f. e. peters - jesus and muhammad parallel tracks

8/18/2019 F. E. Peters - Jesus and Muhammad Parallel Tracks

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Jesus and Muhammad


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JESUS

AND

MUHAMMAD Parallel Tracks, Parallel Lives

F. E. PETERS


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Library o Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataPeters, F. E. (Francis E.)

Jesus and Muhammad : parallel tracks, parallel lives / F. E. Peters. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical reerences and index.ISBN ----

. Jesus Christ—Biography.. Muhammad, Prophet, d. —Biography.. Christianity and other religions—Islam.. Islam—Relations—Christianity. I. itle.

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For

Christine Goettsche Peters

a pluperect , truly


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Contents

Introduction: Clearing the Ground xiii

Te Art o Portraiture xiv

Te Long Quests xv

History and Revelation xv

Saints and Teir Lives xvi

In the Eyes o the Believers xviii Polemic and History xix

wo Foreign Countries xx

Parallel racks, Parallel Lives xxii

. Te Settings

Jesus and First-Century Palestine W W J M F C?

S S

Te Context or Muhammad

S S

R

E

Aferthoughts: Te Prophets in Place

P H

G M

. Opening the Files

Te Dossier on Jesus

P S

J S C S


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viii

Te Dossier on Muhammad

G K B:

B B “P R”

W H I D

W

L

M P

Aferthoughts: Te New estament and the Quran

. Te Critic at Work: Coming o Age

Jesus’ Inancy Narratives

E F G

J B

R

A V C

N I

B M

O M’ F

W J’ L

A: E O

Te “Inancy Gospel o Islam”

B M I A

“ M W H E”

A U C

P P

O B, C

H

A A P C A M

B

S W

M K

M

Aferthoughts: Where Do We Stand?


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ixContents

. Te Living Voice

Jesus Speaks

J’ W D Q

M Q

Q M

Q

L H

Q J

Q D J

Q L W

Q, J

W, W, W?

P Q

Muhammad Speaks, or Sings

Q M, P P

R O C

O

P P

R M

A S S S

M’ R R

M S

M

Aferthoughts: Q and the Hadith

. Te Message: Jesus in Galilee

Te Shape o the Gospels John the Baptist and Jesus

Te wele

Spreading the Good News

An Itinerant Preacher

What Was the Good News?

Te Kingdom


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x

W D K C?

A D K?

Messiahs and Te Messiah M E

R S

J K

A R M

Signs and Wonders

“. . . ”

S, A M

A Jewish eacher

J

A D

Aferthoughts: Te Man and the Message

. Te Message: Muhammad at Mecca

A Preliminary Exercise Te Man Muhammad

Te Call to Prophecy

An Experience o the Unseen World

A Heavenly Journey

Identication, Validation

Muhammad’s Public Preaching

G

I

Te Muslims Pray

Growing Pressures

Te Satanic Verses

Treats o the Judgment

Te Seal o the Prophets Identiying the Prophet

W W M ?

A J C M?

wo Prophetic Reormers

Te Plot against Muhammad

A Resort to Violence Te Migration

Aferthoughts: wo Versions o the Good News


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xiContents

. Act wo: ragedy and riumph

Jesus in Jerusalem

A -P G A C A?

A E

I

A P P

C

L D

L S

A G

S

P

C

B

Muhammad at Medina M A

M

W D ?

M J M

B W

A F R W P

E I

S

I I

D

Aferthoughts: Politics and Piety

. A New Dawn: Te Afermath, the Legacy Jesus, the Afermath

E

R A

P

U

W A

A


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xii

E C

E

Muhammad, the Legacy A P M

M B W

D P

A M S

“A B P”

P R

A P

M M

Aferthoughts: Portraits om Lie

. Epilogue: Spreading the Word

Without the Lord

How the Message Spread

Making Christians Without the Prophet

Te Missionary Impulse

Conersion and Assimilation

Making Muslims

Notes A Guide to Further Reading

Index


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“C” “I” are notions o enormous complexity,complex enough to give considerable pause to anyone tempted to dene, oreven merely to describe, either o them. And yet they are apparently embracedin their totality by the millions o believers who solemnly assert, “I am aChristian” or “I am a Muslim.” Te average Christian or Muslim probably

does not much advert to all the details o those constructs, and, indeed, when presented with this or that particular eature o Christianity or Islam, might well say, “No, that’s not what I believe. I do not believe that hell will last oreternity” or “No, I do not believe that our every act is determined by God.”

Tis rejection o parts o what has been held to be an integral tradition isnot new nor has it been conned to the ill-instructed or casual believer. Chris-tianity and Islam have been evolving rom their very inception, and not merely

in incidentals but in their core components. What are called “heresy” byChristians and “innovation” by Muslims are in effect divergent opinions onthis or another content o the aith. I they ail to attract support, they areconsigned to the believers’ popular catalogs o ailed ideas and their adherentsmay even linger on at the margins o the community. But when and i thesenovel points o view eventually prevail, the earlier offensive labeling is removedand Christianity itsel, or Islam, is quietly altered—the notion o immuta-

bility must be preserved—as when Christians began to hold that Mary wasconceived without sin or Muslims that Muhammad was incapable o sin.

Tough both religious systems are deeply committed to the propositionthat God’s will and God’s revelation are eternal and immutable or, to put it inhistorical terms, that what the Christian or the Muslim now believes is what Jesus or Muhammad originally preached, and intended, the content, shape,and concerns o both Christianity and Islam have in act changed over the

centuries. Not essentially, the believer may insist. We set that issue aside; itsresolution is the burden o the believer, not the historian. Here it is rather the

Introduction: Clearing the Ground


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act o change that is being looked at and, more specically, change as it affectsthe ounding gures o the two communities, Jesus and Muhammad.

Te Art o Portraiture

Te portraits o Jesus and Muhammad are central to Christianity and Islamrespectively. And not simply as sketches but as portraits drawn rom lie, as veriable accounts o two historical personages and what happened to andaround them. For the believer, that portrait is richly gured rom its bold

outlines down to its ne details and with nuanced color and shadings. It is acomplex package indeed that the believer accepts when he or she affi rms, aseach Christian must, “I believe in Jesus Christ, the only Son o God,” or theMuslim, “I bear witness . . . that Muhammad is the Envoy o God.” Complexand evolving. Te portrait o Jesus, which was substantially redrawn in boldlydifferent colors in the ourth century, was regured or many in the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries and again in the nal decades o the

twentieth. Tat o Muhammad, though arguably more stable than that o Jesus, has been turned this way or that by Sus and socialists, modernists andundamentalists.

Historians can look at the current portraits o the two men and detectmany o the various overcoats (though not necessarily their own!) that havebeen laid down on the original. What they attempt to discern is not the actualman, to be sure, who may be lost to us, but the original portrait, the one that

the earliest generation o believers began to gure or themselves. We mustremind ourselves throughout that, or all the stripping away o accretions andor all the deconstructions o the texts beore us, we are still dealing with por-traiture, with artists’ renderings o a subject who was Jesus or who wasMuhammad. We can conjecture about the men who sat or those portraits,but we nonetheless see them only through the eyes o the committed artists who set them down in writing.

Our only relie rom the constriction o authorship is the knowledge thatthe Jesus and the Muhammad who were originally presented to us were not the products o an overly idiosyncratic or individualistic act o creation. Each othe Gospels, even i it was produced by the individual named, represents a social portrait o Jesus. Ibn Ishaq was a crafsman-auteur, not a Francis Baconthrowing off his own personally incandescent vision o Muhammad; and even John, the most particular o the evangelists, was writing to and or a commu-

nity, conrming, and perhaps tweaking, a Jesus they already knew. Amongthem all, Paul alone warns us that we are in the presence o an original artist,


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Introduction: Clearing the Ground xv

but his portrait o Jesus is theological-impressionistic rather than biographical-realistic. Paul’s Jesus Christ is a bold gure, but Paul was not working rom lie

but rather rom an already conceived sketch o the actual Jesus o Nazareth whose bare outlines alone we can occasionally discern there ( Cor :–).

Te Long Quests

Tis is not, o course, the rst attempt to retrieve the original take on either Jesus or Muhammad. uite the contrary: the “quest or the historical Jesus,”

as it was called in one amous book on the subject, has been going on at leastsince David Friedrich Strauss’ Te Lie o Jesus Critically Examined (Germanoriginal, ), and that or Muhammad since two decades later with the publication, likewise in German, o the rst volume o Aloys Sprenger’s Te Lie and eaching o Muhammad . Since then, many have ollowed in theirtracks.1 Te Jesus quest in particular has become not a path but a crowdedhighway, while the search or the historical Muhammad has been transormed

or some into a dangerous passage, not because it is crowded but by reason ocertain outraged bystanders who resent any traffi c along this particular road.

Following back along the historians’ ootsteps will inevitably lead us toashion our own portraits o Jesus and Muhammad, as many others havealready done, and on the same evidence. As we shall see in detail, that evidenceis, or both men, o two sorts. Te rst is documentary: we have at hand what are purported to be the very words uttered by Jesus and Muhammad. Muhammad’s

are reestanding as a work called the uran, but in the Christian instance, Jesus’ words are embedded in our second type o evidence, our biographical portraits whose quite unhistorical point is made in the very titles o the works.“Tis is,” the Gospels announce, “the Good News o Jesus Christ, the Son oGod.” And the Sira or Lie o the Prophet is no less orthcoming: it is, it tellsus, nothing less than “Te Lie o the Envoy o God.” Te Christians preer the portrait: it is not the sayings source but the biographical Gospels that are in-

corporated into the liturgy. Muslims avor the words: the aithul pray theuran, not the Sira . Te uran is the stuff o liturgy; the Sira , o piety. ButMuslims venerate the uran not because it reveals Muhammad, but ratherbecause it reveals God, whose very words, they believe, it records.

History and Revelation

What I have just called preerences are in act determinations imposed by twodifferent views o revelation. For the Muslim, revelation is circumstantially


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historical . God’s nal message to humankind was delivered through a middle-agedArab at a given time and a given place: Muhammad ibn Abdullah, rst at

Mecca and then at Medina, between AD and . For Christians, revela-tion is history itsel: what was said and done by and to Jesus o Nazareth inPalestine between BC and AD .

Islam springs rom a revelation in history, while Christianity rests uponhistory as revelation. Te latter leads directly back to and ocuses on the man Jesus, while the Muslim view directs us through but beyond Muhammad tothe Word o God. Tis is not a place where the historian wants to go. Chris-

tians present the Jesus evidence o the Gospels as divinely guaranteed history,and the historian is both willing and capable o ignoring the guarantee, whichis underwritten by one or another theory o inspiration, and proceeds to con-ront the portraits o Jesus as admittedly tendentious documents. Te Sira is put orward in much the same evangelical manner by Muslims, and i theyrely less than the Christians on divine inspiration to validate the Sira ’s con-tents, the Muslims are no less convinced than the Christians that the bio-

graphical document they have beore them, which is as openly tendentious asthe Gospels, represents the truth o the matter with regard to the lie oMuhammad.

Te uran is not, however, represented by Muslims or the Muslim tradi-tion as anything remotely resembling what we think o as history. It is not intheir eyes a record, accurate or otherwise, o the sayings o Muhammad.Rather, it is a collection o the sayings o God and any attempt to treat it other-

wise, as simply a document , or example, that conceptual touchstone o nine-teenth-century historicism, is strenuously resisted and summarily dismissed.So the historian approaches the uran document without Muslim consent, which is not crucial, but also without valuable Muslim assistance. Muslimshave been copiously helpul on matters o content and even, more recently, onstyle, where the dogma o the inimitability o the uran long inhibited ana-lytical criticism, but they are still notably and understandably reticent on both

the sources and composition o the uran.

Saints and Teir Lives

I we look to the narrative sources or Jesus and Muhammad, we immediatelyrecognize the amiliar genre o biography. We can be more specic, however.Tis is not only biography; the Gospels and the Sira belong to that specialized

type o biography called hagiography, the lie o a saint. Unortunately, thelives o saints make good reading but very bad history. We observe rom


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Introduction: Clearing the Ground xvii

countless examples that the charisma o holy men or women, the quality thatattracted ollowers during their lietime, ofen grows stronger afer death.

Long afer saints have departed lie, their memories and their continuingability to perorm wondrous deeds draw people to their tombs and shrines.But i their reputation grows larger, so too does their legend. Memoriesexpand, stories are enlarged as they are retold. And the retellings o saints’stories become literary shrines on the same scale, and ofen with similar orna-ment, as the buildings that enclose their remains or commemorate their holi-ness. Hagiography is not the history o the saint; it is his or her monument.

Tis is a book about two holy men. Tey are not, however, the amiliarsaints, men and women earmarked by themselves or others, or even by thedeity, as possessing a high degree o sanctity and so too special powers. Teholy men in question here, Jesus and Muhammad, are o course saints by anydenition o that word. Tey were understood during their lietime and aferto possess an extraordinary degree o holiness. But that sanctity arose notrom their powers or their persuasiveness but rom their offi ce. In the simplest

terms, both men were regarded in the rst instance as prophets, individualschosen to be the mouthpieces o God, men sent to warn and to instruct.Other saints earn their authority by their personal holiness, that amous “odoro sanctity” that exudes rom their persons. Jesus and Muhammad doubtless possessed that, but their authority derived rom elsewhere, as they claimedand as their ollowers believed: they were the chosen o God. And they spoke with an authority higher than themselves.

But there is much more. Te public instruction put orth by Jesus andMuhammad was not mere wisdom. Many prophets have given counsel or warning and many saints have preached reorm or renewal, but what pro-ceeded rom the mouths o these two was radical and oundational: radical inthat it represented a break with the current religious tradition and ounda-tional in that it marked the beginning o a new “way” that was, on God’s ownauthority, necessary or salvation. Te words o these prophet saints would be

ignored at the explicit price o eternity.Saints are optional. I many are diffi cult to ignore, in the end the aithul

make their own choices: cults wax and wane; saints slide or tumble, or indeedare occasionally cast, into oblivion. On the record at least, both Judaism andIslam do not much approve o saints or, to be more precise, the cult o saints,the public veneration accorded to the remains or the memory o holy men and women, which is thought to demean the divine. Te Saudis, or example, are

notorious, even among Muslims, or their demolition o the tomb shrineso saints. Jesus and Muhammad—whose tomb remains untouched, indeed,


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extravagantly enlarged, in Saudi Medina—are not optional holy men. TeChristian creed offers no alternatives to the affi rmation that Jesus Christ is in

act the only Son o God. Its Muslim counterpart is likewise insistent. It hasonly two members. Te rst is an affi rmation o monotheism, “Tere is no godbut Te God,” and the second memorably and unmistakably announces that“Muhammad is the Sent One o God.” Here too no alternatives are offered.Unlike David or Isaiah, but quite like Moses, these two prophets are essential saints, objects o respect, veneration, and, what is crucial, perect obedience.

In the Eyes o the Believers

Te two men are by no means equivalent in the eyes o their ollowers. ForMuslims, the Meccan Arab Muhammad ibn Abdullah was a prophet; indeed,the “seal o the prophets,” the end o the prophetic line o monotheistic prophetsthat began with Abraham and included Jesus in its number.2 But, or all that,Muhammad was a mortal; he was born, lived, and died in Western Arabia at

the turn into the seventh Christian century. As just remarked, his remains arebelieved to be in a tomb inside a mosque in Medina, where he died.

Te Galilean Jew Jesus, or Jesus Christ, as the Christians call him, wasofen taken or a prophet by his contemporaries, but in his ollowers’ eyes he was and is the Messiah, the promised Savior o Israel. He was born, lived, anddied in Roman Palestine at the turn into the rst Christian century. But,Christians avow, he was subsequently raised rom the dead, as many witnesses

testied, and so demonstrated that he was truly the Son o God and theSavior and Redeemer o all humankind.

Jesus and Muhammad are, then, considerably more than saints, and thehistorical recollections o their lives, as there surely must have been, havenaturally become magnets or a great mass not only o myth and legend but oargument and even polemic. And they are objects o aith. Myths and legendsare accretions on history and can be removed, not entirely without pain, by

paring with the critical scalpel. But the creeds or statements o aith take usinto a different place. “I believe” or “I bear witness” is quite different rom “Iknow as a act.” Faith, it is said, leads to understanding—Credo ut intelligam ,as one o the believers elegantly put it—which may even be true. But the his-torian is seeking a different, perhaps even a lesser, result: demonstrated knowl-edge. Faith does not supply such. It can assert which sayings o Jesus orMuhammad are authentic, but it cannot demonstrate that they are such. Te

historian thinks he can, and i the results are at times tentative and alwayssubject to rebuttal, they have a claim to be veriably true.


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Introduction: Clearing the Ground xix

For many centuries Christians and Muslim historians were content toaccept aith’s assertions on the subjects o Jesus and Muhammad, but in the

nineteenth century, at the term o intellectual and religious developmentsthat had been going on in the West since at least the sixteenth-century Reor-mation and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, historians began toaddress aresh the lives o these two transcendental holy men, to disregard theassertions o aith and to pose the questions o history.

One o the critical moments in the passage o Jesus and Muhammad romthe hands o believers into those o historians was the book by Albert

Schweitzer titled Te Quest or the Historical Jesus , and that characterizationhas ofen been appropriated to describe the historians’ inquiries concerningboth men. Muhammad in act quickly ollowed Jesus into the historians’ dockin the nineteenth century, and was subjected to the same critical scrutiny.And, it is worth noting, in both instances the inquiry was conducted by Western Protestant Christian scholars, where each o those qualiers carriedits own considerable baggage.

Polemic and History

No historical search begins rom scratch, and certainly not the one being pro- posed here: no one comes to the investigation into the lives o Jesus andMuhammad without prior inormation and, even more consequentially, withno opinions regarding these two extraordinary, and extraordinarily amous,

individuals. Indeed, with the possible exception o one or two Asian sur-names, “Muhammad” has been given to more living individuals than anyother name on the planet.3 But i Christians know a great deal about Jesus,and Muslims about Muhammad, the knowledge that passes between the twocommunities is subject to intense screening. Christians’ knowledge oMuhammad was long grounded in argument rather than evidence, and evennow polemic remains a discernible ingredient in Western writing about the

Prophet o Islam. Muslims or their part do not indulge in polemic against Jesus: the uran instructs them that “Isa,” as he is called in Arabic, is amongthe most esteemed o the prophets, a human who has not yet experienceddeath, as most Muslims believe, and who must one day return and suffer theate common to all mortal humankind.

But i Muslims’ appreciation o Jesus is grounded in the uran, theirknowledge o Jesus is also limited to the uran and to what later Muslim

commentators made o what they ound there. Which was not a great deal.Te uran gives no signs o being acquainted with the actual Christian


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Gospels, which are our earliest and best source o inormation about Jesus.Rather, the uranic inormation about Jesus seems late, derivative, and leg-

endary.4

And since the uran is the authoritative word o God, the Muslimhas little incentive to consult the Gospels, which are, in any event, unreliablesince they were tampered with by the Christians, according to a well-established Muslim article o aith.

I Muslims are instructed by their Scripture to venerate Jesus, Christiansare warned by their religious tradition that Muhammad was a alse prophet.In Christian eyes, Jesus is a unique event, without predecessors (there were

those who oresaw his coming, however) and certainly without successors.Te Jews divide the world into Benei Israel , themselves, and the goyyim , orGentiles; and Christians, though they have carved out a special—and highlyambivalent—social and theological category or Jews, have generally ollowedthe Jewish example and categorized all non-Christians as pagans, heathens, orindels. Such are the Muslims.

Some Christians knew better, early and late. At its rst appearance, Islam

appeared to Christians too similar to their own aith to be a species o theamiliar paganism. Islam looked and sounded like a Christian heresy5 —earlyon Arabia was described by a Christian authority as “teeming with heresies”—and Muhammad, it was surmised, must have gotten his inormation romsome malicious and disgruntled Christian monk; a charlatan, yes, but on theChristian model.

As Christians became better inormed and, more to the point, as more

and more Christians were swept under Muslim sovereignty, heresy was discardedas too benign a characterization o Islam. And the portrait o Muhammadturned darker and coarser as well. Te Muslim sources began to be translatedin the West and the inormation they provided became odder or Christian polemicists. Te much-married Prophet was portrayed as the epitome o anuncontrolled sexuality, his liestyle was the archetype o luxuria , and Muham-mad the military commander the antithesis o the pacist Jesus. Prophets

were not made o such stuff. Te portrait has sofened somewhat among moresel-conscious moderns, but the polemical undertone still lingers in contemporary Western presentations o the Prophet o Islam.

wo Foreign Countries

An awareness o the theological rivalry that has turned sour with polemic in

much o what passes as history in Christian and Muslim circles is only onestep toward objectivity in writing simultaneously about these two surpassingly


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Introduction: Clearing the Ground xxi

important religious gures. Tere is also the less discernible hobble o culturalbias or a Western historian approaching a gure in a different, and alien, cul-

ture. It was once amously remarked that “the past is a oreign country.” In thisinstance we have not one but two quite different oreign countries.

Te literary sources on Jesus and Muhammad are markedly divergent. Tenaked sayings o Jesus are couched in discourse that is relatively amiliar to the Western historian because his own discourse has been modeled in part on it,and its style, content, and even its tropes have become embedded in Westernmodes o expression. Muhammad’s words in the uran are in a different reg-

ister. Tey are in a Semitic language whose expressions and expressive inten-tions are different rom our own Indo-European tongues.

Tat same linguistic dislocation took place in the passage o Jesus’ wordsrom his own native Aramaic into the evangelists’ Greek, but in that instancetheir passage was eased by the act that the Gospels’ original reporters werecontemporary aural witnesses to Jesus’ words and had ears rmly xed in boththe Semitic and Indo-European Greek cultural milieus. We hear the uran,

or rather, in the case o the Western historian, we read the uran across a proound linguistic and cultural divide and the yawning chasm o nearly amillennium and a hal.

But on its own evidence, the uran was apparently opaque to some o itsown rst audience—“How can I explain to you what X means?” is a requenturanic rerain—and it was certainly so to many o its medieval commenta-tors or whom Arabic, though not necessarily its articial art-speech, the

uran’s very specialized poetic idiom, was a mother tongue. And it isassuredly such to us, and particularly to non-Muslims who are reluctant toaccept the communis opinio Islamica on what the text means.

Te other pieces o evidence, the Gospels and the classical Sira or Lie othe Prophet, are both cast in a amiliar biographical orm. Tey display, inchronological order, the sayings and deeds o Jesus or Muhammad rom thecradle to the grave, and beyond. In each the content has been collected rom

earlier sources, and it is there, in the collection and choice o material orinclusion and its subsequent presentation to the reader, that the two bio-graphical traditions chiey diverge. Both had their theological agenda, ocourse, and that was a powerul determinant o what went into the work and what did not. But there are urther determinations that conront the reader who takes up the texts looking not or conviction but or intelligibility. Tehistoriographical compass o the Hellenized Christians who wrote the

Gospels and that o the Arab Muslims behind the Sira have very differentsettings.


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Western readers are products o the same cultural tradition that lies, how-ever imperectly, behind the orm i not the content o the Gospels. Tough

our comprehension has been broadened somewhat by the Semitic rhythmsthat shine through even translations o the Bible, we are entirely at home withthe writer called Luke who composed the Gospel and the Acts o the Apostles.Not so with the uran. Te Gospels were written in the popular, almostdemotic Koine Greek o the Mediterranean world. Te uran, in contrast, was orally composed in an improvisational and artisanal Arabic Kunstsprache that was the poetic medium o the day and whose intricacies were in this par-

ticular case thought to be God-given. Our uran is an earthly representation,a “copy” (musha ) o an eternal heavenly prototype, the “Mother o the Book”(:–), and so the Muslim appreciation o their Scripture is in the rstinstance theological: the uran is made up o the words—and the diction—o God Himsel and hence its style is miraculously inimitable, a quality notshared by the Sacred Books o the Jews and Christians.

I the theological dogma o the “inimitability o the uran” effectively

dislocated serious historical analysis o uranic style and diction on the parto Muslims, it has not prevented Westerners rom making their own assess-ments o the text. Generally speaking, they have ound it diffi cult to share theMuslims,’ and particularly the Arab Muslims,’ appreciation o it as a producto art, a judgment that is not particularly germane in this context.6 What is atissue here is the validity and use o the uran as a document, and most partic-ularly as documentary evidence not or the divine economia but or Muham-

mad, the man rom whose mouth it reportedly issued in the opening decadeso the seventh century.

Tese and other evidence issues will be addressed in due course; here it isenough to signal the tangled landscape across which this quest is and has beenconducted and to attempt to clear some o the ground beore us. Here wehave to conront not only our own ignorance but centuries o misunder-standing buttressed by ill will. Jesus and Muhammad, it is immediately clear,

are not simply objects o study: they are the gures or whom millions uponmillions have lived and died over the centuries. Tey are symbols o hope onone hand and, on the other, warners o God’s terrible judgment on those whoail to heed their words. Tey are bringers o peace and the sword.

Parallel racks, Parallel Lives

Jesus and Muhammad have been the subject o the most sustained and detailedbiographical inquiries in the Western tradition, and the quest or the historical


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Jesus in particular has been almost a laboratory experiment in the historiogra- phy o the preindustrial era. And its successes and ailures have seeped inevi-

tably into the parallel inquiry into the lie o Muhammad. Te quest or bothmen will be retraced here, but pari passu and side by side in the hope that eacho the parallel tracks might illuminate the other. In its course it will becomeincreasingly clear what the two investigations have in common and how and why they differ. But it will reveal as well the parallels and differences in the persons and careers o the two men, each one o whom stands at the head o areligious tradition that divides much o the inhabited world and now claims,

each o them, more than a billion adherents.It hardly needs saying, but almost every sentence o what ollows, or, more

accurately, every word, has been the subject o both intense investigation andsustained and ofen acrimonious debate. We are intruding on privileged subjects whose ollowers have proound, indeed existential, commitments totheir character, their teachings, and their signicance. Tat condition imposesa limitation and a responsibility. Te limitation is that it is impossible on this

scale to support with the usual academic apparatus either my every statemento the acts o the matter or my own judgments as to their likelihood. I havetried to provide the appropriate authority when it comes to Scripture, butotherwise I can only offer a Guide to Further Reading where the reader willbe invited to enter deeper and more opaque waters. Te responsibility is morecomplex: to understand and accept the act that these two are not simply g-ures o history and to respect what each stands or without allowing that

respect to prejudice my historical judgment. It is simple in the saying butdaunting indeed in the doing. Te reader will judge.

I have been writing this book, or something like it, or most o my adultlie, putting Jews, Christians, and Muslims ace to ace and interrogating themon their belies and practices. Te questions, I hope, have been rigorous butnot hostile. Te answers have come at times rom the principals themselvesand at times rom me when I have made bold to speak or them. But on this

occasion the principals really are the principals, at least in the case o theChristians and Muslims. We are back at the beginning.

What I have written in the past has not been to everyone’s liking. Tere isno surprise there: this may be the most inammable matter devised by human-kind, the same ingenious species that has delivered itsel o gunpowder, dyna-mite, and the atom bomb. And there was not only the matter; there was alsome, laboring under every current misconception since Prohibition. But I

crave no indulgence: I have been at this so long that I have by now run out oany conceivable excuse or not getting it right. So this time I did.


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Jesus and Muhammad


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I o the almost two-century-long critical inquiry into theirlives, the very existence o both Jesus and Muhammad has been denied by some.Such radical denials are generally prompted not so much by the evidence asby polemic, or perhaps wishul thinking. It is the believers who chiey botherthe skeptics, those devotees so committed to their aith, it is suspected, that

they might well be willing to invent anything, including its ounder. Tere areothers who in greater numbers judge the testimony o the so-called witnessesso tendentious that they nd it diffi cult to accept any o it, even on the mostundamental points. And some doubters simply misunderstand the nature ohistory, particularly the history o the premodern world. Te evidence or theexistence o Jesus and Muhammad is ar better than that or most o theircontemporaries, even the most amous. We do not always know what to make

o the evidence or them, but the evidence itsel is relatively plentiul, comingas it does rom a world whose archives have not survived. We have no baptis-mal records rom rst-century Judea or the seventh-century Hijaz, no mar-riage registers or tax receipts. Tere are no autographs, no photos.1

Even though we lack these reassuring direct connections to the two men—and to all o their contemporaries—there is a great deal o other material tosif through. Te best and most useul o the available evidence or the careers

o Jesus and Muhammad is literary, that is, written accounts about them,many rom apparent eyewitnesses, and some even purport to have preservedour subjects’ very words. All o these are addressed in the next chapter; here we must rst take a broader look around, a horizon tour o the landscape where the two men spent their lives.

Teir ollowers regard each as divinely inspired, but we have no instru-ments or hearing that voice rom on high. We can attempt to pry somewhat

into the unconscious o each, but we cannot eavesdrop on the conversebetween Jesus and his “Father who is in heaven” or hear what transpired

The Settings


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between Muhammad and the Angel Gabriel. Our crude antenna settings areor the grosser stuff o human portraits and physical, social, and political

landscapes and, above all, the religious environment rom which each cameand to which each addressed himsel. Tis is not to suggest that either Jesus orMuhammad was simply the product o that environment; but even i the preaching o each came rom on high, how it was delivered and how it wasreceived was a unction o the atmospherics in rst-century Palestine and theseventh-century Hijaz. We begin, then, with a weather report.

Jesus and First-Century Palestine

Te Romans were not always careul about names: they called the augustHellenes “Graeci” afer the name o one o the less signicant Hellenic tribesthey happened to encounter. So it is no surprise that they called the land oCanaan, which the Jews thought o as the Kingdom o Israel, “Palestine,” aferthe long-disappeared Philistines. Eventually it became “the Palestines,” since

the onetime Kingdom o Israel had long since splintered into three smallerdomains: Judea, the territory around sacred Jerusalem, east to the Jordan and west to the Mediterranean; in the north, rural and agricultural Galilee aroundthe sea o the same name and up to the sources o the Jordan River; and inbetween, loudly schismatic Samaria, with a population who were genuineHebrews in their own eyes but hybrid aliens and illegitimate pretenders in the view o the Jews who surrounded them.

Te people in Judea and Galilee were both called, somewhat conusingly,“Judeans,” even though they did not all live in the area called Judea. TeRomans decided that these troublesome people constituted both a religiousand an ethnic community and so they were all Ioudaei , the linguistic ances-tors o our “Jews.” Almost all the population o Judea were in act Jews in thatsense, but the population o Galilee was somewhat more hybrid: ItureanArabs and the residue o the old Syro-Canaanite population there worshiped

gods other than Yahweh, the tribal and ethnic God o Israel, whose temple was in Judean Jerusalem.2

Te territory under “Judean” control waxed and waned over the centuries,as did the places where Jews were ound. Since their sixth-century BC exile inBabylonia had led to the rst Jewish diaspora , or “dispersal,” Jews had slowlyspread around the Mediterranean and eventually into most o the port citiesringing that sea. By the rst century there were also Jewish settlements on the

east bank o the Jordan and up onto the Golan Heights east o the Sea oGalilee. Jewish sovereignty extended there as well, particularly under Herod,


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a hal-Jewish puppet king who ruled (– BC) over a simulacrum o theKingdom o Israel on behal o the Romans, who were the real masters o the

Mediterranean basin. We know a great deal about Herod, and about his kingdom, thanks to

Josephus, the Jewish historian who, between AD and , published twomajor histories o Jewish affairs, the Jewish War and the Antiquities o the Jews , which not only take notice o Jesus, John the Baptist, and James, the brothero Jesus,3 but constitute a major element in our understanding o the Palestin-ian milieu into which Jesus was born and out o which his movement evolved.

Religion and politics, social and economic issues are all part o Josephus’attempt to explain Judaism to a not very sympathetic audience o Gentilereaders as well as to his ellow Jews, who were also expected to read his work.And both groups read it, it should be noted, not in imperial Latin or the ver-nacular Aramaic o Palestine, but in Greek, the lingua ranca o the literateMediterranean.

It is Josephus, himsel a Galilean, who alerts us to the social and political

unrest in that province. And it is thanks to him that we have some under-standing o the Jewish king Herod and the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate,Herod Antipas, the tetrarch (a vanity title) o Galilee, and the high priestCaiaphas, all major players in the lie o Jesus o Nazareth. It is also Josephus,a Pharisee as well as a historian, who is our instructor on the parties and sectso Palestinian Judaism in the run-up to the great war with Rome (AD–).

What has more recently attracted the interest o Jesus historians are Josephus’ remarks on Moses and Elijah, who were also prominent paradigmsin the Gospels, and his considerable attention to the phenomenon o charis-matic prophecy, itsel ofen linked to insurgency, in the Palestine o that era.Tere was Teudas (ca. AD –)—Josephus calls him a “charlatan”—whocast himsel as a new Moses who would part the waters o the Jordan. TeRomans intervened: they killed or arrested his ollowers and Teudas himsel

was beheaded. Te Christians remembered him very well (Acts :) and theyremembered the Egyptian insurgent (Acts :), a “alse prophet” to Josephus, who led a large orce o armed men against Jerusalem, and Judah the Galilean(Acts :), a probably messianic insurgent, and the ather and grandather oinsurgents, whose amily bravado—ill-considered according to Josephus—spills across many o the Jewish historian’s pages. And nally there is the oddshouting Jesus who, as Josephus tells it, got under the skin o Jews and Romans

alike in the late s in Jerusalem. Roman Palestine was not a very quiet placein the rst hal o the rst century.


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Te political and sectarian issues that dominate Josephus’ account o con-temporary Palestine do occasionally arise in Jesus’ ollowers’ accounts o his

lie—he is conronted, or example, with questions regarding taxation (Mk:– and parallels)—but they seem remarkably marginal when viewedthrough the prism o the Gospels. Te Romans are hardly present in evangel-ical Galilee and appear center stage only in the last days o Jesus’ lie, whenthey are the agents o his trial and execution. Te Gospels are not about theRomans, nor is the Acts o the Apostles. Tere is, o course, the pious centu-rion Cornelius, whom Peter converts in Acts and , and the various offi -

cials who had to deal with the troublesome Paul, but in the Acts o theApostles, no less than in the Gospels, the Romans are the agents o a criminaland not a political process.

What Was on Jewish Minds in the First Century?

Surrounding the historian Josephus is a body o Jewish religious writing that

was not in the end included in the Bible.4 Tese are the “apocryphal” or“restricted” books eventually considered, or sectarian or other reasons, asunworthy o being included among the authentic witnesses to God’s covenant with Israel, but they were being read by Jesus and his contemporaries and orm part o the spiritual landscape o that era. Te nonbiblical works that interestus here are precisely those in circulation in Jesus’ day. Tey cover a broad spec-trum o genres and subjects: rewritings, ofen or sectarian purposes, o older

biblical books; wisdom literature, reestanding moral exhortations whereHellenic inuence is apparent in the exaltation o “Sophia” and her effects;and nally, the abundant apocalypses (“unveilings”) that described, in a highlyimaginative and emotive ashion, the anticipated events o the Last Days.

Te biblical apocrypha are a mixed bag. Many o the works were originallycomposed in Greek, the chie language o the Jewish Diaspora; many are com- posites o different works lumped together under a single (spurious) name like

that o Abraham and Moses, Ezra and Baruch; and many too display trans- parent Christian interpolations. Te reason why the Christians tampered withthe texts is the same that promotes our own interest. Tese writings at theirbroadest show what was on the minds o many Jews in that era, including Jesus’ own ollowers. More narrowly, they provide a conceptual matrix into which both Jesus and his ollowers placed him, namely, as a messianic gureboth announcing and destined to play a role in the Eschaton , the End ime.

Te Bible as we know it, a rmly dened collection o sacred books, didnot yet exist in Jesus’ day. Tere was already a broad unanimity on “the Law


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and the Prophets,” that is, what constituted the orah and who should beincluded among the Prophets. But the third o the traditional Jewish divisions

o the Bible, the ambiguously titled “Writings,” was an open category and itscontents were still being debated two centuries or more afer Jesus’ death.

Jesus and his ollowers were avid students o the Bible. Isaiah and Daniel were among their avorite reading, but they were equally interested in what we—but not they—have called the apocrypha, the various works attributedto Ezra and Baruch, the Assumption o Moses, the estament o Abraham. It was rom them that both Jesus and his audience were drawing their under-

standing o the past, and the uture, o the Covenant. And we must attemptto do the same. It is not only in “the Law and the Prophets,” as the New esta-ment calls the Bible, that we can expect to nd the spiritual core o Jesus andhis movement, but also in the mélange o both biblical and apocryphal “Writ-ings” that were circulating in the rst century AD.

Sectarian Signals

Te authors, editors, or entire communities that produced what we now callthe biblical apocrypha sometimes appear to represent divergent strains ocontemporary Judaism, what might now be called “sects” or “parties.” Tatclassication might be somewhat misleading since there was in that eranothing that can be described as “normative Judaism” against which a sec-tarian variant might be measured. But Josephus used the term hairesis in his

very schematic presentation o the major ideological divisions among the Jewso his day, so it will have to serve. Literally haireseis means “choices” but it wasgenerally understood as “schools,” a sense that was more comortably intelli-gible to Josephus’ Gentile readers. o our ears, however, “schools” seems artoo academic, while the alternative “parties” has too many political overtonesand “sects” is, well, too sectarian.

Tere is in act a good deal o sectarianism in the apocrypha, special

pleading on behal o some sel-privileged view o Judaism, just as there is inthe parallel writings o that other Jewish sect that sprang rom the teachingso Jesus o Nazareth. As already remarked, Josephus is our chie inormant onthe various Jewish groupings and parties that come into view afer the Jews’return rom the sixth-century Babylonian exile. But Josephus’ uniquely privi-leged position changed suddenly and radically with the discovery o what appears to be an entire sectarian library that had been hidden away,

sealed and barely accessible, in caves high above the northwest corner o theDead Sea.


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Te sect and its ruined settlement at umran below the caves and closerto shore was apparently the one characterized by Josephus and others as “Ess-

enes,” a highly organized, ascetic community whose chie issue was the emple priesthood and whose emphasis was on strict ritual purity in the here andnow—ritual bathing seems to have loomed large at umran—and validationin the approaching End ime. Almost immediately the importance o thend became maniest. Here was an extraordinary, in-their-own-words view ohow some Jews understood their Jewishness in the exact years when Jesuslived and died not too ar away.5 Was Jesus in the Scrolls? Was Jesus an Ess-

ene? Was John the Baptist? Jesus, it turned out, is not in the Scrolls—nor are the Essenes in the

Gospels!—and he was certainly not himsel an Essene. But there is muchinstruction at umran or the New estament historian. Te Essenes, or atleast the umran branch,6 were no less eschatological and messianic, though

perhaps with somewhat less urgency, than the Jesus movement up the road inGalilee. Tere were, however, notable differences. Like some other groups,

the umran Essenes expected at least two messiahs, a kingly Davidic one anda priestly one, the rst representing a common theme in Jewish religiousthought, the restoration o power and glory to the monarchical institutionand through it to Israel; and the second reecting the Essenes’ own ounda-tional issue o restoring legitimacy to the emple priesthood.

I the Scrolls help ocus the messianic claims o Jesus and his ollowers,they also present to us, in its own words, a Jewish sectarian movement, albeit

one more highly organized and wardened than the Jesus movement. And it isnot Jewish messianism alone that they illuminate. One o the most revealingaspects o the Scrolls is their manner o reading the Bible: their allegorical(and sel-serving) understanding o Scripture is not very different rom theGospels’ own.

What we have, then, or Jesus is a good deal o background inormationabout the time and the place in which he lived, the varieties o Judaism that

ourished there, and a sense o the hopes, ears, and expectations o his con-temporaries. From the inormation provided by Josephus, the Dead SeaScrolls, and the almost obsessive archaeological mining o Israel, we can putthe admittedly sketchy oreground lie o Jesus o Nazareth against both aGalilean and a Judean background that is very rich and very deep indeed.

Does that background also include the rabbinic writings like the Mishna(redacted ca. AD ) or the two almuds (redacted ca. AD –)? It

was once thought so, but that conviction has grown progressively weaker inrecent times. Jesus, it is clear, was not a product o the more institutionalized,


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more regulated, and progressively more uniorm Rabbinic Judaism that isrevealed to us in the writings o those industrious clerics who shaped the

Jewish communities ar and wide rom their academies in “Babylonia,” with oneeye perhaps ocused on what had already become a threatening “Christianity.” Jesus and his movement belonged rather to the more open, uid, and chaoticrst-century Judaisms whose heart still beat vibrantly in a troubled Eretz Israel .

Te Context or Muhammad Muhammad’s Hijaz, the stretch o Western Arabia, coast and rising upland,rom Rome’s borders on the north (near those o today’s Jordan) to the ron-tiers o the Yemen on the south, is or us an Empty uarter. It is a stretch othe Arabian Peninsula that was not devoid o lie in the sixth and early sev-enth centuries o the Christian era, but is unhappily devoid o evidence, notonly or Muhammad, as we might expect, but even or Mecca. Between the

last monumental northern remains o the Nabatean Arabs, whose regime wasextinguished in the rst century AD, and the rst eighth- and ninth-centurytraces o Muslim activity here and there in the area, the Hijaz has yielded littlemore than the scratched graffi ti lef behind by bored and barely literateBedouin more interested in cursing Harith or scaring off the desert goblinsthan in contemplating the End ime.

Te Silence o the Sources

Tis dearth is not unexpected perhaps. Te area was entirely unurbanized— perennial monuments are a city phenomenon—and its population mostlyilliterate. What is not expected is the silence o the outside observers. In thesixth century the Hijaz was bordered by highly literate societies to the north,south, and east and even in Abyssinia westward across the Red Sea. And those

neighbors were interested in Western Arabia, whose Arab tribesmen could beuseul as transit carriers in trade or even dangerous either as rontier raiders inthe pay o others or as greedy plunderers o the settled lands on the margins othe steppe. And while their neighbors were well acquainted with the Arabsas a nation and with nomads as an untidy security problem, no Byzantine,Sasanian, or Yemeni who put stylus to parchment or chisel to stone proessedto know anything o Mecca and its shrine. Te Byzantine historian Procopius in

particular, who sometime about the middle o the sixth century did a careuland systematic intelligence survey o Western Arabia, has only a silent hole


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where Mecca should have been. Our Arab sources make a great deal o thecommercial activity o Mecca in that same era, but neither Procopius, who

had looked, nor anyone else had apparently ever heard o the place.oday we possess no sixth- or seventh-century documentation rom the

Hijaz, and i our extant sources had such, it could not have been a great deal,and certainly not so much as some o them would have us believe.7 Mecca andMedina had no archives in Muhammad’s day, nor any, it appears, or a longtime thereafer. In the sixth and seventh centuries they were centers o an oralsociety where writing, i it existed at all, was o an extremely limited and spe-

cialized use. We have, then, ew resources or reconstructing the society o Muhammad’s

Mecca and Medina rom contemporary written sources, or even archaeolog-ical ones, since ormal archaeological investigation has never been permitted within those sacred precincts.8 I such a reconstruction is to be done at all, itmust be accomplished rom the redacted work o tribal poets o the steppeand later Muslim histories o that time and those places, and, in either case, by

authors not much interested in the political economy o the pre-Islamic Hijaz,and even less concerned with the pagan religious practices o those unholyand “barbarous” ( jahili ) days.

Reconstructions

Te social, political, and religious systems o the pre-Islamic environment o

Western Arabia have thus to be extracted rom highly resistant material. It wasrst attempted at the end o the nineteenth century by the celebrated biblicalscholar Julius Wellhausen, and completed, in a remarkably virtuoso manner,by two scholars, the Italian prince Leone Caetani and the Belgian Jesuit HenriLammens. Ironically, both men were highly skeptical o the Arab sources with which they were dealing, but Lammens’ portrait o Mecca in particular, ahighly seductive and sel-serving construct, has provided, and continues to

provide, the background o many o the modern Western lives o Muhammad.Henri Lammens, S. J., is, in effect, the Josephus o Muhammad research, andthat act marks with great precision one o the principal differences betweenthe study o Muhammad’s lie and that o Jesus.

Extraction

Tere is no lack o evidence or Muhammad’s Mecca. It is, however, entirelyliterary, and it dates rom more than a century afer the Prophet’s death. And


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it is the product o a different society living in a place very different rom the pagan and tribal Mecca o the sixth and early seventh centuries.

Te passage o Christianity out o its Jewish matrix into a predominantlyGentile milieu dulled the sensibilities o later Christians regarding the Jewish-ness o Jesus and his rst ollowers in the nascent “Church.” But those Chris-tians still had the Jewish Scriptures, their “Old estament,” as they came tocall it, as well as the Jewish background “noise” in the Gospels to guide themback to at least a general sense o Jesus’ historical position.9 Our Muslimsources on the origins o Islam had no such help. Tey were ar more remote

rom Meccan paganism than were the early Gentile Christians rom Judaism.Te Christians, ollowing Paul, had declined Judaism; the Muslims, ollowingthe uran, had absolutely rejected and repudiated Meccan paganism anddestroyed it. Nor had they an Old estament to remind them o what it once was, and the uran gives only glimmering hints o Muhammad’s religioussetting, his Sitz im Leben .

From this unpromising body o material some rare and precious inorma-

tion has been extracted. Te body o pre-Islamic poetry has been thoroughlysifed to good effect, and the uran has been wrung dry o contemporaryallusion. Te one surviving work on “Te Gods o Mecca” by Ibn al-Kalbi(d. ) has been dissected and analyzed, and the ofen random remarks olater historians and chroniclers have all been collected and some cohesivesemblance o pre-Islamic Mecca and the Hijaz constructed rom them. But inthe end it remains a reconstruction, a building with no material oundation

and no independent conrmation.Finally, there is the matter o the uran itsel. We have no precise exam-

ples o works called “Good News” (euangelion ) in Jewish, Greek, or Romanliterature, but we can recognize the parents o this literary hybrid in the Bios or Lie o Greco-Roman antiquity and in the logoi or sayings collections oMediterranean sages. As literary artiacts, the Gospels nestle not entirelyuncomortably in a rich tradition o writings, Greek and Hebrew, pagan and

Jewish, and in a place where all those traditions met and mingled.Te uran is ar more baffl ing. It is the earliest preserved work in Arabic,

preceded only by our or ve brie inscriptions scattered across the remoteringes o the Syrian steppe. First, it should be remarked that it is not a literarycomposition at all. Like the New estament, our uran is an editoriallyassembled and arranged collection whose unity resides in the act that its con-tents are the revealed word o God.10 Muhammad’s own uran was in act

what are now the constitutive parts o our book, those stanza-like units ( suras ) whose original contours are no longer easy to discern.11 But where we can


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isolate the original elements o the work, we must affi rm that, i it is primary,the uran is not primitive. Like the Homeric poems, its sophistication seems

to signal the prior existence o a religio-poetic tradition. Tere is no trace osuch, however; the uran appears to be a virginal conception. And i it ismysterious what kind o prior tradition could produce the uran, what iseven more mysterious is who in that society barely emerging rom illiteracyhad the skills to write it down.

Aferthoughts: Te Prophets in PlacePalestine and the Hijaz

We are now in a somewhat better position to step back and cast a comparativeregard over the two men in their proper environments. Jesus was born and worked within a culturally and religiously pluralistic society. Israelite andGreek culture existed side by side in rst-century Palestine, and a third, Latin

Roman, was also present: in addition to Jesus’ Roman trial and execution,Roman centurions are encountered in Galilee as well as Jews in Romanemploy as tax collectors, the notorious publicani . And Jesus’ Palestine was thehome o one o the most literate populations in the entire Mediterraneanbasin—the Gospels are lled with “scribes” ( grammateis ).

Judaism was the religion o the mass o the people, but some o the largercities o Palestine like the nearby cities o the Decapolis across the Jordan and

Caesarea-by-the-Sea in Judea itsel were pagan through and through, and onehad but to step beyond the northern borders o Galilee, as Jesus occasionallydid, to encounter a population that was neither Israelite in culture nor Jewishin religion. And schismatic Samaria too, where Jesus also traveled, was inmany respects a oreign country to the Jews who lived around it.

Muhammad lived in a very different place, and we cannot be sure that heever lef it. Te population o Mecca in the Hijaz was singularly Arab, rela-

tively recent transplants rom a tribal to an urban culture with the shared values o each, uniquely Arabophone and vastly illiterate. Religiously, theMeccans were idol-worshiping animists. Tere were Jews about in some o thenorthern oases like Medina and even more to the south in the Yemen, butnone installed in Mecca. Nor were there any Christians there. Te Yemen wasoffi cially Christian and so was Abyssinia across the Red Sea, and there wereundoubtedly indirect contacts since Muhammad knew something o both

aiths and dened Islam against both. But the Prophet seems never to havehad direct encounters with Christians until the very end o his lie.


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Jesus spent almost all o his brie public career on his home soil o LowerGalilee with only an occasional oray beyond its ringes and brie liturgical

visits to Jerusalem. Muhammad may have traveled more widely, even duringhis residence in Mecca, but his journeying would have taken place during hismerchant days and beore his call to prophecy. We do not know how ar aeldhis commercial travels took him, but in the reduced view o Mecca’s tradingnetwork, it seems unlikely that Muhammad ever lef the Hijaz: Syria, theYemen, and Iraq were beyond his personal horizon.12 And once he took up his post as a “warner” in Mecca’s sacred central space, the Haram, Muhammad

seems to have stayed rmly xed within the very narrow connes o his home-town. Jesus, who somewhat oddly reused to preach in his hometown becauseo the locals’ lack o aith or, more pointedly, because he was unable to per-orm any miracles there (Mk :– and parr.), was an itinerant; Muhammad was not, nor had he any need to be: the Meccan Haram stood at the epicenterat an expansive eld o religious orce, the catchment o the Arab pilgrimagenetwork.

Galilee and Mecca

Jesus and Muhammad were both townsmen: Jesus a crafsman in a arming village in relatively densely populated Galilee, Muhammad a trader in a moreimportant place in a less important area. Te late sixth-century Hijaz, which was essentially a land-locked region with no Red Sea ports to speak o, waslightly inhabited, with ew and very marginal settlements. Most o those were,

like Medina, oases supporting a community o Arab date-palm growers and aew craf specialists—the carpenter Jesus would have t in very comortablyin Medina, but the trader Muhammad would have had no employment inNazareth. Te date-palm groves cultivated in the oases could sustain a precar-ious subsistence-level living but the cultivators were subject to the same prob-lems that brought Muhammad to Medina: the palm orchards could notexpand with the population. Family and tribal rivalries over space and pro-

duce developed within their narrow conines: civil strie ( itna ) was anendemic and dangerous condition in the Western Arabia palm groves.

Mecca was not an oasis, however. It had no agriculture and the people wholived there in Muhammad’s day, and or long aferward, supported themselveson traffi c: the traffi c in pilgrims—the paramount tribes controlled bothaccess to the shrines and the victualing and watering o the visitors—and the probably mostly local trade capitalized by the pilgrim traffi c. Muhammad

belonged to the latter category o Meccan: as best we can tell, he was a minormerchant, certainly not a magnate, in a clan o middling rank.


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Mecca had its own social problems, not o space and population as was thecase in Medina, but in the breakdown in tribal loyalties and kinship connec-

tions and their replacement by constantly shifing alliances o convenienceand advantage. Tese were internally generated tensions. In Galilee, however,and in Palestine generally, the pressures came largely rom without. Muhammadlived at Mecca in an autonomous and sel-governing town and, in the lastdecade o his lie, he was in act the ruler rst o his Medina community andthen o a burgeoning “empire” that was rapidly extending out rom it. Jesusspent his lie under an occupation, virtual under Herod Antipas, Rome’s

puppet “tetrarch” in Galilee (r. BC–AD ) and then, afer AD , underdirect Roman rule in Proincia Ioudaea .

Rome’s presence in Palestine was taxing in every sense o the word. Herodthe Great had tax-burdened his subjects to pay or his lavish public works programs, including the rebuilding o the Jerusalem emple ( BC–AD), and the Romans simply added to the load, with the gall o a tax-armingsystem and the exaction o the tribute in Roman coin. Piled atop this was

Roman intererence in emple affairs—the Jerusalem emple was, irresistibly,the largest corporation and the largest bank in the land—and nowhere more painully than in Rome’s pushing upon the monotheistic Jews the mostodious orm o their own polytheism, emperor worship.

All o this tense and varied background is reected and underlined inthe Gospels. Tere is, to begin with, the emergence in that same milieu o thenucleus o both a Greek narration o the lie and a collection in Greek o the

sayings o the Aramaic-speaking Jesus. Tere is, o course, Jesus’ Roman trialand execution on one hand and, on the other, his very Jewish involvement with both the emple establishment and the Pharisees, the reigning religiousideologues o his day. Te Gospels show us not only Rome’s military and judi-cial systems in action but its tributary taxpayers and Roman tax collectors. We are shown cool and collected Jewish aristocrats like Nicodemus and Joseph o Arimathea and the psychically vexed; the sound and the grievously

ill; the rich and the poor; day-laborers and owners; tenants and their land-lords; the rulers and the ruled; and we are exposed to all the issues that those pairs had between them. We are taken inside homes, humble and grand, pal-aces, Roman tribunals, synagogues, the emple.

Tere are issues in the uran, to be sure, but they are chiey transcendental,theological, perennial: submission or rejection, obedience or disbelie, eternal punishment or eternal reward. Te quotidian is deeply submerged sub specie

aeternitatis . On the evidence o the Quran alone we would know little ornothing o Mecca save that perhaps there was such a place—but was it


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called Becca (:)? We can perhaps deduce that the uraysh were tradersthere and the evidence is quite direct that many Meccans were stubborn in

their resistance to the preacher and his message o “Submission.” Tere are nohomes, no riends or amilies in our picture o that place. Te uran’s moun-tains are archetypical, like Sinai or Olivet; its seas generic. As was once said oquite another place, there is no there there.

Te hicceity o Mecca was a later construct o Muslim Arab authors writingin other, very urbanized places and across a very consequential century. As inthe case o the Bible’s editor-authors’ Pentateuchal representation o Iron Age

Israel, there may be some very old and quite authentic memories built intothat Meccan edice, though in the absence o outside conrmation we cannot very ofen make out what they are. Te Iraqi compositors o the Sira did knowthe Muslim Hijaz rsthand and they lled in the spaces back to its pre-Islamiccondition rom reported memories, which they tried to authenticate, andby imagining the past rom its shadowy presence behind the Quran. hemedieval Muslims’ intuitions as to what must have lain behind the uran’s

ofen opaque complaints, commands, and prohibitions should not be tooreadily dismissed. We do the same through analogy: we iner rom what we judge as parallel instances. And ofen with the same results, and with the samedegree o certainty.


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W o what we do and do not knowabout the political, social, and economic settings in which Jesus and Muhammadlived; we turn now to the evidence regarding the men themselves. Wemust not expect a great deal. Tere are no archives, no baptismal or marriageregisters, none o the primary documents rom which historians o a later era

are accustomed to work. What we have is essentially literary remains, later writings about our two subjects. Tere is o course some contemporary mate-rial evidence, particularly in the case o Jesus, but it is merely conrmatory: itconrms that Pontius Pilate was the governor o Judea in the rst century,that the agricultural lie o Galilee was pretty much as Jesus described it in his parables, that there was a pool with ve porticos located just north o theemple area in Jerusalem and rather precisely what death by crucixion might

involve. But the basic act remains: the surviving evidence or Jesus andMuhammad is overwhelmingly literary.

Te Dossier on Jesus

Te literary evidence or Jesus alls conveniently, though not symmetrically,into three categories: that produced by pagans, that by Jewish authors, and,

nally and most substantially, that rom Jesus’ own ollowers.

Te Pagan Sources

No one is quite sure what precisely paganism was, not even the pagans, whonever thought o themselves as such. What is certain is that the term is derog-atory: the adjective paganus was used by the Christians to describe the last

outback holdouts against Christianity—it can be roughly and contempora-neously translated as “hillbilly”—all those who clung to their ancient cults

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Opening the Files

and reused both monotheism and belie in Jesus as the Son o God. In anyevent, the classical pagans seem to have disappeared rom the West, leaving

only the more astidious atheists and agnostics to man the barricades againstaith communities.1

Te pagan sources on Jesus o Nazareth are somewhat illusory as sources.Tey are chiey about Christians rather than Jesus, who is never called by hisHebrew or Aramaic given name but is reerred to as “Christus” or “Chrestos.”Like the material evidence, the pagan authors simply conrm or, at best,enlarge our knowledge o the background. Tey ll in inormation about the

career o Pontius Pilate, or example, or the system o tax collection underRoman auspices in Palestine. At their very best they conrm or us that in thes in Rome there was a group o religious anatics who called themselves“Christers” and who caused problems—unspecied—or the Roman author-ities in Rome and elsewhere.2 Most pertinent is what the historian acitus wrote at the turn into the second century:

Nero . . . inicted the most cruel tortures upon a group o peopledetested or their abominations, and popularly known as “Christians.”Teir name came rom one Christus, who was put to death in the prin-cipate o iberius by the Procurator Pontius Pilate. Tough checkedor a time, the destructive superstition broke out again, not in Judeaonly, where its mischie began, but even in Rome, where everyabominable and shameul iniquity, rom all the world, pours in and

nds a welcome. ( Annals :)

Tat is the sum o it. Tere had been a Judean holy man named Christus whom the Romans had executed sometime between AD and and whoseollowers had already in the s o the rst century constituted at Rome andelsewhere a discernible religious community called afer him.

Te Jewish Sources

Flavius Josephus

Te Jewish sources are somewhat more helpul. Josephus has already beenmentioned. In his Antiquities he not only provides abundant political andreligious background or the era but also mentions in a paragraph or so Johnthe Baptist (:–), Jesus (:–, :), and Jesus’ brother James

(:–). At rst glance, this is an extraordinary stroke o good ortuneor the historian. In the rst passage Josephus says Jesus was a wonder-worker


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and teacher, that he was condemned to death by the Roman governor Pilate,and that his ollowers later claimed he had risen rom the dead. But he also

says “He was the Messiah” and that he had actually appeared to his ollowersafer his death!

But this good ortune must immediately turn to a suspicion that the Chris-tians later tampered with the text o Josephus or perhaps inserted this entire paragraph into his text. It may indeed be so, but in the tenth century an ArabChristian author quotes this same passage o Josephus without the Christian-izing elements and thus in the orm that many believe Josephus originally

wrote it:

At this time there was a wise man who was called Jesus. And his con-duct was good, and (he) was known to be virtuous. And many peoplerom among the Jews and the other nations became his disciples. Pilatecondemned him to be crucied and to die. And those who had becomehis disciples did not desert his discipleship. Tey reported that he had

appeared to them three days afer his crucixion and that he was alive;accordingly, he was perhaps the Messiah concerning whom the prophets have recounted wonders. (Agapius o Manbij, Kitabal-‘Unwan)3

Tis passage in the Antiquities has generated a large and at times heatedliterature. But Josephus is illuminating in other respects, not least in the con-

siderable attention he pays to the phenomenon o charismatic prophecy, ofenlinked to insurgence, in the Palestine o that era. Jesus ts comortably intothe pattern o prophet-messiahs that appeared among the Jews beore andduring his own lietime. Tey were charismatic wonder-workers who tooktheir inspiration rom Moses and were surrounded by bands o loyal ollowers.Tey were almost all involved in some type o political action, whether directlyby taking up arms against the Romans or indirectly by demonstrating against

or criticizing authority. And most o them came to a violent end.

Te Dead Sea Scrolls

Josephus describes the religious currents o the day in terms o action. We candiscern some o the atmospherics in the literature produced by various religiousgroups, whether identiable, like the Essenes who produced the Dead SeaScrolls, or anonymous, like the various shades o sectarians who stand behind

the visionary and apocalyptic writings that never made it into the Bible but were popular in that era. An apocalypse is literally an unveiling, in this instance


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an unveiling o the events o the last days o human history. It would be God’sconclusion to His creation and, it was piously hoped, the nal vindication o

Israel in the ace o its enemies. A time o terror would yield to a time o tri-umph, and in the midst o the latter would stand a gure o Israel’s liberation,the Anointed One, the Messiah. Not all Jews o Jesus’ day believed in the immi-nence o the End ime nor in a Messiah; Jesus’ ollowers obviously did, and theshape and color o their belie can be read off the pages o this apocalyptic liter-ature. Te Dead Sea Scrolls reveal just one such apocalyptic community in thegrip o expectation o the End ime. Te Jesus movement was another.

Te Rabbinic Sources

Te rabbis also weigh in on Jesus, though rom distant Babylon, as they calledIraq, at an interval o our hundred to six hundred years afer the event.4 And,as has recently been observed, what they do say reveals ar more about thestatus o the Jews in pre-Islamic Iraq than it does about the historical Jesus.According to the statements in the almud regarding Jesus, his birth was ille-

gitimate: he was the son o Miriam (by one account a hairdresser) who hadconceived o a certain Pantheros, a Roman soldier. By the same accounts Jesus was put to death by the Jews, either by crucixion or by hanging, on the cap-ital charge o having led the people astray. Jesus, then, in the standard—thatis, rabbinic—accounts was arrested, tried, and executed by the Jewish author-ities o his day on the charge o treasonous seduction.

Te Christian Sources

Finally, we come to our chie evidence or Jesus, namely, the material con-tained in the collection known as the New estament. Te New estament isin effect an argument, a brie assembled to demonstrate that the Abrahamicand the Mosaic covenant (Hebrew berith; Latin testamentum ) had beenredrawn in the person o Jesus, who was the Messiah promised by the

prophets.Te documents collected there consist in the our works called Gospels or

“Good News”; a work o history called, somewhat misleadingly, “Te Acts othe Apostles”; a number o letters, chiey those o Paul, a very early Jewishconvert to the cause o Jesus, but also those attributed to the Apostles Peterand John and Jude, and to Jesus’ brother, James; and nally an Apocalypse orRevelation, the Christian version o a amiliar Jewish literary genre, a visionary

unveiling o the End ime, now seen rom a Christian perspective. Tesedocuments would all appear to date rom the rst century: the earliest are


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certainly Paul’s letters written in the s and the latest the Apocalypse, which was probably written toward the very end o the century.

Te Gospels

Even though Paul’s letters are the earliest documents in the New estament,they have, as we shall see, very little to say about the lie and teachings o Jesuso Nazareth. Most o what we know about Jesus comes in act rom one set obooks, the our so-called canonical Gospels o the New estament. Canon-icity is a theologian’s, not a historian’s, judgment, and the act that the Chris-

tian churches have dubbed these our “canonical” does not, o course, makethan any more (or less) authentic as historical documents. Indeed, one o themost strenuous current arguments over the sources or Jesus is how muchevidentiary credit should be given to some o the materials, including gospels,that are not included in the New estament. Most have remained uncon- vinced o their independent value, and most historians continue to operateon the premise that, i the historical Jesus is going to be extracted rom any

documents, they will most likely be the Gospels called afer Matthew, Mark,Luke, and John and composed by Christian believers sometime —and that isthe operative word—between AD and , that is, thirty to seventy-odd years afer the death o Jesus.5

Beore addressing their dating, we must regard our New estamentGospels as documents. Tey are cast in the orm that we would identiy asbiography, even though they do not name themselves as such—the Greek

word or biography is bios , or “Lie”—but rather “Te Good News,” in Greekeuangelion . Tis latter word had been in technical use earlier; it reerred to a proclamation, usually o an offi cial nature, o some important piece o inor-mation. It does not, however, appear as the denominative o a literary work.

Te Gospels individually identiy themselves, though not exactly byauthor. Each bears the title o “Te Good News according to Matthew” orMark or Luke or John. Tus we are told at the outset that we are getting our

different versions o what is essentially the same Good News. Tree o theour—those o Matthew, Mark, and Luke—are quite similar in their struc-ture, their approach, what they include, and ofen even their very words. Sincethey cover the same ground in the same way, they are now termed “Synoptic.” John, however, is quite different. He covers different incidents, in a differentorder, and according to a different chronology. In the Synoptics Jesus speaksgenerally in aphorisms or in homely parables; in John, in long discourses o

considerable theological sophistication. Te Fourth Gospel omits a great dealo what is in the Synoptics and adds a good deal that is not.


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he three Synoptic Gospels are obviouslyrelated in some not very obvious way, and to understand that interrela-

tionship, it is irst necessary to attempt to sequence them. It is not a simplematter because there are no internal hooks on which to attach dates. Markis the shortest o the three, its style is the most primitive and least pol-ished, its narrative the most direct. For all these reasons there is a generalconsensus—which is the best one can hope or in this kind o inquiry;unanimity is a ugitive ideal—that Mark is the earliest o the SynopticGospels and, it was once thought, our best and truest source or the his-

torical Jesus.Once it is granted, as it generally is, that Mark was the rst Gospel to be

composed, it becomes apparent, rom the two hundred or so verses identicalin all three, that Matthew and Luke must have used Mark in composing theirGospels; that there was an unidentied written source, which we now call“Mark,” lying beore them when they composed their versions o the GoodNews. We are also in a position to observe, with great interest, exactly how

Matthew and Luke each used Mark, how they modied or corrected orexpanded the earlier Gospel.

But something else is apparent i we put the three Synoptics side by side.Tere are another two hundred-plus verses more or less identical in Matthewand Luke, but not ound in Mark. Te easiest explanation is that the two evan-gelists must have had another source they incorporated into their work. Wedo not know what it was; we only know what was in it, or some o what was

in it, namely those identical non-Markan verses that occur in Matthewand Luke. Te nineteenth-century scholars who ormed this convincinghypothesis named it “Q,” or the German Quelle , or “source.”

I we isolate and look more closely at what constitutes Q, it becomesapparent that Q was a collection o Jesus’ sayings, or logoi, as they were calledin his day. And only sayings. Tere is, oddly, no death by crucixion, no resur-rection in the hypothetically reconstructed Q. Who would make such a col-

lection and why? Was it a kind o primitive catechism to serve as an introduc-tion to the Jesus movement, leaving the hard parts till later? Was it conceivablya real Gospel? A quite different Good News, and perhaps about a quite di-erent and, as some now suggest, even the authentic Jesus?

Te Jesus questers o the nineteenth century thought they had uncoveredin Q an interesting new source or Matthew and Luke. It added no new inor-mation, o course, since the Q material was there in those two Gospels rom

the very beginning. But historians o the second hal o the twentieth centurybegan to regard Q in a quite different way, as we shall later see in more detail.


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One o the reasons was the discovery o a manuscript o a work thatcalled itsel “Te Gospel o Tomas.” Tis sel-described Gospel was a collec-

tion o sayings o Jesus, some o them echoed rom the canonical Gospels,some o them not. But the important thing is that it was, ormally, a Gospel.So it was possible to conceive o a sayings collection like Q as a genuineGospel, a ormal announcement o the Jesus message. And “Tomas” presentsto us, exactly like Q, a Jesus who had not died on the cross and had not risenrom the dead. Te Jesus o both Tomas and Q was simply a teacher- preacher.

Q must have been early, at least as early as Mark’s Gospel, but whence and when Tomas? Te preserved Gospel o Tomas, which is a Coptic transla-tion o a Greek original now known only in ragments, does not, in any event,have spotless credentials. It was part o a ourth-century sectarian libraryuncovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt. Te sectarians were known as Gnos-tics, an early Christian movement condemned by the mainstream churches,and their library included a number o works that bore the title o “Gospel”

but do not appear in the New estament. Tey came to be called “apocryphal.”

Te word means “reserved” or “restricted,” and “apocryphal” is a term used to describe works not included in the offi cial collection.Tus there are both biblical apocrypha, like the already mentioned Jewish works attributed to Enoch and Baruch, that are not includ

f. e. peters - jesus and muhammad parallel tracks

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