23 MS Leiden, Universitaire Bibliotheken Leiden, Or. 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. 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. These manuscripts played an important role in European scholarship about the Arabic Bible, Arabic teaching and learning in Europe, and textual criticism. 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. However, the possibility also exists that this translation was carried out by a converso for others who, in the aftermath of 1391 and the Tortosa disputation, had converted or were considering conversion, in order to inform them about their new faith. There are small but significant hints that the translator was a Jew writing for a Jewish audience, in order to provide them with knowledge of these core Christian texts (possibly to help them to undermine Christian polemicists). It was indeed based on a Catalan translation of the Gospels, specifically, the so-called “Bíblia del segle XIV,” which is to be published in the Corpus Biblicum Catalanicum. In this article we attempt to demonstrate that the manuscript is a copy of the original fourteenth or fifteenth century translation.
Delcor argued in 1981 that it was probably translated from Catalan and suggested that the translator was a Jew, probably writing at the end of the fifteenth-century or the start of the sixteenth-century. The study of this manuscript has to date been rather haphazard and very little has been written about it. The first extant translation of the four Gospels into Hebrew is to be found in a late fifteenth-century manuscript kept in the Vatican Library (Vat.
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