Apocryphal gospels in the Quran
The New Testament has been examined rigorously by western scholars, and it has stood their tests. Thousands of manuscripts can be cross-checked to verify each other, so scribal errors, inadvertent or deliberate, can be purged out. The problem comes when a sacred text has only a few manuscripts to support it. Then the cross-checking is limited. This is not the case with the New Testament.
There are many different works which fall under the broad heading of “Christian Apocrypha.” Theologically they cover a wide spectrum, from essentially orthodox gospels to later works exhibiting such developed Gnosticism.
The title “apocryphal gospels” conventionally applies to certain early Christian or Gnostic texts that are written either in imitation of the genre “gospel”
Muhammad lived six hundred or so years after Mary and Jesus. What were his sources for their life?
Devout Muslims say that over time Allah sent Gabriel down to reveal the entire Quran to his favorite prophet Muhammad.
Muhammad was not a scholar, so we must not see him as having dry parchments or dusty papyri manuscripts in front of him, so that he can borrow from them phrase for phrase. Rather, these stories circulated around the trade routes, being told and retold by poets and storytellers and regular folks.
Muhammad turns Jesus into a Muslim, piling anachronism on top of anachronism. The baby Muslim Jesus uses the word salat or obligatory prayers, the second of Five Pillars in Islam. Jesus the infant uses the word zakat or the charity tax that all Muslims must pay, the third pillar. Muhammad has lost sight of objectivity and facts, and bends reality to his purposes. Allah and Muhammad—both of them—are wrong.
Muhammad loved to tell the stories of the Bible, but in his own special way. He adds and deletes details, compared to the original versions. Muhammad did not get these wild assertions from God about the infant Jesus, but from human apocryphal gospels. We should not take Muhammad at his word about his revelational knowledge.
Allah through Gabriel did not send any of these legends down to Muhammad. They came from defective human sources. Placing "revelations" over clear and simple facts is problematic, but this becomes doubly problematic when the "revelations" are built on fictions.
Muhammad agrees that Jesus did not have a human father. He says that Allah spoke the command "be," and Jesus was created in the womb. So this makes God the father of Jesus, of sorts. But he also says that it is not befitting that Allah would have a child. Something is wrong here.
What right does Muhammad have to deny the true nature of the Son of God? He is wrong about the infancy of Jesus, incorporating tall tales into his "inerrant" Quran. So why should we believe him about his denial of the Sonship of Jesus? Clearly, Muhammad was getting these fictions from bad human sources, not from Gabriel. The prophet was so undiscerning and gullible that he accepted outlandish fictions.
Christians are to test doctrines by Christ’s and the Apostles’ standards, because teachers would arise and deny that Jesus Christ is the Son of God:
22 Who is the liar? It is the man who denies that Jesus is the Christ. Such a man is the antichrist—he denies the Father and the Son. 23 No one who denies the Son has the Father; whoever acknowledges the Son has the Father. (1 John 2:22-23)
Based on this New Testament passage, written by the Apostle John, what are Christian supposed to conclude about Muhammad’s denial that Jesus is the Son of God? Muhammad’s denial of Christ’s Sonship makes him look bad, standing in the light of the Biblical verses. He was wrong both about the infant Jesus and about the grown Jesus.
As for the Christian community, dazed and confused Christians must not trade in the eternal Son of God for an error-prone human messenger—Muhammad. His message was clearly not the "best of the best," so neither was he.
***************************************************************************************Muhammad quoted material from spurious Gospels and recited them as the Quran.
These Gospels have their source in folklore and were never accepted by the Church as Scripture from the earliest times. Muhammad unknowingly recited myth as "revelation" from God.
The passage of the Quran which suggests that the Trinity consists of Father, Son, and Virgin Mary is doubtless a criticism of some nominally Christian Arabs who held this view.
Maxime Rodinson writes in "Muhammad", page 60: Among the Jews and the various Christian sects, propaganda was rife. The social conditions which favored its growth have already been described. Anyone in Mecca who was interested could easily find Jews and Christians who were only too ready to explain the basic tenets of their faith.
In the case of the Christians of Mecca it was unfortunate that they knew very little about their own religions. They were for the most part poor folk - traders, butchers, smiths, blood-cuppers, peddlers, wine-sellers, adventurers and slaves. They had no organized community, no priests or churches. They belonged to different sects, each convinced that the rest were heretics.
The material that Muhammad was accused of borrowing was already known as fable, or someone else's religious writings. So, mixed in the Quran were jaded "revelations", i.e. folk tales and myths.
W. St. Clair Tisdall writes in "The Sources of Islam", on page 46, that,
"In the Prophet's day, numbers of Christians in Arabia were not only an ignorant people, but belonged to heretical Sects, which, on account of their dangerous influence, had been expelled from the Roman Empire and thus had taken refuge beyond the border land. They had hardly any acquaintance with the Gospel or Apostolic writings, but were conversant with heretical books and the extravagant tales they contained.”
Muhammad lived six hundred or so years after Jesus. This means that Muhammad would be prone to errors and pick up false ideas about Jesus. That is exactly what happened. Muhammad incorporated deficient human sources into his "revelations."
Since Islam began people have charged Muhammad with borrowing stories and religious material from other religions and repeating them as the Quran. Muhammad's contemporaries had heard those stories before and voiced that Muhammad was repeating them. The exposure of Muhammad's borrowing continues to this day. Modern Islamic scholars continue the assertion. These scholars come from Atheist, Jewish, Christian, and even Muslim backgrounds. They've all agreed that Muhammad borrowed religious material.
Specifically, scholars assert that primarily Muhammad borrowed from Judaism and Christianity. He also borrowed from Arabic paganism and Zoroastrianism. They add that he injected quite a bit of his own concepts, desires, and philosophy, into the Quran.
W. M. Watt, in "Muhammad at Mecca", discussing "sources" for the Quran" Finally, Watt does come out and implicitly say Muhammad was influenced by other religious stories because of the evidence in the Quran itself.
Interestingly, the Quran records this charge of borrowing leveled against Muhammad by his contemporaries:
Quran 25:5 And they say: "Tales of the ancients, which he has caused to be written: and they are dictated before him morning and evening."
The evidence that Muhammad borrowed other religious material. Quran would be invalidated as being pure revelation from God. Wouldn't that make the Quran a deception and Muhammad an impostor?
1. Their writings all agree that Muhammad learned via word of mouth. No one asserts that Muhammad read these other religious writings. That may have been a possibility, but because of the errors in the Quran, and the paucity of Quranic related material, it does not follow that Muhammad had substantial written material in front of him.
2. They also agree that various opportunities occurred in Muhammad's life for him to learn about the other religions.
3. It wasn't necessary for these writings to be in Arabic. A Jew or Christian who knew the stories and speak Arabic could easily teach Muhammad the stories (as was the case in Mecca). Or a Christian slave from a Christian region could speak with Muhammad in Arabic and teach him his knowledge of Christianity, however imperfect it may have been. Even a pagan merchant could relate his knowledge. Muhammad, being generally ignorant of detailed Jewish and Christian teachings would be none the wiser.
4. None of these writers assert that there were "seats" of Judaism or Christianity located in the Hijaz. Of course there were Christians. And, yes, there were Jewish scholars. However, for Muhammad to learn about these religions, as imperfectly as he did, there need not be Ivy League seminaries available. All he needed was to speak to people barely knowledgeable of these religions.
On the other hand fundamentalist Muslims claim, as Muhammad claimed, that he received pure revelations from a spirit he identified as the angel "Gabriel". When Muhammad first encountered this "spirit", the experience drove him to attempt suicide. Oddly enough, it was this same spirit that prevented him from killing himself.
Witnesses say that when he was getting his revelations, he fell over and got sweats and heard ringing bells—generally symptoms that look a lot like epilepsy. The evidence demonstrates beyond doubt and against excessive belief, irrational belief, that Muhammad got this information from apocryphal gospels, not from revelations.
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