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Preservation of the Revelation Received by the Prophets Muhammad and
Jesus
By:
Dr. Ahmad Shafaat
(First published in the Journal of the Muslim Research Institute,
July-August 2001, Vol. 5, No. 2)
Part 2: REVELATION
RECEIVED BY PROPHET JESUS
Unlike Islam, Christianity does not claim that
Jesus prepared under his own supervision a collection of his
revelatory sayings and reports of revelatory events during his life
on this earth which he then passed on to his disciples. Christians
agree that our knowledge about what Jesus said or did is to be
gained by collections of traditions (gospels) about him prepared by
others after him. This makes the gospel tradition similar to the
hadith, both having a comparable degree of reliability.
Extensive observable
alterations in the Jesus story at every stage
Even a very elementary critical study of the
gospels establishes the following two important facts beyond any
reasonable doubt:
1) The texts of the gospels have suffered many
alterations. These are not simply alleged by extra-gospel traditions
but proved by actual evidence from the earliest extant manuscripts.
In a modern Bible one can hardly read a page without finding a
footnote mentioning a variant reading in some ancient source. Some
of the variations are unimportant while others are significant. Thus
in Mark the account of the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus is
missing from all the ancient manuscripts, as is the famous account
in John 8 of the woman arrested for adultery and saved by Jesus from
stoning. 1 John 5:7, the nearest statement to the Christian trinity
in the whole of the Bible, is also not found in any early manuscript
and is now omitted in every text of the Bible reconstructed with
some critical approach. In 1 Tim 3:16, an earlier “which” or “who”
was changed to “God” to support the divinity of Jesus at
Constantinople in the beginning of the 6th century.
Still, variations in the texts of the books of the New Testament are
ultimately not serious, since they do not consist of a thorough
revision of the whole text. By textual criticism we can recover the
original text with fair confidence so that the text as a whole can
be interpreted with most of the uncertainties arising not from
textual variations but from the inherent uncertainties of the human
language and obscurity of the context. Much more significant is the
following fact:
2) Changes were made to earlier oral or written
tradition by later oral transmitters or writers and some traditions
were actually fabricated. Here are some examples:
a) In Mark a man asks Jesus:
"Good Teacher, what must I do
to inherit eternal life?"
Jesus replies:
"Why do you call me good? No
one is good but God alone..." (Mark 10:17).
Luke agrees with Mark, but in Matthew the
dialogue is completely changed. The man no longer addresses Jesus as
Good Teacher but simply as Teacher. Instead of the Good
Teacher we now have good deed:
"Teacher, what good deed must
I do to have eternal life?"
This changes the issue in Jesus' reply from the
goodness of Jesus to goodness of deed:
"Why do you ask me about what
is good? There is only one who is good. ... " (Matt 19:16-17).
The agreement between Luke and Mark and the
incoherence of Matthew's version shows that Mark is more original
and Matthew is thoroughly altering the earlier version probably
because he did not like Jesus admitting that real goodness is found
only in God, not in any teacher such as he himself. Incidentally,
this shows that Matthew did not know of the Trinitarian
interpretation of the Markan passage, which manages somehow to see
in it a subtle pointer to Jesus' divinity. For, had he understood
the verse in that fashion he would not have subjected it to such a
tortured revision.
b) All the synoptic gospels agree that Jesus went
to John the Baptist to be baptized by him, his baptism being for the
forgiveness of sins. This is entirely consistent with Jesus' view
that there is none good but God. Now in Mark and Luke John the
Baptist simply baptizes Jesus and there is no mention of any words
whatsoever being exchanged between John and Jesus. But Matthew adds:
John would have prevented
[Jesus from being baptized], saying, "I need to be baptized by you,
and do you come to me?" But Jesus answered him, "Let it be so now,
for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness."
Then [John] consented.
Once again it is evident that it is Matthew who
is adding to an earlier tradition rather than Mark and Luke omitting
from it. And we can easily understand why he made his addition. Just
as he could not accept Jesus' refusal in earlier tradition to
ascribe any real goodness to himself, he could not accept that Jesus
went to John to be baptized for the forgiveness of sins. Therefore
he fabricates the dialogue between John and Jesus. (This may be
compared with the fabrication of the verse about stoning in the
Hadith literature.)
c) Lest it should appear that Matthew is the only
one who altered earlier tradition whenever it did not fit his view
of Jesus, let us also take a couple of examples from Luke, who in
fact revises Mark more often than Matthew does.
We are told in Mark 15:27, 32:
And they crucified with him
two bandits, one on his right and one on his left ... . Those
crucified with him also taunted him.
This time Matthew agrees with Mark. He, like
Mark, clearly states that both thieves or bandits crucified
with Jesus mocked him like some of the soldiers and passersby. But
look at what Luke has done to this tradition:
One
of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying,
"Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!" But the other
rebuked him, saying, "Do you not fear God, ... we are getting what
we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done no wrong." Then he
said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." He
replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise"
(Luke 23:39-43).
With one stroke of the pen, Luke or his source
has turned one of the bandits of the earlier tradition into a
reformed good guy. And just as some early "Muslims" out of nothing
created the verse about stoning and Matthew or his source out of
nothing created a dialogue between John and Jesus at the latter's
baptism, Luke or his source has out of nothing created a dialogue
between the reformed criminal and Jesus. Apparently, Luke felt that
Jesus, the Lord and Savior of the world, should not leave this world
without performing one last saving act.
d) In Mark the last words of Jesus before his
death are: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" He even gives
the words in Aramaic: Eloi, Eloi, lema' sabachthani. Once again
Matthew agrees with Mark except that he changes the Aramaic Eloi,
Eloi into Hebrew Eli, Eli. But Luke was completely unimpressed by
such touches of authenticity. He removes these words from the Markan
account and replaces them by completely different ones:
Then Jesus, crying with a loud
voice, said: Father, into your hands I commend my spirit." Having
said this, he breathed his last.
Incidentally, the words in Mark and Matthew where
Jesus prays, "My God, my God, ..." prove once again that earlier
tradition did not present Jesus as God, ignoring of course the
post-Trinitarian and highly artificial theory of Jesus' two natures.
But Luke does not change the words for that reason. For, Luke, as
also every other New Testament writer, is not a believer in the
equality of Jesus with God. The reason he or his source changed the
last words of Jesus is that he did not think someone so faithful to
God as Jesus should die with such words of despair as were not
spoken even by lesser Jewish martyrs mentioned, e.g., in the books
of Maccabees.
e) Here is an example where both Matthew and Luke
change earlier tradition, but in very different ways.
All the three synoptic gospels tell the story of
Jesus going to his own hometown and preaching in the synagogue
there. The people reject him, to which Jesus reacts by saying that
no prophet is honored or accepted in his own hometown. Mark
concludes the story with the comment:
And he could do no deed of
power [=miracle] there, except that he laid his hand on a few sick
people and cured them. And he was amazed at their unbelief (Mark
6:5-6).
Here we are told that Jesus could not do
any extraordinary miracles in his own hometown. Matthew does not
want to accept this. He changes the words to:
And he did not do many
deeds of power there, because of their unbelief (Matt 13:58).
"Could not" has here become
"did not," as if Jesus by his own free
choice refrained from performing any miracles because of their
unbelief. Here we have an example of how radically the meaning can
change when a single word in a sentence is changed.
Luke also does not want to accept "could not" in
the earlier tradition. But he has a completely different way of
"correcting" it. After being rejected in his own hometown, Luke's
Jesus says:
And you will say, "Do here
also in your hometown the things (miracles) that we have heard you
did in Capernaum" (Luke 4:23).
According to Mark and Matthew nobody was
demanding any miracles from Jesus. According to Mark, Jesus probably
himself wanted to do some miracles but could not. Luke or his source
has out of nothing created these words for Jesus to speak. After
stating that prophets are not accepted in their hometown, Jesus
continues in the Lukan version:
But the truth is, there were
many widows in Israel [during famine] in the time of Elijah; yet
Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in
Sidon. There were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet
Elisha, and none of them were cleansed except Namaan the Syrian"
(Luke 4:25-27).
Luke is not telling us clearly and directly that
Jesus could not do miracles in Nazareth in front of his own people.
But the issue is clearly on his mind. His answer is the same as that
of Matthew: Jesus by his own choice did not do any miracles. Just as
Elijah and Elisha performed miracles for people outside their own
nation (Israel), so also Jesus performed miracles for people outside
his own town (Nazareth).
The above are only five cases where alteration or
tahrif in earlier Jesus traditions is taking place right
before our very eyes. There are literally hundreds of such examples
in the synoptic gospels. When we move to the Gospel of John and some
non-canonical writings, there are even more alterations. In John,
for example, Jesus is hardly recognizable as a Jewish prophet or
messiah or rabbi or wise teacher that he originally was. He has
become a pre-existent heavenly being, though still not one with God.
Instead of speaking in short yet forceful brief statements his Jesus
gives long discourses that recall the discourses of Gnostic
revealers.
Above, we have mostly talked about changes made
to Mark. Does that mean that Mark is above suspicion? Hardly. Had
the traditions about Jesus been transmitted by a creditable process
and then reported by Mark by a similarly creditable way, Matthew and
Luke would not have felt so free to change his gospel. It is because
they knew that nowhere, neither in Mark nor anywhere else, there
existed completely reliable traditions about Jesus that they felt
that they too like those before them were free to alter earlier
traditions.
Thus every tradition in every gospel must be
critically examined if we want to know what Jesus really said or
did. And if that is done, it becomes clear that very small
proportion of gospel reports can be accepted as they are. Many
reports are simply fabrications while others have some historical
material behind them that has been embellished or otherwise modified
to varying degrees.
Christian
responses to the unreliability of most gospel reports
Although, the gospel tradition is like the
Hadith, there is one crucial difference between the two. As we noted
above, the question of the authenticity of a hadith is a matter of
scholarly activity. This is in contrast to the Christian gospels,
which were never compiled by a use of any scientific method. At one
time (in the third century C. E.) they were given a divine
authority, although none of the gospels themselves claim such
authority. Every word was believed as inspired by the Holy Spirit
who was identified with God. As a result one could not subject the
gospels to a scholarly critical analysis until the University, an
institution inspired in the West by the Muslim civilization,
considerably weakened the hold of the Church. Now far reaching
critical studies are done in universities that are independent of
the churches. The conclusions of these studies have, however, not
been respected by the churches as they should have been. At best,
under the umbrella provided by the secular ideology the Church and
the University coexist, generally in a disregard or uneasy awareness
of each other. Most church members disregard the work of critical
scholars in the universities or dismiss the results of their
painstaking labors with a laugh or a hand wave or fiercely oppose
them. As for critical scholars in the universities, they either
isolate themselves from churches, or express their conclusions in
such a way as to avoid confrontation with the traditional
Christians. Otherwise, they suffer persecution.
More specifically, we can divide the Christian
responses to the results of critical studies of the gospels in four
broad categories:
1) Some Christians reject the conclusion that
much in the gospels is historically unreliable and insist that every
gospel tradition is historically accurate. In line with the past
church tradition they harmonize and weave together the conflicting
gospel reports to construct what are essentially new stories about
Jesus. For example, in Mark, after his resurrection Jesus does not
appear to any body. In Matthew he appears to the women who first
discovered the empty tomb as they were leaving and then to the
disciples as they were assembled on a mountain in Galilee. But in
Luke-Acts Jesus does not appear to the women at the empty tomb and
as for the disciples he expressly instructs them to stay in
Jerusalem. In Luke-Acts the disciples never leave Jerusalem for
Galilee and therefore never have an appearance of Jesus in Galilee.
Most critical scholars today accept the obvious contradictions in
these accounts, but traditional Christians accept them all as
literally true. They put them together to postulate a series of
appearances of Jesus to the male and female disciples in Jerusalem
and Galilee. As another example, Matthew (27:5) and Acts (1:19) give
different accounts of how Judas Iscariot met his fate. In Matthew
he, having been overcome by remorse, hands over his blood money to
the temple authorities, and then goes out and hangs himself. The
temple authorities purchase a field with money returned by Judas.
But in Acts, far from displaying remorse and returning the blood
money, he himself purchases a field with his ill-gotten
gains. And instead of committing suicide by hanging he dies by
accident caused by God: one day while he was out walking he trips,
falls down, and his internal organs burst out. Christians who accept
the New Testament as accurate records of history try to combine the
two accounts as follows: Judas hung himself, the rope broke, he fell
down and then his bowels burst out!
There is evidence that Christian missionaries who
have studied Islam for polemical and evangelical purposes use the
Muslim traditions in the same way, especially when it suits them.
Thus, instead of first dealing with the conflicts in the traditions
about the collection of the Qur`an, they will simply put them in a
particular sequence and conclude that the Qur'an has been altered
many times during the course of history, each revision being so
successful that not a single copy of the previous version was able
to survive!!!
2) Another type of Christian response is to give
some acceptance to the historical problems raised by the gospel
reports, but nevertheless keep insisting on the commonly held
traditional and official beliefs by some rationalizations. They may,
for example, suggest that in Christianity it is the person of Jesus
who is important and therefore it does not matter whether or not we
have reliable information about what he taught or did. Yet important
questions about Christian faith make it vitally important that we
know accurately what Jesus said or did or what happened to him in
the end. For example, the very statement that it is the person of
Jesus that is important needs some basis in the teaching of the
historical Jesus. What if it turns out that Jesus never regarded
himself as divine or never gave the sort of importance to his own
person that the Christians have come to give to him? What if he
never rose from the dead to sit at the right hand of God and
therefore never listens to the Christians when they pray to him?
Some Christians even try to make a virtue of the
fact that they have four, often conflicting gospels, while the
Muslims have only one Qur'an. This, they say, means that the
Christians did not try to produce a single version of the teachings
and life of Jesus and thus showed more faithfulness to earlier
traditions and more acceptance of diversity. The assumption here is
that a prophet cannot leave behind an authentic book about his
teaching, and if a community holds on to such a book it must be the
result of some dark conspiracy or use of force. Another assumption
is that if there is a single founding document for a community then
it cannot have diversity. In other words, the only or the best way
for a community to have diversity is to have several documents
containing different types of fabricated or distorted reports about
the founder of the community. By this type of logic the USA cannot
have enough diversity because it is founded on a constitution for
which we have only a single authentic text and Muslims cannot have
enough diversity simply because they have a major part of the words
uttered by their Prophet preserved in a single authentic book.
(Christians also give no credit to Muslims for having not four but
at least six books of Hadith containing contradictory traditions!!!)
3) There are also some Christians who are
committed to the traditional teachings of the church and use the
critical methods to reinforce those teachings. Naturally, they have
to do a lot of clever maneuvers to appear to achieve this objective.
Their writings usually impress and satisfy only the believers.
4) A fourth response is shown by a small but
growing number of Christians who give due value to the historical
questions and their critical answers. They give new formulations of
the Christian faith in the light of the critical conclusions. Some
of them have formed organized groups, e.g. Jesus Seminar. But, as a
rule they lack organization and are therefore vulnerable to pressure
from the members of traditional, organized churches. Most of them,
however, are able to deal with this pressure, since the church has
no longer the power that it once had.
SUMMARY
To conclude we make the following comments that
can serve as a summary:
When some very significant events such as
inspired speeches or actions of a charismatic religious figure
occur, their reports are transmitted across time and space. In the
ancient world this transmission first took place orally. Then, if
people found continued significance in the reports, small documents
were written which gradually gave rise to larger, more comprehensive
documents. During this process reports suffered all kinds of
distortions due to forgetting, misunderstanding, influences of prior
assumptions, need to adopt the reports for particular uses etc.
Once, however, written reports gained wide acceptability and use,
intentional changes in them reduced considerably. Whatever changes
did occur can now be examined by textual criticism and usually the
original texts can be recovered with reasonable certainty. The
uncertainties that do remain do not seriously hamper the
interpretation of the texts, at least not as far as the main lines
of thought presented in them are concerned. The discovery of the
Dead Sea scrolls has shown how relatively unchanged the texts of at
least some of the Biblical books have remained over the centuries.
The degree to which a text was preserved depended
on how strong and continuous presence the text had in the community
that received it. As mentioned earlier, alteration in texts reduced
when their use and recognition of their authority became
sufficiently widespread and continuous. If similar conditions
prevailed from the very beginning a text could completely avoid
alterations and be preserved with complete faithfulness. This is the
case with the Qur'an. By all historical reports the Qur’an had a
very strong presence in the Muslim community from the very
beginning. It was constantly used and its authority was universally
recognized. Moreover, this strong presence and universal recognition
of authority has been continuous. Hence its text was completely
protected from intentional changes.
There might have existed at some point many
defective manuscripts of the Qur'an due, for example, to scribal
errors, some of which may one day be discovered. The existence of
defective manuscripts might have prompted `Uthman to send to various
regions of the Islamic world standard copies of the text. He could
not have achieved the agreement that he did unless the text he sent
to various cities was completely faithful to the original. This is
because disagreements and divisions come easy to all human beings.
No force of human authority can impose agreement and unity over an
important matter and in a very large and varied community with such
complete success as was achieved by ‘Uthman, or someone earlier than
him, on the text of the Qur'an in the vast Muslim world.
The Prophet, of course, said and did things other
than those mentioned in the Qur'an. The reports of these extra-Qur'anic
words and actions of the Prophet were also found significant enough
to be transmitted. Their transmission, however, was not as faithful.
In fact, these reports suffered all types of alterations at the oral
stage and then at the written stage. They ceased only when some
comprehensive collections gained widespread use and acceptability.
The case with the Gospel traditions is similar.
They were first transmitted orally. Then small documents were
produced which were later combined into bigger gospels. All kinds of
alterations, distortions, and fabrications took place until some of
the documents produced in this way were collected into the canonical
New Testament and widely accepted. When many Muslims say that the
message of Jesus or the Injil given to him suffered alteration or
tahrif they do not refer only to the changes that the texts of
the New Testament books have suffered, but, more importantly, to all
the changes that took place before and during the making of those
books, some of which we can even now see when we compare various
gospels. In this sense the Gospel literature is like the Hadith
literature.
But there are two important differences between
the Hadith and the Gospels:
1)
Both the Muslims and the Christians admit that there were
alterations and fabrications of reports about Jesus and Muhammad.
But Christians separated the authentic and the unauthentic by
declaring some documents as canonical while others as apocryphal.
This declaration, while in reality was based on the degree of
popularity of the documents, was given the authority of the Holy
Spirit. Muslims, however, considered the process of separation of
the authentic from the unauthentic to be largely a scientific
process and so they developed a whole science of Hadith to achieve
this separation. As a result there is no absolute division between
the “canonical” and “apocryphal”. There are to be sure six books (Bukhari,
Muslim, Abu Da`ud, Tirmidhi, Nasa`i, and Ibn Majah) that have come
to achieve a special status among many Muslims but there is no
condemnation of the other collections and among many Muslims there
is no hesitation to use them. Many popular Hadith collections such
as Mishkat al-Masabih contain many traditions
from books other than these six.
In the last two centuries critical Christian
scholarship has developed a “science of the Gospels” corresponding
to the Muslim “science of Hadith” but its valuable results are found
only in the university lectures, academic publications, and some
popular books read by a very limited number of liberal Christians or
non-Christians such as atheists. Its results have barely reached the
Sunday church services. While Muslims need to develop “the science
of Hadith” still further, Christians need to respect and use the
results of “the science of the Gospels” by reflecting them in their
beliefs and practices.
2)
When Muslims produced collections of traditions they kept
them as separate traditions. In contrast, Christians put the
traditions about Jesus together into connected accounts of his life
and ministry. Muslims also produced some biographical literature but
this was kept separate from the collections of traditions that
acquired some authority. This difference is significant because when
individual traditions are put together into connected accounts, they
often suffer yet more distortions because the context given to the
traditions is often different from the original context, thus
changing the meaning of the traditions. Sometimes new stories need
to be created just to fit the existing stories into a connected
account.
When Western, non-Muslim scholars started to
study Islam, most of them reached the conclusion that the Qur'anic
text is preserved in its very original form. However, later, some of
them started to insinuate alterations in the text of the Qur'an.
This may be due to the polemic between Muslims and Christians which
creates a strong need among some Christians to counter the Muslim
allegation of tahrif in the Bible by a similar allegation of
tahrif in the Qur'an. Some basis for such insinuations is
provided by Muslim’s own traditions which allege that the Qur'an
contained this or that statement or that this or that verse was read
in this or that way at some, usually, unspecified time. However,
these traditions, rather late in comparison to the Qur’an, have a
simple explanation:
The impulse and temptation to change an
authoritative text is always there in some people. In case of many
other ancient texts this impulse resulted in actual alterations of
the text. But in case of the Qur’an it could only be satisfied by
insinuations or claims that such and such a statement was once in
the Qur'an. For example, the proponents of the stoning penalty for
adultery wanted the Qur’an to mention this penalty and some Shi‘ah
Muslims wanted it to say that ‘Ali was the lawful successor to the
Prophet. But they could not bring themselves to actually producing
and promoting separate Qur’anic texts containing their ideas. They
could only allege that at some point in time the Qur’an had material
to support them.
After the period of creation of tradition
gradually came to end, say by the third century, it was not even
possible to allege alterations in the Qur’an. Now the impulse to
alter the text and bring it in line with what one wants it to say is
satisfied in another way: by giving it interpretations that suits
us. Such is the way revelation works among human beings because of
our imperfections. Two tendencies work simultaneously: the tendency
to alter and corrupt it and the tendency to undo the alteration and
corruption. In this way the truth gets manifested ever more clearly
for those who seek for it.
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