......... Segovia's article ................ It's also interesting that he explicitly suggests that Muhammad is likely to have been a Christian.
Segovia's articleif it is there in that article that is preposterous statement.. which Muhammad is he taking about?
Whatever Abraha’s agenda, his Christological formula evinces that South-Arabian Christians in the sixth century (even mainstream Christians!) were not totally unfamiliar with the representations of Jesus as the Messiah instead of God’s son – a feature that we also find in the Qur’ān from the viewpoint of the Jesus himself, who is repeatedly called there “the Messiah, son of Mary” instead of “son of God”.44 And it is at least curious in this respect to notice the positive references to the religion of the Arab conquerors in several Dyophysite writings of the seventh century, including Išō’yahb III’s letters (48B.97; 14C.251), the Khuzistan Chronicle (34), and John bar Penkāyē’s Book of Main Points (141).45
Thus
unless we represent Muḥammad himself as a non-Christian monotheist – but why should we? – it is fair to ask whether his religious views were somehow influenced by Abraha’s, and thereby to what extent emergent Islam must be studied against the background of sixth-century South-Arabian Christianity.46
....
46 On Muḥammad’s plausible Christian background see Segovia, “
Messianic Controversy,” as well as the cross-references to Muḥammad’s and Musaylima’s Qur’ān-s, the Old Syriac version of the Gospels, and the New Testament parable of the mustard seed provided in Segovia, “Abraha’s Christological Formula,” in fine. See also Jan M. F. van Reeth, “Ville céleste, ville sainte, ville idéal dans la tradition musulmane,” Acta Orientalia Belgica 24 (2011): 121-31.
I don't know, possibly I'm overstating Segovia's position in saying Muhammad is likely to have been a Christian. I'm referring to the actual historical Muhammad here and not the Muhammad of the Muslim imagination, and I'm sure Segovia is doing the same. If the historical Muhammad didn't start off as a Christian he must have started off as something else (Jewish?, pagan?, some other form of monotheist?) - this is possible but why should it necessarily be so?
I'm not sure Segovia is saying that Muhammad remained a Christian (I'm not sure he takes any position on this). My question though, if we assume Muhammad was originally a Christian, is whether it makes sense to say that at some point he stopped being one and became something else. Did he see actually see himself as launching a new religion or just as a reformer of an existing religion? I'm open to arguments on this, and of course Segovia isn't responsible for the question.
Edit: from
Messianiac Controversy:
I basically see Muḥammad’s mission (wherever exactly we may need to place the historical Muḥammad) as a political movement with somewhat peripheral but nonetheless strong Christian trimmings that took shape in the aftermath of the Persian invasion of the near East. In my view, there is no intrinsic contradiction between this hypothesis and the very likely probability that the Qur’ān as we now have it (i.e. the Qur’ān’s textus receptus) was written and edited in Syria and/or Iraq after a few texts originally belonging to Muḥammad’s milieu that were thus expanded in some cases, abridged in other cases, and in any event reworked and mixed with other miscellaneous writings a few decades after his death – and that in was in this new scenario (evidently a scribal one) that some additional Jewish and Christian components were incorporated into the quranic corpus.
one is compelled to ask whether Muḥammad himself may have been raised in a Christian milieu and initially struggled to re-affirm a particular, if peripheral, type of Christianity; peripheral because of its very complex, and not altogether clear, constituting elements – which in my view fall close, nevertheless, to Dyophysite/ Nestorian Christianity.
I usually tell my students to fancy that they casually come to discover a late-antique fragmentary document that states: “O you who believe, be God’s helpers – as when Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Who are my helpers for God?’ They replied, ‘We are God’s helpers’” (see Q 61:14 above), repeatedly defends Jesus against the “Jews,” declares him to be the messiah, makes systematic use of a number of crucial Christian notions and rhetorical moves, and quotes more or less verbatim the New Testament Apocrypha and the writings of several late-antique Christian authors. “How on earth would you label that text?,” I ask them.
Topic: Qur'anic studies today