In this contribution, I seek to offer a status quaestionis of research in the Arabic Bible. As a field of academic research, much is still in the state of disarray. Many questions, as to the origins of biblical versions in Arabic, their various text types, their Vorlagen and translation strategies, their geographical, chronological and denominational distribution, as well as to the ways they were produced, disseminated and consumed, can only be answered tentatively. Still, the field lacks basic tools, as a comprehensive bibliography or an inventory of manuscripts.  I attempt to bring together different strands of a dynamic field, having received a considerable momentum since the turn of the new millennium, in which much of the recent scholarship draws from the understudied primary sources.

Lecturer: Ronny Vollandt — Professor of Judaic Studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich. Volland completed a Ph.D. in Semitic Philology under the supervision of Prof. Geoffrey Khan at the University of Cambridge in 2011. His research focuses on the Arabic versions of the Bible and biblical exegesis in the Arabic language, more broadly, medieval Christian- and Judaeo-Arabic literature. His current activities center around a number of projects: a curriculum that teaches the history of Jews in the Near East, the planning of an inter-faculty MA course in Jewish Studies at the LMU and a major research project “Biblia Arabica – The Bible in Arabic among Jews, Christians and Muslims” (https://biblia-arabica.com).