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Christmas in the Koran
Luxenberg, Syriac, and the Near Eastern and Judeo-Christian Background of Islam
By IBN WARRAQ Prometheus Books
Copyright © 2014 Ibn Warraq
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61614-937-6
CHAPTER 1
In Search of Avocado
IBN WARRAQ
For Classical Arabic there has long been a need for a new etymological dictionary in which Arabists would recognize, possibly for the first time, that there were other Semitic languages; this lacuna is being filled by a glacially slow appearance of the Worterbuch der klassischen arabischen Sprache, which started with the letter k in 1970 and is already halfway through l.
John Huehnergard
Wa-qad dahala ft 'arabtyati 'ahli š-ša'mi katirun mina s-suryaniyati kama sta'mala 'arabu l-'iraqi 'asya'a mina l-farisiya.
[A great deal of Syriac has pervaded the Arabic of the population of Syria, just as the Arabs of Iraq make use of Persian borrowings.]
Abu Bakr ibn Durayd (died 933)
1. Introduction
1.1. Background to Luxenberg's Thesis of a Mischsprache
When Christoph Luxenberg's Die Syro-Aramaische Lesart des Koran first came out in 2000, one of his theses that inspired incomprehension and even derision was his conclusion that the language of the Koran must have been a "aramäisch-arabische Mischsprache," that is an Aramaic-Arabic mixed or hybrid language. If we get away from the ideas imposed upon us by Islamic tradition, and instead heed the pleas of scholars such as John Wansbrough by placing the theatre of the rise of Islam and the compilation of the Koran in the Near East rather than the Arabian peninsula, then the importance of Syriac, and more generally, the Aramaic substratum not only in the formation of the Koran, but also of the Arabic language, can no longer be denied, since Syro-Aramaic or Syriac, in one form or another, was the language, in the words of Claude Gilliot and Pierre Larcher, "of written communication in the Near East from the second to the seventh centuries CE."
Scholars in the field of New Testament Studies have been vigorously defending the idea that that the original language of the New Testament may well have been Syriac ever since at least the seventeenth century, when that incomparable philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, put forward such a thesis, in 1670, in his extraordinarily influential work Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (Theological-Political Treatise,) which is seen by many as the beginning of Biblical Criticism. Spinoza wrote that "the native language of the Apostles is none other than Syriac" and then suggested, as Steven Nadler reminds us in his superb study of the Tractatus, that "what we have in the Gospels is a Greek translation of the Syriac original."
Nadler continues, "Spinoza also insists, earlier in the Treatise, that the language that is essential for making sense of the Christian Gospels is Hebrew, not Greek." He then quotes Spinoza's observation:
Because all the authors, both of the Old and the New, were Hebrews, it is certain that the History of the Hebrew language is necessary above all others, not only for understanding the books of the Old Testament, which were written in this language, but also for understanding those of the New Testament. For although they have been made common to all in other languages, nevertheless they express themselves in a Hebrew manner.
In other words, even the New Testament contains Hebraisms. In which case, it is not such a stretch to conjecture that the Koran may also contain, if not Hebraisms, at least Syriacisms. Before I come back to the Koran I wish to explore further the work of Biblical Scholars on Syriac and the New Testament, since their work, I believe, can teach us much about the Syriac background to the Koran, and their methodology can perhaps be fruitful for Koranic Studies.
1.2. New Testament Studies
Matthew Black (1908–1994), who was Professor of Divinity and Biblical Criticism at the University of St. Andrews, and the first editor of the journal New Testament Studies, published in 1946 his work that is now considered a classic, An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts. Black calls his approach "linguistic," and he begins by surveying the linguistic situation in first-century Palestine, when four languages were to be found flourishing:
Greek was the speech of the educated "hellenized" classes and the medium of cultural and commercial intercourse between Jew and foreigner; Latin was the language of the army of occupation and, to judge from Latin borrowings in Aramaic, appears also to some extent to have served the purposes of commerce, as it no doubt also did of Roman law; Hebrew, the sacred tongue of the Jewish Scriptures, continued to provide the lettered Jew with an important means of literary expression and was cultivated as a spoken tongue in the learned coteries of the Rabbis; Aramaic was the language of the people of the land and, together with Hebrew, provided the chief literary medium of the Palestinian Jew of the first century; Josephus wrote his Jewish War in Aramaic and later translated it into Greek.
"If," continues Black,
Jesus was a Galilean Rabbi, it is not unlikely that He made use of Hebrew as well as Aramaic, especially ... in His formal disputations with the Pharisees.... In the Palestinian Talmud Aramaic and Hebrew are found together, sometimes in the form of a kind of Mischsprache, sentences half Hebrew, half Aramaic, are familiar to the reader of the Talmud, and this artificial language, rabbinical in origin, may well have been in use before as after the Fall of Jerusalem. [My emphasis, I.W.]
Here we have the use of the term Mischsprache, fifty-four years before Luxenberg's own usage. Black further argues,
The Gospels were written in a predominantly hellenistic environment, and they were written in Greek. But Greek was was not the native language of their central Figure, nor of the earlier apostles, if it was not unfamiliar to them. Jesus must have conversed in the Galilean dialect of Aramaic, and His teaching was probably almost entirely in Aramaic. At the basis of the Greek Gospels, therefore, there must lie a Palestinian Aramaic tradition, at any rate of the sayings and teaching of Jesus, and this tradition must at one time have been translated from Aramaic into Greek. Some have thought that the Evangelists themselves were the translators of these Aramaic sources of the Gospels; they certainly must have utilized, if they did not themselves translate, early translation sources. The "Aramaic problem" of the Gospels is to determine, by internal evidence, to what extent the Greek Gospels are written in or embody "translation Greek" or how much Aramaic influence can be detected in them.
At this stage, Black adds Syriac into the mix,
but Aramaic, other than Jewish Palestinian, may have influenced the Evangelists' work and the early transmission of the Gospels in Greek. Syriac was widely spoken and written, especially in Antioch, the first great Christian centre, and there is a respectable tradition that St. Luke was a native of that city. If the third Evangelist was a "Syrian of Antioch," he was probably bilingual, with Syriac as his second language. Moreover, Palestinian Jewish Aramaic was a dialect little known outside of Palestine: much of the Palestinian Aramaic Gospel tradition may have passed through the more familiar medium of Syriac before it was finally written down in Greek. The influence of Syriac, therefore, as well as of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, may have contributed to the shaping of the Gospel Greek.
Taking both a linguistic and textual approach, Black examines the grammar, syntax, and vocabulary of the Gospels to ferret out what may be Aramaisms, Syriacisms, or, more generally Semitisms. More precisely, he looks at the style and structure of the sentence: order of words, Casus Hyperbaton, and the distribution of Asyndeton; then at the Aramaic subordinate clause. In chapter 6 he examines the Aramaic influence on grammar and vocabulary: the definite article, the pronoun, preposition, verb, and vocabulary. In part 3 Black looks at Semitic poetic form: that is, the formal element of Semitic poetry in the Gospels: for example, parallelism of lines and clauses, alliteration, assonance, and paronomasia. In part 4, Black addresses the question of translation of Aramaic, surveying synoptic variants from Aramaic, and also mistranslation and interpretation of Aramaic, and finally Aramaic as a cause of textual variants. Matthew Black's survey of the results has much to teach us; it
yields one conclusion only which can be regarded as in any degree established, that an Aramaic sayings-source or tradition lies behind the Synoptic Gospels [i.e., Matthew, Mark, and Luke]. Where any one Semitic or Aramaic construction could be observed recurring, its distribution showed that it tended to be found most frequently, and sometimes exclusively, in the Words of Jesus. The same conclusion emerged from a study of the translation and mistranslation of Aramaic in the Gospels.... [The main impression remains] that we have to do with a translation-tradition, sometimes literal, mostly, however, literary and interpretative, but generally bearing the stamp upon it, in one feature or another, of its Aramaic origin. Whether that source was written or oral, it is not possible from the evidence to decide....
In [Luke], apart from the sayings of Jesus, there are far fewer indications of Aramaic influence, The asyndeton openings, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], [says, they say], characteristic of the first Gospel, though Aramaic in origin, are more likely to be a feature of Matthew's Jewish Greek style than an indication of source. Similarly, Luke's temporal conjunction, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] [Luke 10:21; 12:12; 13:31; 20:19: en aute té hóra:In the same hour, or at that very time], need not imply the use of sources; it may be a Lucan Aramaism or Syriacism. The hymns embodied in the Infancy narrative are thoroughly Semitic, but not necessarily translations, though the observation of word-play when we render them in Aramaic strongly supports the translation hypothesis. In the narrative peculiar to Luke of the Emmaus Appearance it is very probable that the Greek text of Luke in WH [editor's note: Edition of New Testament by Westcott & Hort, 1881] mistranslates an Aramaic adjective in XXIV:32.
Black further asks,
What of the Fourth Gospel? Is it a translation of an Aramaic document, as Burney maintained? How far is the linguistic evidence adduced by Burney, which certainly proves a strong Aramaic element, capable of proving more than that St. John is written in "Aramaized" Greek, the work perhaps of an Aramaic-speaking writer with Greek as his second language? The evidence by which translation can be most convincingly demonstrated is that of mistranslation. When all other explanations are considered and evidence weighed, there remains a residuum of such evidence where, if the element of conjecture cannot be eliminated altogether, it may nevertheless be said that alternative suggestions are inferior as explanations.
Noted Semitist and Assyriologist, G. R. Driver (1892-1975), quoted by Black, puts forward a theory for the Fourth Gospel which is the corresponding theory concerning the Koran put forward by Luxenberg. Here is Black again:
Nevertheless, it is possible that an Aramaic sayings-tradition may have been utilized by John, most probably in early Greek translation sources. A not dissimilar conclusion was reached by G. R. Driver, who, while rejecting the theory of an Aramaic documentary source, thought that the evidence supported the hypothesis that John "was mentally translating, as he wrote, logia handed down by tradition and current in Christian circles in Aramaic, from that language into Greek in which he was actually composing his Gospel."
Again, Black's observations concerning what he calls "Translation Greek" seem to me to be of the greatest interest and relevance for Islamology and Koranic Studies. If we take seriously the notion of the Gospels being "translated" into Greek, in some sense, where Aramaic sources were employed, then we must look at the character of the Greek "translation." Black concludes,
The Greek Evangelists or the first Greek translators of the Gospels have not simply transmitted a tradition unaltered: they have interpreted a tradition originally circulating in one language, Aramaic, and composed in more or less literary Greek the results of their interpretation. All translation involves interpretation, but the Gospels are not just the interpretation of translators; they are also Targum of the Evangelists. The consequence is that, in the transmission of the Teaching of Jesus, the end-product in Greek is often less the mind of Jesus than the ideas and interpretation of the Greek Evangelists.
Black then draws attention to a feature that has taken on greater significance since the work of Günter Lüling, as we shall see in a moment: Semitic poetic form to be found in the Gospels.
That the sayings of Jesus were cast originally in poetic form has for long been well-known, In his Poetry of Our Lord, Burney drew attention to such features as parallelism, rhythmic structure, and even rhyme which could be detected in the underlying Aramaic of the Words of Jesus. But such characteristic features of Semitic poetry are also to be found in the hymns of Luke, in the sayings of the Baptist, and perhaps even in several non-dominical sayings in the Gospels. The most striking and one of the most characteristic features of all Semitic poetry is paronomasia, together with its associated alliteration and assonance. When the sayings of Jesus and especially the longer connected passages are turned into simple Aramaic many examples of paronomasia, alliteration and assonance come to light. Paronomasia in particular appears to have been a regular feature of the style and teaching of our Lord in His native Aramaic. It has for the most part disappeared in the Greek Gospels.
Günter Lüling put forward, first in 1974 and then in greater detail in 2003, the thesis that
considerable parts of the Koran text itself were pre-Islamic Christian strophic hymns, most probably predating by about 200 years the emergence of Islam, and quite obviously originally a real pre-Islamic Christian Koran, written in a vernacular Arabic, were reworked and reinterpreted by the earliest Islamic collectors and editors of the Koran text. The original strophic structure, with what were once regular rhymes, was intentionally destroyed and turned into continuous classical Arabic prose, the original content often being reversed into its diametrical opposite.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Christmas in the Koran by IBN WARRAQ. Copyright © 2014 Ibn Warraq. Excerpted by permission of Prometheus Books.
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