The Quran and the Gospels

Emerging scholarship has been suggesting more and more that there are deep links between early Islamic literature and extant Christian literature, especially that of the gospels. Two new books deepen our understanding of this: Emran El-Badawi, The Qur'an and the Aramaic Gospel Traditions (Routledge, 2013). You can read an interview with the author here.

About this book we are told:

This book is a study of related passages found in the Arabic Qur’an and the Aramaic Gospels, i.e. the Gospels preserved in the Syriac and Christian Palestinian Aramaic dialects. It builds upon the work of traditional Muslim scholars, including al-Biqa‘i (d. ca. 808/1460) and al-Suyu?i (d. 911/1505), who wrote books examining connections between the Qur’an on the one hand, and Biblical passages and Aramaic terminology on the other, as well as modern western scholars, including Sidney Griffith who argue that pre-Islamic Arabs accessed the Bible in Aramaic.

The Qur’an and the Aramaic Gospel Traditions examines the history of religious movements in the Middle East from 180-632 CE, explaining Islam as a response to the disunity of the Aramaic speaking churches. It then compares the Arabic text of the Qur’an and the Aramaic text of the Gospels under four main themes: the prophets; the clergy; the divine; and the apocalypse. Among the findings of this book are that the articulator as well as audience of the Qur’an were monotheistic in origin, probably bilingual, culturally sophisticated and accustomed to the theological debates that raged between the Aramaic speaking churches. Arguing that the Qur’an’s teachings and ethics echo Jewish-Christian conservatism, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Religion, History, and Literature.

The publisher also provides the table of contents:

1 Sources and Method 2 Prophetic Tradition in the Late Antique Near East 3 Prophets and their Righteous Entourage 4 The Evils of the Clergy 5 The Divine Realm 6 Divine Judgement and the Apocalypse 7 Data Analysis and Conclusion

Also published in December by Routledge is a second book along a similar though more personally focused theme: Hosn Abboud, Mary in the Qur'an: A Literary Reading (Routledge, 2013). 

About this book we are told:

Providing an analysis of the complete story of Mary in its liturgical, narrative and rhetorical contexts, this literary reading is a prerequisite to any textual reading of the Qur’an whether juristic, theological, or otherwise. The Qur’an is an oral event, linguistic phenomenon and great literature. So the application of modern literary theories is essential to have full comprehension of the history of the development of literary forms from pre-Islamic period such as poetry, story telling, speech-giving to the present. In addition, there is a need, from a feminist perspective, to understand in depth why a Christian mother figure such as Mary was important in early Islam and in the different stages of the development of the Qur’an as a communication process between Muhammad and the early Muslim community. Introducing modern literary theories, gender perspective and feminist criticism into Qur’anic scholarship for the first time, this book will be an invaluable resource for scholars and researchers of Islamic Studies, Qur’anic and New Testament Studies, Comparative Literature and Feminist Theology.