Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

Reuniting James Intercisus: A Mingana Leaf Rejoins Sinai Ar. 369

A guest post by Habib Ibrahim*

1. While working on the Arabic dossier of James Intercisus,1 a Syrian-Persian saint of the 5th century, I came across a fragment in the Mingana Collection in Birmingham that belongs to an Arabic manuscript from Sinai. The single leaf preserved under the shelfmark Birmingham, Cadbury Research Library, Mingana Collection, Chr. Ar. Add. 245 (Mingana Christian Arabic 250)2 can be securely identified as a membrum discjectum of Sinai, St Catherine’s Monastery, Ar. 369 (Kamil 383).3 The latter is a paper codex, dated 1313 CE, that transmits, among other texts, the Arabic Passion of James Intercisus.

2. The match between the Sinaitic codex and the Mingana leaf rests on converging codicological and textual evidence: (1) Dimensions and layout: Sinai Ar. 369 measures 180 × 130 mm, 210 + 1 ff., 12 lines/page; the Passion of James occupies ff. 186v–210v.4 The Mingana leaf measures ca. 179 × 120 mm with 11–12 lines, i.e., practically identical format and ruling. (2) Dating: Sinai Ar. 369 is dated 1313 CE; the Mingana leaf has been dated to the 14th century CE, consistent with the date of the codex. (3) Textual continuity: The Mingana fragment begins exactly where Sinai Ar. 369 breaks off, providing seamless continuation of the Passion text.

Figure 1. Sinai, St Catherine’s Monastery, Ar. 369, f. 210v. The newly identified leaf in the Mingana Collections is the continuation of this text. Source: Library of Congress.

3. There are several reasons why this find matters. With a view to cataloguing, it updates legacy references (Graf,5 Kamil, Mingana) by registering the Mingana leaf as a membrum disjectum of Sinai Ar. 369 in future descriptions. With a view to access to content, the final section (ff. 186v–210v) of Sinai Ar. 369 is now textually complete; editors can cite it as a continuous witness instead of two separate items. Finally, the find also shows that the Sinaitic manuscript fragments in the Christian Arabic section of the Mingana Collection go beyond the series of signatures (Chr. Ar. Add. 123-208) previously known to researchers.6

* Habib Ibrahim specializes in Christian Arabic literature and digital philology. He holds a PhD in the History of Religions from the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. Currently, he is a Research Associate at the University of Tübingen and a Junior Researcher on the ERC project TYPARABIC. His research focuses on Arabic translations of Greek patristic and hagiographic texts, the history of Christian intellectual life in the Middle East, and the development of digital tools for manuscript recognition, text parsing, and lexicon building. He has extensively published on John of Damascus, Yūḥannā ʿAbd al-Masīḥ, and the Antiochian translation movement of the 11th century. Using the OCR Dabbas he developed, he has optically recognized ten books printed in Aleppo between 1706 and 1711. Recently, he has been working on the correspondence of Mūsā Ṭrābulsī (1732–1787), which he has studied, edited, and translated into English; this work is scheduled to be published by De Gruyter by the end of the year; see here.

  1. See Habib Ibrahim, “Le dossier arabe de Jacques l’Intercis”, in: Christelle Jullien, Florence Jullien (eds), Les Actes des martyrs perses du début du Ve siècle: Textes migrateurs entre Orient et Occident, Subsidia Hagiographica, 100 (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 2024), pp. 271–298, at pp. 273, 275. []
  2. See Alphonse Mingana, Catalogue of the Mingana Collection of Manuscripts Now in the Possession of the Trustees of the Woodbrooke Settlement, Selly Oak, Birmingham, vol. III: Additional Christian Arabic and Syriac Manuscripts, Woodbrooke Catalogues, III (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, Ltd., 1939), at p. 53. []
  3. See Aziz S. Atiya, The Arabic Manuscripts of Mount Sinai: A hand-list of the Arabic manuscripts and scrolls microfilmed at the library of the Monastery of St. Catherine, Mount Sinai (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1955), at p. 10; Murad Kamil, Catalogue of all manuscripts in the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1970, at p. 30. []
  4. The codex also contains Mayāmir and Apophthegmata by a Dorotheus. []
  5. See Georg Graf, Georg, Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur, vol. 1: Die Übersetzungen, Testi e studi, 118 (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1944), pp. 504-505; idem, Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur, vol. 2: Die Schriftsteller bis zur Mitte des 15. Jahrhunderts, Testi e studi, 133 (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1948), p. 501. []
  6. See Alba Fedeli, “Manuscript Acquisitions and Their Later Movements: A Further Note About the Case of the Lewis Quranic Manuscript“, in: Boris Liebrenz, Christoph Rauch (eds), Manuscripts, Politics and Oriental Studies: Life and Collections of Johann Gottfried Wetzstein (1815-1905) in Context, Islamic Manuscripts and Books, 19 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019), pp. 228-247, at p. 229; Peter Tarras, “The Collector’s Heir: Käthe Rehfeld (Previously Grote, Née Hahn)“, COMSt Bulletin, 9 (2023 [2024]), pp. 115-128, at p. 122. []

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Habib Ibrahim (October 6, 2025). Reuniting James Intercisus: A Mingana Leaf Rejoins Sinai Ar. 369. Membra Dispersa Sinaitica. Retrieved February 12, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14uyv


Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.