Huon

Jesus son of Mary was not crucified, but it appeared so ...
Allah took him up unto Himself.
say not "Three" - Cease!

sotto voce

Second-hand information tends to be accidentally distorted, in no particular direction. The distortions of the Qur'an are too much in the same direction to be accidental.

sotto voce

Religious teaching may with pride (or perhaps pomposity) say one thing correctly in order to more authoritatively say another thing incorrectly.

sotto voce

It's hardly likely that, in a region of trade routes, in the 7th century, they would have been exposed to only one gospel. The conclusion must be that Joseph was excluded in order to glorify Mary at the expense of Jesus, in mimicry of Rome. This is confirmed, because the Qur'an does indeed glorify Mary.

Islam is indeed just what one would have devised as the counterpart of Romanism for regions where Christianity had spread, but was not under the control of Rome.

As already explained, to even mention Paul would have been to open a Pandora's box, as far as the Qur'anic authors were concerned. Paul's letters would certainly have been familiar, from Spain to India. To take them on would be to entertain the notion that Jesus really had been crucified. To take them on would be to cause readers to ask why the hell Merciful, All-Wise Allah had taken six hundred years to tell the world that "Jesus didn't die, after all, sorry about that."

Let's not forget that the Qur'an is never to be taken seriously for its own content. The only value in study of the Qur'an is its social and political role, in any era.

There would have been no vague notions about any teaching of the antichrist Western empire, or of the Old and New Testaments, by this time. That is a very unrealistic hypothesis. In fact, it was outside of that empire, but within the region in which Christian gospel had reached, that the contrast between the two was at its most embarrassing. One might even suppose that agents of the empire were instrumental in raising for that region a religion 'made in its own image'. It was certainly in their interests to do so.

Doug Shaver

Because there is not the smallest possibility that you could be mistaken. Is there?

Duvduv

But it was distorted in many cases, not the least of which was the claim that Mary was the daughter of Amram and sister of Aaron.
It is claimed that the greatness of Muhammad was that he couldn't read or write. It appears quite clear that the authors never actually read the sources. It was an orally based desert society, and they were working with stories heard along the way at different points in time from various sources. IMHO.

I also don't think opening a Pandora's box was a problem. There are plenty of Pandora's boxes in relation to Christianity and Judaism with the Quran. Not the least of which is that the Christians and Jews are people of the book despite the charge that their Scriptures having been changed.

sotto voce

Why 'But'? The whole thing is a distortion. How can a credible deity do a corrected version of his own testaments at least 600 years after he issued the previous tranche? It's much too amusing a notion. Let's not be so bemused as to suppose that a single word of it is intended as result of honest endeavour.

Are there any more of that ilk?

This looks like a crude rabbinical attempt to make the priesthood of Jesus seem Levitical rather than of Melchizedek. Yes, these trembling busybodies had read Hebrews, and the rest of the NT, too.

Tell it to the marines.

The advantage of which is that novelties are hard to establish. And Islam had to be established by violence, not by intellect. Without violence or threat thereof, it would have been unheard of. Again, like Romanism, that seems to get far more attention than is deserved.

It's quite true that orality was the rule in the desert— as everywhere else— but it is naive indeed to suppose that any whole population was illiterate. The whole NT and of course the whole OT were long established outside the empire, and the contradiction between adjacent Romanism and the Bible was egregious and embarrassing. There was every incentive for a villainous class of persons to suppress the Bible by use of a package of religious fables. Indeed, there is nothing of coherent theological sense in the whole Qur'an, except the bare, unevidenced statement that Jesus did not die. That, of course, was entirely unconvincing, so 'persuasion' of another sort was deemed necessary.

One should always view the Qur'an as secondary to the scimitar, in both religious and historical terms.

Duvduv

The point is the inferences to be made from the Islamic claims themselves. As I wrote earlier the Quran says that Haman was an advisor to Pharoah instead of to Ahaseurus as in the book of Esther. To me it is clear the authors relied on bits of stories that they mixed up rather than the texts themselves.
As far as violence is concerned I think this was rather sporadic. And they pretty much never had Inquisition cases except in a few Shia cases of forced conversion and with the fanatical dynasty in Morocco for a while.

sotto voce

The point of posting is that people actually read arguments.

Huon

Perhaps somebody could say the same about the "previous tranche" (the NT, if I understood correctly). Or the "credible deity" is a mischievious joker, or a bunch of jokers. And what about the Mormon tranche ?