Biblical textual criticism drove the era’s Arabic scholarship

Evidence

Michaelis’s own knowledge of Arabic seems to have been slight, though he translated Erpenius’s grammar from Latin into German. Michaelis was best known for his Einleitung in die göttlichen Schriften des Neuen Bundes (1750), in which he sought to distinguish on textual and philological grounds those books that had actually been written by the Apostles from those which had not. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 231

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors the logic in the earlier Reiske material — scripture study as the engine of so-called oriental philology. — connects to: Nineteenth-century American Muslim knowledge came from Bible, Arabian Nights, and Twain — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 211

Related

• Eighteenth-century scholars studied Arabic to illuminate the Bible (similarity 0.86)
• Michaelis subordinated Arabic study to biblical understanding (similarity 0.85)
• Seventeenth-century Arabic learning centered on scripture and lexicons. (similarity 0.79)