A Catalogue of Christian Arabic Bible Translations at the British Library

The present work contains records of the Christian Arabic Bible translations and Bible commentaries that are kept at the Department of Asian and African Studies at the British Library. Many of these manuscripts have previously been described in various catalogues, yet with different levels of detail. The main problem, however, for those interested in the material is to find and navigate through all these catalogues in order to get an overview of the corpus. As a means of enabling access to such an overview, Stocks and Baker published a Subject-Guide to the Arabic manuscripts at the British Library in 2001, where shelfmarks are arranged according to genre and where references to their respective catalogues are provided and point to the microfiches of the manuscripts that were produced by Brill in 2001. The Subject-Guide has been an important step forward in making the collections easier to navigate and the present catalogue builds on this important initiative. In contrast to the Subject-Guide, the present work is limited to a specific genre, Christian Arabic Bible translations. In addition, it includes a higher number of items and incorporates data into the work, allowing it to be used both as a guide and a catalogue. The present work also aims at systematizing and updating codicological and content-related information about these valuable sources, many of which have previously been described only by title and approximate date and some, which have not yet been catalogued. Finally, the present work includes sample images of the manuscripts it describes as well as indices over scribes, commissioners, dating systems, immediate sources of acquisition, etc.