The “Egyptian Vulgate” in Europe: An Investigation into the Version that Shaped European Scholarship on the Arabic Bible

Abstract

This paper explores part of the history of those Arabic Bible manuscripts that traveled to Europe in the early modern period, focusing on Arabic manuscripts of the Pauline Epistles. These manuscripts played an important role in European scholarship about the Arabic Bible, Arabic teaching and learning in Europe, and textual criticism. When one looks at early European scholarship on the Pauline Epistles in Arabic in the 16th and 17th centuries, it is very noticeable that, by and large, it restricted itself to an examination of a single version. In this paper, I reconstruct the history of the three earliest manuscripts of this version to be studied in European scholarship: MS Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Ar. 23; MS Leiden, Universitaire Bibliotheken Leiden, Or. 217; and MS Leiden, Universitaire Bibliotheken Leiden, Acad. 2. By tracing the history, I analyze the impact of this version, and it becomes clear how this version became, for a while, a standard version, what we might call the “Vulgate” of the Arabic Bible in Europe.