▪ Jeffery1938: »Some of the early authorities tried to find an Arabic origin for it, making it a form
ʔifʕīl from √NǦL, but this theory is rejected with some contempt by the commentators Zam. and Bayḍ. both on general grounds, and because of al-Ḥasan’s reading
ʔanǧīl, which clearly is not an Arabic form. So also the Lexicons
LA, xiv, 171;
TA, viii, 128; and al-Jawālīqī, 17 (al-Khafāǧī, 11), give it as a foreign word derived from either Hbr or Syr (cf. Ibn al-Athīr,
Nihāya, iv, 136). / Obviously it is the Grk ἐυαγγέλιον
euangélion, and both Marracci
1
and Fraenkel
2
have thought that it came directly into Ar from the Grk. The probabilities, however, are that it came into Ar through one of the other Sem tongues. The Hbr origin suggested by some is too remote. […] The suggestion of a Syr source is much more hopeful. It is true that
ʔwnglywn is only a transliteration of the Grk εὐαγγέλιον, but it was as commonly used as the pure Syr
sbartā [‘good tidings, gospel’] and may be assumed to have been in common use among the Christians with whom Muḥammad may have been in contact. Nöldeke has pointed out, however, that the Manichaean forms
ʔnglywn of Persian origin,
3
and
anglion of Turkish origin,
4
still have the Grk
‑ion ending, and had the Arabic, like these, been derived from the Syr we might have expected it also to preserve the final
n. The shortened form, he points out (
Neue Beiträge, 47), is to be found in the Eth [Gz]
wangēl, where the long vowel is almost conclusive evidence of the Ar word having come from Abyssinia.
5
Grimme,
ZA, xxvi, 164, suggests that it may have entered Ar from the Sab, but we have no inscriptional evidence to support this. It is possible that the word was current in this form in pre-Islamic days, though as Horovitz,
KU, 71, points out, there is some doubt of the authenticity of the verses in which it is found.
6
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