the face of it, it wasn’t about the Bible at all. Its declared aim was to render Greek philosophical and scientific works into Arabic. The translation of the Bible into Arabic was little more than a spin-off. Who could have dreamed that it would outlive all its secular rivals?
Dozens, probably hundreds of translators worked in the House of Wisdom during the lifespan of the project. None was more famous, nor more influential, than the man whose name has come to symbolize the entire Translation Movement; Hunayn ibn Ishāq.
Hunayn’s speciality was the translation of Greek and Syriac medical and logical texts into Arabic. But according to the tenth-century historian al-Masudi, he also translated some of the Septuagint. al-Masudi was nearly correct: Hunayn did translate some of the Bible, but from the Syriac, not from the Greek.11 That is what we would expect; Hunayn was a Nestorian Christian, he spoke Syriac and had grown up reading the Bible in that language. But he wasn’t recognized as a theologian or scriptural expert; he was a doctor by profession. He translated Galen’s anatomical writings and is said to have authored over a hundred works himself, including ten treatises on ophthalmology.12 When he chose to turn his hand to translating the Bible it was almost certainly a labour of love, not a career move.
Hunayn doesn’t get the credit for the first Arabic Bibles; that went to the anonymous monks in the Syrian and Palestinian monasteries a century or so earlier. But by admitting the Arabic Bible into the House of Wisdom, the translation scholar par excellence threw down a gauntlet to its detractors. As a Christian living in an Islamic city he had a point to make. The Bible, he implied, should no longer be seen in Islamic eyes as the old, corrupted text belonging to two decaying religious faiths which the new faith declared had been superseded. In the House of Wisdom the Bible ranked as equal to every other classical literary work. Hunayn took the Bible out of the monasteries, churches and synagogues, and planted it firmly within the Islamic secular corpus, on the pinnacle of world civilization.
Nothing remains of Hunayn’s biblical translations, although it is likely that subsequent Arabic bible manuscripts were based on his. His personality too is obscured from us, dwarfed by his tremendous scholarly achievements. In that respect he differs from a certain Egyptian Jew who, a century later, not only produced a new Arabic recension of the Bible, but also left us with a very clear impression of his character, his passions and his fierce commitment to the many principles for which he fought.
Saadia Gaon
Saadia ben Yosef’s life was colourful, controversial and subversive. Colourful and controversial as a result of the many arguments and disputes he involved himself in; subversive because, steeped in the Islamic, theological science of Kalām, he was the first major Jewish thinker to try to demonstrate the validity of his faith through reason and logic.13 In subjecting the pronouncements of Scripture and the ruminations of the rabbis to the tools of epistemology and philology, Saadia ushered in centuries of Jewish philosophical speculation.
Saadia was born in Egypt in 882. His birthplace was, at that time, a stronghold of the Karaite sect; a Jewish faction which differed forcefully from the rabbinic mainstream. The rabbis and their followers believed that the Bible’s injunctions could only be understood through the traditional interpretations of the Talmud. The Karaites took the Bible at face value; they weren’t interested in Talmudic reasoning. The gulf between the two camps is thrown into sharpest contrast by the biblical stricture not to kindle a fire on the Sabbath.14 The rabbis took it to mean that it was acceptable to bask in the heat and light of a fire kindled before the holy day began. The Karaites on the other hand took the injunction literally. They spent the day in the dark and cold.
Saadia spent much of his life battling Karaite ideology. He started the fight as a young man in Egypt, writing polemics against the sect’s founder, Anan ben David. The Karaites responded in kind; accusations, refutations and personal attacks were hurled around liberally. The atmosphere became so vituperative that it eventually forced him to leave the country.15 He spent some years in Israel, studying and teaching in the lakeside city of Tiberias, before finally packing his bags once more and journeying to Baghdad.
The rabbinic academies in Baghdad, where the Babylonian Talmud had been given its final form,16 were regarded by most of the Jewish world as the pre-eminent centre of religious scholarship. They were rivalled only by the scholarly centres in Israel, where Saadia had studied. Because they were situated in the ancient Jewish homeland, the Israeli academies traditionally had the last word in matters of Jewish law. Once Saadia established himself in Baghdad, that all changed.
Had Saadia not involved himself in this dispute, the Baghdadi scholars may well have capitulated, if for no other reason than respect for the fading glory of their rivals in the West. But Saadia was not a man to turn a blind eye when it came to a matter of principle. He was convinced that the calculation on the calendar that had been performed in Israel was wrong. He embarked upon a furious correspondence, in which he displayed his legal, mathematical and literary skill with such passion and energy that his opponents barely stood a chance. The head of the scholarly community in Israel backed down, the Babylonian calculation was vindicated and, as long as Baghdad continued to remain a centre of Jewish scholarship (which wasn’t that long), the authority of its scholars was never again disputed.
Saadia’s battles were personal as well as institutional. Shortly after being appointed as the head of the foremost Jewish college in Baghdad, which effectively made him the rabbinic leader of the Jewish world, he got himself excommunicated. It came about because he refused to countersign a will in which the Exilarch, the secular head of the Babylonian Jewish community, stood to make a lot of money. The Exilarch of course was furious but Saadia, as always, stood on principle. He’d smelt a rat and nobody could make him compromise. Even the caliph’s vizier, Ali ibn Isa, got involved, convening a council in which judges and scholars attempted to adjudicate between the parties. But although Saadia had his principles he didn’t have the Exilarch’s wealth or influence. He was drummed out of town and despite an extravagantly publicized reconciliation five years later, when Saadia was nearing the end of his life, he never truly regained his former vigour.
The Murderous History of Bible Translations Page 7
