Bible
The Bible is the name commonly given to the collection of scriptures used by Jews and Christians. From an Islamic perspective, the Bible must be distinguished from the original revelation that Allah gave to His prophets.
Islam acknowledges that scripture was given to the Christians and Jews; they are called Ahl al-Kitāb — the People of the Book. However, where Muslims disagree begins with the very understanding of what the Bible is.
To the Muslim, the Tawrat was given to Moses and the Injīl was given to the Messiah. This is as the Qur’an says:
“Indeed, We revealed the Torah, containing guidance and light…”
And:
“And We sent, following in their footsteps, Jesus, son of Mary, confirming that which came before him in the Torah. And We gave him the Gospel, in which was guidance and light…”
The Qur’an explicitly states that the Injīl was a scripture given to the Messiah from God, just as the Tawrat was given to Moses from God. No Christian today believes that the New Testament was given by the Messiah to his disciples. These are therefore distinct books. The New Testament is not the Injīl.
As Muslims, we believe that Christians and Jews today do not have in their possession the original Torah or the original Gospel.
Qur'anic criticism of textual corruption
The Qur’an criticizes those who wrote scripture with their own hands and then claimed it was from God:
“So woe to those who write the Scripture with their own hands, then say, ‘This is from Allah,’ in order to exchange it for a small price…”
The Qur’an also states that some from the People of the Book altered words from their proper places:
“So for their breaking of the covenant We cursed them and made their hearts hard. They distort words from their proper usages…”
This is not merely a Muslim claim asserted without evidence. The textual history of the Old and New Testaments themselves shows that “the Bible” is not a single simple text that all Jews and Christians have always possessed in one stable form.
Which Bible?
One of the first problems is the question: which Old Testament and which New Testament is meant?
Examples of Old Testament textual traditions and sources include:
- the Greek Septuagint;
- the Hebrew Vorlage behind the Septuagint;
- the Masoretic Text;
- the Samaritan Pentateuch;
- the Dead Sea Scrolls / Qumran scrolls;
- the sources behind the Greek Septuagint.
Examples of New Testament canons, manuscripts, or printed critical editions include:
- Marcion’s canon;
- Tatian’s Diatessaron;
- Codex Sinaiticus;
- Codex Vaticanus;
- Codex Alexandrinus;
- Codex Bezae;
- Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus;
- Codex Washingtonianus;
- the Textus Receptus;
- Westcott and Hort’s Greek New Testament;
- Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament editions;
- United Bible Societies Greek New Testament editions.
The problem is that there is no one simple “Biblical text” that all Christians or Jews have agreed upon across history. What is called the Bible today is a collected and translated text based on multiple textual traditions and manuscript witnesses.
The Old Testament text
The Old Testament text is not available today as the original autographs. Ernst Würthwein explains that, with ancient writings including the Old and New Testaments, the original documents have been lost, and the available texts exist only in copies separated from the originals by centuries and by an unknown number of intermediate copies.[5]
Würthwein also notes that the available witnesses to the Old Testament text must first be examined in order to reconstruct a text, and that textual witnesses are not all equally reliable, since each has its own character and history.[6]
The Masoretic Text should also not be imagined as one perfect master copy of the original Old Testament. Roy E. Beacham argues that “the Masoretic text” is not one single perfect text, and that no single master copy of the entire Old Testament corpus exists today.[7]
This means that the Old Testament, as possessed today, is transmitted through later textual families, recensions, manuscript traditions, and scholarly reconstruction.
The New Testament and the Injīl
The New Testament is not the Injīl that Muslims believe was given to Jesus. The Qur’an describes the Injīl as revelation given to the Messiah. The New Testament, by contrast, is a later collection of writings about Jesus, his followers, and early Christian communities.
The New Testament did not exist during the lifetime of Jesus. The writings of Paul began after Jesus, and the canonical Gospels were written later still. Modern scholarship commonly dates the canonical Gospels to the latter part of the first century: Mark around 65–70 CE, Matthew and Luke later, and John around 90–95 CE.[8]
The Gospel writings are not transcripts or recordings made at the time of Jesus. Barrie Wilson warns against treating the four Gospel writings as if they were direct transcripts or student notebooks from Jesus’ ministry.[9]
Bart Ehrman similarly notes that the Gospels are not written by eyewitnesses, that the books are anonymous in the sense that their authors do not identify themselves in the texts, and that they circulated before later Christians attached the names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John to them.[10]
Development of Gospel literature
A simplified roadmap of Gospel development can be summarized as follows:
individual sayings about Jesus and from Jesus → sayings collections and sayings Gospels → narrative miracle literature → canonical and non-canonical Gospels.
This means that the Gospel literature developed through sayings, traditions, narrative shaping, theological interpretation, and manuscript transmission before arriving in the later forms known today.
The first canonical Gospel to be written, Mark, is often treated by scholars as a foundation used by Matthew and Luke. The Gospel of Mark is not a strict biography in the modern sense, but contains structured miracle material and theological narrative.[11]
Daniel Wallace distinguishes between the exact words of Jesus and the “voice” of Jesus, stating that only rarely can scholars claim to possess the very words of Jesus, though they may have more confidence in the general voice or message represented in the tradition.[12]
Anonymous publication and later attribution
The four Gospels were published anonymously, meaning that the documents themselves do not name their authors. Later Christian tradition attached the names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John to them.
Dale B. Martin notes that the Gospels were written anonymously and that modern scholars doubt many of the later traditions about their authorship.[13]
Ehrman also argues that the later attributions are difficult because the followers of Jesus were lower-class Aramaic-speaking Jews, whereas the Gospel authors were highly educated Greek-speaking Christians of a later generation, writing in a different language, in different places, and at a later time.[14]
Canon formation
The New Testament canon did not appear all at once.
Dale B. Martin identifies Marcion, in the first half of the second century, as the first known Christian leader to come up with something close to an authoritative list of accepted Christian writings. Marcion selected a version of Luke and letters of Paul, while rejecting other texts.[15]
Martin also notes that the second century contained many different kinds of Christianity, and that the later boundaries between “orthodoxy” and “heresy” were not yet agreed upon in the way they would be in later centuries.[16]
The four-Gospel canon was therefore not simply handed down in a complete form from Jesus. It emerged through later Christian disputes, preferences, arguments, and attempts to identify which writings should count as Christian scripture.
Earliest Gospel manuscripts
There are no complete first-century manuscripts of the canonical Gospels. The earliest surviving fragments are small and fragmentary.
| Gospel | Early manuscript witness | Approximate date |
The names of the Gospel authors were not necessarily circulated with the earliest manuscripts. The earliest Gospel fragment with a title may be associated with Matthew, and authorial names were added to some manuscripts by later correctors.[18] Critical editions and reconstructionThe modern printed Greek New Testament is a critical reconstruction. Textual critics compare manuscript variants and choose readings according to scholarly criteria. This means that the printed Greek New Testament is not identical to any one surviving ancient manuscript. William L. Petersen observed that modern critical editions do not give us the text current in 150, 120, or 100 CE, much less 80 CE.[19] The United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament apparatus also shows the extent of uncertainty in textual decisions. E. J. Edwards noted that, in UBS3 and UBS4, a large percentage of rated variant units were classified as doubtful or extremely doubtful.[20] The result is that the New Testament used today is not a simple photocopy of an original apostolic document. It is an edited text reconstructed from variant manuscripts. Textual variants and theologySome textual variants affect Christian theology and belief. Examples include:
These examples show why textual criticism is not a minor issue. Variant readings can affect how passages are understood doctrinally. The Gospels as shaped traditionOrigen recognized that the Gospel writers sometimes arranged or changed material for theological purposes. In his commentary on John, he says that the writers sometimes dealt freely with things that happened differently, changing place, time, and sequence for spiritual aims.[22] David C. Parker likewise argues that the Gospel tradition should not be imagined as fixed in one final shape from the beginning. He writes that the concept of a Gospel as “fixed in shape, authoritative, and final” has to be abandoned.[23] This does not mean the Gospels are useless as historical documents. It means they must be read as transmitted, interpreted, edited, and theologically shaped writings rather than as verbatim transcripts from Jesus. Muslim conclusionThe Muslim position is not that Allah never revealed scripture to Jews and Christians. Rather, Islam affirms that Allah revealed the Tawrat and the Injīl, while denying that the present Bible is identical to those original revelations. The Bible today is a collection of later textual traditions, translations, manuscript families, canon decisions, and critical reconstructions. The Old Testament is preserved through later witnesses such as the Masoretic tradition, Septuagint, Samaritan Pentateuch, and Dead Sea Scrolls. The New Testament is preserved through later manuscripts, variants, and critical editions. Therefore, Muslims do not accept the Bible as a perfectly preserved scripture in the way Muslims accept the Qur’an. The Bible may contain truth, remnants of revelation, historical material, wisdom, and reports about prophets, but it is not the original Tawrat or the original Injīl in pure form. In sum, there is a serious difference between believing that scripture was originally revealed by God and claiming that the present Biblical text is a perfectly preserved copy of that original revelation. References
|
|---|