[Boston Globe] The origins of a holy book

I have previously addressed issues of scriptural origins and the interrelations of the Abrahamic religions in the following blog entries:

• [Patricia Crone] What do we actually know about Mohammed?
• Linguistics, Islam and the Beatitudes
• Hanukkah, Christmas, and `Idu-l-Adha
• Connecting Shavuot (Pentecost) with Ramadan
• Islam in Europe: Germany: Professor featured on WSJ
• Martillo's Three Hypotheses Plus One
• How Jews Distort Judaic History
• [Dunedin School] Ten Reasons for Dating Deuteronomy to the
• Egypt, Gnosticism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism

Even though the Boston Globe article below describes critical analysis of the Quranic text as mostly an area or Western academic interest, there really is no reason why Muslim believers should not take part, and it is probably a threat to Islamic faith for Muslims to ignore this sort of research.

The origins of a holy book

Using ancient texts, scholars have begun an audacious effort to unravel the story of the Koran. What will they find?

 

(- Image by Earl & Nazima Kowall/CORBIS)

By Drake Bennett March 28, 2010 
Later this spring, a team of scholars at Germany’s Berlin-Brandenberg Academy of Sciences will complete the first phase of what will ultimately be an unprecedented, two-decade effort to throw light on the origins of the Koran.

The project, called the Corpus Coranicum, will be something that scholars of the Koran have long yearned for: a central repository of imagery, information, and analysis about the Muslim holy book. Modern research into Islam’s origin and early years has been hampered by the paucity and inaccessibility of ancient texts, and the reluctance of Muslim governments in places like Yemen to allow wide access to them.

But, drawing on some of the earliest Korans in existence — codices found in Istanbul, Cairo, Paris, and Morocco — the Corpus Coranicum will allow users to study for themselves images of thousands of pages of early Korans, texts that differ in small but potentially telling ways from the modern standard version. The project will also link passages in the text to analogous ones in the New Testament and Hebrew Bible, and offer an exhaustive critical commentary on the Koran’s language, structure, themes, and roots. The project’s creators are calling it the world’s first “critical edition” of the Koran, a resource that gathers historical evidence and scholarly literature into one searchable, cross-referenced whole.

[To read the entire article, click here.]

The article mentions eminent German Semitologist Gotthelf Bergsträsser. In Einführung in die Semitischen Sprachen, Munich, 1928, he disposes of an important Zionist lie when he describes Modern Hebrew on p. 47 as:

… ein Hebraisch, das in Wirklichkeit eine europäische Sprache mit durchsichtiger hebräischer Verkleidung ist … mit nur ganz äusserlich hebräischem Charakter. [… a Hebrew which is in reality a European language with a transparent Hebrew disguise …with only a purely superficial Hebrew character.]

Zionists did not actually revive some form of ancient Hebrew but instead created a sort of Esperanto that uses vocabulary based in various Hebrew dialects that have been preserved in Jewish religious texts.

Sphere: Related Content