Muhammad and the Apocryphal Gospels

A Rebuttal to Bassam Zawadi

Masud Masihiyyen

The discovery of the astonishing ties between the apocryphal Gospels of Infancy and the Islamic stories about Jesus in the Qur’an has marked the beginning of nightmares for many Muslim apologists who dedicated themselves to defending Islam and Muhammad’s character. Being one of such dawa men who try every possible strategy to clear Muhammad of the guilt of being a reckless borrower, Bassam Zawadi has attempted to write a few rebuttals to Sam Shamoun, an author of the Answering-islam, on the theme of plagiarism. After reading his article on the relation between the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Qur’an (*), I have decided to respond to Zawadi’s arguments point by point below. As his primary argument is that the differences between apocryphal Gospels and the stories about Jesus in the Qur’an suffice to refute the charges of plagiarism, I am going to focus on these differences and prove that Muhammad was not only a borrower, but also a great distorter of the non-canonical Christian writings.

Bassam Zawadi claims that Christians use double standards in their approach by comparing the discussion of Christianity borrowing from paganism with Quranic borrowing from apocryphal gospels. He states:

At this early stage of his debate, Zawadi relies on the principle that similarities do not point at sameness as he knows well that the stories in the apocryphal Gospels of Infancy are bafflingly similar to the infancy accounts in the Qur’an. As we shall see below, he will later focus on the differences between such Christian writings and the Islamic scripture to support his argument that Muhammad cannot have practiced plagiarism. Obviously, Zawadi commits the fallacy of straw-man as no Christian apologist claims that the narratives in the Qur’an are exactly the same as the accounts in the apocryphal Gospels of Infancy.

Zawadi here invents a rule and bases it on his straw-man. The Christian polemicists are not supposed to prove something they do not assert. Since no one argues that the stories about Jesus in the Qur’an are the exact copy of the teachings present in some apocryphal Gospels of Infancy, Zawadi’s expectation and invitation are devoid of logic.

More interestingly, Zawadi seems to forget that differences between two texts will not suffice to refute the charges of plagiarism. As similarity does not indicate sameness, some differences between two similar texts do not necessarily dismiss the possibility of one author’s borrowing material from the other, for it is probable that the borrower applied some changes to the texts during the process of plagiarism. As we shall later analyze closely with a few examples, the differences between the accounts in the non-canonical Christian literature and the stories in the Qur’an with regard to Jesus’ infancy are a direct result of not only Muhammad’s plagiarism, but also of his perversion of the texts he made use of.

Here Zawadi wants us to buy the baseless assertion that Muhammad was “a God-fearing and monotheistic believer”. Besides, no one contends that Muhammad would be interested in plagiarizing such myths. On the contrary, we have ample evidence to substantiate that Muhammad did not know that what he was plagiarizing were myths and legends not included in the canonical writings of the universal Church.

Here Zawadi is simply telling lies to save faces. The Qur’an contains no verse that says only some parts of the Gospel is genuine and reliable. Actually, there is not a single verse in the entire Islamic scripture stipulating that Muslims check and compare the Jewish and Christian scriptures with the supposed revelation given to Muhammad to be sure that the Qur’an functions to confirm the former scriptures.¹

As Sam Shamoun emphasized in the second part of his rebuttal entitled "Muhammad the Borrower Still!", Zawadi is ignorant of the fact that the Gospel of John presents Jesus’ miracle of turning water into wine at the wedding in Cana as the FIRST of the miracles He performed in His ministry. Likewise, John states in 20:30 that the miracles that were not recorded in the book had been performed by Jesus in the presence of the disciples! Zawadi is free to entertain the absurd idea that Jesus chose His disciples when He was still an infant and wrought wonders before them. However, even the chronology of the events in Surah 3 suggests that Jesus chose His apostles when He was an adult (vv 52-53). Thus, we have every good reason to wonder in the presence of which of His disciples Jesus could have worked His miracle of speaking from the cradle.

Some may indeed argue this way, but the narratives in the Qur’an on this theme are not clear. According to Surah 19, Jesus’ prophetic ministry began when He was an infant, but what is taught in Surah 3 is not totally compatible with this previous alleged revelation.

Zawadi implicitly suggests that whatever the Qur’an says is true. Therefore, the Gospel of John must be misinterpreted and some infancy miracles must be inserted to this Gospel at the expense of its textual coherence and overt teachings contrary to the claims of the Qur’an.

This argument perfectly exposes either Zawadi’s ignorance or his aims to deceive and mislead people. If this is an issue of ignorance, Zawadi does not really know that the canonical Gospels do not teach that baby Jesus had to defend His mother’s chastity. What is worse, he does not even know that of all the non-canonical Gospels of Infancy, only the Arabic Gospel of the Savior’s Infancy relates the miracle of infant Jesus’ speech from the cradle and does not by any means associate it with Mary’s accusation by her folk. Thus, in the original source, the occasion and aim of infant Jesus’ miraculous speech have nothing to do with the charges targeting Mary’s chastity. If Zawadi wants to get rid of the disgrace of ignorance, I recommend he read my comprehensive article on Surah 19:37. Below are some parts quoted from that study: 

Evidently, Muhammad’s plagiarism from the two apocryphal Gospels of Infancy was not free of textual modifications. He deliberately changed the texts as he was combining them in a rush, but being incompetent and inept, he fell into error and interposed Jesus’ miraculous speech from the cradle, which he borrowed from the Arabic Gospel of the Savior’s Infancy chapter 1, right after the account of Mary’s interrogation and accusation by her folk due to her pregnancy, which he copied from the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew chapter 12. From the twisted form of the account borrowed from the Arabic Gospel, he jumped back to the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and resumed following the account there, which recounted how some people fell into disagreement about Mary’s chastity even after seeing that she was miraculously cleared of guilt. The outcome of this confusion and interpolation was the erroneous idea that the people witnessing infant Jesus’ miraculous speech in the cradle fell into disagreement.

Zawadi is reluctant to take into consideration the possibility that the Infancy Gospels were written after the canonical Gospels by some unknown authors who aimed to promote the idea that Jesus could and did work miracles in His infancy as God incarnate. It is crucial to ask Zawadi the question why the Church did not consider these writings canonical although they did lay emphasis on the doctrine of Jesus’ divinity. It is absolutely ironic that the author of the Qur’an raced to incorporate these stories, which basically aimed to promote the tenet of Jesus’ equality with the Father.

Here Zawadi reckons 6 points, all of which are nothing but claims. As usual, he falsely presumes that it is probable and reasonable to substantiate one claim with another.

Doubtful assertion lacking evidence. We would like to ask Zawadi a simple question and expect him to answer us sincerely by keeping faithful to the truth. How would Muhammad have maintained his honesty and sincerity while feeling free to edit and pervert the apocryphal Gospels of Infancy for their adaptation to his own book?

Doubtful assertion lacking evidence. Even if Muhammad had been illiterate, this would not have prevented him from having someone do the job of plagiarism. More to the point, illiteracy is not equal to deafness or dumbness. Accordingly, Muhammad would be able to hear these stories told, re-arrange them in his mind intentionally or accidentally, and then tell his new version of the stories. The fact that they were then written down by others does nothing to refute the claim that Muhammad (or whoever was the author of the Qur’an) took elements from the apocryphal gospels and used them to compose his own text.

Doubtful assertion lacking evidence. There were some Jews and Christians living in Arabia at that time. The Christian delegation visiting Muhammad in Medina and having a theological debate with him did not come from outer space. Besides, Zawadi’s statement is obscure as he does not specify whether the people in Arabia lacked ready access to the canonical or non-canonical Jewish and Christian documents. While dealing with the history and presence of the Christian texts in Arabia, we must keep in mind that apocryphal stories were more common as they were essentially transmitted orally and reached more people.

Doubtful assertion. Further, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas was not the only non-canonical Gospel Muhammad plagiarized from. The Qur’an contains narratives obviously adopted from the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, Gospel of James, and the Arabic Gospel of the Savior’s Infancy. Interestingly, the sirah literature also speaks of Muhammad’s caravan journeys to Syria. There he had plenty of opportunity to meet with Christian traders and hear their stories. Moreover, the sirah even specifically mentions an encounter with a monk called Bahira, who, according to the Islamic tradition, recognized Muhammad as a messenger:

Zawadi continues:

Zawadi once again disregards the fact that differences between two similar texts will not refute the charges of plagiarism as being a borrower does not necessarily mean being a dupe and idiot. No Christian apologist defends the fallacious argument that Muhammad copied from apocryphal Christian literature word by word. Indeed, his plagiarism always went hand in hand with textual perversion primarily for the sake of the borrowed material’s adaptation to major Islamic tenets.

While analyzing Muhammad’s abuse of the texts he plagiarized from, we discover that his modifications/replacements were deliberate when the adoption of the material in its original form was unthinkable. Thus, Muhammad did not see anything wrong with distorting the accounts in the apocryphal Gospels of Infancy whenever they posed a threat by contradicting his peculiar and innovated teachings. For instance, he copied from the first chapter of the Arabic Gospel the account of infant Jesus’ miraculous speech from the cradle, but replaced Jesus’ statements in the original source with purely Islamic terms that depicted Jesus as a Muslim messenger. Consequently, Jesus in the Qur’an spoke as an infant to say that He was the slave of Allah having a scripture and a prophetic mission whereas Jesus in the Arabic Gospel spoke as an infant to say that He was the Son of Allah, the Logos, who had been sent by His Father for the salvation of the world (mission of a savior).

These major differences display how Muhammad tampered with the original account in the Arabic Infancy Gospel before its incorporation into the Qur’an. Some Muslim apologists who are keen on dreaming and inventing conspiracy theories may contend that the alleged revelation of the Qur’an to Muhammad aimed to correct the allegedly distorted version of the story in the genuine Gospel. However, people who may adhere to this theory must prove that Jesus’ statements in the Qur’an had been recorded in the same or at least similar form in a Gospel predating the Islamic scripture. More strikingly, there is nothing in the Arabic Gospel of Infancy to suggest that this narrative was devised in an effort to negate and modify some basic teachings concerning Jesus’ divine identity in sharp contrast to story in the Qur’an, which exhibits Muhammad’s eagerness to deny and replace the existing Christian portrayal of Jesus. This also explains why there is an abrupt interpolation in the Quranic version of the story: infant Jesus’ speech in Surah 19:28-33 is awkwardly interrupted through the addition of a reference to Christians and the denunciation of their belief that Jesus is the Son of God. I laid emphasis on this problem and the reasons underlying it in my article on Surah 19:37:

In short, Muhammad, unlike the author of the Arabic Gospel, did not only state who Jesus was, but also who Jesus was not! His fiction was derived from his aversion to some teachings in the Infancy Gospels. If he had not known anything about the content of infant Jesus’ miraculous speech in the Arabic Gospel and if he had not falsely presumed that Christians considered that book sacred and authoritative, most of the verses in Surah 19 would be missing from the Qur’an today.

Muhammad’s distortion of the apocryphal Christian writings did not always stem from his enmity towards basic Christian tenets though. In some cases, he applied modifications to an account due to his misunderstandings and faulty conclusions. When he encountered some difficulties in the process of plagiarism, he fell into a chain of mistakes and ended up fabricating a totally absurd scenario. The sources he chose for heavy plagiarism also contributed to his confusion. For example, while devising the infancy narrative in Surah 19, he essentially made use of the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. However, this Gospel had no implicit or explicit references to confirm what Muhammad heard from Christians about Zechariah and his miraculously born son John as well as the Gospel of James, which included overt references to Zechariah and his family. Considering the absence of Zechariah and his son’s story from the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew a great discrepancy, Muhammad decided to correct the text by replacing Mary’s birth narrative with John’s, which also necessitated the replacement of Mary’s parents in the original text with John’s parents in Surah 19. Since Pseudo-Matthew identified Mary’s father Joachim as a person descending from the tribe of Judah and Joachim’s story had a few thematic parallelisms with the story of Joseph in the Old Testament, Muhammad awkwardly identified John’s Father Zechariah in Surah 19 as a man coming from the family of Jacob and inserted into Zechariah’s prayer the phrase “house/family of Jacob”, which was uttered by Jacob in Surah 12:

As for the lack of verbal similarities mentioned by Zawadi, some of Muhammad’s modifications were actually born of his carefree attitude towards the concept of cohesion and his failure to understand the sense of some idiomatic expressions in the original sources that he borrowed from. For instance, Pseudo-Matthew started his Gospel with the narrative of Mary’s birth and infancy and then continued to recount Jesus’ birth and infancy, which started with the angelic visit and annunciation to Mary. Muhammad, however, first narrated in Surah 19 the story of Zechariah and his son, and then jumped to the narrative about Mary without giving a clue about whether Zechariah and Mary lived in the same period or knew each other. More, Muhammad gave the following information on Mary:

A Qur’an-only Muslim reading these verses cannot understand what is meant by Mary’s taking a veil after withdrawing from her family to an eastern place or her motives for this action, but the comparative reading of the following section in Pseudo-Matthew provides aid and clarity:

In both accounts, Mary is suddenly visited by a perfect-looking man and is afraid of this experience. Unlike the author of Surah 19, Pseudo-Matthew states the time of this angelic visit: “on the third day, while she was working at the purple with her fingers”. The answer to the questions “on the third day of what” and why Mary’s working at the purple with her fingers at the time of the vision was considered significant can be found in the previous chapter of Pseudo-Matthew:

With the help of this account, we understand that a messenger of the Lord visited Mary and appeared to her in the form of a perfect man on the third day of her leaving the Temple to settle in Joseph’s house with her virgin friends and while she was sewing the veil/curtain of the temple. Evidently, Muhammad’s deficient and hasty plagiarism from the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, which corresponded to his unfaithfulness to the order and coherence of the original story, made the story in Surah 19 awkward with many obscure elements.²

Another major discrepancy between Pseudo-Matthew and Surah 19 exemplifies Muhammad’s tampering with the original chronology of the events most probably due to his misinterpretation of some idiomatic expressions and accidentally taking figurative language literally. I have discussed this particular problem in two of my previous articles [1] [2]:

Zawadi’s final point:

Zawadi had written this rebuttal before I wrote a comprehensive article on Jesus’ ministry and miracles in the Qur’an and presented the possible reasons for the differences between the miracle stories in the apocryphal Infancy Gospels and their counterparts in the Islamic scripture. To give the gist of my project:

For more information I recommend that Zawadi read my article in its entirety.

Here Zawadi does not notice that he resorts to the fallacy of false analogy when he compares Jesus’ miraculous birth from a virgin with His alleged miracle of creating birds from clay. Does Zawadi think that Jesus performed the miracle of His birth for His own incarnation as the pre-existing Word and God the Son?

Zawadi appears ignorant of the fact that the apocryphal Gospels of Infancy were penned by authors who wanted to provide detailed information on Jesus’ birth and childhood era and ascribed to Child Jesus many miracles for the sake of proving His divinity. This was why most of these miracle stories were naturally associated with Jesus’ peers and His games with them. According to the Qur’an, on the other hand, Jesus gave life to some bird shapes made of clay not in His childhood. Thus, Muhammad distorted the apocryphal miracle stories, which contradicted the teachings about the time of Jesus’ miracles in the canonical writings. Above all, in the canonical accounts Jesus performed ALL of His signs (raising the dead, walking on water…) in front of His disciples.

This is nothing surprising when one remembers that Muhammad did not only plagiarize from apocryphal Gospels, but tampered with their content for some reasons.

Zawadi takes his arguments further by disregarding a few crucial points. First, he has access to the entire Qur’an as a book now, but Muhammad and the early generation of the Muslims living in that era did not have access to the Qur’an in its full form for a comparison and careful check.

Second, the Qur’an identified Jesus as a Word from Allah for the first time in Surah 3, which was devised after Muhammad’s migration to Medina. This designation also ironically came through plagiarism from another famous apocryphal Gospel of Infancy: The Gospel of James.

In the Gospel of James, Jesus’ identification as God’s Word was openly linked to His birth and Mary’s miraculous pregnancy, and Muhammad obviously adopted this teaching in the post-migration period without caring about its theological implications. In the Arabic Gospel of Infancy, however, Jesus spoke and said He was "the Word" right after presenting Himself as the Son of God. Thus, in the Arabic Gospel Jesus’ statement had a different context and the term was more subtle. Additionally, Jesus did not say He was the Word of God, but only the Word, which would make the meaning of the term more complicated for people who were not familiar with the Christian theology stated in John 1:1. Muhammad or his mentor therefore made an attempt to understand this term, but could not come up with anything better than “scripture” in association with Jesus and His prophetic mission. They had to conclude that Jesus’ being the Word meant His having a divine scripture.

Third, we cannot know for sure if Jesus identified Himself as the Logos or the Word in the original language of the text. In Alexander Walker’s translation, Jesus speaks in the cradle and tells His mother that He is the Logos:

If the Greek term "Logos" was maintained in the Arabic text, its misinterpretation or mistranslation would be easier on Muhammad or his scribe’s side.

Finally, it would be impossible for Muhammad to adapt Jesus’ utterance in Surah 19 to the angelic message in Surah 3 in the post-migration period, for that kind of a belated harmonization would cast doubt on the integrity of the narrative in Surah 19.

Zawadi most likely tries to say that angel Gabriel is not mentioned in the Quranic equivalent of the story in the Arabic Gospel of Infancy. He is right, but this should not surprise us if we remember that Muhammad worked as both a borrower and editor. A closer analysis of this particular discrepancy between the Arabic Gospel and the verses in Surah 19 reveals that Muhammad had some good reasons to omit Gabriel’s name from his suited version.

In the first place, Muhammad never inserted the name Gabriel into Jesus’ birth and infancy narratives in the Qur’an. In Surah 19:17 he claimed that Mary was visited by Allah’s Spirit, who appeared in the form of a perfect man whilst in Surah 3:45 he taught Mary was visited by many angels for the annunciation of Jesus’ birth. He most likely did not specify the name of the angel visiting Mary because he followed the annunciation account in Pseudo-Matthew and in the Gospel of James while creating Surah 19 and 3, respectively. Strikingly, these infancy Gospels did not give the name of the angel/angels appearing to Mary and giving her the good news of Jesus’ birth.⁴ The author of the Arabic Gospel, on the other hand, placed a reference to Gabriel into Jesus’ first speech because he made an allusion to the infancy narrative in Luke, which said the angel who visited Mary and foretold Jesus’ birth was Gabriel (Luke 1:26-27). As Muhammad did not borrow from Luke’s Gospel and did not mention Gabriel in the verses relating Mary’s angelic vision, he chose to omit the reference while plagiarizing from the Arabic Gospel.

Second, in the original source Infant Jesus addressed His mother when He miraculously spoke from the cradle in order to remind her of the angelic prediction. In contrast, in Surah 19 Infant Jesus addressed the crowd accusing His mother and questioning her chastity. As the angel had not predicted Jesus’ birth to those people, it would be ridiculous for Muhammad to add this detail into Jesus’ speech.

SUMMARY

This study based on the comparative analysis of the non-canonical Gospels of Infancy with the narratives of Jesus’ birth and infancy in the Islamic scripture verifies the theory that Muhammad was not only a person that plagiarized from some apocryphal texts recounting Jesus’ infancy, but also a dishonest man that tampered with and abused such texts that he made use of in the formation of the Qur’an. Zawadi’s arguments can easily be rebutted as he establishes them on his wrong premise that Muhammad cannot be considered a borrower because the teachings and narratives in the Qur’an were not identical with what had been recorded in the apocryphal Gospels of Infancy.