Textual Criticism, The New Testament, and the Qur'an, by Larry Hurtado -
Larry Hurtado, a New Testament scholar, has given a review of Keith Small's book, Textual Criticism and Qur'an Manuscripts.
James White mentioned this on his Dividing Line web-cast recently, and points out that he used it for his upcoming book, What Every Christian Needs to Know about the Qur'an
I look forward to reading both of these books.
GERD-R. Puin:
ReplyDeleteMy idea is that the Koran is a kind of cocktail of texts that were not all understood even at the time of Muhammad. Many of them may even be a hundred years older than Islam itself. Even within the Islamic traditions there is a huge body of contradictory information, including a significant Christian substrate; one can derive a whole Islamic anti-history from them if one wants.
The Koran claims for itself that it is 'mubeen,' or 'clear,' but if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply doesn't make sense. Many Muslims—and Orientalists—will tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a fifth of the Koranic text is just incomprehensible. This is what has caused the traditional anxiety regarding translation. If the Koran is not comprehensible—if it can't even be understood in Arabic—then it's not translatable. People fear that. And since the Koran claims repeatedly to be clear but obviously is not—as even speakers of Arabic will tell you—there is a contradiction. Something else must be going on. - http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/01/what-is-the-koran/304024/?single_page=true
Yet such the warrant for the conclusions of such scholars should be subjected to to the same level of scrutiny that should be expected when they attack the Bible.
Thanks for that link, Peace by Jesus.
ReplyDeletevery useful.
I may bring your quote and other aspects of that Atlantic Monthly article out for more posts.
Good job.
Any update could be helpful, as that was from 4 years go.
ReplyDelete