The Deadlocked Debate about the Role of the Jewish Christians at the Birth of Islam

Abstract

The thesis concerning the Jewish-Christian origins of Islam has been continuously defended and developed by a good number of authors, even if the proponents of this line of thought have never constituted a school nor followed a unitary or homogeneous discourse. At the other end of the spectrum, many scholars strongly reject the ‘Jewish-Christian connection’ insofar as it introduces a speculative and unnecessary category in the study on the origins of Islam. The matter has aroused irreconcilable stances, studies that remain alien to each other, or simply seem to ignore the status quaestionis. From the traditional perspective, the debate seems to have reached a deadlock, however, and to explain a possible legal, cultural, and religious ‘Judaeo-Christian’ continuum that could be shared by the early Islamic audience, it might be useful to look around the spectrum of mixed beliefs and practices between the Jewish and Christian orthodoxy that can be found at a time very close to the arrival of Islam.

Sources of the Values of the Noble Qur’an According to Orientalists: Value`s Sources of Knowledge as a Model

“…Also, the information and documents about Christian-Jewish groups clarify their presence in Jordan and its environs, but there is no indication that these groups reached the Hijaz, and the documentation of these groups is completely absent after the fourth century AD, so how did their ideas reach Hijazat first, or even their ideas continued until seventh century AD? (Del Rio Sanchez, 2021). Thus, the hypothesis of being influenced by Christian Gnosticism or Jewish Christianity falls due to the absence of evidence of the existence of Christian-Jewish societies in the Arabian Peninsula, and absence of translation of the works of Evagrius Pontius into Arabic before the middle of the seventh century A.D., whether those explained by Babei the Great, or those that remained in the Syriac monasteries which were translated in the renaissance of Christian literature in the Sinai, and later Palestine, in the middle of the second century A.H. / eighth century A.D.…”