Articles and Contributions

Article: « Jésus est-il mort volontairement selon le Coran? Une lecture historico-critique de Q 4:156-159 »

My latest article has been published in the new issue of BABELAO – Electronic Journal for Ancient and Oriental Studies. It is now available through UCLouvain’s open-access journal platform:

N. AFIF, “Jésus est-il mort volontairement selon le Coran? Une lecture historico-critique de Q 4:156-159”, BABELAO 14 (2025), pp. 107-130

In this publication, I discuss new findings related to the Quranic passage on the crucifixion by using a method combining paleography, philology, intertextuality and corpus linguistics (quantitative analysis). As a result, I provide alternative readings that support a new hypothesis about the voluntary death of Jesus in the Quran.

Galen: On Simple Drugs in Syriac Translation. Processed images and digital-born critical edition

The digital outputs of the AHRC-funded project The Syriac Galen Palimpsest based at the University of Manchester from 2015 to 2020 are now available. Our multidisciplinary team used cutting-edge imaging techniques to recover the erased text from a unique manuscript and restore a valuable witness to the scientific heritage of the Syriac Christian world.

The dataset, which is accessible in Open Access, includes a critical edition of Books 6–9 of Galen’s On Simple Drugs, presented in PDF, RTF, and Mellel formats, along with processed images of the manuscript. Further information on our editorial approach will be published in the forthcoming volume The Syriac Galen Palimpsest: A New Paradigm for Cross-Disciplinary Research (Proceedings of the British Academy), stemming from the project’s international British Academy Conference held in 2019. Consult the files on Figshare.