Parallels Between the Qur'an and Late Antique Judeo-Christian Literature: Difference between revisions

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-The similarities between the Qur'an and previous scriptures has been noted since the advent of Islam. However, the Judeo-Christian tales and their Qur'anic counterparts do not always match. There are three explanations for this:
+The similarities between the Qur'an and previous scriptures has been noted since the advent of Islam. However, the Judeo-Christian tales and their Qur'anic counterparts do not always match. A claim of the Qur'an and other Islamic literature is that the Jews and Christians deliberately changed their scriptures to obscure the truth of the Qur'an. There is no documentary evidence in the textual traditions of those religions to support this claim, and as it would require a conspiracy of people across centuries and empires to have done such a thing the claim is generally not taken seriously by modern scholars.
-#The original Judeo-Christian scriptures have been corrupted (as Muslims like to claim).
+The more accepted account is that the Qur'an burrows stories from the ancient milieu in which it arose--Christianity and Judaism of the late antique period in the near or middle east. Contrary to the Islamic tradition, most scholars today agree that the Qur'an must have been composed in an environment in which Christian and Jewish stories were very familiar, both to the person(people) writing the Qur'an and to the audience. As such borrowings are to be expected, and in a semi-literate culture before the advent of the printing press different versions of the same story as well as mistakes in transmission from one medium to the other are also to be expected.
-#Muhammad imperfectly borrowed from the Judeo-Christian scriptures.
-#The Qur'an has been corrupted.
-It is an epistemological matter as to which of the three is correct. The Qur'an’s assertion that the Judeo-Christian scriptures have been corrupted is mere accusation devoid of evidence. To prove corruption of an older scripture, it is logically necessary to provide tangible evidence such as an extant copy of an uncorrupted manuscript. However, to prove a later scripture has either been corrupted or is an imperfect derivation of the previous scripture, one merely has to compare the texts – if one is unable to prove the older scripture has been corrupted then it stands to reason the latter two explanations are likely.
+In such an environment it is also unsurprising that many of the stories one finds in the Qur'an do not comes from the canonical books of the Christian or Jewish bibles, but often from secondary literature which played a huge role in the spiritual life of believers in that time.
-Note: I take the word ‘corruption’ in this context to mean a substantive alteration of the textual meaning, not the change of words or other translational changes.
-No Muslim has ever been able to provide irrefutable tangible evidence that the Judeo-Christian scriptures have been corrupted. Even the Dead Sea Scrolls dating back to at least the Third Century BC can be of no help to the Muslim proposition. So all we have from Muslims is the Qur'an, and what it has to say on the subject is irrelevant if Allah did not see fit to prove himself with tangible evidence.
-On the other hand, it is easy to point out the imperfect ‘borrowing’ from previous scripture in the Qur'an. Muslims speculate that these are merely due to Allah ‘correcting’ the corruption which had crept into the previous scriptures. Prima facie - this is a good argument, as is the 'similarity due to a single source' argument. It would be interesting to take a closer look at the relevant texts and their purported sources of origin.
-It is a common proposition that Muhammad most likely borrowed from previous scripture from hearing scriptural accounts told by Christians and Jews. As he was an unscholarly man, it is unlikely that he read any previous scriptures, hence the imperfection of his borrowing. I believe that it is not commonly asserted that these previous scriptures from which Muhammad ‘borrowed’ the Judeo-Christian tales were translated into Arabic in his day as the Quran and hadiths suggest Jews and Christians were present to do the translation into Arabic for all and sundry to hear.
 ===Old Charges of Borrowing===