The most common claim by traditional Christians regarding the word "Injeel" which is mentioned in The Noble Quran is that its original is "evangelion" from Greeks vocabulary that was later derived to Arabic phonetic. They also claimed that Muslims who belief its origin is Arabic must have been blindly misled by the ignorance of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) who didn't know nothing about it!
Over a decade ago - just for an example - someone named Vladimir Youssef Hattaat wrote as follows,
INJEEL is EVANGELION
"Evangelion" in Greek means "good news".
Why "good news"?
Because Isaiah wrote:
61:1 The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound;
- annointed me: "mashach"
- preach good tidings: "basar"
Jesus believed he was that "Moshiach" to PREACH THE GOOD NEWS TO THE POOR.
When Jesus followers were preaching the new religion to Greek populations they told them that the Messiah or Khristos was prophesied in the old writings, and this verse above was one of the prophecies of the KHRISTOS (Greek for "anointed one").
In Luke 4, it tells us that Jesus went to synagogue on a Sabbath to read the above passage from Isaiah and tell people that the prophecy in the passage became true (in him). This is why the term EVANGELION has been a central concept in Christianity.
When Christianity spread among Arabs the term EVANGELION had already become one of the central theological concepts, and it wasn't translated, rather it derived to Arabic phonetically, and become INJEEL.
But today you find Muslims turning against Christians and asking them "Where is the ORIGINAL HEBREW INJEEL?" They think that "Injeel" was a book. Moreover, they think that "Injeel" was a Hebrew book.
This confusion is rooted in Muhamad's own misunderstanding and ignorance of Christian religion and its scriptures. He was hearing around Jews talking of "The Torah of Moses" and Christians talking of "The Injeel of Christ Jesus". He must have concluded that "Injeel of Jesus" is a Revealed Book of God just like "Torah of Moses" and now his "Koran of Muhammad".
Today you find Muslims calling Jesus "the Christ", and believing that "the Christ" was just a prophet and given a Holy Book from God to preach to the Jews, named a Hebrew name (by God as he names his books) which derived to Arabic to be "Injeel".
I'm not sure what Vladimir believes he is proposing. The Qur'an says that God gave Jesus al-'injiil. That's it. It doesn't say it was a book, although Muslims do understand that it was at least a coherent corpus of revelations. It should be interesting to Christians that this means that Muslims are indeed taught that Jesus' words are inspired of God! It could be worse. At any rate, here are the eight references to the Injiil in the Qur'an, for purposes of verification: 3:3, 48, and 65; 5:46-47, 66, and 68; and 57:27.
Nor is it any surprise that the Qur'an would use the common term of the day with which to refer to the collection of sayings of Jesus that was familiar to the Christians at the time, using the word that they already knew: εὐαγγέλιον ('injiil in Arabic).
More interesting might be the fact that the word 'injiil just happens to line up with the root that means "to kick someone in the buttocks"!
I like that accident. I think it's funny.
Most interesting, however, are these:
- The Arabic term is given in the singular. Muslims know from this fact that there is only one Corpus of Jesus' Words.
- At the time of the revelation of the Qur'an, the Aramaic-speaking Christians "only" had the four Synoptic Gospels [τέσσερα Ευαγγέλια] or 'anaajiil in Arabic. So the word should have been plural in the usage of the Arabic-speaking Christians of the time of Muhammad (pbuh), correct?
If Muhammad (pbuh) merely mimicked Christian usage of the time, which should have been plural, why did God make it singular all eight times in the Qur'an?
- The Diatessaron of Tatian (ca. AD 175) attests to the fact that the Aramaic-speaking people (of Syria), i.e., those who spoke Jesus' language, "wanted" a single Corpus of Jesus' Words. Tatian's work was precisely that: One Gospel: One Corpus of Jesus' Words.
- The Aramaic-speaking (i.e., Syriac) Christians were the only Christian community that used a "single" Gospel ('injiil) for any significant period of history. They did so all the way through the 5th century AD. Prior to Tatian, no one knows what they had, but the odds that they started with four Synoptic Gospels, then switched to Tatian's single Gospel, and then back again to four in the 5th century (once Tatian was declared a heretic) are remote to any reasonable observer.
Thus, although history shows that those early Christians who spoke Jesus' native tongue wanted and indeed used a "single" Gospel, that practice had been declared heretical and therefore was suppressed in favor of four Gospels a full two centuries before the advent of Islam. Yet the Qur'an somehow recalled that there was originally only One Corpus of Jesus' Words.
Doesn't that just kick you in the buttocks?
WHICH ONE IS CORRECT, EVANGELION OR EUANGGELION?
In conjunction to brother Abu Jamil's response, brother Zuiko Azumazi added his comments as follows:
Another piece of artfully disguised folderol meant to criticize the Quran, Islam and Muslims on a "crooked thinking" basis. Haataat would have us believe that because he has a superficial knowledge of Arabic he is some kind of "intellectual" polyglot in all classical languages. What is Hattaat's simplistic "Etymology of Injeel" speciously based on? Does his attack on the "Injeel" have fundamental flaws?
Let's examine that issue in some detail.
"Evangelion" in Greek means "good news", is not the etymological root or meaning of "euangelion" (evangelion), In classical Greek literature the word "euangelion" designated 'the reward given for good tidings' and its later transference to the "good news" itself belongs to the New Testament and early Christian literature. [R.H. Mounce | Bibliography: R.H. Mounce "The Essential Nature of the New Testament Preaching" [1960]; C. Friedrich in TWNT, II, pp 705-735; R. H. Strachan, "The Gospel in the New Testament", IB, VII, 3ff.]
If you want to intelligently comment on such etymological matters then you had better start checking your facts before going to print otherwise subscribers, Muslim and non-Muslim, will get the idea that you don't know what you are writing about (which generally is the case, in my humble opinion, but I admit I'm a "straight thinking") bigot.
Now, would you care to comment on the inherent circular logic of your etymological reference: - "Evangelion" in Greek means "good news". - when in fact it should have read, "Evangelion" in the New Testament means "good news"? Which raises the question, the "New Testament", "Gospel" and "Good News" are often used interchangeably by Christians, which makes the whole item a meaningless tautological exercise from your polemical perspective. It's like Muslims saying the meaning of the word "Quran" is the word "Quran".
Notwithstanding, the signature below. Why would I quote Ludwig Wittgenstein because he wrote some excellent things that confound so many dogmatic "Islamic critics" in SRI. Like his "A proposition always keeps a back door open, as it were. Whatever, we do, we are never sure that we are not mistaken." [Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, p 47]
"For a large class of cases - though not for all - in which we employ the word meaning it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language." [Ludwig Wittgenstein]
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