reynolds-the-quran-in-its-historical-context-2

318 Sidney GriffithMuslim and non-Muslim scholars, including Franc;:ois de Blois, have arguedin the Qur'an's view the Christian Trinity is God, as Father; Mary, as SpiritMother; and Jesus, Mary's son, as their Son, and so the "third ofthree." 42With the recognition that the phrase thalithu thalathatin is best explamedArabic rendition of a Syriac epithet for Jesus, the mystery of its me:arung .. ·resolved. The Qur' an is reflecting a genuine usage of Christians in its auclienctiiits polemic against their belief that Jesus, the Messiah, the son of Mary, and.threefold one," is the Son of God. Similarly, the Qur'an's polemicalalso evident in its suggestion in al-Ma 'ida (5) 116 that in its view the absurdof the Christians should lead to the manifestly unacceptable conclusionJesus is the Son of God and God, so too should his mother Mary be GodGods, apart from God.The Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation that thepolemically rejects are most reasonably seen as the doctrines of theChristian communities lmown to be in its milieu; there is no need to postutlattfpresence of other communities, for which there is no historical evidence attheir presence, save in what the present writer ~akes to be a scholarly misre:aduof the Qur'an itself. The misreading consists in the failure to recognizethe pertinent passages, the Qur'an is not reporting the views of those itNazoreans; it is lmowledgeably and rhetorically suggesting their absurdityits own point of view and polemically rejecting them as wrong. The fact thatQur'an's Christology is then a theological match for the earlier JewishChristo logy in its substance is not a convincing argument for the Qur' an'sence on the Jewish Christians, nor is it evidence for a Jewish Christianits milieu. This is especially the case when there is no historical evidencepresence of Jewish Christians in its milieu, yet there is a convincing,argument in favor of the Qur'an's polemic against the doctrine of thelmown to be in its environs. There is no need for the Qur'an to have athis polemic beyond the logic of its own basic tenet of al-tawl,zfd, "Yourone God; there is no God but He." (al-Baqara [2] 163).There is a similar case in the passage in the Qur' an that has often beenboth Muslims and non-Muslims to deny the reality of the crucifixion ofal-Nisa' (4) 157-59. 43 In the immediate context, the Jews are thePeople" whose reported boasts the Qur'an rejects in this matter. 44 And withincontext, the seemingly docetist or phantasiast Christian views that manytators have seen reflected in the enigmatic phrase shubbiha lahum (vs. 1understood to mean something on the order of"it only seemed so to them,"42 See de Blois, "Na$ranfand lfanif," 13-15.43 See G.S. Reynolds, "The Muslim Jesus: Dead or alive?" BSOAS 72, 2009,T. Lawson, The Cntcifixion and the Qur 'an: A Study in the History of MilS lim ThoughtOneworld, 2009.44 There seems to be some Rabbinic evidence for this boast. See P. Schafer, Jesus in thePrinceton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007, esp. 73-74.Al-Na~ara in the Qur'an: a hermeneutical reflection 319some scholars to posit the presence of an ancient, Gnostic and docetistcommunity in the Qur'an's milieu. 45 In this instance too, there is noto go beyond the contemporary "Melkites," "Jacobites" and ''Nestorians" tofor the Qur'an's awareness of this line of thinking. The so-called "Julianthefollowers of Julian ofHalicarnassus (d. after 518), were a constant targettheologians of the "Jacobite" community, who called them "Aphthartoand"Phantasiasts," accusing them of detracting from the concreteof Jesus's death on the cross because of their teachings about the incorruptofChrist's body. 46 These polemics can be found alluded to in a very generalin Syriac texts that address the historical circumstances of Christians inin the century before the time of Mul;lammad, e.g. in Jacob of Sarug's"Letter to the Himyarites," 47 and in Simeon of Beth Arsham's (d. before· · "Letter on the Himyarite Martyrs." 48 There are even reports of"Julianists" inwith whose Christians, according to the traditions, Mul;lammad himself isto have had relations. 49Arabic Qur' an in its inter-communal environment"'~"u''~"'u of the sens~ of the term al-naifara in the Qur' an and of the identityChristians it designated has sought to discern its intended meaning withinof the Islamic scripture's own horizons, both. in reference to the text'spurposes and within the context of its communal frames of reference.discernment of the Qur'an's intention to offer a critique of Christian beliefpractice is grounded in a reading of the canonical text in the form in which wehave it, without prejudice to any effort to discover earlier stages in theof the text. The recognition of the polemical element in the Qur'an'sstyle suggests that Arabic-speaking Christians were in all likelihood inauc11e111Ce. and certainly within its purview. The determination of the probableof these Christians is based on the historical evidence for actual Christianin the Qur'an's milieu.Qur'an itself, with its obvious debt to the canonical and apocryphal scripofthe Jews and Christians, along with its reflection of much Jewish andlore, provides most of the evidence for its origins in an environment thate.g., Kl.ing, Der Islam, 598.R. Draguet,Julien d'Ha/icarnasse et sa controverse avec Severe d'Antioche sur l'incomtptibilitedu Christ: Etude d'histoire litteraire et doctrinale suivie des fragments dogmatiques deLouvain: Irnprimerie P. Smeesters, 1924; A: Gri1!meier, Christ in Christian Tradition:Council ofChalcedon (451) to Gregory the Great (590-604), vol. II, part 2, "The ChurchCoJnslllmtiJlople in the Sixth Century," P. Allen and J. Cawte, (trans.), London: Mowbray &Wel;tmi.nsto:r, 1995, 79-111. See also Hainthaler, Christliche Araber, 105-6, 133-34.Jacobi Santgensis Epistulae Quotquot Supersunt, CSCO 110, Paris: E TypographeoRei]Jublicae, 1937,87-102."La lettera di Simeone vescovo di Beth-Arsam sopra I Martiri Omeriti," RealeAcc,ademia dei Lincei 278, 1880-1881, 3-32.Hainthaler, Christliche Araber, 133-34.