Another ITSEE doctoral research success

Congratulations to Duane McCrory, who recently defended his doctoral thesis, “A Text-Critical Analysis of the Arabic Traditions of the Epistle to the Romans”. Duane has been working on his doctorate over the last six years as a part-time distance-learning student at Birmingham’s Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing (ITSEE), supervised by Professor Hugh Houghton, Dr Catherine Smith and Dr Amy Myshrall.

Duane’s research included visits to a variety of libraries to examine Arabic manuscripts of the Pauline Epistles in a series of test passages to determine the language from which the translation was made. His thesis includes a large catalogue of Arabic documents reflecting Syriac, Coptic, Latin and Greek originals and an analysis of their distinctive features. It also features a full electronic transcription and synopsis of the 44 Arabic manuscripts he has identified as being translations of a Greek tet of Romans, some of which preserve early evidence for the tradition of this Epistle. During his studies, Duane participated in a variety of academic events, including the EABS conference in Sicily, the SBL Annual Meeting in Boston, and the Birmingham Colloquium, and he has published two chapters relating to his findings.

Unusually, Duane’s examiners (Prof. Dr. Ronny Vollandt from Munich and Dr Sophia Vasalou) recommended that he be awarded the degree with no corrections, as an indication of the excellence of his research. Duane is now preparing his thesis for publication in book form and will be taking up a postdoctoral research fellowship in Australia later this year to work on the project "Rediscovering an Ancient Arabic Version of Paul" with Dr Rob Turnbull at the University of Melbourne.

The abstract of Duane's thesis runs as follows:

The text of the New Testament in Arabic has long been overlooked due to the complicated nature of the version. Arabic translations from Syriac, Coptic, Latin and Greek abound, and it is difficult to develop a methodology for dealing with such a large volume of witnesses. Alongside recent scholarly works to identify and sort Arabic manuscripts of the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles by Vorlagen and trace their history, one of the aims of this thesis is to develop a more efficient methodology for acccomplishing this in the Epistle to the Romans. While utilising test passages has been common practice for research of this sort, the current study emphasises the importance of certain criteria in selecting test passages. It is necessary to choose variation units spanning the entire text of the epistle to discover manuscripts with mixed Vorlagen. Test passages that have distinctive versional translations facilitate the identification of a manuscript's source. Completing transcriptions of the entire verse in each Arabic witness instead of the variation unit only can reveal grammatical peculiarities of the source language that, when translated literally into Arabic, are reliable indicators of the Vorlage. These methodological advancements enabled ready identification of Vorlagen, and the full transcriptions of the test passages indicated word-for-word relationships.

Chapters Two through Five use the results of the test passages to provide detailed analyses of the Arabic manuscripts from each source--Greek, Syriac, Coptic, and Latin--and their division into families. Using this methodology provided corrections to previous identifications of Vorlagen for a few Arabic manuscripts. Another lacuna in the research on Arabic manuscripts is a study that provides enough data to enable the Arabic version to be cited in critical editions of the New Testament. The aim of this thesis is to accomplish this for the text of Romans in Arabic. Full transcriptions of all Arabic manuscripts with Greek Vorlagen were completed. Utilising the publicly available apparatus of the Editio Critica Maior of Romans, 230 Greek variation units were selected for comparison. The reading of each Arabic manuscript is provided in full along with an English translation, and each is assigned to one of the Greek variant readings.

In Chapter Two, this comprehensive analysis of the Arabic version showed earliest translation of Romans from Greek into Arabic is found in a family of manuscripts and its source is an early Greek text with very little influence from the later Byzantine form. The full variation units confirmed manuscript relationships discovered from the initial test passages and revealed others. The results allowed for a stemma of the early Arabic manuscripts to be constructed that sketches the history of the earliest Arabic translation of Romans. The success of the methodology that entails the careful selection of test passages and the full transcriptions of Arabic manuscripts translated from Greek suggests that its use in future research of this kind will provide similar results and enable the full inclusion of the Arabic version as an important witness to the initial text.