The Quranic context of Muslim biblical scholarship

Abstract

Abstract Classical Muslim writing on the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament manifests a continuing tension between two potentially contradictory estimations. Certain verses in the Qur'an charge Jews and Christians with deliberate or inadvertent corruption of their scriptures and persistent misinterpretation of them. Conversely, other qur'anic passages assert the predictive value of these same texts, stimulating Muslim scholars to search biblical sources for the promised attestations. Both incentives to Muslim biblical scholarship have produced, and continue to produce, a diverse body of work and the diametric tension which these works collectively sustain constitutes a central element among those intellectual strategies which secure qur'anic authority.