Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Stephan Huller wrote:http://www.medievalists.net/2014/11/17/ ... iscovered/

This particular item was donated to the university in the 19th century.

outhouse wrote:

Stephan Huller wrote:http://www.medievalists.net/2014/11/17/ ... iscovered/

Great find.


To bad these people are al literalist and anything at all not in line with the Koran they know, will by denied.

There is no scholarship in islam that is credible from what im learning. To be in islam requires literalism

Clive wrote:
Hmm

The connections between formative Islam and late antique Judaism and Christianity have long deserved the attention of scholars of Islamic origins. Since the 19th century Muhammad’s early Christian background, on the one hand, his complex attitude – and that of his immediate followers – towards both Jews and Christians, on the other hand, and finally the presence of Jewish and Christian religious motifs in the Quranic text and in the Hadith corpus have been widely studied in the West.

Yet from the 1970s onwards, a seemingly major shift has taken place in the study of Islam's origins. Whereas the grand narratives of Islamic origins traditionally contained in the earliest Muslim writings have been usually taken to describe with some accuracy the hypothetical emergence of Islam in mid-7th-century Arabia, they are nowadays increasingly regarded as too late and ideologically biased – in short, as too eulogical – to provide a reliable picture of Islamic origins. Accordingly, new timeframes going from the late 7th to the mid-8th century (i.e. from the Marwanids to the Abbasids) and alternative Syro-Palestinian and Mesopotamian spatial locations are currently being explored.

On the other hand a renewed attention is also being paid to the once very plausible pre-canonical redactional and editorial stages of the Qur'an, a book whose core many contemporary scholars agree to be a kind of “palimpsest” originally formed by different, independent writings in which encrypted passages from the OT Pseudepigrapha, the NT Apocrypha and other writings of Jewish, Christian and Manichaean provenance may be found, and whose liturgical and/or homiletical function contrasts, notwithstanding the number of juridical verses contained in the Quranic text, with the overall juridical purposes set forth and projected onto it by the later established Muslim tradition.

Likewise the earliest Islamic community is presently regarded by many scholars as a somewhat undetermined monotheistic group that evolved from an original Jewish-Christian milieu into a distinct Muslim group perhaps much later than commonly assumed and in a rather unclear way, either within or tolerated by the new Arab polity in the Fertile Crescent or outside and initially opposed to it.

Finally the biography of Muhammad, the founding figure of Islam, has also been challenged in recent times due to the paucity and, once more, the late date and the apparently literary nature of the earliest biographical accounts at our disposal. In sum three major trends of thought define today the field of early Islamic studies: (a) the traditional Islamic view, which many non-Muslim scholars still uphold as well; (b) a number of revisionist views which have contributed to reshape afresh the contents, boundaries and themes of the field itself by reframing the methodological and hermeneutical categories required in the academic study of Islamic origins; and (c) several still conservative but at the same time more cautious views that stand half way between the traditional point of view and the revisionist views.

Surveying the history of these three different approaches to the manner in which Islam emerged, the role played by Muhammad and the nature of the Qur'an should provide a comprehensive overview of the significance of this particular field of research for late-antique religious studies, both Jewish and Christian.