A Quaker Perspective on the Qur’an and the Bible -- Page 4

When focusing on the diversity of religious predicates, we might ask: "Does anyone worship the same God?" Can any faith or its followers sport an essentialist label? Which religion can claim to have held a monolithic theological view even within its creedal schools? Hillel and Shammai the sagely Pharisaic "pair" sat together at the head of the Great Sanhedrin but posited sharply divergent visions of God’s character and actions. The Alexandrian Fathers and their counterparts in Antioch were not always affectionately immersed in Christian fellowship. For that matter, earlier Jews and Christians not only differed from their Hellenistic brethren on how they viewed God and Christ but held jarringly different notions of the basic structure of reality.

Re-framing this question in this way opens up an entirely different perspective. It becomes clear that each believer has a different view of God, depending on his or her stage of spiritual/psychological development and/or theological perspective.

In today’s world, the theological boundary is not between Muslims and Christians, or even Muslims and Jews. Rather it is between competing understandings of God. This becomes clear if we consider Prof Abd-Allah’s question in contemporary terms: Do Christians such as Jim Wallis, Marcus Borg, Pat Robertson and Ted Haggard all worship the same God?

My own Quaker-influenced understanding of God is closer to that of Muslims and Jews in the peace movement than it is to fundamentalist Christians who support war. (Both positions have scriptural warrant, as I will explain later.) Furthermore, many fundamentalist Christians and extremist Muslims share a similarly exclusivist and possessive view of God (i.e. "my God is better, bigger, stronger than your God"). This view of God is one that progressive Muslims, Christians and Jews find repellent, or at least immature.

To conclude this brief overview of how different faith traditions view God, it is worth noting that many Muslims would strongly object to the claim that Islam portrays God/Allah as stern and cruel being who demands to be obeyed unquestioningly. With the exception of one, all 114 chapters of the Qur’an begin with the phrase: "In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate." Mercy, compassion and forgiveness are among the most commonly mentioned attributes of God in the Qur’an. In one of the sayings (hadith) of the Prophet Muhammad we are told that "God is more loving and kinder than a mother to her dear child." Most Muslims as well as most Christians and Jews believe in a God that is compassionate and forgiving as well as peaceful and just.

Composition of the Bible and Qur’an

The Bible and the Qur’an derive from a common religious tradition and express similar spiritual verities, but they were composed under strikingly different circumstances.

The Bible (the Greek word meaning "The Book") consists of two parts, the "Old" (Hebrew) and the "New" (Christian) Testament (or Gospels). The Hebrew Bible (known to Jews as Tanakh) is actually a series of 39 (or 46, depending on the version) books or writings compiled from 1000-660 BCE [before the Common Era]. The New Testament was composed by a variety of writers between 60 to 110 CE. The contents of the New Testament were formalized by Athanasius of Alexandria in 367 CE, and finally "canonized" (officially authorized) in 382 CE.

Some Christians and Jews believe that everything in the Bible is literally true. Some Christians believe that the Bible has one unifying message, pointing to Christ. Other Christians and Jews see the Bible as a multivocal and polysemous source of Divine wisdom composed by a variety of human authors and reflecting a diversity of meanings and religious perspectives. Efforts to view the Bible, or even the New Testament, as a unified whole have proven problematic at best.

In considering the composition of scripture, at least two issues need to be considered:

1) How were the scriptures composed? Who composed them, when, and for what reason? Is the text we have what the original author(s) wrote or said, or has it been altered over time?

Determining the answers to these questions is extremely difficult. Traditionalists believed that the scriptures were written by the authors whose names are given in the scriptures, e.g. the first five books of the Bible were composed by Moses, the gospel of Matthew was written by the apostle Matthew, etc. Traditionalists also believe that the scriptures have been preserved verbatim and therefore can be seen as "inerrant."

Beginning in the 18th century, many scholars have come to question these traditional accounts for textual and historical reasons. Close readings of scriptures revealed many stylistic discrepancies showing that these works were written by numerous individuals over a period of many years, and for complex theological reasons.

2) How did certain scriptures become "canonized," i.e. officially recognized? In the first two centuries after the death of Jesus dozens of "gospels" and epistles attributed to the apostles were written, including the gospels of Mary Magdalene, Thomas, and Peter; the Epistle of Barnabas; the Acts of Andrew and John; the Revelation of Peter, etc. All of these works were rejected by the Church for various reasons. How did certain gospels come to be considered "canonical" (i.e. fit for use by the church) and others rejected as inauthentic or heretical?

These questions have preoccupied Christian scholars for the last couple of centuries.

So far, however, most Muslim scholars have not grappled with questions such as these because the Qur’an is assumed to have always been a unified work directly inspired by God. The Qur’an (meaning "Recital") consists of 144 suras, or chapters, that were revealed to one man, Mohammad, over a 22-year period, from 610 CE until shortly before his death in 632 CE. As a result, the Qur’an is a much more unified work than the Bible, although some apparent contradictions and inconsistencies have been noted and will be discussed later.

Twenty years after the Prophet’s death, in 653 CE, the first "authorized" version of the Qur’an was compiled under Caliph Uthman. The earliest manuscripts of the Qur’an date back to around 100 years after the Prophet’s death. Most Muslims believe that every word in the Qur’an is an exact transcript of what God revealed to Mohammed, with absolutely no changes in wording since it was first transmitted and written down. Today only fundamentalist Jews or Christians would make such a claim about their Scripture.

Controversies Regarding the "Canonization" of the Qur’an

Some modern non-Muslim scholars have questioned whether the Qur’an was preserved perfectly, word-for-word, as Mohammad received and recited it. Since we do not have an "authorized" version of the Qur’an dating back to the Prophet’s lifetime, we will never know for sure, just as we will never know for certain what happened after the crucifixion of Jesus. We are told that the Prophet’s revelations came in fragmentary outbursts that were copied down and memorized by believers. After his death, these fragments were gathered together into a unified work through a process that has never fully been explained or understood. Caliph Uthman is supposed to have authorized Muslim religious leaders to gather these different versions and produce a standardized text. However, some modern scholars, such as the archeologist Arthur Jeffrey, believe that there were "wide divergences" among these early quranic texts:

When we come to the accounts of ‘Uthman’s recension, it quickly becomes clear that his work is no mere matter of removing dialectical peculiarities in reading, but was a necessary stroke of policy to establish a standard text for the whole empire – there were wide divergences between the collections that had been digested into Codices in the great Metropolitan centres of Medina, Mecca, Basra, Kufa and Demascus. Uthman’s solution was to canonize the Medinan Codex and order all others to be destroyed. There can be little doubt that the text canonized by Uthman was only one among several types of text in existence at the time.

This passage is quoted by the ex-Muslim Christian convert Sarker with great satisfaction, since any suggestion that the text of today’s Qur’an is not exactly as Mohammmad received it would undermine the Muslim claim that the Qur’an is a "perfected" scripture while the scriptures of the Jews and Christians were added to and corrupted over time.

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