It is said that what became Judaism started out as the adoption as patron of a warrior god thought to control weather by a non-monotheistic group called Yahwists, and there is some support for this in the Old Testament, in particular the Pentateuch. See Exodus 19:9, 16-19; Deuteronomy 33:1-2; Exodus 15:1-18; Deuteronomy 4:11–12, 33, 36; Deuteronomy 5:22–26; Exodus 9:13-35; Numbers 11:25, 12:5, 14:10-14.
But cults, like cultures, adapt. When elite elements of Israelite society were displaced to Babylon, the Old Testament editors turned to the scriptures in search of a placeless god with whom they had a pact. See Albertz, R., Israel in Exile (2003) at 246 (“Stripped of the organizational structure of the state, Israel was largely reduced to the family as a basis for its common life.”), 268 (discussing exilic doctrinal revisions presenting YHWH as “הָאֵ֣ל” [hā-’êl], i.e., “the [only] God” to support the notion that “God’s activity cannot be limited” since “God is bound not to a geographical location but to a human group.”), 294-95 (“To prevent the destruction of the temple from affecting Yahweh himself, the Deuteronomists made every effort to spiritualize the earlier highly concrete notions of Yahweh’s cultic presence in the temple. No longer did Yahweh dwell on Mount Zion (Pss 46:5 [4]; 76:3 [2]; 84:2 [1]; 132:7; 1 Kgs 8:12), as the exponents of ancient Zion theology asserted; neither did he cause his name to dwell there (Deut 12:11; 14:23; 16:2, 6, 11; 26:2), as the Deuteronomic theologians taught. Instead, he actually dwelt in heaven (1 Kgs 8:27). In the view of the Deuteronomistic historians, the temple was no longer built for Yahweh himself but ‘for his name’ . . . In other words, he was not present there but was merely accessible in a special way through prayer (1 Kgs 8:29–30).”).
By the time of Jeremiah, who is said to have died in around 570 BC, the cult that had initially focused on animal sacrifices performed at a specific temple had evolved to one focused on obedience in accordance with timeless divine scripture. See Carroll, R. P., Jeremiah: A Commentary (1986), at 80 (“As the bearer of the word Jeremiah represents one development of a theologized surrogate for human institutions in the Persian period and reflects a movement of considerable importance in the evolution of Judaean religion in the direction of early Judaism.”), 216 (“It is part of the Deuteronomistic desacralization of the community’s life in order to concentrate its attention on the divine word – an example of the theology of the word rewriting the nation’s history. Obedience, not sacrifice, was the original command, and by that standard the nation’s history has been one of complete and continual rebellion against Yahweh. Hence its destruction is warranted.”). The story of Jeremiah is interesting for our purposes because when he is supposedly told by YHWH that he had been preselected as a prophet, Jeremiah protested that he could not speak as a prophet in light of his youth. See Jeremiah 1:6. Despite this, YHWH insists. See Jeremiah 1:7-10 (“But the Lord said to me, ‘Do not say, I am too young. You must go to everyone I send you to and say whatever I command you. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you and will rescue you,’ declares the Lord. Then the Lord reached out his hand and touched my mouth and said to me, ‘I have put my words in your mouth. See, today I appoint you over nations and kingdoms to uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant.'”). We will not the parallels in the Qur’an later.
Whereas the exilic revisions answer the question of how to receive YHWH’s favor without physical proximity to his temple, Christianity came to answer the question of how to receive it without privity in the pact. Before there was anything written that would make its way into the New Testament, there came to be an apocalyptic and messianic movement whose adherents considered themselves Jewish followers of Jesus. See Fredriksen, P., From Jesus to Christ (2000), at 135 (“[T]he original community of Jesus’ followers, like Jesus himself, had stood recognizably within the bounds of traditional Judaism and traditional apocalyptic expectation . . . Soon the message of Jesus and the coming Kingdom spread to the synagogue communities of the Diaspora.”), 142 (“So far I have reconstructed a messianic movement whose message, despite one glaring oddity—its messiah had died and been raised—essentially recapitulated the traditional hopes and commitments of Jewish restoration theology. Its first apostles, themselves Jews, shortly after the resurrection took this message of the impending redemption of Israel to Israel. They traveled via the network of synagogue communities spreading throughout the Jewish homeland to the Diaspora, fervently preaching the coming of the Kingdom and their messiah’s return.”).
Of the writings that many years later made their way into the New Testament biblical canons, the earliest were letters authored by a person who admits to not being an eyewitness, namely, Paul. See Brown, R., An Introduction to the New Testament, abridg. (2016), at 3 (“It is no accident, then, that letters were the first Christian literature of which we know. Thus in the 50s of the first century Paul produced the earliest surviving Christian documents: I Thess, Gal, Phil, Phlm, I and II Cor, and Rom.”), 163 (“As the oldest preserved Christian writing, this document has a special significance even outside the Pauline corpus. Within the corpus I Thess has at times been neglected because it does not treat the great Pauline theme of justification by faith apart from the works of the Law.”), 152 (“His letters do not suggest that he had seen Jesus during the public ministry or at the crucifixion, and so implicitly cast doubt on his continuous presence in Jerusalem in the years AD 26–30/33.”), 257-58 (“Perhaps above all, Paul denied receiving his gospel from any other human being—God revealed the Son to him (Gal 1:11–12)…”); Murphy-O’Connor, J., Paul: A Critical Life (1996), at 42 (“The name Saul, however, is known to us only through Luke, whose credibility unfortunately cannot be taken for granted, because his usage smacks of artificiality.”).
As best can be inferred, Paul was born around 6 B.C. as a Roman citizen, was educated in Greek, and may have studied Judaism in Jerusalem, where he became “extremely zealous” and “completely dedicated to, and totally involved in,” the persecution of the early Jesus movement. (Murphy-O’Connor, at 8, 41, 48-49, 60-69). However, much of what is claimed about Paul biographically comes from the author of Luke-Acts, whose narration is untrustworthy. See Fredriksen, at 55 (“Unfortunately, what little biographical information Paul does give us seems to fatally compromise, if not contradict, what we have from Luke. Paul himself never states that he studied in Jerusalem under Gamaliel or anyone else (as we would expect he would when he boasts of being a ‘Hebrew of Hebrews’; Phil 3:4–6); nor that he participated in any way in persecutions there… If Acts did not exist and all we had were Paul’s letters, we would have no reason to think of him as other than a Jew of the Diaspora whose language was Greek, whose original arena of activity was Damascus…”); Murphy-O’Connor, at 66 (“Once it is noticed that the strongest statements concerning Paul’s pre-Christian activity always occur as introductions to narratives of his conversion, it becomes obvious that it was in Luke’s artistic interest to exaggerate certain negative traits of Paul the persecutor in order to set in greater relief the miracle of his conversion and the success of his apostolate.”); Brown, Intro, at 151 (“No doubt, Acts has offered a theological interpretation of Paul, adapting his role to fit an overall view of the spread of Christianity.”).
Despite never meeting Jesus in person, Paul professed that he encountered him in a revelation. Written some 20 years after Jesus’s death, Paul’s letter to the churches of Galatia asserts that God selected him (Paul) for a revelation of his (God’s) son (Gal. 1:16). Following this: “Paul now knew with the inescapable conviction of direct experience that the Jesus who had been crucified under Pontius Pilate was alive. The resurrection which he had contemptuously dismissed was a fact, as undeniable as his own reality. He knew that Jesus now existed on another plane.” (Murphy-O’Connor, at 78). Initially, Paul may have taught that, in order to attain salvation, a convert would need to follow Jewish law. See Campbell, D. A., “Galatians 5.11: Evidence of an Early Law-observant Mission by Paul?“, in New Testament Studies 57(3) (July 2011), at 347 (“Paul did spend part of his apostolic career proclaiming a gospel that included a commitment to circumcision, which is to say that he did not always relax this expectation for male converts to his movement from paganism.”). Or, it could be that his idea all along was that Jewish law had been rendered obsolete by Jesus’s death. See Collman, R.D., The Apostle to the Foreskin: Circumcision in the Letters of Paul (2023), at 105 (“To be sure, Paul’s thought likely developed—as is expected with any individual— but that he drastically altered his core message to gentiles seems unlikely.”). Either way, by the end of his ministry, it was Paul’s emphatic claim that Jesus’s death admitted non-Jews to the covenant notwithstanding non-adherence to Mosaic law. See Sanders, E. P., Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (1983), at 207-08 (“Paul’s thought was largely Jewish, and his work as apostle to the Gentiles is to be understood within the framework of Jewish eschatological speculation, as Rom. 15:16 makes clear. Paul interpreted his task of bringing the Gentiles into the people of God in such a way, however, that the church, in both his understanding and practice, became in effect a third entity – although he seems not to have perceived that his gospel and his missionary activity imply a break with Judaism. There are, nevertheless, two points at which the break is clearly perceptible. One is the traditional Jewish doctrine of election, which Paul denies. He appeals, to be sure, to God’s covenant with Abraham, and thus his language is often appropriate to understanding the church as ‘true Israel.’ But his argument that the covenant ‘skips’ from Abraham to Christ, and now includes those in Christ, but not Jews by descent, is in fact a flat denial of the election of Israel. The second point at which the break is especially clear is his insistence that it is through faith in Christ, not by accepting the law, that one enters the people of God. Thus he denies two pillars common to all forms of Judaism: the election of Israel and faithfulness to the Mosaic law.”).
Paul’s activities proved that among the non-Jewish inhabitants of the Roman Empire there was hunger for Israelite monotheism, so long as it could be adapted to their lifestyle. See Meeks, W., The First Urban Christians, 2d ed. (2003), at 36 (“Their strict monotheism, their ‘imageless’ worship, the strong cohesion of their communities won admiration among many of their pagan neighbors, leading some to become outright proselytes, others to become sympathizers or even formal adherents to the synagogue.”), 81 (“Paul explicitly and emphatically rejected the ritual of circumcision and the other observances that distinguished Jew from gentile, although the controversy in Galatia shows that this was by no means a self-evident step.”), 91 (“[T]here was an old and expanding tradition of intellectual monotheism in Hellenistic culture, and the series of prepositional phrases appended to ‘one God, the Father,’ and ‘one Lord, Jesus Christ’ in Paul’s formulalike statement can be found in almost identical form in writings of the Roman Stoics and others.”), 92 (“Whereas the Jewish communities in the diaspora cities welcomed both proselytes and ‘god-fearers’ who were not yet ready to make the full commitment signified by circumcision, Paul and the other urban missionaries of the new sect took a much more radical approach toward the non-Jews. They proclaimed in the death and resurrection of Messiah Jesus the beginning of a new age, in which Jew and gentile were to be joined together without distinction in the people of God. The ritual markers that protected the identity of the Jews in pagan cities— particularly circumcision, kashrut, sabbath observance—were now abandoned (though not without dissent).”).
It is only after Paul’s activities prove the viability of a Judaism for non-Jews that we get the first of the Gospels, Mark. Mark is, compared to the later gospels of Matthew and Luke, less mythological with respect to Jesus’s origin. Mark, for example, does not make the claim that Mary and Joseph traveled to Bethlehem pursuant to a Roman decree requiring householders to be counted in their ancestral town, nor does it claim that Jesus was born of a virgin. See Brown, R. E., The Birth of the Messiah (1993), at 27 (“The oldest example, the Gospel of Mark… terminates with the angelic proclamation of the resurrection at the empty tomb (16:1-8). Mark tells the reader nothing about Jesus’ birth or youth, not even the name of his father (Joseph).”), 35 (“The Lucan account alone depicts the following: the story of Elizabeth, Zechariah, and the birth of JBap [John the Baptist]; the census which brings Joseph to Bethlehem; the acclamation of Jesus by the shepherds…”). Paul, likewise, did not assert that Jesus was born of a virgin on the two occasions he considered it worthwhile to address his birth at all. See Galatians 4:4-5 (“But when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.”); Romans 1:3 (“the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh”).
Translations, too, adapt. In Mark 7 Jesus defended his apostles who ate with unwashed hands on grounds that food enters the stomach and not the heart, and is evacuated, purging all impurity. It is a single Greek word with varying transcription that has been turned in translation into a declaration that Jewish dietary laws were abrogated by Jesus along the lines of: “(In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.).” The Greek word is either καθαρίζων or καθαρίζον and by Jesus’s time pronounced identically or at least very similarly. If the penultimate letter is correctly ω, then the word is a masculine active participle, and if ο is correct, then the participle is neuter. The oldest manuscripts render the participle as masculine, and the neuter is used in Byzantine manuscripts. Hence the KJV, inheriting the neuter, has: “it entereth not into his heart, but into the belly, and goeth out into the draught, purging all meats,” the participle referring to the neuter noun πᾶν (pan, i.e., “everything” or “whatsoever thing from without” which “entereth . . . and goeth out into the draught.”). By contrast, and relying on the assumption that the participle is properly masculine, the NIV and RSV have the purifying agent referring to the accusative masculine singular “Jesus”, for the proposition that the same “he” who “says” that whatsoever enters from the outside ends up in the sewer having passed through the stomach without touching the heart–that “he”, i.e., Jesus–is the active participle that purifies all food in Mark 7:19. The translation having Mark’s narrator say "Jesus declared all foods clean” is a new interpretation innovated, for the English-speaking world at least, in 1881 at the earliest. It is in 1881 that the English Revised Version renders the word: “This he said, making all meats clean.” Then, in 1946, the Revised Standard Version comes out with: “(Thus he declared all foods clean.)”, and the NIV in 1978 gave a similar rendition. The RSV and NIV insert a subject not present or obvious in the original (“Jesus”) and an adjudicative verb absent in the original (“declared”). Even if we assume the participle is masculine, we must acknowledge that Bible readers in Europe were without the benefit of the alleged significance of this single word until modern times. See Booth, R. P., Jesus and the Laws of Purity (1986), at 50 (“The preservation of καθαρίζων, notwithstanding its grammatical difficulty, argues for Mark’s hand . . .”). See also, generally, Bruce, F. F., History of the Bible in English, 3d ed. (1978), at 135-203 (discussing translation controversies following availability of Vatican and Sinaitic codices in the late nineteenth century); Metzger, B. M., The Bible in Translation: Ancient and English Versions, Ch. 6 (“By the middle of the nineteenth century, the study of the Greek manuscripts had shown beyond question that the King James Version was based upon a Greek text that contained the accumulated errors of fifteen centuries of manuscript copying.”), Ch. 12 (discussing history of translations catering to conservative American readers from, 1952-1978); Barker, K. L., The NIV: The Making of a Contemporary Translation (1986), at 128 (“While it may be true that at times the NIV translators have been guilty of reading something into the text, I would contend that overall this version has achieved a high level of accuracy by its philosophy of translation.”); Goddard, B. L., The NIV Story: The Inside Story of the New International Version (1989), at 38-39 (“The translators will seek to communicate to those who read or heard it as originally given–no more and no less . . . Theirs will be an idiomatic version–neither a wooden word-for-word translation nor one characterized by free paraphrase.”).
John 7:53-8:11 is silently included in the KJV as a natural result of the manuscripts available when the translation was published in 1611. This is the story in which Jesus tells an adulterous woman to “go, and sin no more” after telling the crowd prepared to stone her that the member of the crowd who “is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” After the crowd dispersed, “being convicted by their own conscience,” Jesus asks the woman: “Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee?” When the woman responds in the negative, Jesus says to her: “Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.” The NIV prefaces John 7:53 with the following disclosure: “[The earliest manuscripts and many other ancient witnesses do not have John 7:53—8:11. A few manuscripts include these verses, wholly or in part, after John 7:36, John 21:25, Luke 21:38 or Luke 24:53.]”, and italicizes John 7:53-8:11. Similarly, in the RSV we find a footnote after John 8:11, which says: “The most ancient authorities omit 7.53–8.11; other authorities add the passage here or after 7.36 or after 21.25 or after Luke 21.38, with variations of text.” An obvious question presents itself: if the earlier manuscripts upon which the RSV and NIV are based are sufficiently authoritative to confidently convert a hanging masculine active participle into “Jesus declared all foods clean,” then why are they not sufficiently authoritative to delete the added story of John 7:53-8:11? Compare Knust, J. & Wasserman, T., To Cast the First Stone: The Transmission of a Gospel Story (2019), at 343-44 (“Our survey of the evidence has convinced us that the story was interpolated into a Greek copy of John in the West, probably during the first half of the third century, and with great care; that the Johannine pericope was then gradually but decisively brought into texts, liturgy, and art in Greek and Latin, albeit at different rates; and thus that the story was not actively suppressed on theological grounds, either in its initial version(s) or in its Johannine (and Lukan!) forms, despite the custom among some Byzantine scribes and scholars of identifying the passage as spurious.”) with, e.g., Various Authors, “Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy” (1978) (“WE AFFIRM that inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of Scripture, which in the providence of God can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy. We further affirm that copies and translations of Scripture are the Word of God to the extent that they faithfully represent the original. WE DENY that any essential element of the Christian faith is affected by the absence of the autographs. We further deny that this absence renders the assertion of Biblical inerrancy invalid or irrelevant.”).
The idea of benefitting from the covenant YHWH allegedly made with the Israelites, without being an Israelite, caught on rather quickly, especially among governments. By 250 AD, around 2 percent of the Roman Empire’s total population was Christian. See Fox, R. L., Pagans and Christians (1986) [Penguin ed. 2006], at 244 (“Christians spread and increased: no other cult in the Empire grew at anything like the same speed[.]”), 287 (describing Christianity as “much the most rapidly growing religion in the Mediterranean,” though “its total membership was still small in absolute terms, perhaps (at a guess) only 2 percent of the Empire’s total population by 250.”). By 312 AD, Paul’s law-free backdoor into Judaism was utilized by Constantine, who is said to have seen the image of a cross in the sky and to have been visited by Jesus in a dream in anticipation of a military campaign, following which he converted, saw military success, and went on to become the uncontested Caesar and sole ruler of the Roman Empire. See generally, id., at 570-76. Soon came the Kingdom of Aksum in modern-day Ethiopia, under its ruler Ezana, who adopted Christianity sometime around 340 AD. See Phillipson, David W., Foundations of an African Civilisation (2012), at 98-99.
In around 380, monotheism caught on in Himyar, located in modern-day Yemen. See Grasso, V. A., “A Late Antique Kingdom’s Conversion: Jews and Sympathizers in South Arabia,” Journal of Late Antiquity 13, no. 2 (2020), at 374 (“Like rulers of neighboring kingdoms—for instance, Constantine, ‘Ēzānā, Tiridates III of Armenia (reigned 287–330), and Mirian III of Kartli in Georgia (reigned 284–361)—, Malkīkarib Yuha’min and his successors recognized the strategic importance of adopting a monotheistic religion to prevent cultural fragmentation and thereby consolidate their power.”). Initially, the faith adopted was a non-specific Judaism-inspired religion. See id., at 361 (noting early inscriptions invoke a non-denominational “Lord of Heaven and Earth” and that “Malkīkarib Yuha’min’s monotheism does not have a particular affiliation and seems to be rather generic”). The situation progressed into a more formalized and militant adherence to Judaism by the early sixth century, culminating in explicit anti-Christian geopolitical warfare. See id., at 369 (“In addition to the aforementioned testimonies clearly attesting to the presence of a Jewish South Arabian community, there are two monumental inscriptions, both dated to the sixth century during the reign of the Jewish king Yūsuf, who ruled from 522 to sometime between 525 and 530. One invokes rb-Hwd b-Rḥmnn (‘Lord of the Jew in/with/by the aid of Rhmnn’), and the other rb-Hd b-Mhmd (‘Lord of the Jews in/with/by the aid of the Highly Praised’).”), 373 (“The Ḥimyarite kings’ choice to adopt a monotheism inspired not by Christianity but by Judaism potentially had international implications, distancing Ḥimyar from Rome, Aksūm, and the Roman foederati of North Arabia . . . It is significant that in 523 the Jewish ruler of Ḥimyar, author of the massacre of the Christian Arabian center of Najrān, wrote to the king of the Sasanians and to Nasrid leader al-Mundhir . . . asking them to follow his example and kill all Christians in their land for 3,000 dinars.”).
Hence, by the time Muhammad was born in Mecca around 570, to his west across the Red Sea lie Aksum, which had adopted Christianity some two centuries earlier, to his south lie Himyar with its Christian community in Najran (presently on the border of Yemen and Saudi Arabia) and official Judaism-inspired monotheism that referred to its Lord (rabb) as Rahmanan (merciful) and Mhmd (beloved/highly praised). To the north, in Syria, lie Harran, where in 568 Arabs were building martyr shrines dedicated to St. John. See University of Oxford, “E02143: Bilingual Greek-Arabic building inscription for a martyr shrine (martyrion) of *John (probably *John the Baptist, S00020), constructed by a phylarch. Found at Ḥarrān, to the northwest of Bostra and Dionysias (Roman province of Arabia). Dated 568.”, https://doi.org/10.25446/oxford.13816601. See also Grasso, V. A., Pre-Islamic Arabia (2023), at 202 (discussing Judeo-Christian saturation in Arabia and environs). Even closer, the Nabataean kingdom, including its Hijazi city of Hegra (الْحِجْر / Al-Hijr), had been annexed by the Roman Empire by 107 AD. See Fiema, Z. T., et al., “Provincia Arabia: Nabataea, the Emergence of Arabic as a Written Language, and Graeco-Arabic,” in Arabs and Empires before Islam (Fisher, G., ed., 2015), at 4-5. Hegra continued to be occupied off and on at least until the fourth century, and perhaps as late as the sixth, before it was abandoned. Id., at 10. The ruins of Hegra are located in the modern Medina province of Saudi Arabia. The ruins were apparently known to Muhammad’s audience. See Qur’an 29:38, 15:80-84. During Muhammad’s lifetime, various Arab tribes in the Hijaz, including the Quraysh from which Muhammad hails, were subject to, or at least cooperative with, Himyarite rule. See Fiema, at 15-16. Muhammad and his audience were familiar with the massacre of Christians in Najran, who were considered believers (mu’minun), such that the perpetrators are condemned to hellfire in Sura 85–or at least that is how Sura 85 was interpreted throughout history. Compare Silverstein, A., “Who are the Aṣḥāb al-Ukhdūd? Q 85:4‒10 in Near Eastern Context,” in Der Islam 2:96 (2019), at 282 (“[A]lthough the Martyrs of Najrān episode is most widely adduced in elucidating this Qurʾānic passage, it is in fact the episode recounted in Daniel 3 that is most relevant here.”); Saleh, W. A., “The Qur’an and Communal Memory: Q. 85 and the Martyrs of Najrān,” in Journal of Qur’anic Studies 26:3 (2025) (“This article reviews the massive literature on this sura and proposes that the Najran martyrs remain the most plausible referent.”). Indeed, in Muhammad’s backyard in Medina, Jewish tribes held high status. See Lecker, M., Muslims, Jews, and Pagans: Studies on Early Islamic Medina (1995, 2017 ed.), at 9-10 (“There can be no doubt that when the Prophet arrived at Medina, the Jewish Nadir and Qurayza were the dominant element in the ‘Aliya and in Medina generally . . ."). And Muhammad was intimately familiar with Aksum, too. See Watt, W. M., Muhammad at Mecca (1953), at 100-01 (translating correspondence preserved in al-Tabari regarding Muhammad instructing followers to “go away to the land of the Abyssinians” where: “there was a good king called the Najāshī (or Negus)” and a “land [in which] no one suffered wrong; and moreover he himself was praised for his uprightness. Abyssinia was a market where the Quraysh traded, finding in it ample supplies, security, and good business.”). See also Raven, W., “Some Early Islamic Texts on the Negus of Abyssinia,” in Journal of Semitic Studies XXXIII/2 (1988), at 197 (discussing Islamic tradition that Negus endorsed Muhammad as prophet and sent him gifts, and Muhammad prayed for him upon his death); Cerulli, E., “Ethiopia’s relations with the Muslim World,” in General History of Africa III: Africa from the Seventh to the Eleventh Century (El Fasi, ed., 1988), at 576 (discussing Islamic traditions that "generally refer to the Ethiopian Bilāl and the Prophet’s predilection for him and people of the same origin" and borrowed Ethiopian words found in the Qur'an); Munro-Hay, S., Aksum: An African Civilisation of Late Antiquity (1991), at 209-10 (“An early account of the church’s magnificence is said to have been related to the prophet Muhammad during his last illness by two of his wives, Umm Habiba and Umm Salama, both of whom had been in exile in Ethiopia with their former husbands in the 620s.”) Hence, no credence should be given to the myth that would have us believe that the Qur’an fell out of the sky in a pagan vacuum. Yes, there were pagans, but they were surrounded by, and intermixed with, monotheists of various kinds.
Muhammad, similar to Jeremiah, was supposedly selected for prophethood despite his own doubts regarding his competency. Whereas YHWH commands Jeremiah to speak, and Jeremiah protests that he is too young to speak, Muhammad is commanded to read/recite [iqraʾ], and Muhammad protests that he does not know how to read. See Sahih al-Bukhari 3 (relating traditional account of Muhammad being told to read/recite and Muhammad protesting that he is illiterate); Anthony, S. W., Muhammad and the Empires of Faith (2020), at 228 (“Rather than functioning as a record of Muḥammad’s first prophetic experiences, or even a historically accurate attestation to the authentic past, the iqraʾ narrative first and foremost must be read as a literary artifact of its age, which conveys how early Muslims wished to imagine Muḥammad and how they relied on their image of him to articulate the meaning of prophecy and divine guidance for human affairs, a cultural memory synthesized and constructed from an array of literary forms current in the historical landscape of Late Antiquity.”).
Whereas Paul claimed that access to YHWH no longer depended on covenant compliance because Jesus represented fulfillment of Mosaic law, Muhammad took a different tack by placing access to YHWH behind Moses. It is Muhammad’s claim that submission (islam) to God’s authority is what causes salvation, irrespective of Israelite membership. See Qur’an 3:67 (“Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian; rather he was a hanif (non-idolater) who submitted (muslim) and was non-polytheistic.”); Levenson, J. D., Inheriting Abraham (2012), at 209-10 (“But whereas Paul found in Abraham a foreshadowing of what would eventually become available through the Gospel, the Qur’an presents its message as itself ‘the religion of Abraham’: Abraham was a Muslim.”). Note the parallel with John 8:58-59: “‘Very truly I tell you,’ Jesus answered, ‘before Abraham was born, I am!’ At this, they picked up stones to stone him, but Jesus hid himself, slipping away from the temple grounds.” Contrary evidence notwithstanding, the Qur’an claims that the coming of an illiterate prophet, named Ahmed, is foretold in both the Torah and the Gospel(s). See Qur’an 7:157 (“Those who follow the messenger, the Prophet who can neither read nor write, whom they will find described in the Torah and the Gospel (which are) with them.”); Qur’an 61:6 (“Jesus, son of Mary, said, ‘Children of Israel, I am sent to you by God, confirming the Torah that came before me and bringing good news of a messenger to follow me whose name will be Ahmad.’ Yet when he came to them with clear signs, they said, ‘This is obviously sorcery.’”). The fact that no such foretelling is actually found in either is attributed to deliberate deletion. See, e.g., Qur’an 2:59, 2:75-79, 4:46, 5:13, 6:91.
By tradition, the Qur’an we have today is the result of an early compilation process following Muhammad’s death. We are told that variations existed, but they were deliberately suppressed to avoid the type of debate exhibited by the Jews and Christians. See Déroche, F., The One and the Many: The Early History of the Qur’an (DeBevoise transl., 2021), at 104-05 (translating “Bukhārī’s version, which goes back to Anas b. Malīk” as: “Ḥudhayfa b. al-Yamān presented himself to ‘Uthmān at the time when he was fighting the people of Syria [Shām], seeking to use Iraqi troops to conquer Armenia and Azerbaijan. He had been alarmed by the different ways in which these people recited [the Qur’an]. He therefore said to ‘Uthmān: ‘Commander of the faithful, rescue this community [umma] before it disagrees about Holy Scripture as Jews and Christians have disagreed [about their own scriptures].’ ‘Uthmān therefore sent someone to say to [his wife] Ḥafṣa: ‘Send us the sheets [ṣuḥuf], we will copy them in the maṣāḥif, then we will send them back to you.’ Ḥafṣa sent the sheets to ‘Uthmān and he gave orders to Zayd b. Thābit, ‘Abd Allāh b. Zubayr, Sa‘īd b. al-‘Aṣ, and ‘Abd al-Raḥman b. al-Hārith b. Hishām. These men copied the sheets in the maṣāḥif. ‘Uthmān said to the three Qurayshites [of the group]: ‘If you differ from Zayd b. Thābit over some passage of the Qur’an, copy it in the language of the Quraysh, for the Qur’an has come down in their language.’ This they did. When they had copied the sheets in the maṣāḥif, ‘Uthmān sent the sheets back to Ḥafṣa. And he sent [copies] of the codex that they had made into the various regions and he ordered every other collection [ṣaḥīfa] and every other codex to be burned.”) The evidence is clear that under Uthman a written prototype with the promulgated rasm (consonantal skeleton without the dots necessary to distinguish, e.g., between a “b”, “t”, ” or “th,” or between an “h”, “kh,” or “j”) was distributed and enforced by the eighth century at the latest. Id., at 73, 135 (“Significantly, accounts of the making of a written Qur’an often conclude by mentioning the destruction of earlier codices. ‘Uthmān is said to have ordered them to be burned, torn apart, or even buried.”). Though the Qur’an purports to be the word of God, in certain cases it was abrogated (naskh) based on Muhammad’s conduct (sunnah). For example, the Qur’an mandates corporal punishment for fornication, but stoning was taken as orthodoxy pursuant to reports that Muhammad had ordered it during his lifetime. Compare Qur’an 24:2 (mandating 100 lashes) with Burton, J., The Sources of Islamic Law: Islamic theories of abrogation (1990), at 137 (translating Shafi’i discussion concluding that penalty of flogging for non-virgin non-enslaved fornicators was abrogated in favor of stoning based on Muhammad’s ordering the stoning of Ma’iz b. Malik, who insisted on confessing his adultery, and the practical impossibility of halving stoning in the case of enslaved persons pursuant to Qur’an 4:25), 164 (“On the question of stoning for adultery, all madhhabs are unanimous in agreeing on a penalty nowhere referred to in the mushaf, indeed, in conflict with the penalty that is mentioned there.”). Though the various madhhabs (schools of jurisprudence) were unanimous in concluding that the Qur’anic penalty of flogging had indeed been abrogated, there was variance between them on the question of whether this was by reports of Muhammad’s conduct alone, or by an invisible verse not appearing in the text of the Qur’an. See id. at 164 (discussing disagreement between Malikis and Hanafis, on the one hand, who contended that Muhammad’s conduct abrogated the penalty, and Shafi’i on the other, who contended that such conduct alone may not abrogate Qur’anic provisions and, therefore, the abrogation was the product of a verse not actually appearing in the text).
Conveniently, though each of these faiths depends on revision of a prior faith for its legitimation, the door is always closed behind them. See Deuteronomy 4:2; Deuteronomy 12:32; Malachi 4:4-5; Hebrews 1:1-2; Revelation 22:18-19; Qur’an 5:3; Qur’an 33:40.
Because religion is a technology designed to unify subjects and enable cohesion and cooperation among previously heterogenous people groups, dissent is typically not tolerated. For example, in Leviticus 24 it is related that the son of Shelomith “blasphemed the Name with a curse” and was brought to Moses and confined until such time as “the will of the Lord should be made clear,” following which the Lord instructs Moses: “‘Take the blasphemer outside the camp. All those who heard him are to lay their hands on his head, and the entire assembly is to stone him.’ Say to the Israelites: ‘Anyone who curses their God will be held responsible; anyone who blasphemes the name of the Lord is to be put to death. The entire assembly must stone them. Whether foreigner or native-born, when they blaspheme the Name they are to be put to death.'” See Leviticus 24:10-16. As we have already discussed, Paul’s activities before his epiphany were dedicated to the persecution of Jews who professed that Jesus was the Messiah. See Galatians 1:13-14; 1 Corinthians 15:9; Philippians 3:6. After that, he himself was supposedly beaten for his own beliefs or proselytism. See 2 Corinthians 11:24. Once Christianity was the dominant doctrine, the authorities were not hesitant to stamp out dissent. See, e.g., Athanassiadi, P., “Persecution and Response in Late Paganism: The Evidence of Damascius,” in Journal of Hellenic Studies cxiii (1993), at 20-21 (“The persecution of individuals was complemented, as usual, by an attack on pagan monuments in and around Alexandria . . . The grammarian [Horapollo] was duly arrested together with his uncle, the philosopher Heraiscus. Both were tortured to make them reveal the names of other co-religionists, but ‘they gnashed their teeth and did not succumb to the tyrant’. . . Yet the pressures on him [Horapollo] had been too many; and the mockery implicit in his appalling betrayal by a wife of impeccable pagan pedigree and upbringing must have struck at the very core of his belief. It was at that point that he broke down and converted to Christianity… Horapollo’s combative spirit had been worn away by a psychological war of attrition which lasted for too long. This failure of nerve was an all-too-common response to Christian intolerance.”). Once Islam was an instrument of imperial power, thought crimes offending the doctrine of the day were likewise prosecuted. See, e.g., Mason, H. W., Al-Hallaj (1995), at xii (“[Hallaj] was taken very seriously in his own time to the point of gathering both disciples and enemies throughout the Islamic world and of being regarded as a political threat to the state and being executed in 922 AD for the charge of heresy. . .”), 50-51 (“In the eighth/fourteenth century, however, a major Hanbalite traditionalist, Ibn Taymiya (728/ 1328), reexamined the trial and execution of Hallaj and concluded the condemnation and terms were just. . . Hallaj was justly condemned. And anyone who is not of this opinion is either hypocritical or ignorant; and whoever approves of him must be killed like him.”).
One could go on and on, but the point seems well established that humans craft religions to meet the needs of their situation, and only then do they retrofit their conclusions to the ancient doctrines from which they purport to derive authority. Once established, the authority is forcefully guarded.
