Trusting the Bible
While writing an article on five historic myths about Christianity (that will be published here in addition to its primary publication elsewhere), I came across this website. I'm not an expert in all of the information provided, but I can vouch for this section, which is extremely accurate.
I'm not an expert in Quranic manuscripts or writing styles or anything like that, so I can't vouch for this section; based on my knowledge of Islamic history, it seems reasonable, but I'm not expert enough in the history of Islam to say, "Yep, spot on, it's good to go." In fact, I do take some issue with this section...
As an ancient historian, I take some degree of issue with this. It's true, of course, that the further a manuscript is from the events it describes, the more incredulous a historian should be. Even so, there are many manuscripts that are separated from their events by as much as eleven hundred years that I still consider to be accurate and authoritative. Examples are the manuscripts of Caesar, Thucydides, Herodotus, and Suetonius, all of which are cited by the (anonymous?) author. When I read The Conquest of Gaul, I was confident that what I was reading was a translation of what Caesar had actually written. Caesar's simple language, his third person narrative, the barely-discernible traces of political propaganda, they show through and you can tell that it's Caesar, even if the oldest manuscripts are separated from his death by nearly a thousand years.
Basically, it's fascinating that modern scholars, both religious and secular, would like to be elitist and say that people couldn't be trusted to maintain literature, but it's simply not true. One needs to go no further than to study Jewish numerology to understand that many scribes and scholars in the ancient world were every bit as good as a Xerox machine. Were there occasional scribal errors? Yes. Do I find a typographical error in pretty much every book I ever read, even those written in the age of spell-checking software and professional proofreaders? You betcha, and I'm smart enough to read around it and figure out what it meant.
Do the Islamic and Western traditions share much in common? Not really. The Arabs had scribes, but Western culture was kept alive by veritable armies of monks whose life's work was copying and recopying and recopying manuscripts. Among Christians, literacy was widespread, whereas among Muslims, memorization and recitation was stressed. The traditions were different, so the transmission of the texts were different.
I don't know if any of you regular readers have read the Quran, or if any of you are familiar with its formation. I read the Quran from January until March of this year, and studied its transmission and formation. In case you haven't read it, I found it to be rather repetitive. In some instances, that's a good thing, but in other instances, it's not terribly helpful or encouraging evidence for a reliable transmission of all details. Frequent repetition of such phrases as "For Allah is most compassionate, merciful" is understandable. Four or five repetitions of the story of Saleh are not encouraging; picture detailed reiterations of Noah's flood, David's battle with Goliath, and the Exodus throughout the Old Testament and you'll understand my point. Muslims claim that the Quran is authoritative, but it has a lot of details that are found nowhere in the Old or New Testaments that it claims to complete, while completely ignoring many other details.
As for the way the Quran was composed after Muhammed's death, it seems to have been a committee method, where anyone who'd heard anything Muhammed said was asked what they remembered, and it was compiled and completed. This assumes that the version of these events that we get from the Islamic tradition is what really happened; for my purposes, it doesn't matter, although the author of that piece suggests that the version that Muslim apologists offer may be a fictitious one. Either way, even if I assumed that Muhammed had a strong case, I would find the formation of the final version of the Quran to be very questionable. I find the formation of the biblical canon to be much more credible.
For what it's worth, I'm not an elitist about this issue, and there are clearly items and manuscripts that survive as a result of the Islamic tradition. A cloak reported to have belonged to Muhammed survives, as does ibn Fadlan's Rusiyyah, which is not drastically older than the Quran in the historical scheme of things.
As far as I'm concerned, books like Caesar, or Thucydides, or Suetonius set the standard for reliability. The Bible exceeds that standard with extreme prejudice. Even without the information presented by the cited website, the Quran doesn't meet my minimum burden. Is that a judgment on the Quran, or on Islam, or on Muslims? Not really. They're free to use whatever burden of proof they wish, and if their entire acceptance of the Quran is based on faith, then that's up to them.
As for me, I'll stick to the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and the works of C.S. Lewis.
I'm not an expert in Quranic manuscripts or writing styles or anything like that, so I can't vouch for this section; based on my knowledge of Islamic history, it seems reasonable, but I'm not expert enough in the history of Islam to say, "Yep, spot on, it's good to go." In fact, I do take some issue with this section...
In fact the primary sources which we possess are from 150-300 years after the events which they describe, and therefore are quite distant from those events (Nevo 1994:108; Wansbrough 1978:119; Crone 1987:204). For that reason they are, for all practical purposes, secondary sources, as they rely on other material, much of which no longer exists.
As an ancient historian, I take some degree of issue with this. It's true, of course, that the further a manuscript is from the events it describes, the more incredulous a historian should be. Even so, there are many manuscripts that are separated from their events by as much as eleven hundred years that I still consider to be accurate and authoritative. Examples are the manuscripts of Caesar, Thucydides, Herodotus, and Suetonius, all of which are cited by the (anonymous?) author. When I read The Conquest of Gaul, I was confident that what I was reading was a translation of what Caesar had actually written. Caesar's simple language, his third person narrative, the barely-discernible traces of political propaganda, they show through and you can tell that it's Caesar, even if the oldest manuscripts are separated from his death by nearly a thousand years.
Basically, it's fascinating that modern scholars, both religious and secular, would like to be elitist and say that people couldn't be trusted to maintain literature, but it's simply not true. One needs to go no further than to study Jewish numerology to understand that many scribes and scholars in the ancient world were every bit as good as a Xerox machine. Were there occasional scribal errors? Yes. Do I find a typographical error in pretty much every book I ever read, even those written in the age of spell-checking software and professional proofreaders? You betcha, and I'm smart enough to read around it and figure out what it meant.
Do the Islamic and Western traditions share much in common? Not really. The Arabs had scribes, but Western culture was kept alive by veritable armies of monks whose life's work was copying and recopying and recopying manuscripts. Among Christians, literacy was widespread, whereas among Muslims, memorization and recitation was stressed. The traditions were different, so the transmission of the texts were different.
I don't know if any of you regular readers have read the Quran, or if any of you are familiar with its formation. I read the Quran from January until March of this year, and studied its transmission and formation. In case you haven't read it, I found it to be rather repetitive. In some instances, that's a good thing, but in other instances, it's not terribly helpful or encouraging evidence for a reliable transmission of all details. Frequent repetition of such phrases as "For Allah is most compassionate, merciful" is understandable. Four or five repetitions of the story of Saleh are not encouraging; picture detailed reiterations of Noah's flood, David's battle with Goliath, and the Exodus throughout the Old Testament and you'll understand my point. Muslims claim that the Quran is authoritative, but it has a lot of details that are found nowhere in the Old or New Testaments that it claims to complete, while completely ignoring many other details.
As for the way the Quran was composed after Muhammed's death, it seems to have been a committee method, where anyone who'd heard anything Muhammed said was asked what they remembered, and it was compiled and completed. This assumes that the version of these events that we get from the Islamic tradition is what really happened; for my purposes, it doesn't matter, although the author of that piece suggests that the version that Muslim apologists offer may be a fictitious one. Either way, even if I assumed that Muhammed had a strong case, I would find the formation of the final version of the Quran to be very questionable. I find the formation of the biblical canon to be much more credible.
For what it's worth, I'm not an elitist about this issue, and there are clearly items and manuscripts that survive as a result of the Islamic tradition. A cloak reported to have belonged to Muhammed survives, as does ibn Fadlan's Rusiyyah, which is not drastically older than the Quran in the historical scheme of things.
As far as I'm concerned, books like Caesar, or Thucydides, or Suetonius set the standard for reliability. The Bible exceeds that standard with extreme prejudice. Even without the information presented by the cited website, the Quran doesn't meet my minimum burden. Is that a judgment on the Quran, or on Islam, or on Muslims? Not really. They're free to use whatever burden of proof they wish, and if their entire acceptance of the Quran is based on faith, then that's up to them.
As for me, I'll stick to the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and the works of C.S. Lewis.
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