Talk:أسقف

Age

@Fenakhay: You could try to find whether it occurs in Christian writings or translations from Syriac before Arab colonization of Egypt, which is somehow likely since Christian church structures existed already before Islam existed. The word was used in polemics in the 9th century already, including in the title of The Book of Nestor the Priest (قِصَّةُ مُجَادَلَةُ الْأُسْقُفِ‎ (qiṣṣatu mujādalatu l-ʔusqufi)), which is called the “earliest Jewish anti-Christian text extant” (because there are hardly ever any lengthy prose texts predating that time extant, let alone Jewish ones, but this alone indicates that the word had already pervaded the language). A bit more and earlier of that and it is conclusively refuted that this word is from Coptic. As this book is alleged to be of Egyptian origin of course it can contain Coptic words, but in general Coptic has had very little influence from Coptic, in any social area bar agriculture and fishing, and in the 9th century we find this word with Iraqis: Abū al-Faraj al-ʾIṣfahānī uses it, in the first half of the 8th century Muḥammad Ibn ʾIsḥāq does but he was in Alexandria (according to his bio); Ibn Saʿd in 8th-century Iraq multiple times, in Ibn Sallām al-Jumaḥī it is in one passage. Of course it is in the Kitāb al-ʿayn, where defined as رأس من رءوس النصارى، ويجمع أساقِفَة. as if it was in use with the Iraqi Christians too. After two pages on al-Waraq, I see all after the Arab conquest of Egypt, but this only shows that at its time Arabic literature did not exist yet.

An attempt however to conjecture the word’s presence by the history of people is conclusive: I read that the Ghassanids had bishops. Wikipedia even knows their first one: “their first official bishop, John of Evaria was from Huwwārīn” – where we read of him is Shahîd, Irfan (2002) Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century. Volume II: Part 1: Toponymy, Monuments, Historical Geography, Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, page 152 and Shahîd, Irfan (1995) Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century. Volume I: Part 2: Ecclesiastical History, Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, pages 717, 740, where it is called their last bishop in 519, then they were ministered by lower-ranking clerics but had to have bishops from Syriac areas. And how would Jabalah IV ibn al-Ḥāriṯ have referred to bishop Simeon of Beth Arsham in their correspondence around 520 CE which is mentioned for the article Jabiyah?

Of course it is not implausible after all that ʿUmar himself used the word as in a weak ḥadĩṯ.

Siegmund Fraenkel’s contemporaries often assumed borrowing paths on shallow reasons, of course due to the number of texts available back then. It is splendid now that I have outlined how baseless the story about س ج ن (s-j-n) being borrowed from Coptic is. But we see its presence so early that it would have to be from Demotic (the word and concept “Demotic” totally existed in his time, research on it seemingly incipient in the 1820s). Fay Freak (talk) 20:01, 13 August 2021 (UTC)