Zaotar and Zeca,
I found this article of Gallez repudiating Ohlig´s theory of an existing primitive arabic sect where he argues amongst other:
The complete article is here:
http://www.lemessieetsonprophete.com/annexes/Hidden_Origins_of_Islam-EN.pdfGallez argues that there is no trace to be found in ME of Christians aligning with the "Quranic christiology. Is he overlooking something?
It's not so much overlooking as pointing out the evidentiary problem with my view, which is that I see quranic soteriology as essentially emerging on the periphery of the ecclesiastical establishment, born from new ideas of eternal paradise that penetrated into Old Arabian devotional practice.... practice that had previously centered on supplicating the deity in exchange for worldly rewards (fame, wealth, sons, victory in battle, security). This was replaced by the hope of paradise. That replacement occurred *outside* Christian ecclesiastical hierarchy, on the periphery.
The evidentiary problem here is that, being generated outside of a highly-literate hierarchy, we should expect to find (a) no formal written texts that express this generic soteriological attitude; and (b) only find it expressed as folk piety, in short graffiti and recitations. That seems to have been the case, but we cannot expect to find elaborate written texts by a priesthood which memorialize this type of folk piety. It is not the kind of proposition that is easily proved historically either way (compare, btw, to evolutionary theory, where 'peripheral' variation in a population tends to be indescernible until it explosively displaces the seemingly static prevalent forms, with this punctuated equilibrium in the fossil record giving the illusion of species bursting forth from nowhere). In religious history, peripheral simplification tends to survive only as isolated sayings, inscriptions, and above all in the criticisms or narratives of its competing literate orthodoxies.
On the latter front, Jack Tannous has done great work discussing this kind of folk peripheral 'Christian-ish' devotional practice in Syria, and I see the same/similar environment as existing, with even less clerical supervision, in the more 'Arabian' regions.
Finally, my view is that Quranic Christology is somewhat misunderstood, and that (like Sinai's quote sort of implies) what you saw was an ur-quranic Christological *collapse*, in which the soteriological value of the human Jesus was suppressed dogmatically, and the divinity of Jesus was assimilated entirely to the Lord, with his divinity 'correctly' seen as God's revelation of himself as a descending eschatological word, non-human (cf. Q 97 here). Jesus was basically sundered into a purely divine aspect of God, alongside a completely suppressed human residue. I have a long draft paper written on this subject, arguing that genetically quranic theology is actually most easily seen as emerging from a popularized peripheral form of anti-Chalcedonian (i.e. monophysite) Christianity, just as the quranic lexicon would suggest, rather than from a 'low Christology,' as usually believed. In my view the 'lowness' of the Christology of Medinan surahs is secondary. More primitively, Christ was 'collapsed' into the rabb, and his human nature suppressed entirely. The Lord was the Lord, period. This meant there never was any truly human Jesus, which is why he doesn't appear until relatively late in the corpus, then appears in a bizarrely faux-docetic form, and is called a 'word' or 'spirit' from God .... and as I argue, this was a secondary assimilation of Jesus to quranic prophetology, built over the basal Christological collapse, essentially a 'compromise' with the musrikun.
Sorry to go on at great length, but quranic Christology has been an interest of mine recently, and my view is that it tends to be greatly over-simplified by starting with the explicit mentions of Jesus in the Medinan surahs and assuming that these views are (a) unified and (b) identical to precursors implicitly expressed in the archaic surahs, much less in the ur-quranic milieu. I think that you need to build it out the other way, to articulate a coherent genealogical map by which Syriac Christian theology could be transformed into the archaic surah theology (which has no Jesus, as Sinai points out), and then explain how that later transitions into the explicit mentions of Jesus in the 'Medinan' surahs.
Topic: Qur'anic studies today