Priest, theologian, exegete, physician, translator, and philosopher. His full name is Abū al-Faraj ʿAbd Allāh Ibn al‑Ṭayyib al-ʿIrāqī. He worked at the ʿAḍūdiyya Hospital in Baghdad and served as secretary to both Cath. Yūḥannā b. Nāzūk (r. 1012–22) and Cath. Eliya I (r. 1028–49). He was a student of al-Ḥasan b. Suwār b. al-Khammār (d. after 1017), who himself was a student of Yaḥyā b. ʿAdī (d. 974). Ibn al-Ṭayyib’s students include ʿAlī b. ʿĪsā al-kaḥḥāl (d. after 1010), Abū al-Ḥusayn al-Baṣrī (d. 1044), and Ibn Buṭlān (d. 1066). He was also a contemporary of Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna).
Ibn al-Ṭayyib’s oeuvre includes more than forty items, all in Arabic, that span the fields of philosophy, medicine, theology, exegesis, and canon law. In philosophy, he wrote commentaries on the ‘Isagoge’ of Porphyry (ed. Gyekye) and on several works by Aristotle , including the ‘Categories’(ed. Ferrari; ed. ʿAlī Ḥusayn al-Jābirī et al.). In medicine, he wrote several treatises in addition to commentaries on Hippocrates and Galen . Among Ibn al-Ṭayyib’s most significant works in theology is his biblical commentary entitled Firdaws al-naṣrāniyya ‘The Paradise of Christianity’ (Gen. ed. with FT Sanders). This exegetical work draws upon various Syriac sources, including the Scholion of Theodoros bar Koni (fl. end of the 8th cent.), the ‘Selected Questions’ of Ishoʿ bar Nun (d. 828), and the commentaries of Ishoʿdad of Merv (fl. ca. 850), and it served as one of the primary bridges by which E.-Syr. biblical exegesis reached Coptic Christianity and Ethiopic Christianity. In addition to the Firdaws al-naṣrāniyya, Ibn al-Ṭayyib wrote separate commentaries on the Psalms (ed. Manquriyūs and Jirjis) and the Gospels (ed. Manquriyūs; cf. Faultless) as well as (probably) translated the Diatessaron into Arabic (see Baarda). He also authored a number of theological treatises. Finally, mention should be made of his Fiqh al-naṣrāniyya ‘The law of Christianity’, which is a compilation of juridical literature of the Ch. of E. (ed. Hoenerbach and Spies).