Jesus and Muhammad in Western Scholarship (2021-10-15) ​

0:00:00 good afternoon everyone and welcome to
0:00:02 blogging theology
0:00:04 and today i welcome back usman sheikh uh
0:00:08 who was last a guest on blogging
0:00:10 theology on the 8th of september uh
0:00:13 where he refuted certain christian
0:00:15 scholars claims about god in the qurans
0:00:18 and if you haven't
0:00:20 watched that video please do go and
0:00:21 watch this because it's a superb uh talk
0:00:24 to you guys so welcome to blogging
0:00:26 theology usman thank you so much it's
0:00:28 great to be here again
0:00:30 uh and just to uh remind us uh usman um
0:00:34 has completed uh postgraduate research
0:00:36 at heathrop college uh which is part of
0:00:38 the university of london um and he
0:00:41 completed that on the historical jesus
0:00:43 biblical studies the whole thing new
0:00:45 testament studies um and also he has uh
0:00:48 just completed uh
0:00:50 postgraduate research at the university
0:00:53 of oxford on uh islamic studies the
0:00:56 historical muhammad and the quran and so
0:00:58 on
0:00:59 so today uh we're very happy that you
0:01:02 can come back on to talk about three
0:01:04 things really the historical jesus the
0:01:07 historical muhammad and this issue of
0:01:10 intertextuality
0:01:12 which um you'll perhaps explain later on
0:01:14 that's actually a really important
0:01:16 subject so
0:01:17 um if you're okay could you just perhaps
0:01:19 introduce us to um
0:01:21 the your studies the what you discover
0:01:24 the methodology the kind of issues that
0:01:26 surround the whole study of the
0:01:28 historical jesus in a western academic
0:01:32 uh setting that's right
0:01:34 uh yeah absolutely so even before i
0:01:37 began my studies at heathrow college i
0:01:40 had been reading up on the topic of
0:01:42 historical jesus for
0:01:45 at least
0:01:46 well i would say 15 years
0:01:48 reading scholarly books journal articles
0:01:50 so i was you know very passionate about
0:01:52 the subject and i wanted to learn more
0:01:55 and
0:01:56 there was a terrific opportunity for me
0:01:58 to pursue this subject at heathrow
0:02:00 college which was not that far away you
0:02:02 know from my uh
0:02:03 location
0:02:05 and so i took the opportunity and i
0:02:09 focused
0:02:10 mainly upon this subject
0:02:13 and in my thesis
0:02:16 i was looking at the topic of the
0:02:18 methodologies we can use in order to get
0:02:21 behind the gospels
0:02:24 it was a critical discussion of two very
0:02:28 commonly applied methods upon the new
0:02:31 testament writings
0:02:33 mainly the synoptic gospels when it
0:02:36 comes to the historical jesus subject
0:02:37 primarily scholars respect restrict
0:02:39 themselves to the synoptic gospels they
0:02:42 might have a look at maybe you know some
0:02:43 bits and pieces in the authentic uh
0:02:45 pauline corpus
0:02:47 and uh some scholars may uh have a look
0:02:51 at the gospel of john uh many don't um i
0:02:55 was looking at the message
0:02:57 what do you mean by the synoptic gospels
0:02:59 what what are they
0:03:01 so
0:03:02 the gospels of matthew mark and and luke
0:03:05 they are collectively known as the
0:03:07 synoptic gospels and uh
0:03:10 scholars have been very much interested
0:03:12 you know in the
0:03:14 interconnections between
0:03:16 these gospels and uh the majority
0:03:19 opinion at the moment is that probably
0:03:21 mark is the earliest gospel which was
0:03:24 subsequently utilized by the authors of
0:03:26 the gospels of matthew and luke
0:03:29 i looked at this particular issue in
0:03:31 detail also uh i mean uh when you have a
0:03:34 look at the popular level books on the
0:03:37 uh
0:03:38 uh you know like introductions to the to
0:03:40 the new testament it may seem as if the
0:03:42 synoptic problem
0:03:44 is a problem which is resolved what is
0:03:46 the synoptic problem it is ascertaining
0:03:49 why are these three gospels so similar
0:03:52 and what are the possible you know
0:03:53 connections between them if if any uh
0:03:56 who is copying who who is depending who
0:03:59 is dependent upon you know which uh
0:04:01 particular gospel and so the majority
0:04:03 opinion at the moment is that the gospel
0:04:05 of mark is the earliest gospel and which
0:04:08 was used by the authors of matthew and
0:04:10 luke
0:04:11 but scholars have continued to have
0:04:13 disagreements over other bits and pieces
0:04:16 but as far as the majority of the data
0:04:19 is concerned
0:04:20 most scholars feel that uh most of the
0:04:23 similarities and differences at the very
0:04:25 least are
0:04:27 are better explained
0:04:28 upon the hypothesis of morgan priority
0:04:32 that is to say that mark was composed
0:04:34 first and was then used by matthew and
0:04:38 luke
0:04:38 um let's clarify why do scholars think
0:04:41 that one gospel writes a copy from
0:04:43 another in the first place what evidence
0:04:45 is there that there was because
0:04:46 traditionally because we think that the
0:04:48 gospel writers were eyewitnesses at
0:04:50 least in the case of matthew and john uh
0:04:53 and the eyewitness testimony presumably
0:04:55 is behind
0:04:56 luke and mark so what why why is this
0:04:59 idea that there's copying going on and
0:05:01 why is it called a synoptic problem
0:05:03 obviously you mentioned you know who is
0:05:05 copying whom that's the maybe the
0:05:06 problem
0:05:07 why do we think they're copying in the
0:05:09 first place so the reason is because of
0:05:11 the similarities between the three
0:05:13 gospels which extends to the level of
0:05:16 the wording
0:05:17 uh
0:05:18 it even extends to the level of the
0:05:20 uh sequence of the worrying and and you
0:05:23 know sometimes the ordering of the
0:05:25 events i mean uh
0:05:27 once you look at these gospels you will
0:05:28 see that certain episodes are happening
0:05:32 at you know different times in the
0:05:33 various gospels but they also happen you
0:05:36 know sometimes uh um
0:05:38 at the same time and apart from that i
0:05:40 mean just at the level of the wording uh
0:05:43 you can see the
0:05:44 exactitudes in in several places um
0:05:48 and so you know there has to be a
0:05:50 literary
0:05:51 connection between these gospels and so
0:05:53 the problem is uh what is the direction
0:05:56 of the literary dependency uh we think
0:05:59 that copying has taken place not copying
0:06:03 in the sense that you know someone is
0:06:05 just blindly copying a document these
0:06:07 are creative authors also so when they
0:06:09 are copying the source they are uh
0:06:12 many times you know copying it
0:06:14 uh
0:06:15 well sometimes they are copying it
0:06:17 verbatim sometimes they are copying it
0:06:19 somewhat loosely
0:06:20 um
0:06:22 and so you have similarities and
0:06:23 differences uh between them and so the
0:06:26 question is how do you best explain uh
0:06:28 these similarities and differences and
0:06:30 the fact that over the past um well uh a
0:06:33 hundred if you just have a look over the
0:06:35 past hundred years for example
0:06:37 the hundreds and hundreds of
0:06:38 commentaries that have been written
0:06:41 um
0:06:42 upon the hypothesis of mark and priority
0:06:45 is a testimony as to how you know
0:06:49 widely accepted this hypothesis is that
0:06:52 mark was written first because most
0:06:53 scholars feel that
0:06:55 most of the data is best explained
0:06:58 if you suppose that mark was composed
0:07:01 first and you would like these authors
0:07:03 okay is it the case though that scholars
0:07:05 today think that the uh say matthew's
0:07:07 gospel is an eyewitness account after
0:07:09 all it says the gospel according to
0:07:12 saint matthew uh what what does scholars
0:07:14 uh it would get at the historical jesus
0:07:16 is the whole point
0:07:18 why can't we just read matthew's gospel
0:07:20 uh written by the apostle matthew
0:07:22 himself the famous tax collector
0:07:25 and just say well that's that's what
0:07:26 happened because matthew tells us why
0:07:28 don't scholars take that easy route why
0:07:30 do they go into this complicated copying
0:07:33 hypothesis and market priority
0:07:35 so 90
0:07:37 of the gospel of mark
0:07:39 makes an appearance in the gospel of
0:07:41 matthew
0:07:42 and i think 60
0:07:44 of the gospel of mark approximately 60
0:07:47 or 63 percent is present in the gospel
0:07:49 of luke
0:07:51 uh so if uh the finished product the
0:07:54 gospel of matthew was the work of an
0:07:57 eyewitness a disciple of jesus who
0:07:59 personally knew jesus then firstly i
0:08:01 mean the question is why is he dependent
0:08:04 uh so heavily upon the work of a
0:08:07 non-eyewitness mark is said to be
0:08:09 according to the traditions a
0:08:12 follower of a disciple of jesus namely
0:08:14 peter
0:08:17 so uh why is it that matthew is not you
0:08:20 know presenting
0:08:21 first-hand information telling us about
0:08:24 his own direct experiences with the
0:08:26 historical jesus why is he using someone
0:08:29 else's material i mean 90 percent uh
0:08:32 that that can't be you know so so uh
0:08:34 easily ignored so i think that it is
0:08:36 therefore most scholars including
0:08:39 uh many conservative scholars um
0:08:41 they find it you know very difficult to
0:08:44 accept that
0:08:45 that the gospel of matthew
0:08:47 emanates in its finished form from a
0:08:50 disciple of jesus now it could be
0:08:52 possible that the gospel of matthew
0:08:54 contains bits and pieces
0:08:56 which may you know go back to someone
0:08:59 who knew jesus say a disciple by the
0:09:02 name of matthew
0:09:04 that is possible there is no way to
0:09:07 demonstrate that definitively or to a
0:09:09 high degree of probability i am open to
0:09:12 that suggestion personally i think that
0:09:15 it's quite possible that there is some
0:09:17 element of truth in the traditional
0:09:20 authorship claims not in the sense that
0:09:22 the finnish products are the works of
0:09:25 you know matthew mark luke and john but
0:09:28 that it could be that uh ancient
0:09:30 christians believed either rightly or
0:09:32 wrongly uh that you know there are
0:09:34 traditions uh which emanate from matthew
0:09:37 from luke from uh from john and from
0:09:40 mark and that maybe you know these came
0:09:43 to be
0:09:44 uh included
0:09:46 in the gospels as we now know them so
0:09:49 why i'm i'm open to that sort of a
0:09:51 suggestion but that that's as far as the
0:09:53 finished products are concerned and
0:09:54 given the fact that they were originally
0:09:56 composed in greek
0:09:58 right uh i i did some greek uh when i
0:10:01 was at heathrop and i can tell you that
0:10:03 it's a far more difficult language than
0:10:05 than arabic
0:10:07 arabic grammar is much best
0:10:09 but greek grammar i actually found very
0:10:12 difficult and it's it's not the case
0:10:15 that that you know the disciples of
0:10:17 jesus who were probably you know uh
0:10:20 from the
0:10:22 lower classes in you know uh uh
0:10:24 palestine uh almost certainly uh
0:10:27 illiterate individuals or even let's say
0:10:29 we suppose that they had
0:10:31 some of them might have had you know
0:10:33 some familiarity with let's say
0:10:36 business greek so that you know they
0:10:38 might be able to utter a few phrases or
0:10:41 words here and there you know just to
0:10:42 get by and to you know get their
0:10:44 business done
0:10:45 um to suppose that they
0:10:48 after the resurrection that you know
0:10:49 they went on to devote
0:10:52 uh some time to learn greek and were
0:10:54 then able to write
0:10:57 such rhetorically rich material
0:11:00 i mean that justifies common sense i
0:11:02 don't think that you know many scholars
0:11:04 would be able to uh would be willing to
0:11:06 grant that
0:11:08 okay going on to perhaps the gospel of
0:11:09 john traditionally the last one to be
0:11:11 written
0:11:12 it strikes me and many readers this
0:11:14 seems quite a different kind of gospel
0:11:16 from matthew mark and luke uh the whole
0:11:19 the whole feel of it the the the long
0:11:21 speeches you see in john and
0:11:23 marvelous claims on the lips of jesus i
0:11:25 am the way that you know i'm the way the
0:11:27 truth in my life and what abraham was i
0:11:30 am and so on um so what what what what
0:11:34 did we learn about uh john's gospel
0:11:37 academically uh how are historians
0:11:39 seeing the gospel of john these days so
0:11:42 uh
0:11:43 by large i think academics do not
0:11:47 really
0:11:48 put the gospel of john at the same level
0:11:50 as the synoptic gospels there are
0:11:52 problems with the synoptic gospels they
0:11:54 don't say that you know you can simply
0:11:55 read them and and you know you are
0:11:58 gaining an access to the historical
0:11:59 jesus
0:12:00 but there are far more problems when it
0:12:02 comes to the gospel of john firstly the
0:12:05 content of the preaching of jesus
0:12:07 seems seems to not overlap with the
0:12:10 gospel of uh
0:12:12 well with the snap the gospels
0:12:14 um secondly the style of jesus's
0:12:17 presentation
0:12:18 even that seems markedly different so
0:12:21 just to you know vaguely paraphrase
0:12:23 the great
0:12:24 new testament scholar e.p saunders
0:12:27 it is very difficult to suppose that
0:12:29 jesus went about in his historical
0:12:31 ministry
0:12:33 um presenting his teachings and
0:12:36 preaching you know uh in two very
0:12:39 different ways so the authors of the
0:12:40 synoptic gospels captured only 50
0:12:43 and the remaining 50 with no almost no
0:12:46 overlap was captured by the author of
0:12:48 the gospel of john so you know that
0:12:50 seems uh highly unlikely uh now it's
0:12:53 also possible that you know
0:12:56 uh that uh
0:12:57 the gospel of john could contain uh
0:13:00 elements
0:13:01 from another stream of the historical
0:13:03 jesus tradition uh um so uh
0:13:07 yeah i mean that cannot be denied by uh
0:13:11 by default i don't think that it's it's
0:13:14 the case that what jesus taught what he
0:13:16 said and how people remembered him that
0:13:19 you know that was very restricted i
0:13:20 think it was a very haphazard thing
0:13:23 and uh different people were you know
0:13:25 recalling
0:13:27 or you know remembering as best as they
0:13:29 could different elements of jesus's
0:13:31 teachings so it's quite possible that
0:13:33 for example you know in the gospel of
0:13:35 john jesus this historical ministry
0:13:36 seems to last for a
0:13:39 longer duration of time it could be
0:13:41 possible that you know the gospel of
0:13:42 john is historically accurate
0:13:44 uh as far as you know this element is
0:13:47 concerned but now the question is one of
0:13:49 methodology
0:13:50 what is the objective methodology
0:13:52 whereby you can argue that you know
0:13:54 certain things in the gospel of john
0:13:56 uh are probably a bit more historical
0:13:59 than you know what you come across in
0:14:00 the
0:14:01 in the synoptic gospels uh
0:14:04 no one has you know really a very good
0:14:06 answer but be that as it may overall as
0:14:09 far as the
0:14:11 style of jesus's preaching is concerned
0:14:13 as far as the content of his preaching
0:14:15 is concerned in the gospel of john jesus
0:14:17 for example is more obvious you know
0:14:19 regarding himself
0:14:21 um
0:14:22 parables i think uh find no presence in
0:14:26 the
0:14:26 gospel of john so these things are very
0:14:29 difficult to explain and even a scholar
0:14:32 such as richard bocam uh i think you're
0:14:35 familiar with this work i'm forgetting
0:14:37 the name i think it's called jesus and
0:14:38 the eyewitnesses
0:14:40 the second volume is very massive i
0:14:42 think something like 700 pages 600 pages
0:14:45 long
0:14:46 even he is inclined to conclude that in
0:14:48 the gospel of john
0:14:50 uh we have more of an interpretation of
0:14:52 the preaching of jesus it's more of an
0:14:55 uh
0:14:56 um more of a exegetical sort of work and
0:15:00 interpretive work on the
0:15:02 ministry of jesus so when scholars say
0:15:05 that when they talk about the fourth
0:15:07 gospel the gospel john being a highly
0:15:09 interpreted account of the life of jesus
0:15:12 uh some of them liking it to a sermon
0:15:14 it's a sermon on the significance of the
0:15:17 life of jesus for the author of that
0:15:18 gospel
0:15:20 what what does that mean for uh our
0:15:22 understanding of the historical jesus
0:15:25 does that mean there's a gap when it
0:15:27 comes to the historical jesus and the
0:15:30 presentation of jesus and john
0:15:32 i think virtually everyone believes that
0:15:34 maybe with the exception of you know the
0:15:36 very hardcore uh fundamentalist and the
0:15:38 various christian denominations i think
0:15:41 uh the mainstream opinion including the
0:15:43 views of uh
0:15:44 evangelical scholars conservative
0:15:46 scholars is indeed to accept that there
0:15:50 is a gap
0:15:51 they may disagree over the uh length of
0:15:54 the gap
0:15:56 but a gap there is
0:15:58 right so we can't just read the surface
0:16:00 of john's gospel if you like and say aha
0:16:02 this is what jesus said so
0:16:05 it's a very familiar um the same holds
0:16:08 true for the gospel of uh matthew mark
0:16:10 and luke you can't just read them and
0:16:12 you can say that you know uh this is
0:16:14 what uh jesus said and did and
0:16:16 christopher tucker whom you had you know
0:16:18 on your show several months ago he has
0:16:20 written a very interesting book it's on
0:16:23 the
0:16:24 various methodologies which scholars
0:16:25 apply upon the new testament
0:16:28 writings i'm forgetting the name of the
0:16:30 title um
0:16:32 but
0:16:33 he has a very good discussion on the
0:16:35 historical jesus subject also and this
0:16:37 is what he says just to you know
0:16:40 loosely paraphrase him you can't simply
0:16:43 read the gospels send out the gospels
0:16:45 and just assume
0:16:47 that this is what really happened there
0:16:49 is a gap here too maybe not as great a
0:16:52 gap as the gap between the finished
0:16:54 product the gospel of john and the
0:16:55 historical jesus
0:16:57 but nonetheless scholars do recognize
0:16:59 that there is a gap i mean how do we
0:17:01 know that there is a gap when we look at
0:17:03 the material in the synoptic gospels we
0:17:05 notice that there are similarities and
0:17:07 differences we can see at least two
0:17:10 authors
0:17:12 are changing the material
0:17:15 so matthew and luke when they are
0:17:17 copying the gospel of mark
0:17:19 they are also making changes uh one very
0:17:22 famous example just from the top of my
0:17:24 head you know jesus in the gospel of
0:17:26 mark says why do you call me good there
0:17:28 is none good but god you look at the
0:17:30 parallel in the gospel of matthew why do
0:17:32 you ask me about that which is good uh
0:17:34 uh so you know matthew has made a change
0:17:37 uh to the gospel of mark and he's gonna
0:17:39 be multiplied indeed the example you
0:17:42 give i mentioned to professor john
0:17:43 barton who's the author of uh this book
0:17:46 uh history of the bible uh the book and
0:17:48 its face and uh he said on on this very
0:17:52 channel that matthew in his view is
0:17:54 dishonest to change
0:17:55 jesus words in mark to remove this
0:17:58 denial that jesus is god uh
0:18:01 so that uh matthew's jesus conforms much
0:18:04 better to late first century uh
0:18:06 understandings of who jesus was at that
0:18:08 time and uh but
0:18:10 a john barton professor at oxford in the
0:18:13 bible there's a very senior scholar
0:18:15 saying that publicly it's quite shocking
0:18:17 and he is actually not playing clergyman
0:18:19 in the church of england himself and now
0:18:20 the issue is this if we can see
0:18:23 matthew and luke making all types of
0:18:25 changes to mark you know many times
0:18:27 minor changes small changes changes to
0:18:29 the level of the grammar but on
0:18:31 occasions also you know rather serious
0:18:33 changes yeah to their source material
0:18:36 then the question which i have is this
0:18:39 uh was this an innovation or uh
0:18:42 were other christians prior to the
0:18:44 composition of these gospels were they
0:18:47 handling the jesus tradition in a in
0:18:49 similar sort of ways that you know um
0:18:52 they were not
0:18:53 it was not like exact verbatim passing
0:18:56 on of the teachings of jesus but it was
0:18:59 you know rather deuce
0:19:01 so uh at times you know certain
0:19:03 teachings of jesus you know would be
0:19:05 more or less accurately circulated but
0:19:07 there would also be times when uh things
0:19:10 would be changed or even invented at
0:19:12 times
0:19:16 of a saying in the gospels which
0:19:17 historians think was invented by the so
0:19:20 uh in the gospel of matthew for example
0:19:22 the material which is commonly commonly
0:19:25 uh labeled m
0:19:27 so that is the special material in the
0:19:30 gospel of matthew
0:19:31 uh so many times scholars you know
0:19:33 believe that okay there is another
0:19:36 source let's call it m and matthew
0:19:38 acquired his information from there but
0:19:40 there are also uh a number of scholars
0:19:43 uh who have argued that you know um
0:19:46 m could also be the reduction of the
0:19:48 gospel of the author of matthew that is
0:19:51 to say that you know it could consist of
0:19:53 material which basically he also made up
0:19:56 and one of these items could be uh you
0:19:58 know uh the saints uh coming out from
0:20:02 the jew from the tomb upon the
0:20:04 crucifixion of jesus and walking in the
0:20:06 streets of jerusalem which is an account
0:20:09 which you find in the gospel of matthew
0:20:12 it's only found in matthew i think and
0:20:14 not in gospel or any other historical
0:20:17 source known to history and this amazing
0:20:20 public event where many uh people
0:20:23 believers came out of their graves their
0:20:24 tombs walked around in jerusalem in
0:20:26 broad daylight and it is curious that no
0:20:29 other historical source josephus he was
0:20:31 a a jewish historian from jerusalem
0:20:34 roughly contemporaneous with that uh no
0:20:36 makes no mention of it in his history uh
0:20:39 either so you're saying that's an
0:20:40 example of perhaps a made-up story that
0:20:43 uh matthew included in his gospel
0:20:45 exactly and to think of it even the
0:20:47 story of why do you ask me about that
0:20:49 which is good that is actually we can
0:20:52 also say that you know it is made up
0:20:54 made up in the sense that that probably
0:20:56 did not happen uh what probably happened
0:20:59 is more similar to you know what you
0:21:01 find in mark why do you ask me about
0:21:03 that which is uh uh
0:21:04 why do you call me good there is none
0:21:06 good but god exactly exactly yeah uh so
0:21:09 so so again i mean uh one can think of a
0:21:12 few other examples uh but you know
0:21:15 scholars disagree
0:21:16 they would agree generally speaking that
0:21:18 the there is material in the gospel you
0:21:20 know which uh underwent various sort of
0:21:22 changes minor changes sometimes you know
0:21:25 major changes some material you know
0:21:26 could probably be made up also so they
0:21:29 would say that the i am statements in
0:21:31 the gospel of john for example probably
0:21:33 they are the creations if not the author
0:21:35 of the finished product then at the very
0:21:37 least maybe of his community that he
0:21:39 inherited these traditions from his
0:21:41 community and it is this genre and
0:21:43 community uh which um gave rise to these
0:21:47 traditions rather than acquiring them
0:21:49 you know uh from people maybe who who
0:21:52 knew jesus um
0:21:55 i've come across is the
0:21:57 uh the two gospels that have extended
0:21:59 nativity stories the the birth uh the
0:22:01 the events surrounding the birth of
0:22:03 jesus and matthew and luke is the only
0:22:04 two places that have yeah uh stories
0:22:06 about uh the birth of jesus agree that
0:22:10 jesus was born of the virgin mary but
0:22:12 virtually everything else exactly yeah
0:22:15 is completely different yeah extremely
0:22:17 hard to recognize you have to uh you
0:22:19 know have some pretty amazing
0:22:20 intellectual and gymnastic gymnastics to
0:22:23 make these things cohere in any way at
0:22:25 all so scholars i think tend to see most
0:22:28 of the information in those two
0:22:30 as just made up because it's so
0:22:33 different
0:22:34 and uh and for other reasons as well
0:22:36 they think it's fictionalized
0:22:38 absolutely i mean so in the gospel of
0:22:40 luke when you come
0:22:42 when you look at the at its infancy
0:22:44 narrative the you know the famous census
0:22:47 at that time that has uh um
0:22:50 something you know raymond brown has a
0:22:52 very detailed discussion on that and he
0:22:54 says that you know that is probably just
0:22:56 a not historically accurate
0:22:58 and apart from that when it comes to the
0:23:00 gospel of matthew and its infancy story
0:23:03 you can see that it's very very heavily
0:23:05 influenced by a typological reading of
0:23:08 the jewish bible of different elements
0:23:10 in the jewish bible and that is what is
0:23:12 causing him to shape his account so it
0:23:16 could be so you know how do you speak of
0:23:18 historicity here maybe you can say that
0:23:20 you know um matthew and luke are agreed
0:23:24 upon the virgin birth of jesus so
0:23:27 this story predates them
0:23:30 all the other bits and pieces uh we
0:23:32 don't know we can't you know really say
0:23:34 much more no okay
0:23:36 before we move uh sorry i must ask
0:23:38 before we move on to the historical
0:23:40 mohammed
0:23:41 is there i have scholars generally
0:23:44 reached any conclusions about who the
0:23:46 historical jesus was in terms of his own
0:23:49 self-understanding i mean or yeah
0:23:52 we can see how other people understood
0:23:54 him we have four gospels and we have
0:23:55 other sources other gospels and so on
0:23:57 but do we have any sense of what jesus
0:23:59 understood his ministry and his identity
0:24:02 to be
0:24:04 um
0:24:05 so uh once again uh there is a very
0:24:08 broad general-ish sort of agreement
0:24:11 among scholars that you know jesus in
0:24:13 his historical ministry
0:24:15 is best looked upon
0:24:17 as a
0:24:19 prophet
0:24:20 of god as a messiah as a jewish teacher
0:24:25 messiah not in the sense of a divine
0:24:27 sort of being if you look at the concept
0:24:29 of the messiah in the second temple
0:24:31 writings
0:24:32 you know you come across a lot of
0:24:33 diversity there
0:24:37 and
0:24:38 when it comes to the material in the
0:24:40 synoptic gospels in particular you don't
0:24:42 really find any strong evidence for you
0:24:44 know jesus proclaiming himself as a
0:24:46 divine sort of a messiah but but maybe
0:24:49 as a you know prophet slash messiah uh
0:24:52 uh um
0:24:53 as that sort of a person who is
0:24:56 upholding the laws and the commandments
0:24:58 maybe intensifying certain elements
0:25:01 therein
0:25:02 but not like you know overriding them
0:25:04 and and they look at him in the first
0:25:06 century jewish context
0:25:11 and
0:25:11 i think that most scholars even if they
0:25:14 believe personally if they confess
0:25:16 uh that you know jesus is god the second
0:25:19 person of the trinity when they put on
0:25:21 their historian's hat
0:25:23 uh they they do tend to acknowledge that
0:25:26 at least in his historical ministry it
0:25:28 is highly highly unlikely at the very
0:25:30 least that you know jesus claimed to be
0:25:32 uh the second person of the trinity god
0:25:34 uh more than a man or you know a divine
0:25:36 sort of a being there there isn't really
0:25:38 any strong
0:25:40 evidence for that i see
0:25:43 so before we come on to the historical
0:25:45 mohammed i i just have to point out i'm
0:25:47 sure it's obvious to to everyone that
0:25:49 the picture you have just
0:25:50 given us of the historical jesus bears a
0:25:52 remarkable similarity to the quran's own
0:25:56 presentation of
0:25:57 jesus as he really was namely a prophet
0:26:00 uh someone who was known as the messiah
0:26:02 born
0:26:03 born of a virgin a teacher but someone
0:26:06 who disavows uh being god himself in any
0:26:09 shape or form in the quran so i just
0:26:11 note that extraordinary convergence
0:26:13 indeed and uh that really is the main
0:26:16 point of contention that the quran has
0:26:18 uh uh with the christians that um it
0:26:21 disagrees with the review that jesus is
0:26:24 god that elevation of jesus is
0:26:26 completely denied in the quran
0:26:28 in in you know rather clear-cut terms
0:26:31 and he is basically presented as a
0:26:34 prophet who was sent to the jewish
0:26:37 people and that a party of the jewish
0:26:40 people believed in him a party
0:26:42 disbelieved in him that he is someone
0:26:44 who upheld the laws and the commandments
0:26:47 um
0:26:48 and that um
0:26:50 there is typology in the quran also in
0:26:53 the sense that the quran presents the
0:26:55 prophets as alike so they're all
0:26:58 preaching about the same one god their
0:27:02 essential message is the same
0:27:04 and um uh and so by extension the
0:27:08 teachings of the quran uh in terms of
0:27:11 you know what one needs to believe about
0:27:13 god about the
0:27:15 hereafter
0:27:16 about you know what one needs to do to
0:27:18 to attain salvation and to live a good
0:27:21 godly life
0:27:23 this by extension is also the teaching
0:27:26 according to the quran of jesus and in
0:27:28 fact all other prophets so the quran
0:27:31 mentions that you know jesus is not god
0:27:33 um and
0:27:35 and you know provides a few details
0:27:36 about uh
0:27:38 about his mission
0:27:40 and then by extension it attributes its
0:27:43 teaching
0:27:44 through uh through the quran
0:27:47 to the other prophets this includes
0:27:48 jesus also
0:27:50 it's very interesting um and just uh
0:27:52 finally before we move on to the
0:27:53 historical muhammad just a few books i i
0:27:56 recommend and uh what one is this one
0:27:58 christian beginnings from nice uh
0:28:00 nazareth to nicaea ad30 to 8325 by giza
0:28:04 vermesh who uh until his uh untimely
0:28:07 death recently professor at oxford uh
0:28:10 specialist in judaism and historical
0:28:13 jesus uh this is a marvelous book very
0:28:15 readable uh roman williams the former
0:28:17 archbishop of canterbury calls a
0:28:19 beautiful and magisterial book um even
0:28:21 though basically uh
0:28:23 it doesn't present jesus as a divine
0:28:26 figure very much a human figure a
0:28:27 prophet
0:28:28 a teacher as well
0:28:31 another book
0:28:32 which i recommend uh is by
0:28:35 this one by dale martin
0:28:38 called new testament history and
0:28:39 literature
0:28:41 this is based on his lectures at yale
0:28:43 university to undergraduates on the new
0:28:45 testament includes a lot of material on
0:28:48 all of the gospels the historical jesus
0:28:50 and the different methodologies that
0:28:53 scholars use as well as other material
0:28:55 on the gospel of thomas which is
0:28:58 fascinating and finally there's so many
0:29:00 but um
0:29:01 one of my favorites this book by bart
0:29:03 ehrman this is a reference work
0:29:06 it's come in many editions it's the
0:29:07 latest edition a historical introduction
0:29:10 to early christian writings published by
0:29:13 oxford university press
0:29:15 this is full of lovely photographs it's
0:29:17 very very readable
0:29:19 again
0:29:20 undergraduate text
0:29:22 as a must-have if you want to look at
0:29:25 this in more depth uh would you
0:29:28 there is one book which i would like to
0:29:29 recommend also and that is by e.p
0:29:32 saunders the historical figure of jesus
0:29:35 i think 1993 penguin publishers uh
0:29:38 obviously it's it's it's uh dated but
0:29:40 it's it remains relevant and so i think
0:29:43 that you know uh if you must read just
0:29:46 one book if you have the time uh to do
0:29:48 that you know on the historical jesus
0:29:49 subject then get hold of that start with
0:29:51 that book because i think even though
0:29:54 published in 1993 it still remains
0:29:56 relevant and uh
0:29:58 my copy is in my home in london so i
0:30:00 don't have it here otherwise i would
0:30:01 have held a copy of it out but it's the
0:30:03 historical jews by ep sanders uh the
0:30:06 american new testament scholar he's
0:30:07 quite elderly now but yeah it's highly
0:30:09 recommended as the kind of the best
0:30:11 single volume introduction to the
0:30:12 historical exactly
0:30:14 jesus as opposed to the crisis
0:30:17 and i would also mention
0:30:19 john meyer
0:30:22 yeah so uh he has produced uh i think
0:30:25 probably the most detailed work in the
0:30:27 english language on the historical jesus
0:30:30 it's under the uh
0:30:32 the title of the marginal jew i think
0:30:34 there are four volumes already out if
0:30:37 i'm correct he is working on the fifth
0:30:39 volume or maybe it's out i'm not sure
0:30:41 but but it's a multi-volume work it goes
0:30:44 in the first volume he explains the
0:30:46 methodology of doing historical jesus
0:30:49 the language of jesus he goes through
0:30:51 the infancy narratives all the basic
0:30:53 stuff and the good thing about him is
0:30:55 that if you know nothing about the
0:30:56 subject uh
0:30:58 you know you'll be able to still very
0:31:00 easily follow his discussion he doesn't
0:31:02 like you know dumb things down but his
0:31:04 writing style is really superb and he
0:31:06 engages with a wide range of scholarship
0:31:09 critically so uh just by reading his
0:31:12 book you will get a very quick general
0:31:15 overview of the various you know
0:31:17 scholarly positions back and forth on
0:31:19 the various topics so that would be my
0:31:22 second recommendation no i certainly
0:31:24 recommend that so moving on then to our
0:31:26 next uh
0:31:28 uh section of this uh the historical
0:31:31 mohammed
0:31:33 so
0:31:34 which of course subject you studied at
0:31:35 oxford recently could you just give us a
0:31:38 very uh accessible uh overview of uh the
0:31:41 issues uh in western academic circles to
0:31:44 do with the historical mohammed
0:31:47 yes so when it comes to
0:31:49 the historical muhammad subject
0:31:51 there will be some issues and
0:31:53 difficulties
0:31:57 you know that we encountered in the
0:31:58 historical jesus subject which we would
0:32:00 actually encounter here also so we have
0:32:03 various sources at our disposal and so
0:32:06 now the question is how do we learn
0:32:07 about the historical muhammad uh there
0:32:10 is first first and foremost the quran
0:32:12 and so uh many times
0:32:15 you'll frequently come across scholars
0:32:17 who say that you know the quran does not
0:32:19 say much about the historical muhammad
0:32:21 and so you know we
0:32:23 we cannot really
0:32:24 say much about him on the basis of the
0:32:27 quran and and you will also come across
0:32:29 various scholars who
0:32:31 actually uh deny
0:32:33 uh uh who actually give the quran who
0:32:36 plays the quran at a rather late date so
0:32:38 they would you know uh view the quran as
0:32:41 sort of like a composite document
0:32:43 written by different people uh and at
0:32:46 you know different times and places
0:32:48 ultimately reaching its final form
0:32:50 sometime you know in the omega period uh
0:32:53 these days scholars
0:32:55 are generally
0:32:57 not convinced by such constructions and
0:33:00 the reason is uh firstly because you've
0:33:03 got now manuscripts many of them have
0:33:05 been carbonated
0:33:07 which go all the way back to the first
0:33:09 islamic century uh the earliest one
0:33:11 being i think the son of palm sist in
0:33:14 the first half of the first islamic
0:33:15 century so that is you know from the
0:33:17 time of the sahaba
0:33:20 and so you know we can safely therefore
0:33:22 say or simply on the basis of the
0:33:23 manuscripts that the
0:33:25 the quran uh immersed at a very early
0:33:28 point in time uh uh
0:33:30 you know uh during the time of the
0:33:32 sahaba themselves that you know we can
0:33:34 simply be on the base on the basis of
0:33:36 the material evidence we can trace it uh
0:33:38 uh very close or all the way back uh at
0:33:41 least to uh the the third caleb
0:33:44 when he left his copies and i just want
0:33:46 to obviously mention that people can
0:33:47 watch a discussion i have with uh dr
0:33:50 sidke uh just a week ago he's an expert
0:33:53 on the chronic manuscripts he's the new
0:33:55 executive director of the international
0:33:57 chronic studies association and uh he he
0:34:00 talks us through uh the historical
0:34:02 evidence and indeed is showing that the
0:34:04 uh the crime essentially we have today
0:34:06 that the same quran is found uh in the
0:34:08 earliest manuscripts there's been no uh
0:34:11 uh significant changes at all in the
0:34:13 transmission of that but but still how
0:34:15 much does the quran tell us about
0:34:16 muhammad and what other sources are
0:34:18 about
0:34:20 indeed so uh a few words need to need to
0:34:23 be said about the quran so now that we
0:34:24 can situate the quran at a rather early
0:34:28 date as a completed corpus uh then the
0:34:32 question is you know how do we utilize
0:34:34 it and what can we
0:34:36 know about the historical muhammad
0:34:39 now one point which the late patricia
0:34:42 crona pointed out in one of her essays
0:34:45 which is available still on the open
0:34:46 democracy website was this that you know
0:34:49 while we may not be able to construct a
0:34:51 biography of the prophet on the basis of
0:34:54 the quran that is to say that you know
0:34:56 day one he went to this location then he
0:34:58 went to that application then he said
0:35:00 this someone else said that you know you
0:35:02 can't do that with the uh with the quran
0:35:04 but it gives you access to his preaching
0:35:08 so what he believed were revelations
0:35:10 from god and and you know he is uh
0:35:12 preaching that to the people so if you
0:35:14 want to ask questions such as
0:35:17 what did the prophet believe about god
0:35:19 what did he believe about the prophets
0:35:21 what did he believe about good deeds
0:35:23 about the afterlife about heaven and
0:35:25 hell the angels etc
0:35:28 then you know uh the quran is then a
0:35:30 very useful source uh because it gives
0:35:33 you you know direct access
0:35:35 to his preaching so so that you know um
0:35:39 uh while we cannot construct his
0:35:41 biography
0:35:42 to know his preaching what he stood for
0:35:44 uh that is no less significant and and
0:35:47 in fact you know would be very
0:35:48 significant i mean just to very quickly
0:35:50 compare this with the historical jesus
0:35:52 subject if you want to know about what
0:35:54 jesus preached
0:35:55 uh specifically um
0:35:58 okay you can say a few things uh but not
0:36:01 uh
0:36:02 that much you know you can't like you
0:36:04 know um
0:36:05 say a lot about his preaching on a
0:36:08 variety of subjects you can say okay he
0:36:10 talked about the kingdom of god he um uh
0:36:13 talked about you know having the strong
0:36:15 belief in god and a few other items uh
0:36:17 comparative compared to this the quran
0:36:21 contains
0:36:22 more details about the preaching of the
0:36:24 prophet now this doesn't mean that okay
0:36:27 we can simply you know read the quran
0:36:29 and that's it one still has to overcome
0:36:32 the hurdle of
0:36:33 interpretation because it's it's it's
0:36:35 absolutely possible that people can
0:36:38 disagree over the interpretation of uh
0:36:41 of some passages or many passages in the
0:36:44 quran so um be that as it may
0:36:47 nonetheless if one wants to know about
0:36:49 the preaching of the prophet
0:36:51 the quran is there uh so uh um uh that's
0:36:55 the main use of the quran and more
0:36:57 recently i would like to mention a
0:36:58 scholar by the name of
0:37:00 waleed saleh who is i think in the
0:37:02 university of toronto so he he wrote a
0:37:05 very interesting uh article it's a two
0:37:09 two volume article so the first volume
0:37:11 is the preacher of the meccan quran
0:37:14 deuterono
0:37:15 mystic history and confessionalism in
0:37:17 muhammad's early preaching
0:37:20 in the journal of quranic studies
0:37:22 and uh he believes that we can actually
0:37:24 from the quran itself uh know certain
0:37:27 things about the historical muhammad so
0:37:30 just to quote him very briefly he says
0:37:32 that the quran is packed with
0:37:34 information about muhammad
0:37:36 and he believes that
0:37:39 the most important details about
0:37:41 muhammad in the makkan quran
0:37:45 sorry
0:37:46 let me just quote him again he says that
0:37:48 we can obtain historical information
0:37:49 about muhammad his community and their
0:37:52 respective ideas and just to give you a
0:37:55 few
0:37:56 very quick summarized example he says
0:37:58 that you know prior to his ministry
0:38:00 muhammad was not active as a soothsayer
0:38:02 uh that he was acting on his own with no
0:38:04 group or cult behind his mission the
0:38:07 unbelievers uh were worshipers of an
0:38:09 ancestral cult
0:38:11 and they did not uphold the notion of
0:38:13 one universal fruit and they admitted
0:38:15 that religion was not scripturally based
0:38:17 and
0:38:18 there is also the insistence in the
0:38:19 quran upon muhammad's humanity and his
0:38:22 physical nature
0:38:23 and uh you know it defines his
0:38:25 messengership where human messengers
0:38:27 merely convey god's message so this is
0:38:29 just quickly summarizing what wali
0:38:31 tsales says so he says that we can
0:38:33 actually you know say a few things about
0:38:35 the historical muhammad and about his
0:38:37 his community but even if that is the
0:38:40 case it would mean that we would have
0:38:42 and we would gain an
0:38:43 atomistic uh look into the uh
0:38:47 into the historical muhammad that we
0:38:49 won't be able to construct a biography
0:38:52 so the main utilization of the quran
0:38:54 would be to understand the preaching of
0:38:57 the uh prophet muhammad um besides the
0:39:01 quran itself
0:39:02 there is a large pile of material which
0:39:05 you know goes in there under the heading
0:39:07 of tradition or a hadith
0:39:10 and here there are
0:39:12 several disagreements among among
0:39:14 scholars so uh had these basically you
0:39:17 know uh sayings attributed to the
0:39:19 prophet or you know things attributed to
0:39:22 his companions
0:39:23 um
0:39:25 not all of the hadiths necessarily
0:39:27 present um information about the prophet
0:39:30 himself or you know uh something he said
0:39:32 so at least we can view you know sort of
0:39:33 like a report which can be either
0:39:36 conveying something about the prophet
0:39:38 himself about something which he
0:39:39 allegedly said and did or you know uh
0:39:42 maybe some information which uh a sahaba
0:39:46 said
0:39:47 uh about about various matters so uh
0:39:51 there is a lot of disagreement still
0:39:53 among scholars on
0:39:55 the way we should utilize the hadith
0:39:57 material or and if it can be utilized at
0:40:01 all so you'll come across some scholars
0:40:02 who simply make no use of the hadith
0:40:05 some scholars who would say okay that
0:40:06 there is an authentic core here
0:40:09 um
0:40:10 but uh we can't say much more than that
0:40:13 some would say okay you know there are
0:40:15 some nuggets of historical information
0:40:17 but there are other scholars in the
0:40:19 recent years who have
0:40:22 given the pushback you know against such
0:40:24 sort of views and opinions and their
0:40:26 stance is that this material really
0:40:29 needs to be taken much more seriously
0:40:31 and you have to look at the material on
0:40:33 a case-by-case basis and then draw a
0:40:35 conclusion and whatever conclusion you
0:40:37 draw
0:40:38 upon your analysis of let's say a
0:40:40 particular tradition
0:40:42 that cannot be
0:40:44 like uh you know generalized upon the
0:40:46 entirety of the hadith material
0:40:48 it could be that you look at another
0:40:50 tradition in detail and your conclusion
0:40:52 would be very different about that
0:40:53 tradition so so they're advocating a
0:40:55 case-by-case approach they're not saying
0:40:57 that all of this material is authentic
0:40:59 they're not saying that all of this
0:41:00 material is inauthentic uh what they're
0:41:03 advocating is that let's look at it on a
0:41:05 case-by-case basis
0:41:07 associated with uh very distinguished
0:41:09 scholars like harold motsky uh for
0:41:11 example
0:41:12 indeed
0:41:14 yeah because he's a very key figure who
0:41:17 challenged this uh prevailing skepticism
0:41:19 towards the hadith corpus
0:41:21 in recent years
0:41:23 precisely on the grounds that you've
0:41:24 just yes
0:41:26 exactly so just before i get to harold
0:41:28 mosky uh there is one scholar uh
0:41:30 dr uh najam iftahar
0:41:33 his article in the publication der islam
0:41:36 2013 let me just quote one bit just just
0:41:39 uh so you get a sense of where
0:41:42 modern scholarship stands at the moment
0:41:45 uh so this is what he says that there is
0:41:47 a growing scholarly view that traditions
0:41:49 were being recorded without wholesale
0:41:52 fabrication in the early second or or
0:41:56 the eighth century uh muslim world
0:41:59 um
0:42:00 and uh likewise uh gregor scholler and
0:42:04 i'm quoting this from his work uh
0:42:06 english translation of his work the
0:42:07 biography of muhammad nature and
0:42:09 authenticity
0:42:11 2011.
0:42:12 he writes
0:42:14 we could reconstruct on the basis of the
0:42:17 sources available reports which go back
0:42:19 to persons in very close contact with
0:42:22 muhammad sometimes even to eyewitnesses
0:42:24 of the events in the in the intervening
0:42:27 period between the appearance of that
0:42:30 book so he is referring to his earlier
0:42:32 german study and this uh what i'm
0:42:35 quoting from further studies have
0:42:37 exemplified and confirmed my thesis so
0:42:40 as uh you know some of these scholars
0:42:42 and this includes harold motsky have
0:42:44 looked
0:42:45 into this material in more detail uh
0:42:48 they have come to the conclusion that
0:42:50 firstly you know the uh tradition uh the
0:42:53 the is not it's not are the chains of
0:42:55 transmission that it's not the case that
0:42:57 you know in the early second century
0:42:59 people were just you know
0:43:01 making it
0:43:02 making it all up and just fabricating
0:43:04 this
0:43:04 uh as dr header uh mentions
0:43:07 and at the very least more scholars are
0:43:10 now willing to grant that um
0:43:13 in this large pile of material we do
0:43:15 have early material which at the very
0:43:17 least you know goes back to the second
0:43:18 century and then increasingly scholars
0:43:21 are arguing that once you look at the
0:43:22 material in more detail you can come
0:43:25 across information which was already
0:43:27 circulating in the first islamic century
0:43:29 also so it's not like that you know
0:43:31 buhari and muslim who appear later were
0:43:34 you know just when they sitting down and
0:43:36 just you know just me
0:43:38 they are uh they are
0:43:41 collecting the information that they
0:43:43 were familiar with which was already
0:43:45 long circulating they were not like
0:43:47 making it up can i just give you
0:43:49 precisely example of that drawing on
0:43:51 this work
0:43:52 i know you you haven't read uh hadith
0:43:54 muhammad's legacy in the medieval and
0:43:56 modern world by professor jonathan a c
0:43:58 brown uh it's recommended highly by
0:44:01 christopher melcher professor of arabic
0:44:03 islamic studies at oxford university as
0:44:04 well as jake hamza youssef at zay tuna
0:44:07 college and i was referring just a tiny
0:44:09 little fragment of a a point here on
0:44:11 page 21 22 uh where dr um
0:44:15 brown writes about um
0:44:18 something called a sahifa
0:44:20 uh which he uh defines where are we uh
0:44:25 sahifas these are collections of they're
0:44:27 like small notebooks he says um
0:44:30 uh before printer sorry before paper um
0:44:33 was uh discovered or made available i
0:44:36 should say in the arabian peninsula um
0:44:39 that came later from china uh there were
0:44:42 these things called sahifas these small
0:44:44 notebooks compiled uh uh and written on
0:44:46 papyrus and the parchment and so on
0:44:49 anyway he says on page 22 jonathan brown
0:44:51 says an example of a sahifa that has
0:44:55 survived intact today
0:44:57 that's the writing of this book in the
0:44:59 21st century is the sahiva of the
0:45:02 successor this is someone who came after
0:45:04 the sahaba the companions of the prophet
0:45:05 his successor
0:45:09 and he uh died approximately 747 of the
0:45:12 common era or 130
0:45:14 after hajj this contains
0:45:17 138 hadiths
0:45:20 from the prophet via abu huraira abu
0:45:22 hara was probably the most prolific
0:45:24 transmitter of the prophet's own um
0:45:26 hadith i think it's about 5 300
0:45:29 according to dr brown
0:45:31 so we actually have uh physically
0:45:34 the actual sahifa of the successor
0:45:37 hammond who was the direct uh
0:45:40 i don't know pupil or disciple
0:45:42 of abu huraira himself he was obviously
0:45:44 a companion of the prophet so that that
0:45:46 goes back right to the time of muhammad
0:45:48 now bukhari and muslim also use the
0:45:51 these these hadiths in their sahih
0:45:54 collections these authentic collections
0:45:56 of hadith that they compiled a little
0:45:58 little later so there's just a just one
0:46:00 example of historical evidence shall we
0:46:02 say that goes back to the prophet
0:46:04 containing you know hundreds of hadith
0:46:06 so and i'll just mention uh one more uh
0:46:10 examples oh so i'm just uh i i won't go
0:46:13 into too much details otherwise it may
0:46:15 become a bit complicated but i'll just
0:46:17 briefly mention one study by harold
0:46:19 motsky who passed away i think a couple
0:46:21 of years ago or three years ago so this
0:46:23 is uh just a summary of his analysis of
0:46:27 um of the musa of abdul razak asanani so
0:46:31 abdul razaka
0:46:32 he died 211 after hitler so that would
0:46:35 be 827
0:46:37 ce he was a student of malik who died in
0:46:40 796 uh ce and he lived in yemen so
0:46:45 here's musanov so firstly muslim is uh
0:46:48 muslim of our books which are organized
0:46:51 topically so under various topics
0:46:53 you have the relevant material so it
0:46:56 contains around i believe 18 000 reports
0:47:00 and harold monsky in a study looks at a
0:47:03 representative sample so that is 21 of
0:47:07 the material he subjects that to intent
0:47:10 study so that's uh
0:47:12 3810 reports
0:47:15 and um
0:47:16 he uses the methodology so you know we
0:47:18 would call it source criticism and what
0:47:20 he does is this it's a very intuitive
0:47:23 exercise and it's a very logical
0:47:25 exercise he looks at the
0:47:27 immediate informants of uh abdul razak
0:47:31 and he looks at the distribution of the
0:47:33 material among his informants just to
0:47:36 give you an idea informant one so
0:47:39 someone whom abdul razak is claiming to
0:47:41 have received his information directly
0:47:44 informant one uh uh 32 percent of the
0:47:47 total material is attributed to
0:47:49 informant one 29 percent to inform and 2
0:47:53 22 percent to inform and three and only
0:47:55 four percent to informant number four i
0:47:57 won't be naming them uh and he's uh uh
0:48:01 attributes 13 of the material
0:48:04 to 90 different informants among them
0:48:07 famous scholars so 0.7 material
0:48:10 approximately is attributed to abu
0:48:12 hanifa and only 0.6 to malik and he then
0:48:16 asked logical question he he looks at
0:48:18 all of these informants one by one
0:48:21 he looks at the informants of the
0:48:23 informants
0:48:25 and looks at the distribution of the
0:48:26 material there
0:48:28 and he says that you know these uh
0:48:30 these are very
0:48:32 this is very idiosyncratic
0:48:35 um
0:48:36 and uh the point that he's making is
0:48:38 that we would have expected the
0:48:40 transmission structure of the sources to
0:48:43 be similar
0:48:44 if this was assuming it was being forced
0:48:47 but that is not the case why is it that
0:48:49 the material is distributed in you know
0:48:52 highly divergent ways in idiosyncratic
0:48:54 ways would forgery have produced highly
0:48:57 divergent collections or would it have
0:48:59 likely produced more uniform and
0:49:01 consistent distribution of material he
0:49:04 also looks at you know uh uh some um
0:49:10 at the statements of the various
0:49:11 informants sometimes the informant they
0:49:14 quote
0:49:15 sometimes abdul razak for example quote
0:49:17 someone anonymous and he says if abdul
0:49:20 razak was making it up why is he quoting
0:49:22 an anonymous individual
0:49:24 uh why is he not attributing his
0:49:26 material to a you know a heavyweight
0:49:28 source
0:49:29 likewise
0:49:30 sometimes abdul razak and his informants
0:49:33 and the informants of the informants
0:49:36 they quote material and then they say
0:49:38 uh
0:49:39 that you know
0:49:41 maybe he said this or he said that
0:49:44 they're not sure about the wording
0:49:47 would the forger likely do this
0:49:49 or would a forger be likely more you
0:49:51 know certain about the wording
0:49:54 there are times when uh abdul razak
0:49:56 indirectly quotes his direct informants
0:49:59 so you know there is a guy who he quotes
0:50:02 uh directly regularly and then you come
0:50:04 across certain reports where he quotes
0:50:06 someone else who quotes this person
0:50:09 and the question is why is this
0:50:10 happening um then you also come across
0:50:14 cases where abdel razak and his
0:50:16 informants and the informants of the
0:50:17 informants so moemotsuki is looking at
0:50:19 you know all of these various levels and
0:50:21 uh what's what happens is that they
0:50:23 might quote someone and then they would
0:50:26 express their disagreement with their
0:50:28 uh with that cited opinion
0:50:30 and they say but i think
0:50:32 uh
0:50:34 this is likely the case and again the
0:50:36 question is once you look at you know
0:50:38 all of these various bits and pieces
0:50:40 uh marty gives many examples of these
0:50:43 that why is this happening and the
0:50:45 question is is this likely the work of a
0:50:48 forger
0:50:49 or is it more likely that you know
0:50:52 this is authentically being cited and
0:50:54 the people are really many times not
0:50:56 sure about the wording sometimes they
0:50:58 are quoting people anonymously also and
0:51:00 there are times
0:51:02 and and why is it that they're not
0:51:03 attributing their material to the
0:51:05 heavyweights of the time let's say if
0:51:07 you know you and i
0:51:09 happen to be um
0:51:10 christian forges of material uh it would
0:51:13 make sense if we are attributing our
0:51:15 material to let's say the apostle peter
0:51:17 uh
0:51:18 and to you know to john and to other
0:51:21 people
0:51:22 that is not the sort of thing which is
0:51:24 taking place here
0:51:25 so so so monsieur's conclusion at the
0:51:28 end is that
0:51:30 this material can be viewed at least the
0:51:32 material which he is examined he's not
0:51:34 making a generalized comment about the
0:51:35 entirety of the muslim but he's saying
0:51:38 that this material can be
0:51:40 accepted as a source of first century
0:51:42 hades
0:51:44 that you can so
0:51:46 that this material can be taken as a
0:51:49 source of first century hades that you
0:51:51 can glean information from here which
0:51:53 was already circulating in the first
0:51:55 century and subsequently in his essay he
0:51:57 gives a few examples of you know where
0:52:00 we may be able to acquire information
0:52:01 about the historical muhammad also from
0:52:04 certain hadees not all of the hadiths
0:52:06 quote the teachings of muhammad or or
0:52:08 his statements but when they do
0:52:12 at least the examples which he
0:52:14 investigates he says that you know
0:52:16 we can actually at times even go back to
0:52:19 the historical muhammad nonetheless
0:52:21 overall he's saying that this is not
0:52:22 stuff that is made up this was already
0:52:24 circulating in the first islamic century
0:52:27 wow and so that's how many so what the
0:52:29 21 you say over total so i haven't so
0:52:32 the total number of reports are 18 000.
0:52:35 he examines 21
0:52:38 3810 reports so he's not saying that the
0:52:41 material which he hasn't examined that
0:52:44 you know his findings would would hold
0:52:46 through there also would be applicable
0:52:48 upon all of it uh he is very careful to
0:52:50 say that look the material which i've
0:52:52 examined uh
0:52:54 uh these are the reasons for supposing
0:52:56 that this is not just forced stuff that
0:52:58 this was regulating in the first century
0:53:00 and these are actual informants that
0:53:02 when abdul razak is claiming to receive
0:53:04 information from particular individuals
0:53:06 that we should accept that and likewise
0:53:09 we should accept the same for his
0:53:10 informants and the informants of the
0:53:12 informants and and so on
0:53:15 so this summarize
0:53:17 just for me in a very simple way we have
0:53:19 the quran now which is securely dated
0:53:22 according to what you're saying and also
0:53:24 dr sidki to me also before purely dated
0:53:27 now to the first century
0:53:30 of the islamic era we i have a sahiba
0:53:33 according to professor jonathan brown at
0:53:35 least those uh 130-yard uh hadees are
0:53:38 securely dated now back to abraham
0:53:41 a very senior companion of the prophet
0:53:44 and now harold
0:53:45 motsky a very senior western uh german
0:53:50 hadith expert saying that these uh
0:53:52 several thousand hadees could well go
0:53:54 back to the first century so we haven't
0:53:56 just have a body of um historical
0:54:00 possibilities when it comes to and just
0:54:01 one more research which i'll just very
0:54:03 quickly mention
0:54:05 um that is the work of
0:54:07 gregor scholler and um andreas gorky at
0:54:10 the university of edinburgh that's where
0:54:12 andrea's work is so um
0:54:15 they examined the letters which are
0:54:17 attributed to orwa and nil zubair so
0:54:19 there are nine letters which are
0:54:20 attributed to him he died in 93. 294
0:54:24 after hijra that's 711 713 ce uh he is
0:54:28 the younger brother of abdullah ibn
0:54:30 zubair and uh he is the son of the
0:54:34 companion al-zubair ibn awam who died in
0:54:38 36 after hijra and he is the grandson of
0:54:41 the first caliph abu bakr
0:54:43 his mother
0:54:45 his
0:54:45 his mother is asma and his auntie is the
0:54:49 wife of the prophet aisha so this is the
0:54:51 nephew of aisha uh orwa even zubair
0:54:55 so um gregor's shoulder
0:54:59 they and and andreas gorky they look at
0:55:02 the letters there are nine letters
0:55:05 which they believe are
0:55:07 authentically from him that a lot of
0:55:09 information here does go back to him and
0:55:12 it's you know absolutely reasonable to
0:55:14 suppose that orba acquired his
0:55:16 information from from his auntie and and
0:55:19 and from other people who who knew the
0:55:21 sahaba and who knew the prophet also and
0:55:23 so the letters are
0:55:25 cited in in in later works
0:55:28 and as i said it's their general
0:55:30 authenticity is defended by these two
0:55:32 scholars now sean anthony summarizes
0:55:35 this material in his book
0:55:38 uh which is
0:55:39 what do these letters tell us oh here we
0:55:41 go yeah so this is the book
0:55:45 of faith the making of the prophet of
0:55:47 islam by sean w anthony
0:55:50 who's the publisher
0:55:52 so the publisher university of
0:55:54 california press
0:55:56 okay
0:55:57 yeah so it's a recent book came out in
0:56:00 2020 and so let me just quote uh uh what
0:56:03 he says he says
0:56:05 i must confess that the very process of
0:56:07 translating and gathering these texts
0:56:10 has mitigated much of my own skepticism
0:56:13 about the authenticity of this corpus or
0:56:16 rather what remains thereof
0:56:19 page 103
0:56:21 so um
0:56:22 uh these are you know just a few
0:56:24 examples which i've given you again this
0:56:26 is not to say that the hadith material
0:56:28 you know all pedophilic this isn't even
0:56:30 the traditional muslim view their view
0:56:32 was that you know look at it on a
0:56:33 case-by-case basis and then we decide
0:56:36 and then you know we will rate the
0:56:37 hadith some some would be authentic some
0:56:39 would be naive weak uh somebody
0:56:43 has always acknowledged uh exactly
0:56:45 a major preoccupation the problem of
0:56:48 forge to death and so
0:56:49 and you know that's why you have the the
0:56:51 great canonical collections but
0:56:52 particularly the sahih collections of
0:56:54 muslim and uh bukhari uh yeah
0:56:58 develop quite sophisticated science
0:57:01 discrimination those uh which are you
0:57:03 know reliable those are aren't those uh
0:57:05 uh forged and so on so it's not as if
0:57:07 this is a surprise to anyone yeah
0:57:10 but so
0:57:11 and i will simply end this uh just to
0:57:13 where we just uh quickly conclude uh i
0:57:16 would say uh well the best conclusion
0:57:18 that's offered by again patricia krona
0:57:20 she says and i'm quoting her we probably
0:57:22 know more about muhammad than we do
0:57:24 about jesus let alone moses or the
0:57:27 buddha and we certainly have the
0:57:29 potential to know a great deal more this
0:57:32 is quoted from what do we actually know
0:57:34 about muhammad from the open democracy
0:57:36 website so
0:57:38 what i would say is that um
0:57:40 as far as the historical jesus and the
0:57:43 historical muhammad projects are
0:57:44 concerned i think that the historical
0:57:46 muhammad project is actually a more
0:57:49 difficult project than the historical
0:57:50 jesus one and the reason for that is
0:57:53 that um you know we're not just dealing
0:57:55 with three documents we are dealing with
0:57:58 a larger pile of material and it's
0:58:01 extremely extremely time consuming to
0:58:03 work your way uh through this material
0:58:06 no one scholar can you know just
0:58:08 exhausted exhaustively look at this
0:58:10 material on his own this has to be a
0:58:12 group effort uh and uh
0:58:15 just to give you an example uh
0:58:18 when i began my research at oxford i was
0:58:20 investigating one hadis
0:58:22 um and uh that hadis has something like
0:58:26 350 versions my aim was to examine all
0:58:30 of these versions of the hades's and
0:58:32 then do my analysis and you know then
0:58:34 reach a conclusion after six months i
0:58:36 had to give up because i had to
0:58:38 concentrate upon other things
0:58:40 and i thought that fine i'll look at
0:58:42 this i'll continue with this project
0:58:44 later on but that just shows you how
0:58:46 time time how time consuming this is
0:58:49 that you have to look at well i was
0:58:51 looking at something like
0:58:53 30 35 collections of hades's uh
0:58:57 the task becomes easier because now
0:58:59 there are databases available so you can
0:59:01 do a search and you know you can gather
0:59:02 the material quickly but to analyze so
0:59:05 many versions of a report uh that that
0:59:08 just takes too long so that's why it's a
0:59:10 more difficult uh process because there
0:59:12 is a lot more uh available out there but
0:59:15 secondly
0:59:16 uh you can't simply
0:59:18 uh apply biblical methods upon these
0:59:22 sources if you look at the methods
0:59:24 applied upon um the synoptic gospels for
0:59:27 example
0:59:28 uh i would say that they that they would
0:59:30 not be adequate to deal with the hadees
0:59:33 material simply because you know fine
0:59:35 you can apply a few methods to look at
0:59:37 three documents matthew mark and luke
0:59:39 you can even you know add to the pile
0:59:41 the gospel of john
0:59:43 but we are dealing with
0:59:44 with a lot more material with many more
0:59:47 sources so we need probably more
0:59:48 sophisticated methods multiple methods
0:59:51 to investigate you know uh different uh
0:59:55 different items uh so but finally the
0:59:59 historical muhammad
1:00:01 project would be much more promising for
1:00:04 the reasons mentioned by patricia crona
1:00:06 because we can make more discoveries we
1:00:09 can learn more things because there is a
1:00:12 lot of material out there which is yet
1:00:14 to be explored
1:00:16 it's not likely that you would learn
1:00:17 anything new about the historical jesus
1:00:19 based on your reading of the new
1:00:21 testament writings
1:00:23 unless you discover new sources unless
1:00:25 you know
1:00:27 you come across
1:00:28 i don't know any
1:00:30 uh manuscript of a document which is not
1:00:33 part of the new testament canon then
1:00:35 fine if it goes back to the first
1:00:37 century
1:00:39 but as far as you're stuck with the new
1:00:40 testament writings i don't think that
1:00:42 you'll make any marvelous new
1:00:44 discoveries
1:00:45 so a field of the historical muhammad
1:00:48 project is actually a more exciting one
1:00:51 simply because there is the realistic
1:00:53 potential to learn so much more but it's
1:00:55 more difficult
1:00:57 that's very interesting so what i
1:00:59 conclude from that and just a very
1:01:00 preserved point that you know the idea
1:01:02 of the lone scholar the biblical scholar
1:01:04 analyzing in his ivory tower the gospel
1:01:06 of mark hospital yeah you could but with
1:01:09 the the in islam with the historical
1:01:11 muhammad you need a collaboration you
1:01:14 need a team effort
1:01:15 simply because of the uh the
1:01:17 interdisciplinary nature of the material
1:01:19 uh the diversity of it but also the
1:01:21 sheer quantity of it as well uh and this
1:01:24 is still to be discovered but also
1:01:27 thinking of dr sidke actually who is the
1:01:30 new executive director of the
1:01:31 international clinic studies uh
1:01:33 organization um he's a an expert on
1:01:35 chronic manuscripts his background
1:01:38 before he became a a crown scholar is as
1:01:40 a scientist he's a a microbiologist at
1:01:43 the university of chicago and i
1:01:45 mentioned that because there's a
1:01:47 cross-disciplinary benefit there someone
1:01:49 who is an expert in science scientific
1:01:51 methodology and statistics which he is
1:01:54 as well can bring a statistical analysis
1:01:56 and a rigor to to the the the sheer vast
1:02:00 corpus of material there you mentioned
1:02:03 you know 21 of that of that hadith
1:02:06 corpus you know he can do statistical
1:02:07 analyses uh bringing that discipline
1:02:10 into this study
1:02:12 an exciting uh is collaborative it can
1:02:14 you know it can move beyond the the
1:02:16 solitary uh dusty old scholar and and
1:02:19 you can bring in uh other disciplines to
1:02:21 benefit and expedite this so that's
1:02:24 really exciting but also what strikes me
1:02:26 is that
1:02:27 so to conclude really um
1:02:30 when we look at the historical jesus
1:02:32 there is seemingly a big gap between
1:02:36 later
1:02:37 orthodox christian belief about who
1:02:39 jesus was as the second person of the
1:02:41 trinity god become man a man who claimed
1:02:44 to be god on the one hand
1:02:47 and the fruit of the historical research
1:02:50 into the historical jesus who is
1:02:53 a just a man albeit a great man a
1:02:56 prophet a teacher a messiah but a
1:02:58 messiah understood in a jewish sense not
1:03:00 in a later christian understanding of
1:03:02 messiah as a divine savior figure uh in
1:03:05 the sense that um
1:03:07 later christians understood
1:03:09 so you have this gap but when we come to
1:03:11 the islamic um
1:03:14 and western understandings historical
1:03:16 muhammad there doesn't seem to be any
1:03:18 disagreement by anyone that mohammed
1:03:21 not thought he was
1:03:23 a prophet understood himself to be a
1:03:25 prophet in the in the
1:03:27 tradition of moses and the jewish
1:03:30 prophets i say that because if the quran
1:03:32 represents and reflects his own
1:03:34 preaching which we now that does then
1:03:37 that is what he would have believed
1:03:38 because he's preaching
1:03:40 that message obviously so we know that
1:03:42 he understood himself to be a prophet in
1:03:45 in the same way that jesus and moses was
1:03:47 because the quran says that
1:03:49 but also the all the evidence of his
1:03:51 followers and other hadith also suggests
1:03:54 that he was understood to be a prophet
1:03:56 as well by others and no more than a
1:03:58 prophet
1:03:59 and so there seems to be an anonymity
1:04:02 and
1:04:02 a universal understanding from the man
1:04:05 himself to his followers
1:04:07 uh contemporary with him and subsequent
1:04:09 to him that he was just one thing or or
1:04:12 multifaceted but one multifaceted
1:04:14 reality but with the historical jesus we
1:04:16 don't get that we get discontinuity as
1:04:19 i'm trying to say radical discontinuity
1:04:22 between the history and the later faith
1:04:24 which we don't have in the islamic
1:04:26 tradition and that strikes me as the
1:04:28 most fundamental difference between
1:04:30 the historical jesus and the historical
1:04:33 muhammad in terms of how they were
1:04:34 viewed in their respective faith
1:04:36 traditions
1:04:37 uh yes so i would generally agree with
1:04:39 this and i would say that you know um
1:04:41 Music
1:04:43 my feeling is that most scholars would
1:04:45 not have an objection to the notion of
1:04:47 the prophet muhammad
1:04:49 having presented himself historically as
1:04:51 a prophet of god as um
1:04:55 sort of like a viceroy of god you know
1:04:56 presenting god's message and you know
1:04:59 that we have access to his preaching uh
1:05:01 of course uh scholars would disagree
1:05:04 over various particular episodes which
1:05:07 allegedly took place in this light
1:05:10 even muslims disagree uh over that but
1:05:12 as far as the core matter is concerned
1:05:14 that you know he is uh
1:05:17 believed to be god's prophet a human
1:05:19 being that this is what the prophet
1:05:22 almost certainly also preached and and
1:05:24 you know that seems to be very
1:05:25 straightforward from the quran itself um
1:05:29 so uh so yeah uh
1:05:31 there isn't much of a gap here as far as
1:05:33 this particular element is concerned
1:05:36 which is that which is a key point you
1:05:38 know who was who was muhammad in terms
1:05:40 of their own self-understanding and how
1:05:42 that was made perceived by their
1:05:43 followers um okay well perhaps we can
1:05:46 move on to the last uh segment of uh our
1:05:50 discussion which is this um obscurely
1:05:53 entitled intertextuality
1:05:55 um which doesn't reveal much of what's
1:05:57 going on
1:05:59 what are these texts and what is going
1:06:01 on here why is this such an important
1:06:02 subject that obviously you uh
1:06:06 explored in your recent postgraduate
1:06:08 studies at the university of oxford
1:06:11 indeed so i was always interested in the
1:06:13 similarities and the differences between
1:06:16 stories in the quran and the parallels
1:06:18 in biblical tradition by biblical
1:06:20 tradition i mean not only the canonical
1:06:23 uh
1:06:24 biblical writings but post canonical
1:06:26 writings also so you know the writings
1:06:28 of the church fathers the talmud and
1:06:31 jewish traditions second temple writings
1:06:33 etc
1:06:34 um
1:06:35 and so you know uh how do we explain the
1:06:38 similarities and the differences and
1:06:41 over the past two decades at the very
1:06:42 least uh a lot
1:06:45 a lot more scholarly
1:06:47 material has come out
1:06:49 uh which is uh looking at the
1:06:52 similarities and the differences of you
1:06:54 know various
1:06:56 chronic accounts uh
1:06:58 against the biblical backdrop and so um
1:07:02 i've been interested in this topic also
1:07:04 um
1:07:05 and and i've looked specifically at a
1:07:07 few accounts so this would be the story
1:07:09 of uh moses in the quran uh the story of
1:07:12 jesus in my pieces i focused upon the
1:07:15 story of zechariah
1:07:18 and uh also one element of the story of
1:07:21 moses that would be moses's
1:07:25 separation and his reunion with his
1:07:27 mother so when he is you know uh still a
1:07:30 baby
1:07:31 um and my personal conclusion on my
1:07:35 examination thus far is that it seems
1:07:37 that the quran um intentionally passed
1:07:40 ways
1:07:42 with commonly known stories stories
1:07:45 which are to be found in the bible which
1:07:46 are to be found in biblical tradition
1:07:48 also and that the quran has its own
1:07:50 perspective and it
1:07:53 really you know
1:07:54 doesn't care what someone else is saying
1:07:58 it is just putting forth its own view
1:08:01 and it wants people to accept that as
1:08:03 the correct view
1:08:06 at the very least the stories which i've
1:08:07 examined uh that would seem to be the
1:08:10 case and yeah the tradition used to be
1:08:13 uh and you still get some christian
1:08:15 missionaries who say this that the the
1:08:16 quran is a crude cut and paste job of of
1:08:19 the bible basically and uh it gets it
1:08:22 gets it wrong makes mistakes but there
1:08:23 are differences between the bible and
1:08:25 the quran uh the bible being the default
1:08:27 position of course which is true and
1:08:29 right uh the quran just makes mistakes
1:08:31 when it differs from the quran um so but
1:08:34 you're saying that that whole crude
1:08:36 paradigm is just gone and i know um
1:08:39 your supervisor at oxford nikolai sinai
1:08:42 has or in his most recent work called uh
1:08:45 the quran a historical critical
1:08:46 introduction also says that in the
1:08:48 introduction uh to that book um that
1:08:51 that paradigm is now gone in in western
1:08:54 scholarship and now as you are
1:08:56 explaining of course that um the quran
1:08:58 has its own view and is polemically
1:09:00 engaging with the stories uh uh uh
1:09:04 the in the scriptures the people of the
1:09:06 book uh other stories and and telling
1:09:09 them and correcting them perhaps or
1:09:11 giving his own version of these stories
1:09:14 with an understanding of course what the
1:09:16 quran is saying is the true
1:09:17 understanding it's not just a different
1:09:19 view it's the view the truth about what
1:09:22 really happened uh in those stories but
1:09:24 the the quran is is asserting itself
1:09:26 over
1:09:27 these other stories uh and giving its
1:09:30 own giving the truth the capital t uh
1:09:33 yes indeed and so my intertextual
1:09:36 reading uh has has definitely you know
1:09:38 led me to that uh conclusion and uh as
1:09:41 far as the polemical view is concerned i
1:09:43 wouldn't say that it's completely gone
1:09:45 uh
1:09:46 but but it has received a very
1:09:49 significant dent and and and it has been
1:09:52 it is rather uh diminished so you will
1:09:54 come across obviously you know uh purely
1:09:56 polemical circles where you know uh such
1:09:59 views are still circulating according to
1:10:01 which you know the quran simply you know
1:10:03 is the product of copying from the bible
1:10:06 when it comes to the
1:10:08 scholarship on the other hand so uh
1:10:11 a critical uh
1:10:13 academic scholarship of the quran
1:10:15 this view is seldom championed by by
1:10:18 scholars there might be you know a few
1:10:20 individuals here uh here and there um
1:10:24 who may say you know something along
1:10:25 these lines
1:10:27 but really it's it's not at all a
1:10:29 mainstream or a common view and the
1:10:31 reason is not because you know uh
1:10:32 scholars suddenly developed this need to
1:10:35 be
1:10:36 nice to muslim and to respect the quran
1:10:38 it's just that you know
1:10:40 um
1:10:41 as many scholars began
1:10:43 examining the parallels in more detail
1:10:47 they realized that you know some of
1:10:48 these
1:10:49 in fact a lot of these polemical
1:10:51 paradigms they are really very difficult
1:10:54 to sustain and i can give you like
1:10:56 one example of this so
1:11:00 in the quran there is the story of the
1:11:01 annunciation uh to zechariah zechariah
1:11:05 is praying for an offspring
1:11:08 and
1:11:09 god accepts his prayer and then
1:11:12 zechariah asks for a sign
1:11:15 and
1:11:16 a sign is given to him that he will not
1:11:18 speak for three days and three nights
1:11:20 and uh you know it's a very happy
1:11:22 occasion and uh it's a very positive
1:11:25 account uh if you look at the parallel
1:11:28 in the gospel of luke
1:11:30 zechariah is informed about the son he
1:11:33 is given details about uh
1:11:36 this son to be
1:11:38 and then zechariah like the quran
1:11:40 requests a sign
1:11:43 the angel becomes angry and says i am
1:11:46 gabriel i just gave you this news and
1:11:48 you know you you are still asking for a
1:11:51 sign and i'm just very loosely
1:11:52 paraphrasing and then the angel says
1:11:55 that you know for your uh disbelief you
1:11:58 will not be able to speak
1:12:01 and and he is basically his punishment
1:12:03 is that he is struck mute
1:12:05 so it's a very very different story uh
1:12:08 i mean you can see the sharp contrast
1:12:11 with the quranic account in in the quran
1:12:13 zechariah asked for a sign he is gladly
1:12:15 given the sign
1:12:17 and
1:12:18 but uh the sign the punishment
1:12:20 in
1:12:22 and if you look at the subsequent uh
1:12:25 church fathers in my pieces i had a look
1:12:28 at maybe
1:12:29 around um
1:12:31 close to a dozen i think fathers uh this
1:12:34 includes uh you know the syriac uh
1:12:37 church father saint abram and various
1:12:40 others uh origin
1:12:42 um
1:12:43 yeah
1:12:44 and so i mean they consistently carry
1:12:46 forward the story of the gospel of luth
1:12:49 and they simply add some complementary
1:12:52 details to it they expanded in a
1:12:54 complementary fashion
1:12:56 and in some of these fathers and saint
1:12:58 ephraim for example
1:13:00 origen and a few others
1:13:03 the punishment of muteness that is uh
1:13:07 uh
1:13:08 that is you know basically uh inflicted
1:13:10 upon zechariah is taken as a
1:13:13 uh as a symbolic separation between
1:13:16 christianity and judaism
1:13:19 so uh it is almost as if you know that
1:13:23 the punishment of zechariah
1:13:26 is a symbol of the replacement of the
1:13:29 jewish temple or the jewish system of
1:13:31 worship
1:13:33 by something new i.e jesus
1:13:38 and the new you know system ushered in
1:13:39 by uh jesus
1:13:41 um
1:13:43 now when you look at the koran against
1:13:46 all of these various parallels not only
1:13:48 do you notice a sharp contrast
1:13:51 uh between the
1:13:54 the main story that you know
1:13:56 punishment of zechariah there is no
1:13:58 punishment in the quran in fact it's a
1:14:00 blessing it's a sign it's a positive
1:14:02 thing
1:14:03 uh that is granted to zechariah
1:14:05 but also in the quran
1:14:10 zechariah's son
1:14:11 yahya or john the baptist is introduced
1:14:14 as the heir of the house of jacob
1:14:19 so the continuation of their inherited
1:14:22 religious tradition
1:14:24 is is
1:14:26 very clearly implied in the account uh
1:14:29 zechariah and
1:14:31 um um
1:14:33 john the baptist are
1:14:35 legitimate heirs of the house of jacob
1:14:37 and of their inherited religious
1:14:39 tradition jesus does not replace that
1:14:42 uh jesus does not end that so
1:14:44 continuation
1:14:46 versus a discontinuity that you come
1:14:48 across in the writings of the various uh
1:14:51 church fathers
1:14:52 and you have a word
1:14:54 for me is that you get the sense uh very
1:14:56 much from contemporary historians of the
1:14:59 new testament and christianity and
1:15:01 historical jesus
1:15:03 uh the consensus appears to be that
1:15:05 jesus didn't come to establish a new
1:15:07 religion called christianity
1:15:10 um that he was a jew preaching judaism
1:15:12 to jews yes he had his own particular
1:15:14 take on torah observance and perhaps an
1:15:16 intensification
1:15:18 of observance and terrorization perhaps
1:15:20 a great emphasis on love mercy and faith
1:15:23 and so on but certainly not establishing
1:15:25 this new religion called christianity
1:15:26 which pretty quickly came on the scene
1:15:28 towards the end of the first century for
1:15:30 sure with people like the conventions of
1:15:32 antioch who actually explicitly referred
1:15:34 to uh that um so it seems that the quran
1:15:37 is uh in agreement with that view in as
1:15:40 much as jesus is seen and john the
1:15:42 baptist of course is yes and seen as
1:15:44 people who were very much within the
1:15:46 second temple judaism
1:15:48 and operating and teaching uh
1:15:49 accordingly um as opposed to the idea of
1:15:52 a new religion being born which is
1:15:55 arguably understood by the early fathers
1:15:57 under uh exegesis or
1:15:59 luke chapter one so that that's
1:16:00 interesting
1:16:01 um multi-faceted way looking at it yeah
1:16:04 absolutely and uh you come across you
1:16:07 know uh other points of contrast and
1:16:09 differences uh in this quranic account
1:16:12 of zechariah uh which is mentioned in
1:16:14 q19 and q3 surah al-imran and
1:16:18 surah maryam and you know
1:16:21 these various biblical traditions but
1:16:22 you come across the same thing in
1:16:25 uh different stories different prophetic
1:16:27 stories that you examine i mean just
1:16:29 looking at the story of moses there is
1:16:31 one interesting example that i was
1:16:33 actually not familiar with up until my
1:16:35 studies at oxford uh so you'll notice
1:16:37 that you know the sign given to
1:16:40 the miracle given to moses one is that
1:16:42 you know his staff transforms into a
1:16:44 serpent and the other one is that his
1:16:46 hand becomes leprous
1:16:49 uh
1:16:50 the hebrew term in exodus i'm forgetting
1:16:53 what term it is but you look at the
1:16:55 meaning and it has a negative
1:16:57 connotation that his hand becomes you
1:17:00 know like a diseased or uh infected uh
1:17:04 when he pulls it out
1:17:05 uh and when he uh puts it you know in
1:17:08 his bosom and takes it out again it
1:17:10 becomes normal so you know that's a uh
1:17:13 miracle which is uh given to moses
1:17:16 interestingly enough when the quran
1:17:17 mentions uh this particular miracle
1:17:21 the hand miracle
1:17:22 the quran refers to it five times
1:17:25 and on three occasions the quran says
1:17:28 that
1:17:29 his hand was uh
1:17:32 white without disease without defect
1:17:36 so you see you know again the contrast
1:17:38 you know with that uh detail in the
1:17:41 bible because that word if you look in
1:17:43 it if you look at the concordances and
1:17:45 the dictionaries
1:17:46 uh it's a negative word i mean the
1:17:48 translation uh oftentimes is diseased
1:17:52 the difference but why why is the quran
1:17:54 making that point
1:17:56 yeah so it's not a random point oh
1:17:59 instantly you just have a diseased hand
1:18:01 well why is it saying this
1:18:04 yeah so so again the question is why uh
1:18:06 as you said the quran says this now if
1:18:08 you look at the
1:18:10 uh post canonical you know uh uh jewish
1:18:13 writings uh
1:18:14 you
1:18:15 uh you may be able to glean maybe you
1:18:17 know some uh difficulty with this nature
1:18:20 of the miracle so uh the
1:18:23 uh in exodus 4 6 in the uh
1:18:26 septuagint for example it simply states
1:18:29 his hand
1:18:31 became as snow
1:18:33 and josephus mentions for example his
1:18:35 hand became white of a color resembling
1:18:39 chalk
1:18:40 now they they're not disagreeing with
1:18:42 what is there
1:18:44 in the canonical uh uh exodus
1:18:47 uh they're simply emphasizing the
1:18:49 whiteness of the hand uh and they're
1:18:51 just leaving out the bit about the
1:18:52 disease we may guess that okay they were
1:18:55 uncomfortable with that although you can
1:18:57 give it a positive spin also that you
1:18:59 know his hand became very leprous very
1:19:02 diseased and you know uh then
1:19:05 in an instant it is healed and you know
1:19:07 that is a miracle uh and it shows that
1:19:10 uh i was reading somewhere that you know
1:19:12 that uh the control of god over uh moses
1:19:16 and that you know um
1:19:18 some people are trying to show the
1:19:19 superiority of jesus uh compared to
1:19:23 moses
1:19:25 i'm just vaguely recording some things
1:19:27 which which i read quite some time ago
1:19:30 but nonetheless uh in these jewish
1:19:32 writers you can see that you know there
1:19:34 is simply an emphasis in some of them
1:19:37 upon the whiteness of the hand and the
1:19:38 hand becoming resembling choke as
1:19:40 josephus but the quran goes out of its
1:19:42 way to mention in three places it was
1:19:44 without defect without disease what is
1:19:46 the reason for that
1:19:48 maybe the quran just disagrees with that
1:19:50 and thinks that you know uh uh it was
1:19:53 white it was
1:19:54 not diseased not defected and that is
1:19:56 wrong
1:19:58 because it is wrong
1:20:00 i can't think of any other reason at
1:20:01 this stage as to why that is the case
1:20:03 but there is something else also again
1:20:05 in the story of uh moses uh in exodus we
1:20:09 read about the famous dew which moses
1:20:12 has with the magicians
1:20:15 and you know the magicians are able to
1:20:17 replicate a
1:20:18 miracle of
1:20:20 moses but moses prevails his serpent
1:20:23 i think gobbles up or swallows the
1:20:26 other snakes now the same story is
1:20:28 mentioned uh in the quran
1:20:30 now there is a the quran disagrees with
1:20:34 exodus in the order
1:20:35 of it in the sequence of what happened
1:20:38 so according to etc if i remember
1:20:40 correctly
1:20:41 it is moses who first
1:20:43 throws his staff and it converts into a
1:20:45 snake and then the magicians are able to
1:20:48 replicate that
1:20:50 in the quran
1:20:53 moses invites the uh magicians
1:20:56 to cast their
1:20:58 staff or you know whatever they had
1:21:00 first so they did it first
1:21:03 and something happens
1:21:05 the quran calls it trickery or you know
1:21:08 somehow they fool the people but it
1:21:09 seemed real
1:21:11 and the quran mentions that moses became
1:21:13 afraid
1:21:14 that within himself you know like he was
1:21:17 concerned that he was not expecting this
1:21:19 at all
1:21:20 and at that very moment
1:21:22 god tells moses don't be afraid you will
1:21:26 prevail cast your stuff
1:21:28 moses does that and immediately what
1:21:30 happens
1:21:31 when the magicians see the miracle
1:21:34 they just fall in frustration they know
1:21:36 that this is the real thing this is not
1:21:39 you know akin to what they did look at
1:21:42 the contrast with the biblical story
1:21:45 after the deal with the magicians the
1:21:47 magicians are able to then they don't
1:21:50 give up they continue to be on the side
1:21:53 of the pharaoh and they are able to
1:21:54 replicate i think two or three miracles
1:21:57 of moses uh uh uh the miracle i think of
1:22:00 the frogs or maybe the uh turning uh uh
1:22:04 water into blood i can't remember
1:22:06 correctly uh uh precisely at the moment
1:22:08 but they are able to replicate it
1:22:10 according to exodus some of the miracles
1:22:12 of of moses even though what they're
1:22:15 doing is not miracles it's trickery
1:22:17 trickery but they are able to you know
1:22:19 match moses at least to some extent not
1:22:22 so in the quran immediately game over
1:22:24 the magicians it has such a huge impact
1:22:27 upon them they are on their knees
1:22:30 they
1:22:31 immediately you know ask god forgiveness
1:22:34 and when the pharaoh screams at them
1:22:36 that you know i'll punish you i'll
1:22:37 crucify you what not they say we don't
1:22:39 care to what you like that is the impact
1:22:42 moses miracle has upon them
1:22:44 now if you look at the um
1:22:47 subsequent jewish uh commentaries on uh
1:22:52 on you know this episode in exodus
1:22:55 um
1:22:55 you can see that some authors are
1:22:58 troubled by the fact that the magicians
1:23:00 are able to replicate a few of the
1:23:02 miracles of moses
1:23:04 and
1:23:05 different explanations are used to
1:23:06 justify this so you know uh i won't go
1:23:09 into the explanations in detail i have
1:23:10 them written down somewhere but i'll get
1:23:12 lost if i start reading them uh uh but
1:23:15 anyway they give various explanations
1:23:17 and you know some people say that well
1:23:18 even though they are able to replicate
1:23:20 what moses did but you know moses the
1:23:23 serpent it was more ferocious and it was
1:23:26 able to you know swallow up
1:23:28 uh their snakes but notice again how the
1:23:30 quran
1:23:32 pathways
1:23:33 with the biblical story in a more
1:23:35 drastic way
1:23:37 according to the quran no
1:23:39 they were defeated
1:23:41 in that very instance
1:23:43 and that was end of story for them
1:23:45 when you come across these bits and
1:23:47 pieces and so many other places in the
1:23:49 story of jesus i've already mentioned
1:23:51 the story of zechariah you look at the
1:23:53 story of joseph and you know compare
1:23:55 that with the parables in in the bible
1:23:58 that again and again at least you know
1:24:00 i've come across these uh
1:24:03 these instances which leads me to
1:24:05 conclude that you know it's not correct
1:24:06 to say that the quran just
1:24:08 endorses the bible i think the quran has
1:24:11 an adversarial attitude towards biblical
1:24:14 traditions both canonical and
1:24:16 non-canonicals there are times when it
1:24:18 agrees with what is there in the bible
1:24:20 and in biblical tradition
1:24:22 and it's time to disagree with them
1:24:24 rather drastically yeah i mean this is
1:24:25 extremely what you're saying you give
1:24:27 them detailed evidence that still many
1:24:29 uh christian apologists polemicists
1:24:31 particularly insist that the quran
1:24:33 endorses uh the bible when it patently
1:24:36 obviously doesn't uh in when you really
1:24:39 look at the detail and comparatively the
1:24:41 intertextual analysis you you see a as
1:24:44 you say an adversary or polemical
1:24:46 attitude a correction a change um but my
1:24:49 own personal uh favorite uh which i know
1:24:52 you deal with in your thesis is so
1:24:55 uh surah al iclas 112
1:24:58 and uh my own favorite translation is
1:25:00 muhammad assad's a great jewish uh
1:25:03 convert to islam in the 20th century his
1:25:06 uh commentary on the translation of the
1:25:09 quran and uh he
1:25:11 uh it's very very brief this
1:25:12 in his translation it says say he is the
1:25:16 one god
1:25:17 god the eternal the uncaused cause of
1:25:21 all being he begets not and neither is
1:25:24 he begotten and there is nothing that
1:25:26 could be compared with him so in four
1:25:29 short
1:25:31 for sure ayah we have
1:25:33 what you've you have turned precision
1:25:36 theology but both in terms of confirming
1:25:38 the shema in the first verse which is
1:25:41 you know here is where the lord our god
1:25:42 is one lord universalizing it dropping
1:25:44 as you put it uh the reference to israel
1:25:48 and and then also
1:25:50 in the third verse uh he begets not
1:25:52 neither is begotten there's got to be a
1:25:54 specific reference there to the council
1:25:56 of nicaea the idea of the begotten of
1:25:58 the father um
1:26:00 so you have on the one hand the quran
1:26:03 affirming the shema which is in
1:26:04 deuteronomy of course
1:26:06 the creed of israel still resides today
1:26:08 by pious jews of course also reaffirmed
1:26:11 by jesus in the christian gospels in the
1:26:14 gospel of mark
1:26:15 uh and the quran takes the side of jesus
1:26:17 and moses will put it that way over
1:26:19 against
1:26:21 later christian tradition which would
1:26:23 have jesus as uh begotten of god
1:26:28 um and so for me is a very not just
1:26:31 precision theology is incredibly rich
1:26:33 theology um which centers the quran the
1:26:36 chronicles perspective very much in the
1:26:38 jewish
1:26:40 um mosaic tradition which jesus
1:26:42 identifies with uh according to mark
1:26:46 um over against another religion uh
1:26:48 which was not established by jesus as
1:26:50 scholars now know in the west he didn't
1:26:51 come to establish christianity this
1:26:53 later catholic tradition uh of the
1:26:56 creeds and the councils of the church
1:26:58 which are accepted by all mainstream
1:26:59 catholics and africans and the orthodox
1:27:02 and methodists and so on we all accept
1:27:03 these creeds as authoritative at least
1:27:06 the nicene creed anyway
1:27:07 um
1:27:08 that is uh discontinuous from the mosaic
1:27:12 jesus muhammadan quranic tradition
1:27:16 so for me this is incredibly rich surah
1:27:18 which speaks volumes on many levels uh
1:27:21 um about this and i know you've written
1:27:23 in your pieces let me just work there
1:27:26 yeah just wanted to highlight that no
1:27:28 absolutely and i have just one
1:27:29 confession to make the term which i used
1:27:31 precis uh precision strike i borrowed
1:27:34 that from a scholar i can't remember her
1:27:36 name but she was giving a presentation
1:27:37 and it stuck in my mind so uh if i
1:27:40 remember her name later on i'll i'll
1:27:42 definitely mention it to you
1:27:50 because that's what i read it in your
1:27:52 thesis at oxford so yeah
1:27:54 yeah
1:27:56 that for me is you know a really weighty
1:27:58 matter i mean the detail of moses hand
1:28:00 coming out white disease yeah that
1:28:02 that's there and tells us
1:28:04 but this sure is is the bombshell of all
1:28:07 bombshells i mean it really absolutely
1:28:09 yeah amazing
1:28:10 i have a like a you know a comparison
1:28:13 with an ic and creed which you might be
1:28:15 able to well you won't be able to see so
1:28:17 yeah like you mentioned
1:28:19 say he is god one now the word uh ahadi
1:28:23 here
1:28:24 is a hypox uh legomenon so it occurs
1:28:27 only once in the entire quranic corpus
1:28:30 only here
1:28:31 otherwise the word for one is why which
1:28:33 the quran uses but ahad is used here and
1:28:36 then if you compare that you know with
1:28:38 the shema here where israel the lord our
1:28:40 god is one the word is ah
1:28:44 so so so you know you can immediately
1:28:46 you know when you are
1:28:47 reading
1:28:49 uh if you know hebrew
1:28:51 ahad will remind you of the shema uh
1:28:54 hebrew israel
1:28:58 and also
1:28:59 notice that the uh biblical statement uh
1:29:02 here oh
1:29:03 here o israel can be looked upon as a
1:29:06 passive whereas the quran says
1:29:12 he is god the one
1:29:13 so you can see that the shema is
1:29:16 actually intensified
1:29:18 here uh it's no longer about hearing
1:29:21 it's about declaring it's about saying
1:29:23 uh it's about asserting uh and then
1:29:25 allah
1:29:27 which can be translated as you know god
1:29:29 the internal uh now you compare this
1:29:32 with the nicean creed uh the father
1:29:35 almighty maker of heaven and earth and
1:29:37 of all things visible and invisible okay
1:29:41 so we can say that you know this would
1:29:42 match with god the eternal but the next
1:29:46 crucial bit who has not begun nor has
1:29:49 has been begotten
1:29:51 now this stands in contrast specifically
1:29:54 you know uh very very strongly with the
1:29:55 nicene creed where we read and in one
1:29:58 lord jesus christ the only begotten son
1:30:01 of god begone of the father before all
1:30:03 worlds or eons
1:30:05 light of light very god of very god
1:30:08 begotten not made
1:30:10 so there is a very
1:30:12 precise
1:30:13 reputation of this in a few words in the
1:30:16 quran
1:30:17 and there is no equal to him
1:30:20 uh
1:30:21 and the relevant bit in the nicer creed
1:30:24 being of one substance with the father
1:30:26 so the quran is you know uh
1:30:32 uh who has not been begotten nor has
1:30:34 been
1:30:35 begotten there is no equal to him how
1:30:38 precisely the quran
1:30:40 like you know refutes the
1:30:41 notions to be found in the nicean creed
1:30:44 and like you said at the same time
1:30:46 affirming or intensifying the shaman
1:30:49 and that this is this is bad news though
1:30:51 surely for some people who
1:30:53 um in a misguided sense perhaps of uh
1:30:55 interfaith let's get along together
1:30:58 all religions lead equally to god
1:31:01 we all have our own partial view of the
1:31:03 truth karani here is asserting
1:31:05 absolutely uh the categorical um
1:31:09 absoluteness of god uh that he's not
1:31:11 forgotten but made
1:31:13 and the nun can be compared to him so it
1:31:15 really is it's laying down the line here
1:31:17 and saying no
1:31:18 this is the truth
1:31:20 uh and this is the truth that moses
1:31:21 taught that jesus affirmed as well over
1:31:24 against other formulations which do have
1:31:26 uh god begetting or making other beings
1:31:30 um you know in that fashion
1:31:33 ultimately is not going to be joining
1:31:35 hands singing kumbaya
1:31:37 in a kind of um you know a way that's
1:31:39 very fashionable in many religious
1:31:40 circles in the west it is
1:31:44 in a very uncompromising way as you say
1:31:46 in the first surah cool
1:31:48 as you fascinatingly said it's an
1:31:50 imperative to say what does here
1:31:53 proclaim
1:31:54 that he is the one god the shema uh so
1:31:57 it's uncompromising so i'm trying to say
1:32:00 and it just that is just the nature of
1:32:02 truth metaphysical truth
1:32:04 uh is absolute um for the crime and um
1:32:08 it can't be negotiated with it it's
1:32:10 asserting itself without any compromise
1:32:13 yeah i tend to agree with that i mean i
1:32:16 am all in support of you know uh
1:32:17 interreligious uh uh dialogues uh but
1:32:21 there is no doubt that the quran has its
1:32:23 uh true claims
1:32:24 and it has taken very precise positions
1:32:27 on particular issues and you know one
1:32:30 has to uh deal with that um
1:32:32 yeah
1:32:33 yeah i mean i i don't mean to yes
1:32:35 i do think that dialogue is very good
1:32:37 but this kind of facile sense of there
1:32:39 are there are certain groups i i'm aware
1:32:41 what mentioned by name you do have this
1:32:42 kind of uh you know uh where you kind of
1:32:45 overlook these issues and we'll pretend
1:32:47 basically we'll all uh believe the same
1:32:49 thing and that the quran is clear that
1:32:52 it stakes the truth very clearly
1:32:54 um
1:32:55 okay well uh we we've uh we've been on
1:32:58 air for uh just over one and a half
1:33:00 hours yeah
1:33:02 and and i'm also very conscious that
1:33:03 you've hardly scratched the surface and
1:33:06 um because so much more you could have
1:33:07 said and can be said about any of these
1:33:10 objects uh the historical jesus the
1:33:12 historical muhammad and intertextuality
1:33:15 is a new bit of jargon there we're gonna
1:33:16 have to learn i suppose um if we're
1:33:19 gonna appear knowledgeable about these
1:33:20 things um so um
1:33:23 just to conclude then usman if you have
1:33:25 something you want to share with us and
1:33:26 and and then we'll we'll perhaps call it
1:33:28 a day
1:33:29 uh no no further thoughts uh i can just
1:33:32 thank you for having me here again and i
1:33:34 look forward to our next discussion
1:33:37 thank you
1:33:39 there's a promise there for further
1:33:40 installments
1:33:42 i think what will happen we're going to
1:33:43 have to do is chop up this video i don't
1:33:45 mean you know this video will go out
1:33:46 unedited uh but i will think actually i
1:33:49 will create three separate videos uh
1:33:52 because there are three subjects that
1:33:53 can be more easily digested in
1:33:56 bite-sized uh proportion kind of thing
1:33:58 so um but what we'll have four videos
1:34:01 from this book and people i know from
1:34:03 tiktok tend to grab extracts as well
1:34:06 which is great um because it's uh you
1:34:08 know
1:34:09 spread the knowledge spread the truth
1:34:10 yeah anyway osman sheikh thank you uh
1:34:13 very much thank you
1:34:15 and i look forward to your going on
1:34:16 presumably to do your phd uh hopefully
1:34:18 at oxford
1:34:20 uh hopefully fingers crossed i need to
1:34:22 send out my application and look into a
1:34:24 few things but uh after getting my
1:34:26 results i'm very motivated to proceed
1:34:29 with it
1:34:30 absolutely and i look forward to perhaps
1:34:32 seeing you again on blogging theology to
1:34:34 share thank you with the viewers so
1:34:35 thank you very much until you're more
1:34:37 focused
1:34:38 thank you absolutely see you bye