Muslim Paul

Muslim Paul April 14, 2016

Patrick Gray’s Paul as a Problem in History and Culture is a wide-ranging study of anti-Paulinism. Biblical scholars are familiar with anti-Paulists who charge that Paul betrayed the message and life of Jesus when he founded Christianity. But the attacks on Paul are ancient and medieval as well as modern, Jewish and Muslim as well as pagan, Deist, or rationalist. Paul has been condemned as a pagan and a Judaizer, a libertine and a joyless moralist, a misogynist and a neurotic and a hypocrite. Gray deals carefully with the real questions about Paul’s relation to Jesus, cognizant of wilful misunderstandings of scholars and polemicists, sensitive to the ways the Jesus-Paul debate has illumined Christian faith in ways unintended by Paul’s critics.

Some of the most intriguing passages of the book summarize Muslim criticisms of Paul, which anticipate and echo the critics of modern scholars. Islamic polemics against Paul started early. Gray examines the Book of Wars of Apostasy and Conquest, written by Sayf b. ‘Umar al-Tamimi in the eighth century. Sayf is writing about Ibn Saba’s rebellion against the caliphate, but along the way finds plenty of parallels between Ibn Saba and Paul.

Sayf attacks Paul for invention the notion of Jesus’ divinity. This is Paul’s “most deplorable” evil, since “making anything a ‘partner’ alongside or equal to God . . . is the greatest of sins listed in the Qur’an and a violation of the most basic Islamic creed.” Paul also “introduces deviations in Muslim practice in areas such as diet and prayer. His nefarious influence extends to military matters as well in that he persuades the Christians to eschew war as a means of righting wrongs.” Finally, “Paul’s machinations become the source of the sectarian strife that plagued the Near East in late antiquity,” and Ibn Saba is “a latter-day Paul, responsible for the split between Sunni and Shiite” (40-41).

Some of those criticisms anticipate modern critical scholarship, but in more recent Islamic writing on Paul, the relation between Western scholarship and Islamic polemic is reversed. Gray writes that in some instances, “Muslim writers invoke theories uncontroversial among biblical scholars but deploy them in novel ways to undercut traditional narratives about Christian origins. Rather than see that Paul’s letters predate the writings of the four evangelists as evidence of his chronological proximity to the earliest community of believers, it is taken as proof that he is the ultimate source of the Gospels’ corruption” (139).

Other contemporary Islamic treatments of Paul are more creative. According to Sayyid Qutb (the “philosopher” of al-Qaeda), “Paul’s preaching ‘was adulterated by the residues of Roman mythology and Greek philosophy’ because he was a Roman heathen convert to Christianity, and according to Qutb this state of affairs ‘was a catastrophe which infected Christianity since its earliest days in Europe, over and above its disfigurement during the early period of persecution when the prevailing circumstances did not allow for examining and authenticating its religious textual bases.’” Curiously, Qutb condemns Constantine for contributing to the “separation of religion and public order” (136-7) and thus accelerating Christianity’s inherent impulse toward secularization.


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