Subject: Acts in Arabic...

From: Jean VALENTIN <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Apr 97 19:19:55 +0200

Here follow the text of the beginning of the Acts, translated from Sinai 
Arabic 158. It is the oldest ms of what I call the "Acts in the melkite 
version of the XIIIth century".
First the text, then a few precisions :

1 As to the first discourse, o Theophile, I composed it in all the things 
that Jesus begun to do and to teach, 2 until the day when he commanded by 
the Holy Spirit to his disciples that he had chosen and he ascended, 
going-by-degrees, (3) they to whom he rose (parestisen!) his soul after 
his suffering alive by many firm proofs, they saw him appearing to them a 
period of forty days and saying discourses about the reign of God, 4 and 
in his gathering with them he commanded that they flee not from Jerusalem 
but that they wait the promise of the Father which you have heard from 
me. 5 For sure, John baptized with water, and you, you will be baptized 
with the Holy Spirit, not after many days from this one. 6 And they 
approached him and asked him saying: O Lord, will you at that moment 
bring the reign back to Israel? 7 And he said to them: it is not 
entrusted to you that you know the years or the moments that the Father 
established in his might. 8 But you, you will take a force through the 
descent of the Holy Spirit to you, and you will be witnesses for me in 
Jerusalem and Samaria and to the end of the earth. 

Here's a list of the mss that have this version in Mt Sinai: 
Sin. Arb. 158 (1232)
Sin. Arb. 168 (1238)
Sin. Arb. 175 (1255)
Sin. Arb. 170 (1285)
Sin. Arb. 171 (1296)
Sin. Arb. 173 (1303)
Sin. Arb. 156 (1316)
As you see, they were all produced over a period of a century.

It is most probably translated from Greek, but we don't know what 
text-type exactly, and nothing excludes totally that the translator 
consulted syriac texts. But the Greek is clearly dominant. As to its 
text, a friend of mine who is working on the text of the Acts says it's a 
mixed text, in which elements from B, D, Byz, syp and others are present. 
Does the sample above allow you to see something interesting?

There are earlier mss at Mt Sinai (Sin. Arb. 154, 151, both of the IXth 
century), but they have other versions and have been published. This 
version seemed to have an official character, as the number of mss seems 
to show. They have liturgical indications. Also, some of them have their 
text interspersed with homiletical texts. The version is in literary 
arabic. Its vocabulary is often quite researched (rare words...).

Why was such a text extinct after a century? Probably because of the 
concurrence of another version. Sinai Arabic 151, one of the oldest 
versions, was revised: Sinai Arabic 150 (1252) is a lectionary showing 
the text of that revision. We find another, probably independant, 
revision of the same text in the Acts that Erpenius published in his 
Arabic NT (1616).

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Jean Valentin - 58/7 rue Van Kalck - 1080 Bruxelles - BELGIQUE
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email : [email-masked]   ***   netmail : 2:291/780.103
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