In the comment thread to this post, discussion of Neal Robinson’s excellent book Discovering the Qur’an: A Contemporary Approach to a Veiled Text arose. (I highly recommend it for anyone interested in understanding something of the history, composition and style of the Qur’anic text. I also found a chapter by Prof. Robinson in Wilderness: Essays In Honour Of Frances Young (if you baulked at the price of the first book, you’ll keel over in shock at the cost of this one).

Although I only managed to have a partial squiz through Google Book Search, it looks like a thoroughly interesting chapter on the Qur’an’s use of stories about Jesus to demonstrate Qur’anic theology. Robinson points out that many modern critics of the Jesus texts in the Qur’an dismiss them as simply the ill-informed myths and legends that Muhammad may have picked up in his interaction with Jews and Christians. “Many Christians are still inclined to dismiss the quranic Jesus material as a confused mishmash of apocryphal legends and naive anti-Christian polemic” (p187). However, Robinson argues that the Qur’an used the stories and techniques that the Semites of the day would have understood, and used them to elucidate particular Qur’anic beliefs and themes. He argues that “unlike their modern Western counterparts, the Christians of seventh-century Arabia would have found the quranic account of Jesus coherent because the Qur’an deliberately drew on stories that they had heard, and used exegetical methods with which they were familiar” (p187).

This is related to a point that Watt makes in Religious Truth for Our Time. He argues that Western readers may not fully appreciate it, given how intimately familiar we are with the Biblical stories, but if one were to read the Qur’an without this knowledge–particularly the earlier revelations–one is struck by the fact that the Qur’an presupposes knowledge of the Biblical stories. That is, the Qur’an does not feel it is necessary to fully flesh out the historical stories of Adam, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and so on, because the audience is expected to already know them.

The Qur’an’s role is not to re-describe the Biblical stories, but rather it takes the Biblical figures and recasts them in order to make a particular moral point. So, with the story of Abraham and his son, the point is that both were willing to obedient to the will of God. The son questions the father as to whether it is the will of God that is being done, and submits himself to this will with wholeheartedness.