interpretem; sed ex ipso Hebraico, Arabicoque sermone, et interdum Syro, nunc
verba, nunc sensum, nunc simul utrumque resonabit," (Prol. Gal.) obviously
does not refer to versions, but to idiom. The earliest Ar. version of the Old
Testament, of which we have any knowledge, is that of R. Saadias Gaon, A.D.
900; and the oldest Ar. version of the New Testament, is that published by
Erpenius in 1616, and transcribed in the Thebais, in the year 1171, by a
Coptic Bishop, from a copy made by a person whose name is known, but whose
date is uncertain. Michaelis thinks that the Arabic versions of the New
Testament were made between the Saracen conquests in the seventh century, and
the Crusades in the eleventh century-an opinion in which he follows, or
coincides with, Walton (Prol. in Polygl. § xiv.) who remarks-"Plane constat
versionem Arabicam apud eas (ecclesias orientales) factam esse postquam
lingua Arabica per victorias et religionem Muhammedanicam per Orientem
propagata fuerat, et in multis locis facta esset vernacula." If, indeed, in
these comparatively late versions, the general phraseology, especially in the
histories common to the Scriptures and to the Koran, bore any similarity to
each other, and if the orthography of the proper names had been the same in
each, it might have been fair to suppose that such versions had been made,
more or less, upon the basis of others, which, though now lost, existed in
the ages prior to Muhammad, and influenced, if they did not directly form,
his sources of information. But5 this does not appear to be the case. The
phraseology of our existing versions is not that of the Koran-and these
versions appear to have been made from the Septuagint, the Vulgate, Syriac,
Coptic, and Greek; the four Gospels, says Tischendorf6 originem mixtam habere
videntur.

From the Arab Jews, Muhammad would be enabled to derive an abundant, though
most distorted, knowledge of the Scripture histories. The secrecy in which he
received his instructions from them, and from his Christian informants,
enabled him boldly to declare to the ignorant pagan Meccans that God had