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Yefet ben Eli, a medieval Jewish Karaite scholar, considers Solomon the primary author of the Book of Proverbs. However, he suggests that Solomon first conveyed the material orally and that the acts of recording, compilation and arrangement of the book took place after his time. Being conscious of his own writing, voice and presence, he notices the footprints of the editorial process in Scripture. For him, Scripture was of divine origin, but needed to be recorded by human hands. In his commentary on Proverbs, Yefet points to clues in the text, and the structure of the book, in order to delineate the literary process that resulted in the book as it has come down to us. His reconstruction includes models of recording and transmission as envisioned in his mind. Yefet identifies the mudawwins of Proverbs, those who wrote, recorded, redacted, narrated and/or copied the text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Andalusian mystic and Qur'an commentator Ibn Barrajān (d. 536/1141) was one of the earliest scholars of Islam to use the Arabic Bible extensively and non-polemically in his quest to understand the divine Word. This paper assesses his mode of engagement with the Bible and the different strategies he employed to resolve perceived incongruities between narratives of the Qur'an and the Bible. The Bible enjoys the same degree of interpretive authority in Ibn Barrajān's works as Prophetic reports ( ḥadīth), and there is at least one instance where the Bible not only complements but also challenges his understanding of the Qur'an. Ibn Barrajān's openness to the Bible rests on his principle of 'Qur'anic epistemological supremacy'-that is to say, his reasoning that since the Qur'an is God's untarnished divine revelation, it can serve as the ultimate litmus test against which all other scriptural passages, including the Bible, are to be judged. His far-reaching hermeneutical principle of Qur'anic hegemony was probably partly inspired by the scripturalist-literalist writings of the Ẓāhirī scholar Ibn Ḥazm (d. 456/1064). An exhaustive appendix and translation of the Biblical materials in Ibn Barrajān's works accompanies this paper, confirming beyond reasonable doubt that the Bible used by Ibn Barrajān was translated into Arabic directly from Jerome's Latin Vulgate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a reflection on the 150th anniversary of the historic publication of the Arabic Boustani-Van Dyck version of the Bible, on November 2015 at a conference organized by the National Evangelical Church of Beirut (NECB), the Near East School of Theology (NEST), the Arab Baptist Seminary (ABTS) and the Bible Society in Lebanon in collaboration with Anis Makdisi Program for Literature at the American University of Beirut (AUB). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Agapius of Hierapolis' and Michael the Syrian's versions of the Testimonium Flavianum, a passage about Jesus from Josephus' Jewish Antiquities, both derive from the Syriac translation of Eusebius of Caesarea's Historia Ecclesiastica. Michael's Testimonium is more authentic than Agapius' Testimonium, and it is more authentic than the textus receptus in reading that Jesus was 'thought to be the Messiah'. Some features of Agapius' Testimonium previously considered to be more authentic than the textus receptus can be explained by distinctive readings in the Syriac text that Agapius used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It was most natural and reasonable that the Holy Quran has been descended Arabic for the Messenger was being Arab. The Message should be in his own tongue, that he might explain it in every detail, with the greatest power and eloquence. Even though it was to be for the whole world, its initial exposition was thus to be in Arabic. Now when the Qur'an is being sent down in their own tongue so that they may understand it, they raise the objection: why has it been sent down to an Arab in Arabic? But if it had been sent down in foreign tongue, these very people would have said, ‘How strange! An Arab Messenger has been sent to the Arabs, but the Revelations being sent to him are in a tongue which is neither understood by him nor by his people.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The polemical anti-Christian narrative Toledot Yeshu (henceforth, TY) is the earliest freestanding composition written by Jews against central tenets of Christianity. Broadly speaking, the narrative is a subversive rendering of central aspects of the life of Jesus and was composed at some point during Late Antiquity or the early Islamic period. This article discusses the origins of the long ("Helene") version of this polemical parody, which was well known in most parts of the Jewish world, and argues that this expanded version of the narrative was a creation of the classical Islamic period, in Judeo-Arabic, likely around the ninth or tenth century. This argument is supported by manuscript evidence in Judeo-Arabic from a slightly later period. Furthermore, Jewish-Christian debate in a variety of Near Eastern languages was and remained active during the first few centuries of the Islamic period, and the tone and contents of TY are typical of the polemics composed during this time. A further backdrop for the creation of this Jewish polemical narrative was the existence of numerous accounts of Jesus's birth and childhood in Arabic, among Muslims and Christians, which would have provided fertile ground for the creation of a Jewish account of Jesus's birth and childhood, or "Jewish infancy gospel," as found in TY. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]