The Quranic Jesus: A New Interpretation

204 Pages·2018·2.134 MB·English

by  Carlos A. Segovia

Carlos A. Segovia
The Quranic Jesus
Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam – Tension, Transmission,
Transformation
Edited by Patrice Brodeur, Alexandra Cuffel, Assaad
Elias Kattan, and Georges Tamer
Volume 5
Carlos A. Segovia
The Quranic Jesus
A New Interpretation
ISBN 978-3-11-059764-6
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-059968-8
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-059896-4
ISSN 2196-405X
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018951346
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To Sofya

نِ ارَ جْ َأ هُ لَفَ ، يبِ نَ مَ آ مَّ ثُ یسَ يعِ بِ نَ مَ آ اذَِإوَ
٣٤٤٦ يراخبلا حيحص

Preface
While clearly affirming that God has no partner, and moreover that he is child-
less,1 the quranic authors repeatedly encourage their audience to behave like
Jesus’s disciples, defend Jesus against the Jews, declare him to be the Messiah
and the Word of God as well as a spirit from him (a series of titles they never
apply to other prophets), make systematic use of a number of crucial Christian
rhetorical moves, and quote more or less verbatim the New Testament Apocry-
pha and the writings of several late-antique Christian authors. Furthermore, they
seem to be engaged in intra-Christian controversies just as much as they seem
to partake in anti-Christian polemics. Conversely, the apparently pro-Jewish pas-
sages that one finds in the Qur’ān often prove tricky, as they are usually placed
within, or next to, more or less violent anti-Jewish pericopes that bear the marks
of Christian rhetoric despite a few occasional anti-Christian interpolations. And
to further complicate the matter, the earliest quranic layers seem to develop a
high- yet non-incarnationist Christology of which, interestingly enough, Jesus’s
name is totally missing.
What, then, can we make out of this puzzle? To what extent may the Qur’ān’s
highly complex Christology2 help to decipher not only the intent of various
quranic authors – which may well be very different from what has been hitherto
taken for granted – but also the likewise complex redactional process charac-
teristic of the document itself? Is it, moreover, possible to inscribe the often –
indeed too-often – oversimplified Christology of the Qur’ān within the periph-
eral religious culture of the 6th-to-7th-century Near East? Is it possible, also, to
unearth from it something about the tension carefully – or perhaps not so care-
fully – buried in the document between a messianic-oriented- and a prophet-
ic-guided religious thought, and to root therein the earliest “Islamic” schism –
if speaking of Islam before ‘Abd al-Malik’s reign in the late 7th century makes
any sense, that is? By analysing, first, the typology and the plausible date of the
Jesus-texts contained in the Qur’ān (which implies moving far beyond any purely
thematic division of the passages in question), and by examining, in the second
place, the Qur’ān’s earliest Christology vis-à-vis its later (and indeed much better
known) Muhamadan kerygma, the present study tries to give response to these
crucial questions.
1 On the difference between God being “sonless” and “childless,” see further Chapter 5.
2 Let this composite term be provisionally understood here in its broadest sense, i.e. as allusive
to the treatment that God’s Word and Jesus’s messiahship receive in the quranic corpus.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110599688-201
X   Preface
A few acknowledgements are in order here. I should like to thank Ali Amir-
Moezzi and Guillaume Dye for encouraging me to work on sūra-s 2 and 3 of the
Qur’ān for a collective volume forthcoming at Les Éditions du Cerf, of which I have
extracted a few excerpts in Chapter 3; Haggai Mazuz for allowing me to include
in it a few paragraphs of a paper of mine upcoming in a volume he is preparing
for the Brill Reference Library of J udaism;3 William Adler, Lorenzo DiTommaso,
and Matthias Henze, for permitting me to reproduce there too a few fragments of
my recent contribution to Michael Stone’s Festschrift;4 Isaac Oliver and Anders
Petersen for their helpful feedback on an earlier draft of my analysis of Q 9:30-1,
which I have undertaken and reworked in Chapter 4; Manfred Kropp for his val-
uable insights on the section on Abrǝha’s Christology included too in it – whose
first draft, moreover, he welcomed for publication in Oriens Christianus in 2015;5
Matt Sheddy, for authorising me to incorporate to the Afterword some excerpts
of a paper of mine on the Dome of the Rock inscriptions;6 and Daniel Beck, on
whose hermeneutical insights I substantially rely in Chapter 5. I am also grate-
ful to Guillaume Dye, with whom I have had the pleasure to thoroughly discuss
many of the views put forward in the pages that follow; Basil Lourié, who without
knowing it helped me to make of the study of the Qur’ān my field of speciali-
sation over the past ten years;7 Emilio González Ferrín, who kindly shared with
3 Carlos A. Segovia, “Friends, Enemies, or Hoped-for New Rulers? Reassessing the Early Jewish
Sources Mentioning the Rise of Islam,” forthcoming in Jews and Judaism in Northern Arabia, ed.
Haggai Mazuz (BRLJ; Leiden and Boston: Brill).
4 Carlos A. Segovia, “An Encrypted Adamic Christology in the Qur’ān? New Insights on 15:29;
21:91; 38:72; 66:12,” in The Embroidered Bible: Studies in Biblical Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha
in Honour of Michael E. Stone, ed. William Adler, Lorenzo DiTommaso, and Matthias Henze
(SVTP; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018) 913–27.
5 Carlos A. Segovia, “Abraha’s Christological Formula RḤMNN W-MAS1Ḥ-HW and Its Relevance
for the Study of Islam’s Origins,” OC 98 (2015): 52–63.
6 Carlos A. Segovia, “Identity Politics and the Study of Islamic Origins: The Inscriptions of the
Dome of the Rock as a Test Case,” forthcoming in Identity, Politics and the Study of Islam: Current
Dilemmas in the Study of Religions, ed. Matt Sheddy (CESIF; Sheffield, UK, and Bristol, CT: Equinox)
7 For this book, together with my upcoming papers: “Messalianism, Binitarianism, and the
East-Syrian Bacground of the Qur’ān” (forthcoming in Remapping Emergent Islam: Texts, S ocial
Contexts, and Ideological Trajectories, ed. Carlos A. Segovia [SWLAEMA; Amsterdam: Amster-
dam University Press], “Asceticism and the Early Quranic Milieu: A Symptomatic Reading of Q
17:79, 43:36, 73:1–8, 74:43, 76:26, and 108” (forthcoming), and (with Gilles Courtieu) “Bābil, Makka
and Ṭā’if, or (always) Ctesiphon(-Seleucia)? New Insights into the Iranian Setting of the Earliest
Quranic Milieu” (forthcoming) is my final contribution to the study of Islams origins, since I have
recently moved into an altogether different field of research at the crossroads of postcolonial
studies, contemporary philosophy, and anthropological theory – after having fulfilled, that is,
an ambitious research project whose two principal results I take to be (1) the underlying of the