When Jesus speaks colloquial Egyptian Arabic: an incarnational understanding of translation

ABSTRACT

Al-Khabar al-Ṭayyib bitāʿ Yasūʿ al-Masīḥ (the Good News of Jesus Christ, 1927) is one of the earliest, if not the first, translation of the New Testament into colloquial Arabic. Initiated by the British missionary and civil engineer William Willcocks, the translation responds to different linguistic and ideological tensions at a time when Egypt endeavoured to configure its national identity. In using colloquial Egyptian Arabic, the translation was motivated by the then dominant missionary ethos of translating into the vernaculars, which was propagated at the World Missionary Conference held in Edinburgh in 1910. This article has two aims: first to understand Willcocks’ translation in light of two competing conceptualisations of ‘sacred language’ among speakers of Arabic in Egypt; second, to explore the synergy between theology and translation studies and test the viability of theological concepts such as that of ‘incarnation’ in explaining translation phenomena in the sacred context.

KEYWORDS:

• Al-Khabar al-Ṭayyib
• sacredness
• colloquial Egyptian Arabic
• incarnation
• kenosis
• Quran

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Sameh Hanna is Lecturer in Arabic Literature and Translation, University of Leeds. His research interests include the sociology of translation, the Arabic Translation of Shakespeare's work and the Bible in Arabic. His book on Bourdieu in Translation Studies: The Socio-cultural Dynamics of Shakespeare Translation in Egypt was published with Routledge in 2016.

ORCID

Sameh Hanna http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5763-1784

Notes

1 The reference here is to ideas from sacred and literary texts which, as will be explained later, were the focus of William Willcocks in his endeavours to translate into the Egyptian vernacular.

2 All translations from Arabic sources are mine, unless otherwise indicated.

3 The dating of the earliest Arabic translation of the Bible has long been debated among two groups of scholars. One, including Cheikho (1901) and Kachouh (2012), suggests that Arabic versions of the Bible must have pre-dated Islam, arguing that the Quran draws on Biblical narratives which must have been known to the prophet and his audience. Another group of scholars, including Griffith (2013), argues that what was available before Islam was an oral Christian and Jewish tradition. For Griffith, for instance, the scripted Arabic translations of the Bible were enabled by three interrelated factors that did not have their full impact before late eighth and early ninth centuries. These factors were the collection of the Quran and its circulation in written form, the Islamicisation and Arabicisation of conquered lands and the codification of Arabic grammar and the development of Arabic lexicography.

4 This covered, not only sacred Christian texts, but other activities, including the civil and scientific domains.

5 For a discussion of the ‘sacred’ status of Arabic and how this is negotiated by an early Arabic translation of the Gospels that sought to emulate the language of the Quran, i.e., Al-Subawi’s Rhymed Gospels (1300), see Hanna (2018).

6 For a detailed discussion of the Bustani-Van Dyck version of the Arabic Bible, see Grafton (2015).

7 As the well-researched study by Badawi (1973) demonstrates, the Egyptian dialect is not one monolithic entity and it has different sub-varieties and levels (mustawayāt), depending not only on the region where it is spoken, but the educational, religious and cultural background of those who use it.

8 See, for example, the work of Saʿīd (1964/1980); al-Dusuqi (1948/2000).

9 ‘Standard Arabic’ is usually interchangeably used with ‘classical Arabic’ to mean the grammatically sound variety of Arabic, which is used for formal registers, mainly in writing. However, ‘classical’ also connotes the formal register specifically used in literary and religious discourses.

10 A similar line of argument was given by Mustapha Safouan (1998) in the introduction he wrote to his published translation of Othello into Egyptian colloquial Arabic. For a detailed study of the history of the debate on the use of fuṣḥa and ʿāmmiyya in writing, see Hanna (2009).

11 Unlike most Arabic linguists, Willcocks considers the Egyptian colloquial a ‘language’ not a ‘dialect’.

12 It is worth noting that the English title does not literally translate the Arabic one which should be back translated as ‘The Good News of Jesus Christ or The Gospel in the Egyptian Language’.

13 I am grateful for Dr Wageeh Mikhael and the librarians of the seminary for kindly giving me access to this copy.

14 The copy of volume 2 I had access to is of the second edition published in 1928. The first edition of volume 2 must have been published anytime between 1921 and 1926.

15 This included a few portions from the Book of Revelation.

16 Archibald Henry Sayce (1845–1933) was a British Assyriologist and professor of Assyriology at university of Oxford. In addition to his many publications on Biblical languages and cultures, he contributed a number of entries on the same areas in Encyclopedia Britanica.

17 We also know that Bakhīt translated another book for the Nile Mission Press in 1924. The English title of the book is Wonders of the Universe and in Arabic translation it was entitled ‘Ajāʾib al-Kawn.

18 The only exception, according to Sayce, is the epistle to the Hebrews, which was written in literary Greek.

19 The ‘mind of Christ’ is a direct reference to Philippians 2: 5–7 where the expression means Christ emptying himself and giving up his glories as the second Person of the Trinity in order to become human. See below the discussion of the theological concept of kenosis and its implications for translation.

20 The Nile Mission Press moved to Beirut in 1958 and recently became a Christian multimedia mission operating from Cyprus. For details on the Nile Mission Press and other missions that were active in Egypt at that time, see Sharkey (2005).

21 Despite the support that NMP had received from Egyptian protestant churches at the time, I would assume that the support coming from the Coptic Orthodox church, which comprises the majority of Egyptian Christians, was minimal, if non-existent. No information is available, though, to support this assumption.

22 It is interesting to note that the use of rhyme is used in both the sacred language of the Quran and the secular language of folk narratives. What may explain this common feature is the fact that both the Quran and folk literature are meant to be primarily spoken, and hence the oral/aural qualities of their discourse are significantly important. Traditionally, and even before the advent of Islam, rhyme was a key feature of Pre-Islamic poetry which guaranteed its perlocutionary effect on the hearers. It was this discursive quality that both the Quran and folk narratives drew on.

23 Quotations from the Bible are from the English Study Version (ESV).

24 In ESV, these verses read:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ²He was in the beginning with God. ³All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. ⁴In him was life, and the life was the light of men. ⁵The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it (John 1: 1–5, ESV).

25 The verse reads: ‘Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets (Luke 6: 23, ESV).’

26 There are different views regarding the use of the colloquial in written literature – for a detailed analysis of the socio-cultural implications of this tension between fuṣḥa andʿāmmiyya in Arabic, see chapter 6 in Hanna (2016).

27 The model of a collaborative team involving missionary translators and natives was already used in the production of the Bust ā n ī -Van Dyck translation of the Bible in 1865.

28 This expression was used in the missionary reports at that time to refer to those missionaries whose job was to produce Christian literature, through translation or original writing, for distribution among the locals.

29 Scorgie speaks of ‘incarnation’ and ‘Pentecost’ as offering two heuristic ‘paradigms’ that legitimate and guarantee successful communication of Christian Scripture across language boundaries.

30 ‘[…] Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself [ekenosen], by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men (ESV).’

31 Although there is common agreement on this general meaning, there has been a historical debate in Kenotic Christology on the dynamics of this ‘self-emptying’ and which ‘divine attributes’ were relinquished by Christ. For details on this debate, see Crisp (2007) and Brown (2011).

32 This is the view of a number of contemporary theologians, including N. T. Wright; for a full discussion, see Wright (1993, 56–98).

33 Perhaps the picture portrayed in John 13: 3–5 is the best illustration of ‘kenotic incarnation’ and offers us a visual correlative of Philippians 2: 6–7. John presents us with the second person of the Trinity who, despite ‘knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands and that he had come from God’, he rose from supper, ‘laid aside his garment’ and took on the likeness of a servant and started washing his disciples’ feet. This moment of ‘laying aside’ the garment of the master, the rabbi, and more widely the Son of God, and sitting at the disciples’ feet to wash them is visually representative of Christ’s kenosis.

34 One of the recognised traits of institutionalised religion, Sanneh (2003, 100) convincingly argues, is ‘encouraging a superstitious tendency in their followers to like best what they understand least.’ In an unpublished conference paper, Sabri Butrus (2015), the general editor of the Arabic version of the NIV Study Bible, relates that he once recorded a portion of the gospel in the Egyptian vernacular on an audio tape and gave it to an uneducated Egyptian woman. When asked about her feedback, she said she liked it, but did not think this was the gospel, as she understood it all.

35 Usually working in newspapers, publishing houses or other institutions dealing with different forms of print media, the language corrector (musahih al-lugha) is responsible for making sure the written language used is grammatically correct and any citations from the Quran or Hadith (sayings of the Prophet) are accurate. These correctors are usually graduates of either al-Azhar, Dar al-ʿUlūm or Faculty of Arts, where their training involves varying degrees of Islamic studies. For a detailed discussion of the socio-cultural implications of this role in Egyptian print media, see Haeri (2003).

36 Philologist, poet and editor who edited a number of Arabic-speaking newspapers and magazines. He was raised in the Greek Catholic church by his father Naṣīf al-Yaziji (1800–1871) who was also commissioned earlier by the American Protestant missionaries to edit the Bustani Van Dyck translation.

37 The poet, politician and historian Shakīb Arsalān (1869–1946) sent a letter of support to al-Rafʿī in response to his article on ‘The Qur’anic sentence’. In the letter, which was included later in Under the Banner of the Qur’an, Arsalān reiterates what al-Rafʿī says by citing the example of an earlier Arabic translation of the Bible, which was co-authored by Samuel Lee (1783–1852), an orientalist and professor of Arabic at Cambridge, and Lebanese writer and linguist Fāris al-Shidyāq (1805–1887). As reported by Arsalān, al-Shydiāq was not allowed by Lee to use the features characteristic of the Arabic used in classical literature and the Qur’an, including rhetoric and rhyming prose (sajʿ). The translation, which was commissioned by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, was completed and published by Thomas Jarrett (1805–1882) after Lee’s death in 1852. For Arsalān’s letter, see (al-Raf’i 1927/2014, 31–36). For al-Shidyāq’s report on his discussions of the translation with Samuel Lee, see (Al-Shidyaq 1866/2014, 70–71).