Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

112 t CHAPTER FIVE
of the importance of the plain sense of what God was saying. Philo
at the outset and many after him clung tenaciously to the literal
sense of Scripture even as they explored the riches of allegoria.
Unpacking the Word of God
If we turn to the Quran and its early exegesis, we are in a very
different landscape. The Quran is not history; its initial intent was
to convert—the Quran’s original audience were idolaters and
polytheists—and its literary form is kerygma, “proclamation,” or
preaching. Hence, its “exegetic truth” was never the same as that
of the Bible and the Gospels. The Gospels too are “preaching”—
the Gospels and the Quran share the title “The Good News”
(Quran 17:9)—though in the Gospels the proclamation is embedded
in a historical narrative wherein Jesus’ reported words and
deeds constitute the kerygma. All three revealed texts were “true,”
of course, in the sense that they came from God, but the issue here
is the exegetic point of approach to the text, the extraction of
God’s intended meaning from God’s words.
The literal sense of Scripture was certainly the primary concern
of both Jewish and Muslim exegetes. There were, however, times
when the literal meaning did not make any sense, or contradicted
something else in Scripture, or was simply unacceptable, usually
on moral grounds. Indeed, the very first book of the Bible reads
like a textbook of such instances and produced a score of scriptural
conundra to test the exegetical skills of Jews and Christians
alike. If that latter seems like an odd notion in connection with the
Word of God, consider how many Jews and Christians are now
incapable of understanding Genesis in its literal sense, that the
world and all in it were created in six days, or that God required
“rest” on the primitive beginnings of what turned out to be a
weekend. In addition, many Jews of the Greco-Roman era, and
many Christians and Muslims after them, were unwilling to accept
the anthropomorphisms of Scripture, where God is portrayed in
human terms (“He stretched out His hand,” “He spoke thus to
Moses,” “His throne is eternal,” etc.). The Septuagint softened