Arabic versions (Arab.) are many, though of the slightest possible critical importance; their literary history, therefore, need not be traced with much minuteness. A notice is quoted from Bar-hebraeus (Assemani, Bibl. Or., ii. 335) to the effect that John, Patriarch of the Monophysites from 631-640, translated the “Gospel” from Syriac into Arabic; and some scholars have believed in the existence of a pre-Mohammedan version of parts at least of the New Testament on other grounds; from such a version (written in the “Hebrew” character) in the opinion of Sprenger (Das Leben und die Lehre Muhammads, i. 131) come the verses of St. John’s Gospel (xv. 23-27, xvi. 1), cited by Ibn Ishaq (ob. 768) in his “Life of Mohammed” (ed. Wüstenfeld, i. 150)(133). These verses are evidently translated from the (Jerusalem?) Syriac; but the translation of the Gospel, from the Syriac into Arabic, existing in a Leipzig MS. brought by Tischendorf from the East and described at length by Gildemeister (De evangeliis in Arabicum e simplici Syriaco translatis, Bonn, 1865) is shown by internal evidence to be posterior to Islam (pp. 30 sq.). The Arabic versions of the Gospel existing in MS. are divided by Guidi (Atti della R. Academia dei Lincei, classe di scienze morali &c., 1888, 1-30) into five sorts: (1) those made directly from the Greek; (2) made directly or corrected from the Peshitto; (3) made directly or corrected from the Coptic; (4) MSS. of two distinct eclectic recensions made in the Alexandrian Patriarchate in the thirteenth century; (5) MSS. (chiefly derived from the Syriac) which are distinguished by their style; being in rhymed prose or elegant Arabic. MSS. of the first sort can all, he says, be traced to the convent of St. Saba near Jerusalem, and are preceded by the lives of its founders, St. Eutimius and St. Saba; the version they contain is to be ascribed to the time of the Caliph Mamun (ninth century). Of the MSS. of class 4, one set represents a recension made by Ibn El-Assāl, circ. 1250; while another represents a less elaborate recension made shortly afterwards, in which the passages omitted in the other were restored, while marginal notes recorded their omission in other versions. Versions of the fifth class were made in the tenth, fourteenth, and seventeenth centuries. A list of MSS. containing the different recensions of all these classes is given by Guidi, _l. c._, pp. 30-33.