The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever (72 page)

And in every putative miracle, it is more reasonable and in accordance with our experience to deny that the “miracle” ever happened. People are duped and deluded, are apt to exaggerate, and have this strong need to believe; or as Feuerbach put it, a miracle is “the sorcery of the imagination, which satisfies without contradiction all the wishes of the heart.” Koranic miracles occurred a long time ago, and we are no longer in a position to verify them.

Perhaps one of the most important arguments against miracles, an argument often overlooked, is that, to quote Hospers:

We believe that most of the alleged miracles are in some way unworthy of an omnipotent being. If God wanted people to believe in him, why perform a few miracles in a remote area where few people could witness them?…Instead of healing a few people of their disease, why not all sufferers? Instead of performing a miracle in Fatima [a Portuguese village where three illiterate children saw visions of “Our Lady of the Rosary”] in 1917, why not put an end to the enormous slaughter of World War 1, which was occurring at the same time, or keep it from starting?

Jesus in the Koran
The Annunciation and the Virgin Birth

The Koran tells us that Jesus was miraculously born of the Virgin Mary. The Annunciation of the Virgin is recounted at sura 19.16–21 and sura 3.45–48:

Behold! the angels said: “O Mary! God gives you glad tidings of a Word from Him: his name will be Jesus Christ, the son of Mary, held in honour in this world and the hereafter and of those nearest to God; he shall speak to the people in childhood and in maturity. And he shall be of the righteous.”

“How, O my Lord, shall I have a son, when no man has touched me?” asked Mary. He said, “Thus: God creates whatever He wants, when He decrees a thing He only has to say, ‘Be,’ and it is. And God will teach him the Book and Wisdom, the Torah and the Gospel.”

Although it remains a tenet of orthodox Christian theology, liberal Christian theologians and many Christians now, and even the Bishop of Durham (England), no longer accept the story as literally true, preferring to interpret “virgin” as “pure” or morally without reproach, in other words, symbolically. Martin Luther (1483–1546), writing in the sixteenth century, conceded that “We Christians seem fools to the world for believing that Mary was the true mother of this child, and nevertheless a pure virgin. For this is not only against all reason, but also against the creation of God, who said to Adam and Eve, ‘Be fruitful and multiply.’”

The treatment of the Virgin Birth by Christian biblical scholars is a good example of how Muslims cannot hide from their conclusions, for these conclusions have a direct bearing on the veracity or at least the literal truth of the Koran. Charles Guignebert (1867–1939) has made a detailed examination of the legend of the Virgin birth. Guignebert points out the striking parallels to the Virgin birth legend in the Greco-Roman world:

It is here that we find the legend of Perseus, born of Danae, a virgin who was impregnated by a shower of gold, [and] the story of Attis whose mother Nana, became pregnant as a result of eating a pomegranate. It was here especially that the birth of notable men—Pythagoras, Plato, Augustus himself—tended to be explained by some kind of parthenogenesis, or by the mysterious intervention of a god. It is quite conceivable that, in a community in which so many stories of this kind were current, the Christians, desirous of adducing conclusive vindication of their faith in the divinity of Jesus, naturally turned to the sign by which men bearing the divine stamp were commonly identified. There was no question, of course, of a conscious imitation of any particular story, but simply of the influence of a certain atmosphere of belief.

Some scholars, such as Adolf Hamack (1851–1930), believe the Virgin birth legend arose from the interpretation of a prophetic passage in the Old Testament, namely, Isa. 7.14, according to the Greek text of the Septuagint, a translation made in 132 B.C. On this occasion, Ahaz, King of Judah, fears a new attack by the allied kings of Syria and Israel, who have just failed to take Jerusalem. The prophet reassures Ahaz and says:

Therefore the Lord shall give a sign. Behold the Virgin shall conceive and give birth to a son, and thou shalt call him Emmanuel. Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know how to refuse the evil and choose the good. But before this child shall know how to recognize good and evil and choose the good, the land whose two kings thou abhorrest shall be forsaken.

The Christians, while searching for all the prophetic sayings concerning the Messiah, discovered this passage from Isaiah and, taking it out of context, gave it a messianic meaning. Most important of all, the Hebrew original does not contain the word “virgin” (“bethulah”) but the word “young woman” (“haalmah”); in Greek, “parthenos” and “neanis,” respectively. As Guignebert says,

The orthodox theologians have made every effort to prove that “haalmah” might mean virgin, but without success. The prophet had no thought of predicting a miracle, and the Jews, as soon as they began to attack the Christians, did not miss the opportunity of pointing out that the term to which their opponents appealed was nothing but a blunder.

The Christians, convinced that Christ was born of the Spirit of God, as the accounts of the Baptism must testify must eagerly have seized upon the word parthenos as a means of effectuating this divine relationship.

Guignebert himself does not accept this theory of the origin of the Virgin birth legend put forward by Harnack. Instead, Guignebert offers his own hypothesis [Chapter 31]:

It will be observed that in Paul, John, and Mark, none of whom believes in the Virgin Birth, Jesus is characterised as the Son of God. This description of him is accordingly, prior to the establishment of the belief in the miracle related by Matthew and Luke, and does not arise out of it. As soon as they were convinced that, not only had Jesus been raised up by God, as a man full of the Holy Spirit, to accomplish his plans, but that his birth into this life for God had been divinely predestined, and glorified by the Holy Ghost, they must have attempted to signalise and to express this special relationship between Jesus and God. They said that he was his “son,” because that was the only term in human language by which they could intelligibly, if not completely and adequately, express this relation. Since the idea of the direct generation of a man by God could only appear to the Jewish mind as a monstrous absurdity, the expression was, in reality, to the Palestinians, only a manner of speaking, only a metaphor.

[It is clear] that Jesus never applied it to himself and that, moreover, it had not hitherto, in Israel, any Messianic significance. That is to say, the Jews did not beforehand bestow this title of Son of God upon the expected Messiah. The Messiah must have been for them not the Son, but the Servant, of God (Ebed Yahweh), for such was the designation of the “men of Yahweh.” But on Greek soil the Christological belief found an environment very different from that of Palestine. There, the idea of the procreation of a human being by a god was current, and the relation of real sonship between Christ and God the Father could shock no one…. On the contrary, the term Son of God was more likely to arouse sympathy in that quarter than the too peculiarly Jewish, too nationalistic, name of Messiah. Hence it was, in all probability, in the first Christian communities among t e Gentiles, that the expression arose. Possibly it did so, at first, as a simple translation of the Palestinian Ebed Yahweh, for the Greek word
pais
means both servant and child, and it would be an easy transition from child to son. But it soon took on the colouring of an original Christological idea, the idea which met the needs of the environment which called it forth, the idea expressed in the Epistles of Paul. It found its Pauline and Johannine justification in the doctrine of divine preexistence and of the incarnation of the Lord. The legend of the Virgin Birth is another of its justifications, sprung from a quite different intellectual environment, but analogous to the one just cited, and finding its scriptural confirmation, when the need arose to defend it in controversy, in Isaiah 7:14. Matthew and Luke represent two concrete embodiments, different in form, but similar in spirit and meaning, of the belief: “He is the Son of God. He is born of the Holy Spirit.”

The Birth of Jesus

The account of the birth of Jesus in sura 19.22–34 shows remarkable similarity not only to, as was pointed out by Sale, the story of Leto, but also to something which I have not seen remarked on anywhere, the birth of the historical Buddha. Let us look at the Koran first, sura 19.22f.:

And she conceived him, and retired with him to a far-off place. And the throes came upon her by the trunk of a palm tree. She said: “Oh, would that I had died before this! would that I had been a thing forgotten and out of sight!”

But a voice cried to her from beneath her, “Grieve not! for thy Lord has provided a rivulet at your feet; and shake the trunk of the palm tree towards you, it will drop fresh ripe dates upon you. Eat then and drink, and cheer your eye; and if you see anyone, say, “Verily, I have vowed abstinence to the God of mercy. I will not speak with anyone today.”

Then she brought it to her people, carrying it. They said, “Oh Mary! you have done a strange thing! O sister of Aaron! your father was not a bad man, nor was your mother a whore!” And she made a sign to them, pointing towards the babe. They said, “How shall we speak with him who is in the cradle, an infant?” [The babe] said, “Verily, I am the servant of God, He has given me a book, and He has made me a prophet, and He has made me blessed wherever I be; and He has required of me prayer and almsgiving so long as I live, and piety towards my mother, and has not made me a miserable tyrant; and peace upon me the day I was bom, and the day I die, and the day I shall be raised up alive.”

Leto—or in Latin, Latona—was a Titaness, a daughter of Coeus and Phoebe. According to the Homeric hymn to the Delian Apollo, Leto gave birth to Apollo while grasping the sacred palm tree. Apollo is also said to have spoken from Leto’s womb. Callimachus (ca. 305–240 B.C.) in his “Hymn in Delum” recounts a similar story.

According to the legends of the birth of the Buddha, Queen Maya Devi dreamed that a white elephant entered her right side. Many Brahmins reassured the king and the queen that their child would one day be a great monarch or a Buddha. The miraculous pregnancy lasted ten months. On her way to her own parents towards the end of her pregnancy, Maya Devi entered the Lumbini garden where, as she grasped the branch of the Shala tree, the child emerged from her right side. As soon as he was born, the future Buddha stood up and took seven steps toward the north, and then toward the other cardinal points of the earth to announce his possession of the universe, and proclaimed that this was his last birth. We have already remarked on the probable direct source of the Koranic story of the birth of Jesus, viz., the apocryphal book called
The History of the Nativity of Mary and the Saviour’s Infancy.

Did Jesus Exist?

It may come as a surprise to Muslims that there were, and are still, scholars who doubt the historicity of Jesus, to whose existence Muslims are totally committed. Bruno Bauer (1809–1882), J. M. Robertson (1856–1933), Arthur Drews (1865–1935), van den Bergh van Eysinga, Albert Kalthoff, and in recent years, Guy Fau (
Le Fable dc Jesus Christ,
Paris, 1967), Prosper Alfaric (
Ongines Sociales du Christianisme
, Paris, 1959), W. B. Smith (
The Birth of the Gospel
, New York, 1957), and Professor G. A. Wells of Birkbeck College, University of London, have all developed the “Christ-Myth” theory. Professor Joseph Hoffmann sums up the situation in this manner:

Scholarly opinion still holds (albeit not tenaciously) to the postulate of an historical figure whose life story was very soon displaced by the mythmaking activity of a cult. [Other scholars hold] the view that the postulation of an historical figure is unnecessary to explain the apparently “biographical” features of the Gospels. A candid appraisal of the evidence would seem to favour the latter view but we cannot easily dismiss the possibility that an historical figure lies behind the Jesus legend of the New Testament.

I intend to discuss the not-so-negligible evidence for the view that Jesus did not exist for several reasons:

1. First, very generally, the debates, discussions, and arguments on the Jesus myth are as much the concern of Muslims as Christians; or rather, they should be. I suspect that no book written on Islam has ever discussed the views of Bauer or those of the Radical Dutch school on the historicity of Jesus. It should be the deep concern of all educated people who are interested in our intellectual and spiritual heritage and origins. The early history of Christianity is one of the most important chapters in the history of civilization. For Muslims, Jesus was one of God’s prophets and a historical figure who performed various miracles, and who would come again at the last day and kill the Antichrist. If it can be shown that Jesus did not exist, it will have obvious consequences for all Muslims, for such a revelation will automatically throw the veracity of the Koran into question.
   However, it is not simply a question of the historicity of Jesus, but what we do and can know about him. Again these questions should be of the utmost importance for all, including Muslims. Muslims believe Jesus existed, therefore, what nearly two hundred years of dedicated and selfless research by some of the greatest historians and intellectuals has revealed about this man should be of passionate interest. Muslims as much as Christians should be concerned with the truth of the matter. Even the Christian theologians who accept Jesus’s existence concede a number of problems concerning his life have not been resolved. Most of the stories in the New Testament concerning his life are now accepted, even by conservative Christian theologians, to be legends with no basis in history. The New Testament scholar Ernst Kasemann concluded: “Over few subjects has there been such a bitter battle among the New Testament scholars of the last two centuries as over the miracle-stories of the Gospels…. We may say that today the battle is over, not perhaps as yet in the arena of church life, but certainly in the ield of theological science. It has ended in the defeat of the concept of miracle which has been tradition in the church.”
   Where does this leave the Koran? None of the stories of Jesus in the Koran is accepted as true; most of them contain gross superstitions and “miracles” that only the most credulous would deem worthy of attention. It is worth remarking that if the Koran is absolutely true and the literal word of God, why is it that no Christian theologian adduces it as proof of Jesus’s existence? No historian has ever looked at the Koran for historical enlightenment, for the simple reason that no historian will look at a document, which he will presume to be of human origin, written some six hundred years after the events it purports to describe when there are documents written some fifty or sixty years after the same events. We also know the source of the Koran stories, namely, heretical Gnostic gospels such as the Gospel of St. Thomas, which in turn have been dismissed as unhistorical.
   Even if we do not accept the thesis that Jesus never existed, the conclusions of the New Testament historians throw a very illuminating light on the growth of religions and religious mythology; furthermore, they point to the striking similarities to the recent theories put forward by Islamicist scholars on the rise of Islam and the Muhammad legend of the Muslim traditions.
   
2. Many of the criticisms of Christianity to be found in the works to be discussed apply,
   mutatis mutandis,
   to all religions, including Islam.
   
3. The discussions of the historicity of Jesus have been conducted in Europe and the United States for over a hundred and fifty years now, without any of the scholars who denied Jesus’s historicity being threatened by assassination. It is true Bauer was dismissed from his university post in theology at Bonn in 1842, but he continued to publish until the end of his life. Professor Wells is alive (1994) and well and taught at the University of London until 1971, while still vigorously denying that Jesus ever existed. In all this, there is surely a lesson for the Islamic world.
   
4. Blind dogmatism has shut Muslims off from the intellectually challenging and exhilarating research, debate, and discussion of the last century and a half. In the words of Joseph Hoffmann: “It is through such discussion, however, that we avoid the dogmatism of the past and learn to respect uncertainty as a mark of enlightenment.”
   
5. There is also a deeper methodological moral to be learned from the following discussions. The virtue of disinterested historical inquiry is undermined if we bring into it the Muslim or Christian faith. Historical research only leads to an approximation of the objective truth, after a process of conjectures and refutations, critical thought, rational arguments, presentation of evidence, and so on. However, if we bring subjective religious faith, with its dogmatic certainties, into the “historical approximation process, it inevitably undermines what R. G. Collingwood argued was the fundamental attribute of the critical historian, skepticism regarding testimony about the past.”