Peoples of the Book Part II

To repeat the quote I focused on in my earlier post;

 "We on our part know of many peoples who have books and give praise to God each in its own tongue.  Such peoples, it is known, are the Armenians, the Persians, the Abzags, the Ivers, the Sugds, the Goths, the Tirsians, the Hazaras, the Arabs, the Egyptians, the Syrians, and many more."

-St. Cyril (Constantine the Philosopher), as recorded by Kliment Ohridski

 "Hazaras" (or Khazars) were mainly known for being Turkic and pagan converts to Judaism, so apparently this is a list of both Christian and Jewish groups - i.e. people who use either the New or Old Testament or both, which makes sense because the Trilingual doctrine applies to both.  Constantine had encountered Jews and Samaritans in or on his way to Khazaria from Cherson, and had supposedly learned the Samaritan alphabet and studied the Samaritan books in preparation for his debates with the Khazars.  I am not sure if this was the form in which the Khazars initially encountered the Hebrew Bible, but it would make sense if Samaritans as well as Hebrew speaking Jews had influenced their religious practices.  The Samaritans were brutally suppressed in Palestine during the reign of Justinian (6th century), and some of the survivors travelled as far as the Crimea.  The Khazars seem to have adopted Old Testament-style monotheism gradually, becoming a properly Jewish state only by the 9th century.

Apparently knowledge of Samaritan was something Constantine considered useful for his mission there in 860-861.  It was important enough that he supposedly shut himself up for  days in Cherson (Crimea) to perfect his Samaritan before continuing east to Khazaria.  There is no mention of him learning the Turkic Khazar language.  There would be no reason to include the Khazars in his list of peoples of the book if they used only Hebrew, since Trilingualism recognizes Hebrew as the "official" language of the Old Testament, as Greek is for the New Testament.  The possibility that the scriptures were written in the Turkic Khazar language seems remote, since there is so little tradition of writing in that language.  Anyway, in short, Kliment's own account of Constantine's time in Khazaria gives no evidence of a local version of the New Testament, and if they had the Old Testament they must have used a language other than Hebrew to be worth including in Constantine's list of people who have books in languages other than the "official" three.  This would mean Constantine included the Khazars in the list in order to generalize his argument to all three aspects of trilingualism - showing that there are different versions of the old testament as well as new.

The mention of Arabic scriptures after the Khazars' is also important, because the Koran is certainly not what he is referring to - this would be pretty ridiculous in his situation of trying to justify to the Romans the orthodoxy of his translated Slavonic gospels.  He must be referring to Arabic versions of the Old and/or New Testament.  The Christians in Arabic-speaking lands, however, used their own languages and scripts, such as Coptic and Syriac (which he mentions specifically).  Its likely he is referring only to the Old Testament, as seems to be the case for the Khazars.  We know this was translated by Jewish scholars in the middle east.  The oldest existing version dates from decades after his death, but evidently Jewish scriptures in Arabic were not unknown to Constantine the Philosopher, who had traveled to Baghdad in the 850s.  Thus, he is giving two examples of Jews who write their holy books (which the Christians share) in languages other than Classical Hebrew.  The first, the "Khazars/Samaritans" (my own interpretation), had books in an ancient but controversial writing, while the Jews of the Middle East and Muslim Spain had adopted the new lingua franca, Arabic.  (Latin, remember, is dubiously included in the trinity of holy languages merely for having been the lingua franca for the Church's first half millennium, and as Constantine pointed out, appears in the New Testament only on the head board of the crucifix - hence referring to the Latinophiles as "Pilates".)