zzazzeefrazzee and his "codices"

Submitted by jennifer solis (United States), Mar 21, 2008 at 17:41

Zzazzeefrazzee,

The Mt. Sinai Arabic Codex 151 (9th century) consists of all the Pauline Epistles, plus the book of Acts and the General Epistles. It does NOT contain the Gospels.

The oldest (complete) copies of the New Testament known to exist today are: The Codex Alexandrius and the Codex Sinaiticus in the British Museum Library in London, and the Codex Vaticanus in the Vatican. They date back to approximately the 300's A.D. In 315 A.D., Athenasis, the Bishop of Alexandria identified the 27 Books which we recognize today as the canon of the New Testament scripture.

Papyri manuscripts of the New Testament exist that date back to 125 - 200 A.D. The following site gives the locations of these scriptures:

http://www.carm.org/evidence/textualevidence.htm

That's a six-hundred year difference, by the way, between physical evidence of Greek New Testament scripture and Arabic translation of the Bible; in 382 A.D. the Greek was translated into Latin; 400+ year difference; that's not a few centuries during which "Allah" was arguably used only for poly-theism and Islamic religion.

By 500 A.D. the Bible had been translated into over 500 languages.

I, too, have an interest in the history of manuscripts. I have in my possession a Bible which dates back to 1861; it was my great-great-great grandfather's. It containes all 14 books of the Apocrypha. That's a mystery - why was the Apocrypha removed? In 382 A.D., the early church father Jerome translated the New Testament from it's original Greek into Latin. This translation became known as the "Latin Vulgate" ("Vulgate" meaning "vulgar" or "common"). He put a note next to the Apocrypha Books, stating that he did not know whether or not they were inspired scripture, or just Jewish historical writtings which accompanied the Old Testament. In the mid-1880's the Apocrypha was removed from Protestant Bibles. Roman Catholics kept 12 of the 14 Apocrypha Books in their Bible. Many people make the mistake of attributing the Apocrypha to Catholicism because of this.

Regarding your statement, "The religion as practiced in Mecca was not at all universal among all Arabs."

Do you mean that all Arabs in Mecca did not practice the same religion? Or that Arabs outside Mecca practiced a different religion than that of those residing in Mecca?

By "different religion" do you mean outside that of the "pantheon"?

I've said before that different Arab tribes attributed to a different "god" the name Allah; in other words, of the 360 gods, each tribe claimed a different one as the "most high", Allah.

In closing, I will say that I do not object to the use of "Allah" in the Arabic translation of the Bible, so long as connotation involving Islam or pre-Islamic polytheism, both heavily, more so than not, identified with "Allah", is not present.

One has to wonder, had the event of the 9th century translation not been so intimidated, would the word "Allah" be present in Arabic translations of the Bible?

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