A Group of Thirteenth-Century Greek-Arabic Lectionaries from Mt. Sinai

Liturgical bilingualism (and trilingualism) is a well-attested phenomenon among the Melkites in the patriarchate of Jerusalem since the early Islamic period. Beyond well-known examples such as the ninth-century Greek-Syriac-Arabic Psalter from Jerusalem (Moscow, RGB Φ. 201 No. 18-1) or the Greek-Arabic lectionary Sinai Ar. 116 (a. 995/6), such bilingual manuscripts continued to be produced and used until the later medieval period. The paper will first offer a brief survey of the existing Greek-Arabic lectionaries and discuss the current state-of-the-art, which has so far focused primarily on the earlier manuscripts. The second part of the paper will provide a closer analysis of a group of lesser studied thirteenth-century manuscripts (Sinai Ar. 124, Sinai Ar. 149, Sinai Ar. 172), which contain Arabic and Greek lectionaries arranged in consecutive order.