ABSTRACT
The Qur’anic (Q) discourse about the ‘Īsā (عيسى) figure-taken to be identical to the New Testament’s (NT) Jesus by most scholars-reveals many salient features, some of which refer to, not borrow from, NT narratives as mock narratives, not as source narratives. While the term ‘narrative’ is used here in the sense it is by Susana Onega and José Angel Garcia Landa:1 ‘A narrative is the semiotic representation of a series of events meaningfully connected’, mock narrative/text, refers to the other(s) narrative(s)/text(s) as implied narrative(s)/text(s) by the Qur’anic narrative. Mock narrative/ text represents the counterpart of the Qur’anic narrative/text, functioning as its second narrative/text. I coined this term, on the basis of the term ‘mock reader’ that Walker Gibson coined in 1950.2 In a communicative situation, this mock narrative/text presupposes an implied reader, who engages in the reading process from the outside into the inside of the (Qur’anic) text. Both the implied reader and the mock narrative/text are abstractions, but unlike the implied reader, mock narrative/text can actually be heard and seen in the text. Mock narrative/text is intended by the concrete narrative/ text, and as such it occupies an intermediate position between the concrete text/narrative, Qur’an-and the non-Qur’anic texts/sources/narrativesQur’an commentaries, midrashic literature, NT tradition, pre-Islamic oral traditions and so forth.3
