Online lecture on early Arabic Bibles

In the lecture, Ronny Vollandt will present the state of research on Arabic versions of the Bible, of which there are estimated to be about ten thousand manuscripts. This corpus includes translations of the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament, but also of the New Testament. A considerable number go back to deuterocanonical books. Some of these manuscripts have survived the ages as intact codices. However, a not insignificant part has survived only in fragments or in the form of objects that have been reused. They can be found in public or ecclesiastical collections worldwide. Bible manuscripts were produced from the 9th to the 20th century. Some Arabic versions are of Jewish origin, others are of Christian or Samaritan origin. Each religious group created and preserved its own corpus of Bible translations into Arabic, based on different source texts (the Masoretic text, but also Greek, Syriac, Coptic and Latin versions).

Ronny Vollandt discusses the state of affairs regarding the origins of Bible versions in Arabic, the various text types, models and translation strategies, the geographical and confessional distribution, as well as the nature of production, distribution and reception. Here, an attempt is made to bring together the different tendencies in a dynamic field of scholarship that has received significant impetus since the turn of the millennium and in which much of the recent research is based on hardly studied primary texts.

Vollandt is a professor of Jewish Studies at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich and currently the first chairman of the association "Judaisten in Deutschland e.V." He teaches rabbinic Judaism and the intellectual history of the Jews in the Islamic world. He researches Arabic versions of the Bible, Judaeo-Arabic literature and Jewish cultural heritage, especially manuscripts, in the Middle East.

Admission to the free event is via this link: https://uni-erfurt.webex.com/meet/veranstaltungen.fb.

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