sotto voce

In the Bible, too. Cunning.

Duvduv

It would seem to me that it is impossible that in the 7th century the authors of the Quran did not know of the canonical New Testament including the Pauline epistles. According to the web page of the excerpt below, there were a number of Arab tribes before Islam who adopted Christianity (who were then known as the Nasara).

See excerpt below from this web page: http://www.gnfcw.com/images/christia...amic_times.pdf
Mecca was a commercial, religious and cultural center, highly respected by the Arabs. Caravans from Syria, Iraq, Yemen, China, and Persia came to trade with the Meccans. At the same time, Meccan merchants were accustomed to going to Syria for trading at least twice a year. Thus Mecca was vibrant with life and activities and merchants from everyway of life carried with them, besides their goods, their civilizations, religions and cultures. Islamic sources recount many trips Muhammad made to Syria with his uncle Abu Talib as well as after he was employed by Khadija, who later became his first wife. During these trips, it was said that he encountered Christian monks and other Christians. When his followers were persecuted in Mecca, he sent them to the Christian Abyssinian king to find refuge in his country.

sotto voce

At last, we have admission that these deeply disturbed fable-tellers must have known Paul's letters.

We will of course ignore the crackpot idea that monks can be Christians.

Duvduv

Sotto Voce, I don't follow your humor. But if there was enough Christianity available for the Quran writers to know about the canonical texts AND Christian doctrine, then clarification would be needed as to why they relied on sources resembling the gospel of Luke and infancy gospels, skipping over the rest (include the epistles) and then attacking the trinity.

sotto voce

:blush: I can't take the credit, unfortunately. Of course it's lunacy to suppose that a Christian can be a monk. Or that anyone other than a lunatic can believe in a trinity.

If you've got one, you've got the other, of course. You're really on form, today! :notworthy:

Duvduv

Whatever.....it's a bit over my head.
In any case, there seems to be good reason to believe that Arabs located in Arabia in the 6th and 7th centuries had ample opportunity to be exposed (for want of a better term) to "Chalcedonian/Canonical Christians".
And that makes the situation even more intriguing that the authors of the Quran seemingly IGNORED the details of the canonical texts when discussing the life of Jesus/Isa and then taking a swipe specifically at the trinity.

I can only imagine that the authors simply read the texts and refused to rely on GLuke or on anything else. Most of the life stories of Jesus evoking the NT are simply brief pronouncements.

The Quran doesn't even care about all the attention granted in the gospels to the actual birth of Jesus despite it's acceptance of the very unusual idea of a virgin birth for this particular "prophet" and his special "messianic" status which the Quran accepts.

sotto voce

The trinity? I don't understand why polytheism is so very popular. It's no gods, or several.

Duvduv

Sotto Voce, any other thoughts on the points about the Quran? I think it's fair to say that we can assume that the authors of the Quran did not write everything from scratch, but incorporated stories circulating among the Arabs long before Islam and which were probably even in written form that they considered MORE ORIGINAL tales of Jesus and the Baptist than the canonical text versions.

mountainman

Its quite simple: in the eyes of the Quranic compilers the canonical Christian orthodoxy had no respect. They of the 6th and 7th centuries knew a great deal about the contraversies of the 4th and 5th centuries, and what lay behind them. The use of non canonical sources demonstrates this clearly. The Quranic compilers represented a hybrid Christian orthodoxy.

sotto voce

The Qur'an's authors had a very simple strategy, which was to prove beyond peradventure that the doctrine of justification by faith terrified them, as it did many others, who, in their own ways, set out to prove that had that same fear.