The New Testament in Muslim Eyes

Paul's Letter to the Galatians

Shabbir Akhtar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315448268
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica mediorientale

This book explores Christian origins by examining a key New Testament epistle, Paul's letter to the Galatian churches, seen by Christians as the charter of Christian liberty from the inherited Jewish law.

The New Testament in Muslim Eyes provides a close textual commentary on perhaps the earliest declaration of Paul's apostleship and of his undying commitment to the risen Christ. It notes the subtleties of the Greek original against the backdrop of an exciting glimpse of Quranic Arabic parallels and differences. It asks: Does Paul qualify as a prophet of Allah (God)? The thoughts of Paul are assessed by examining his claims against the background of Islam's rival views of Abraham and his legacy. The Arabic Quran framed and inspired the life of the Arab Apostle, Muhammad, who was sent, according to Islam, to all humanity, Jewish and Gentile alike. Pauline themes are set in dialectical tension with the claims of the Quran. Akhtar compares and contrasts the two rival faiths with regard to: the resources of human nature, the salvation of the sinner, and the status of the works of the law. Both Christians and Muslims concur on the need for God's grace, an essential condition of success in the life of faith. The core Pauline Christian doctrine of justification by faith alone is scrutinised and assessed from a variety of non-Christian, especially Islamic, stances.

Providing an Islamic view of Christian origins, this book helps to build bridges between the two religions. It will be a valuable resource to students and scholars of Biblical Studies, Islamic Studies, and the Philosophy of Religion.

1

PREFACE TO THE COMMENTARY

In each chapter of the textual commentary a brief general introduction opens the way to a short commentary on each verse (or a few related verses) of our chosen part of the letter. Sometimes, I merely paraphrase the material under consideration if no commentary is needed. A topic-oriented longer commentary is offered on themes emerging from the pericopae being studied. The short commentary consists of aphorisms and brief observations from several perspectives: Christian exegetical, Islamic, agnostic, philosophical and secular humanist. A single verse rarely requires all these perspectives or in this order; I indicate the perspective but it is often self-evident, especially as we proceed further in this inquiry. These somewhat desultory reflections are my pensées in the style of Blaise Pascal.¹

Through these dual commentaries, then, we scrutinise the text while identifying its larger themes of doctrine and ethics and their broader interfaith significance. At the end of each chapter, and especially in Chapter 8, we note the largest issues, many packed with contemporary value. Major themes with modern relevance, mined from the commentary, are initially noted and explored in the textual commentary itself but then run to earth, at the end of each chapter, as we note the contemporary ramifications of these themes. The commentary on Paul’s epistle to his disciples in Galatia is sandwiched between the formulation, at one level and the resolution, at another level, of key questions that continue to intrigue us some two millennia after Paul. The very form of this procedure is a tribute to the topicality and enduring relevance of the Apostle’s thought.

This is not a typical commentary on Galatians, few of which can any longer lay claim to much originality at this late hour in Christian scholarship. (How much more can we today hope to discover about Paul’s letters and life?) My commentary is sui generis in terms of omission of themes, choice of themes and format of presentation. I do not systematically survey the views of other commentators although I do refer to the views of some, from Augustine to Luther to Dunn. The bibliography lists some of the commentaries on Galatians and on Acts. Surveying the extensive literature on the New Testament and Galatians and so on enables one to know the state of New Testament scholarship. But an assessment would require one to record and summarise a vast body of literature before assessing it. Instead I have opted to read Galatians, in the broader context supplied by the New Testament, and make direct contact with themes that unite and divide members of the three Near Eastern monotheisms, all of which are potentially universal but in fact respectively ethnic, ethical and juridical, if we define them by dominant emphasis.

The translation of Galatians is my own and it is a wholly literal one. In this way seminal Christian themes are made to confront the text of the Quran, through the human lens of a Muslim thinker. I have also translated the Quran myself and, moreover, endorsed only accepted Sunni interpretations of its claims. For this is the voice of the majority, the inherited normative and orthodox stance of a global community. This is the voice of the mainstream with whom outsiders should seek to engage. The increasingly proliferating views of countless dissident minorities give a distorted and unrepresentative view of original and current Islam. It can be no business of the outsider to encourage or patronise these minority understandings, let alone attempt to make them central.

I

For understanding the message of Paul’s letter to the Galatians, one can endorse the conventional tripartite arrangement: roughly two chapters apiece in the sequence these appear in the epistle-sermon itself. I avoid denaturing Paul’s thought while presenting and commenting on his letter. Only twice in my commentary do I rearrange the text itself – only to attain greater clarity of presentation. One could alter the arrangement of the entire letter in order to highlight themes with an Islamic dimension. This would be unnecessarily invasive and intrusive. To cite a partial parallel, Muslims resent non-Muslim scholars who rearrange the Quran to suit their own speculative chronology. Like the surahs of the Islamic scripture, Paul’s epistles are not arranged chronologically but rather, roughly, in order of decreasing length. Some Muslims even dislike the notion of non-Muslims summarising the Quran and selecting passages for thematic assessment – though I see nothing wrong or malicious in such a procedure.²

Chapters 2 and 3 of my commentary cover Gal. 1.1–12 and 1.13–3:5 respectively. The first two chapters of Galatians contain a confessional autobiography. I separate 1.1–12 and read these as an exordium, providing a written preface to key doctrinal concerns of the epistle. I take Paul’s apostolic apologia to begin at 1.13 and end at the close of Gal. 2. In Chapter 3 of my commentary, I include my commentary on Gal. 3.1–5, a semi-autobiographical postscript to the apologia, providing Paul’s pastoral appendix about the implications of the gospel of grace for the Galatians minded to defect from their initial grace-only stance.

In Chapter 4 (covering Gal. 3.6–4.7), I investigate and assess Paul’s arguments, especially his use of scriptural evidence. He juxtaposes the present experience of the spirit’s activities among the Galatians with the inherited authority of father Abraham – the believer whose commitment to God demonstrated that faith and its promises precede law and its attendant works.

I perform the first surgery at Chapter 5 of my work where I remove two essentially pastoral portions of the epistle. I scrutinise this pair of pastoral interludes (Gal. 4.8–20 and 5.2–12) in the larger context of a wide-ranging Islamic appraisal of pastoral and practical beliefs and practices that sometimes unite and sometimes divide the trio of Abrahamic monotheisms.

The second rearrangement occurs in Chapter 6 where I treat the concentrated ethical exhortations of Gal. 5.13–26 while discerning the enduring significance of a regrettably influential allegory offered somewhat casually by Paul. It involves some involved scriptural reasoning about Abraham’s two sons (Gal. 4.21–31). The allegory highlights the way the spirit-based ethical programme of grace and freedom transcends the ancient covenant based on slavery to the law. The motivation behind the allegory is revealed in Gal. 5.1, a verse best explored here in Chapter 6 where I explain and defend my decision to unite this allegorical material with the preface to the ethical substance of Galatians.

In Chapter 7, I comment on Gal. 6 which contains miscellaneous materials – ethical and pastoral, catechistic and doxological – of course, but also a culminating eschatological and polemical postscript. In the penultimate chapter (8), in an epilogue to the textual commentary, I run to earth the cornucopia of Galatian themes.

Finally, in Chapter 9, I extract lessons from both the letter and the wider spirit of this epistle as I relate my Islamic commentary to the core message of the entire New Testament and ‘the new testament’ it proclaims. In this panoramic epilogue, I offer a reflection on Paul and Galatians in view of Christian-Muslim relations, the latter captured in a retrospective bifocal glance on their divergent doctrinal origins and their shared future.

II

Students of Paul’s epistles are enmeshed in various disputes. There is, for example, no consensus regarding the authorship of Ephesians, its intended recipients, date of composition or even its provenance. Galatians is, however, mysterious for an unusual reason. Though inspired by a known historical occasion, it remains the only authentic epistle for which two specific but competing geographical regions are proposed – making the debate over date of authorship dependent on a decision about the letter’s intended geographical destination.

The letter to the Galatians was probably penned some six hundred years before the Caliph Umar walked barefoot into Christian Byzantine Jerusalem to declare it a city under Muslim protection. Nearer its own day, it was written roughly half a dozen years after the start of the Roman conquest of Britain which can be securely dated to 43 ce. I have a special reason for my interest in the precise dating of Galatians. If it is indeed an early work – perhaps completed by the end of 48 or the beginning of 49 ce – this would make it the manifesto of the new Jesus movement.

It is therefore an ideal candidate for an Islamic commentary. Now, Muslims reject Paul’s challenging assessment of Jesus but few know that the New Testament is unique among the world’s scriptures in being an excellent documentation of the birth of a new world faith. The problem is that we know reliably little or nothing about the central historical figure in this new faith: we know about the movement but not about the man. The scenario for Islam is the opposite. We know a great deal about the life and activities of Muhammad, some facts being even attested in contemporary non-Muslim sources, but the scripture of Islam is, despite being fully contemporaneous with the man who first received it, largely silent about its recipient and his Arab context. The Quran is neither a biography of the Prophet nor an historical account of the emergence and evolution of the new juridical monotheism of the Arab tribes as these engaged in a civil war during Muhammad’s lifetime.

Nor is this, incidentally, to endorse a sceptical view of Christian origins while opting for a faith-based view of the emergence of historical Islam. I believe that an agnostic historian would concur with my outlook – though I am here only stating my view rather than arguing for it. I acknowledge that many non-Muslims would challenge if not reject my view that we know reliably little about Jesus but much about Muhammad. They would seek to challenge me on some religious and historical basis. But while I can see motives for their challenge, I see no grounds for it.

Leaving aside such larger Christian-Muslim concerns, we note one crucial point of interest to Muslims who engage with Christian concerns. The text of Galatians is authentic – indeed authentic enough to provide the yardstick for assessing the canonicity of other candidates for Pauline authorship. Apostolicity of authorship, an automatic basis for the grant of canonicity, was the chief criterion for acceptance but, in practice, the ultimate decision involved the reception history of the document. A letter’s capacity to instruct and edify supplied a relevant auxiliary consideration. Now, Muslims regard the entire Quran as by definition canonical, there being no apocrypha or disputed surahs and verses, despite the presence of a few occasional but traditionally authorised variant readings – to be found inevitably in any defective pre-vocalised text with only rudimentary consonantal markings. A reliable accompanying oral tradition fixed the correct normative pronunciation while authorising some minor variations. Therefore such readings never substantially alter the sense – although some Shi’ites occasionally point the text differently and dispute the orthodox vocalisation and thus meaning of a few select verses that might have been originally about Ali even though these had, from the start, general application too. Among orthodox Muslims, only the Prophet’s traditions are assessed for authenticity in ways resembling Christian judgements about scriptural canonicity.

Paul was the sole author of Galatians though he mentions, as a courtesy, ‘all the brothers with me’ (1.2). His unnamed amanuensis was a skilled scribe, judging by his small and neat (cursive) letters which contrast with Paul’s large and awkward ones (6.11). Paul dictated this letter. Unlike classical poets who, albeit only as a literary convention, formally shared the honour of authorship with the muse, Paul no doubt saw his amanuensis as a scribe with no input into the composition. According to reliable but piously amplified Islamic tradition, Muhammad’s amanuenses merely took dictation from his illiterate prophet who repeated divine speech conveyed by Gabriel.

Given the New Testament data, various reconstructions of Paul’s life are possible. Apart from Paul’s letters, we may use other material, particularly Acts, to organise and reconstruct Paul’s life and mission. The second part of Luke’s letter to Theophilus, written in about 62–64 ce, is not a history in the post-Enlightenment Western sense of a critical assessment of events but rather a theologised history in which Luke selected, recorded and emphasised certain events, mostly no doubt for ulterior confessional motives. Thus, for all we know, there might have been, say, a dozen missionary journeys! Perhaps Luke did not have the time and space to record all of them. It would be wrong, then, to read Luke as supplying the sole authentic historical setting for Galatians while relegating other materials – such as the two letters to Timothy – to the status of unreliably partisan history. Nonetheless, much in Acts, especially the three accounts of Paul’s miraculous conversion and fervent subsequent missionary activity, complements elements of his confessional autobiography first found in Galatians, later confirmed and augmented in the Corinthian correspondence and finally run to earth in Philippians.

Galatians is likely to be one of the peripatetic (travel) epistles written before Paul’s first Roman incarceration. It was written from Antioch, destined to become the city of the indomitable martyr-bishop Ignatius of the early second century. Galatians may responsibly be dated to c.49 ce, at the latest, making it Paul’s earliest letter. Just before departing on his first missionary journey, Paul (along with Barnabas) went to Jerusalem to bring money for famine relief for the churches in Judaea (Gal. 2.1–2, confirmed at Acts 11.27–30). Galatians was probably written and sent after the visit to Jerusalem to bring money for famine relief and after Paul’s return from his first missionary journey. The alternative dating, to 54, would place it far too late in Paul’s career as Apostle to the Gentiles. If it were so late, the letter would have been dispatched probably from Ephesus, shortly before Paul wrote his letter to the Romans.

Judging from internal Pauline evidence and from Luke’s account, the Galatians were Gentiles. All the Galatian churches, whatever their number, were probably founded at more or less the same time during Paul’s first missionary journey. Were these people converts of Galatian ethnic extraction or simply Gentiles who lived in the Roman province of Galatia, regardless of their ethnic identity?

Ultimately, I would judge the southern (provincial) Galatian hypothesis to be true, though not demonstrably so. Fortunately, I am not required to take a stance on this intra-Christian dispute. The epistle then was not written to the ethnic Galatians of the central and northern regions but rather to the Gentile neophytes who inhabited the southern cities located in the Roman province of Galatia. This province was absorbed into Roman dominion in 25 bce, under Augustus, some 75 years before Paul wrote this epistle. Typically, Paul uses Roman provincial titles when identifying the locations of his foundations. However, he occasionally uses more vague and apolitical designations such as Arabia (Gal. 1.17) and the regions of Syria and Cilicia (1.21).

Two further considerations support the southern Galatian hypothesis. Barnabas, mentioned three times in Galatians, travelled with Paul only during his first missionary journey. Secondly, Timothy is mentioned in all of Paul’s genuine letters, except in Galatians. This furnishes strong circumstantial evidence that Paul wrote Galatians before his second missionary journey during which, very early on, he met Timothy who became his protégé. Timothy is mentioned in Acts (16.1–3).

III

Acts records that Barnabas introduced Paul to the apostles in Jerusalem partly because the believers, including those in Damascus, were afraid of this former persecutor of the church. We can correlate key events in Gal. 1–2 with the chronology of Paul’s life as given in Acts. Gal. 1.17–19 correlates with Acts 9.23–36. Luke explains that a plot against Paul’s life forced him to leave Damascus. Acts 11.27–30 claims that a prophet called Agabus came to Antioch from Jerusalem and predicted a famine that would spread to the whole Roman world. The church in Antioch dispatched Paul and Barnabas to Jerusalem with some charitable donations for famine relief. Paul seems to refer to this event, calling it a revelation (Gal. 2.2), presumably of Jesus, even though it was probably a prophecy of Agabus. Paul and Barnabas go to Jerusalem but, unlike the Apostle himself (see Gal. 2.1), Luke does not mention Titus (see Acts 11.30). Paul and his companions returned to Antioch where Peter later visited them (Gal. 2.11–14).

Gal. 1–2 covers events preceding Paul’s inaugural missionary journey, recorded in Acts 13–14. The last event in his own account of his life, which is also mentioned in Acts, is his famine relief visit to Jerusalem, his second visit there – as a follower of Christ Jesus. Paul never calls himself a ‘Christian’.

Since the Galatians are the fruit of the Apostle’s first journey, he has no reason to mention this journey in a letter to them. I conclude that Paul wrote his epistle to his Galatian disciples after his first missionary journey but before his third visit to Jerusalem to attend the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15). Peter’s visit to (Syrian) Antioch probably occurred after Paul’s return, to this same Antioch, from his first missionary journey and before he went to Jerusalem for the second time, the aim being to deliver money for famine relief. It is, incidentally, an open question whether or not Peter’s visit to Antioch in fact predates the foundation of the Galatian churches. Fortunately, it does not affect any important issues raised in this commentary.

Paul travelled to Pisidian Antioch during his inaugural evangelistic journey (Acts 13.14). Luke records a speec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Preface to the commentary
• 2 ‘There is no gospel except the only Gospel’ (1.1–12)
• 3 The Apostle’s Apologia and Gospel (1.13–3.5)
• 4 The promise of Abraham’s Gospel (3.6–4.7)
• 5 Pastoral interventions
• 6 Covenant of the Spirit (4.21–5.1 and 5.13–26)
• 7 Law of Christ, Gospel of the Cross (6.1–18)
• 8 Crisis of law, promise of grace
• 9 Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index