Georges Tamer (editor) - Exegetical Crossroads: Understanding Scripture in Judaism, Christianity and Islam in the Pre-Modern Orient

Exegetical Crossroads

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam Tension, Transmission, Transformation

Edited by Patrice Brodeur, Assaad Elias Kattan,
and Georges Tamer

Volume 8

ISBN 978-3-11-056114-2

e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-056434-1

e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-056293-4

ISSN 2196-405X

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Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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Georges Tamer, Regina Grundmann, Assaad Elias Kattan and Karl Pinggra

Understanding Scripture in Judaism, Christianity and Islam in the Pre-Modern Orient

Introduction

Judaism, Christianity and Islam do not only share the broad geographic and multicultural context of their respective origins in the Orient, but also numerous characteristics intrinsic to their constitutions. Most specifically, they are religions of revelation, with revelation understood primarily as communication. Indeed, the foundational narrative of each of these three religions is characterized by an act of communication. In Judaism, God gives Moses, in conversation, the two Tablets of the Torah; in Christianity, the Word of God is incarnated as a communicating human being; in Islam, the Qurn, which includes Gods words, is communicated orally. These three world religions are, thus, word-religions. The God they proclaim does not eternally persist in dark seclusion. According to the three traditions, God shares some of himself with humans, speaks to them, and lets them recognize something of him at certain times in history. Captured in scriptures, Gods communicative action incites further communication. His narrated communication with man is once again re-communicated among them in the context of community. That what is believed to be divine revelation takes its final literary shape through the activity of communication-based communities who ultimately canonize such interactions and transmit them in the form of a holy scripture from generation to generation. The result of such diverse, accumulative, multi-faceted and, as long as religion persists, never-ending communicative action builds the corpus of each of the three religions.

Although the original act of communication at the foundation of each of these religions occurs under specific historical conditions within particular social and cultural contexts, scriptures possess, in the context of their interpretive communities, normative universality due to their belief in a divine origin that transcends, for the faithful, the boundaries of human experience. The interpretation of Scriptures consists primarily in making Gods message, which believers claim to be communicated to people at a certain point of history, accessible to later generations under changing historical conditions. Interpretation is, in fact, a complex matrix of communication. The interpreter communicates with the transmitted Scriptures and attempts to penetrate their depths by engaging in dialogue with them. He/She unpacks these texts within their respective contexts and thus introduces them to new forms of communication.

Not only does monotheistic belief lie at the core of all three religions, but such belief is also based on core Scriptures that have normatively determined the relationship between man and God, and between man and his environment. Over the course of centuries, Judaism, Christianity and Islam have developed different methods of interpreting these Scriptures. Every generation of religious scholars that has attempted to disclose their true meaning has faced the same challenge: that is linking their own interpretations to a specific exegetical tradition and, at the same time, finding answers to questions arising in their own particular era.

In this, the three exegetical traditions have exerted influence on one another, either through demarcation of boundaries or through appropriation. The exegetical developments unfolded ultimately by and large in a culturally heterogeneous environment marked by mutual influence. While public discourse today seems to be focusing on the differences rather than similarities between the three religious traditions, we tend to ignore the high degree of religious and cultural commonality that has characterized Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Most centrally, the position of revealed Scripture at the very core of every religious community in the pre-modern Orient is one of those commonalities that have provoked further cross-cultural entanglements.

The religious traditions considered in the present volume appear nowadays to be sources of dispute and conflict in some regions of the world, especially in the context of their origin. Nevertheless, religious scholars operating within culturally heterogeneous contexts such as the pre-modern Orient had to deal with each other as well as other traditions. They demonstrated cooperation in multifarious ways through mutual influence and the demarcation of boundaries. How productive were these interactions for the further development of their own respective traditions? Have there been blurred spaces of scholarly activity that transcended sectarian borders? What was the role played by mutual influence in how these scholars demarcated the boundaries of their own traditions? In what way did dynamic processes within particular traditions remain alive via discussion between younger exegetes and their past masters? These and other related questions have been dealt with by exegetes in all three religions who actually shared similar interests, similar worries and similar struggles for answers as some of the contributions in the present volume document.

The exact investigation of these questions as well as a critical assessment of the relationship between exegetical traditions in the pre-modern Orient gives us the opportunity to expand our understanding of these traditions and, subsequently, of our present time. This is necessary not in the least because the contemporary religious and cultural traditions of all three religions are based on exegetical methods and inner-religious discourses of that era. It is, therefore, an important task of research to illuminate this area of common heritage. The alignment of this volume with this particular focus seems to be all the more urgent, as this topic deserves more scholarly attention than it has received up to now.

This can be accomplished via interdisciplinary cooperation between scholars from relevant areas of research. Accordingly, most contributions in the present volume are devoted to the interrelationship of at least two of the three religious traditions. Interdisciplinary research remains invaluable for exploring the complex religious phenomena which developed in the Orient in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. We hope that this volume can offer a useful contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship related to these intertwined religions, particularly in the cultural realm of the pre-modern Orient, which witnessed their rise and early decisive theological developments.