ABSTRACT

Introduction 1 One could say that a comparative approach towards the Qurʾānic text and earlier scriptures and sacred traditions fi rst emerges within the Qurʾān itself. 2 In addition, the scarcity of documentary evidence, and the problematic nature of the traditional Islamic literary sources, 3 which render complicated the study of the Qurʾān, makes a comparative approach a scholarly obligation. The Biblical, Midrashic and Apocryphal background of the Qurʾān 4 has been a matter of critical scholarly examination for the better part of two centuries. However, to my knowledge no direct comparative examination between the Qurʾān and Syriac Gospels has been undertaken. This absence is peculiar given that the late antique Arabian milieu in which the Qurʾān was revealed served as a point of contact between Arabian communities and the sacred literature and theological expression of Syriac Christian speaking groups. The lives of Arabic speaking Christians were diglossic, as they used Arabic for common everyday matters and Syriac for liturgical, religious purposes. 5

With his 1833 landmark work, Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen? , 6 Abraham Geiger drew attention to the large role that Hebrew Scripture and rabbinical sources played in shaping the Qurʾān’s religious worldview. The important role that language played in Qurʾānic revelation obtained greater value with Theodor Nöldeke and Karl Vollers. Following the traditional theory, Nöldeke argued that classical Arabic or fuṣḥā existed as a spoken language among Arab tribes even prior to the rise of Islam. 7 Vollers refuted this claim by arguing that, before the rise of Islam, Arab tribes spoke various dialects of Arabic koiné and that fuṣḥā developed with later Islamic civilization. 8 Broader comparative studies with Judaism and Christianity gave rise to Wilhelm Rudolph’s Die Abhängigkeit des Qorans von Judentum und Christentum , published in 1922, 9 and the investigative approach to extracting the sources of the Qurʾān were fully under way by 1926 when Joseph Horovitz wrote his Koranische Untersuchungen . 10 In that same year Richard Bell’s The Origin of Islam in its Christian Environment was published. In it Bell describes the general infl uence of the Syrian, Mesopotamian and especially Abyssinian church on Late Antique Arabia, emphasizing in particular the remnants of such infl uences found in the Qurʾān. Bell also acknow ledged that some Qurʾānic terms “indicate penetration of Aramaic culture into Arabia.” 11 The linguistic inquiry into Qurʾānic origins eventually expanded into a discourse that integrated a diversity of Late Antique languages. Arthur Jeffery’s The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qurʾān underscores the vital theological and literary function of Qurʾānic terms originating from other languages such as Aramaic (especially Syriac), Hebrew, Ethiopic, Greek, and Persian. 12 Jeffery followed this book with other works on the Qurʾān such as The Qurʾān as Scripture , which situates the Qurʾān within the diverse genre of scripture in the continuously intermingling religious context of the ancient (before c. 300 CE) and Late Antique (c. 300-700 CE) Near East (Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, Egypt, and Arabia). 13

The study of the Qurʾān in relation to Syriac came into being, albeit under the radar, in 1926 with Tor Andrae’s Der Ursprung der Islams und das Christentum . 14 After portraying an image of Late Antique Arabia similar to that of Bell’s, in which the Persian Nestorian and Abyssinian Monophysite churches exercised much infl uence along Arabian trade routes, Andrae’s insightful analysis compares verses of the Qurʾān with various Syriac works, most notably the hymns of Ephrem (d. 373). 15 However, it was the following year that Alphonse Mingana set the foundation for research on the Qurʾān within the context of Syriac in an article entitled “Syriac Infl uence on the Style of the Kurʾān,” in which he provides a brief typology and some examples of Syriac words used in the Qurʾān, while asserting that 70 percent of the Qurʾān’s foreign vocabulary was Syriac in origin. 16 Still, Mingana’s article did not have a profound impact on Qurʾānic Studies – and with the exception of Andrae and Mingana’s works, which still do not address the Syriac Gospels directly but rather Syriac literature generally, the study of the Qurʾān within the context of Syriac was relatively uncommon.