ABSTRACT
The work on the translation of the Holy Scriptures began at the initiative of al-Rizzi, who requested permission to do so from the Pope Urban VIII. The translation project was launched in 1625, conducted by a team of linguists and theologians under al-Rizzi’s supervision. Work on the translation continued for several decades, during which al-Rizzi died in 1638. By the nineteenth century, the most widely circulated and officially recognized version of the Bible in the Arab East was the Catholic translation published in Rome in 1671. Mostly an indirect translation, the Catholic version was based more on the Latin Vulgate, the official Bible of the Catholic Church, than on the original Greek and Hebrew. The translators deliberately avoided a “word for word” literal approach. In their deference to the prevailing tradition, the translators also preserved their predecessors’ terms, as well as their interpretations, even in cases of deviations from the Latin canon.
