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Carbon Dating Shows Koran May Predate Muhammad
HughPickens.com writes: Brian Booker writes at Digital Journal that carbon dating suggests the Koran, or at least portions of it, may actually be older than the prophet Muhammad himself, a finding that if confirmed could rewrite early Islamic history and shed doubt on the "heavenly" origins of the holy text. Scholars believe that a copy of the Koran held by the Birmingham Library was actually written sometime between 568 AD and 645, while the Prophet Mohammad was believed to have been born in 570 AD and to have died in 632 AD. It should be noted, however, that the dating was only conducted on the parchment, rather than the ink, so it is possible that the Koran was simply written on old paper. Some scholars believe, however, that Muhammad did not receive the Koran from heaven, as he claimed during his lifetime, but instead collected texts and scripts that fit his political agenda. "This gives more ground to what have been peripheral views of the Koran's genesis, like that Muhammad and his early followers used a text that was already in existence and shaped it to fit their own political and theological agenda, rather than Muhammad receiving a revelation from heaven," says Keith Small, from the University of Oxford's Bodleian Library. "'It destabilises, to put it mildly, the idea that we can know anything with certainty about how the Koran emerged," says Historian Tom Holland. "and that in turn has implications for the history of Muhammad and the Companions."
Update: 09/01 17:32 GMT by S : There was a typo in the dates used by the original linked article — in the press release from the University of Birmingham, the date range given for the parchment is between 568 AD and 645 AD, which overlaps more closely with Muhammad's lifetime. The dates and link have been fixed now in the summary. Historians say this new information highlights the uncertainty surrounding the emergence of such religious texts, rather than being a major upheaval.
645.
Typo (hopefully, as opposed to willful disinformation) in TFS. The actual range is 568 to 645. Which conveniently spans the Prophet's lifetime.
Which means it might have predated the Prophet. Or it might not.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Yeah, of course there was. The Bible is nothing but centuries of political manipulation. The whole religion was based on a preacher who wanted Rome and the status quo destroyed. If we transported an early Christian or Muslim to today, they wouldn't have a clue WTF modern practitioners are talking about.
Why if Jesus were alive today, Fox News would call him Jesus ( pronounced hey- Zeus) the Socialist Middle Eastern Terrorist.
Religion has always been political - the Dali Lama was the head of the Tibetan state before his resignation a few years ago - so, do not give any shit about Buddhists being all pure.
Name the religion and I will show you how they oppress people or have in the past like Tibetan Buddhism. And clergy are power hungry parasites - like politicians.
Muhammed was illiterate. He had friends who could read, but he himself could not. So in the original story God dictated the Koran to him, and he recited it to his friend who wrote it down. The more you think about this the less it makes sense.
As such the Koran is supposed to be the literal word of God. I mean, it clearly isn't, because even if you accept that there might be a deity, the book itself is very poorly written. It's very obviously a product of the minds of the time, and you don't need a language degree to see that.
This finding is a huge problem for people who believe that the Koran is the literal word of God, dictated to Muhammed. Unlike the Bible, where it is accepted that there are many authors and many of them were not alive at the time of the events depicted, and each had their own agendas etc, the Koran is supposed to be perfect. Any flaw would be a flaw in God's work.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Palimpsest.
Even if the carbon dating is right, all we know is the sheep (or goat) on which it was written died before Mohammed was born.
Bad science journalists! No biscuit!
You save only 59 seconds over 8 miles by going 75 instead of 65. Do you really have to pass that guy? Do the Math!
I knew there would be some prick changing the subject to Christianity. Like clockwork. At least have some originality and make a different criticism like "the Koran is in its original language while the Bible exists only in translation." Otherwise you're as derivative and cliche as Banksy's Disneyland.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
"no one claims it is the literal word of God"
Like most absolute statements, this is false. It might be that most Christians don't believe the Bible to be the literal word of God, but there is definitely a vocal sub group that do claim it is exactly that. Additionally, despite knowing that the Bible was assembled into its various forms by groups of religious leaders centuries after the constituent parts were supposedly written, many people I have talked to believe that the form we have today is what God intended all along.
While we know a lot about the history of The New Testament, the Old Testament is far more obscured. The last I heard it looked like the author attributed as Moses had written the first few books. Which is troubling when you think of all the Christian mythology that comes out of those books. For instance the Exodus appears to be completely unsupported by archaeological evidence.
Your points about the shroud of Turin and the alleged tomb are spot-on.
As for the Qur'an, it would indeed be a major problem for Islam intellectually if it were found to preexist Mohammed. However, even though I don't have any desire to defend Islam, from a critical standpoint I think that these findings are really too weak to even imply such a claim.
In the first place, the fact that the dating belongs to the parchment and not necessarily the ink is huge. Since parchment was relatively rare and expensive, it was a common practice (even among Christians) to re-use old parchment, e.g. blank pages in other manuscripts or even at times writing over other texts. In fact, the manuscript in question seems to be a copy of the Qur'an, and no claim seems to have been made that it was the original copy penned by Mohammed himself, and so this opens up seemingly endless possible scenarios where somebody found an older piece of parchment and copied the Qur'an onto it.
Secondly, the real and obvious character of the Qur'an is not so much that it plagiarizes other written texts but that it borrows explicit elements from Judaism, Christianity, and local religious thought, and reshapes all of this material through a particular lens that services Mohammed's political and social agenda. This is clear even without any specific manuscript dating, as it is a process that is more internal and subtle than merely taking a page from one book and inserting it into a another. Understanding this, it actually makes even more sense to suppose that a copyist reused an older parchment, because it fits with the spirit of Islam, a spirit that is evident in ISIS's systematic destruction of antiquities, even if a substantial portion of Muslims may be horrified by this action as well. Islam is in many ways a white-washing and concealment of history; Allah's transcendence breaks into history as an external and alien power and provides the Qur'an as a kind of divine text without history. Hence the Qur'an cannot be translated or critically examined because to do so would be to submit the text to historical forces. (If anyone reading this sees a resemblance between this kind of thinking and Christian fundamentalism, this is not at all surprising.)
Christianity in contrast, despite significant variations and particular groups that lean more in the direction of Islam, is like Judaism a deeply historical religion. By breaking into history in the Incarnation, God takes on our history as his very own, in such a way that the history of human beings becomes transcendently meaningful. Hence the Bible is written by human authors in human language (not a divine dialect of Arabic), but mysteriously transmits the Word of God. Hence it really would be no problem for Christianity (except for a few particular groups) if it were found that certain of Jesus' famous sayings had already been said verbatim by someone else. The divine authority of the Qur'an is premised upon a denial of any human element, but the divine authority of the Bible is premised upon a divine acceptance of human language.
Incipiamus, fratres, servire Domino Deo, quia hucusque vix vel parum in nullo profecimus.
It's worse than that. The Koran contains stories that are based on common at the time mis-translations of the Jewish books.
Just like the book of Mormon, it contains proof of being the work of men, by virtue of the mis-translations included.
I'm sure the same would be true of the Jewish and Christian books, but their predecessor books aren't readily available.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
it would be akin to finding a written account of Jesus' life that carbon-dates to 30-40 BCE... now *that* would be faith-shaking.
Even an account from 30-40 *AD* would likely be faith-shaking. Everything we have was written by people who never met Jesus, most of it long after his death by anonymous authors. (No, the gospels were not written by the disciples with whose names they are traditionally associated.)
You might want to read something like Bart Ehrman's "Misquoting Jesus", or look at some historical examples of the game of "telephone" and how easily it can generate spurious information, as opposed to church propaganda. I agree that it is probably more likely than not that a unitary Jesus existed, but it isn't more likely than not as in 99% likely, it is more likely than not maybe 60-40 or 70-30, and it is certain that we know nothing reliable about Jesus' life outside of -- maybe -- his sayings. Luke and Matthew disagree categorically about his birth and don't even have it occurring during the same decade or the reign of the same Herod. Mark (the oldest synoptic and likely source for the material in the other two) starts with Jesus fully grown, appearing more or less out of nowhere (and ends, in the earliest extant manuscripts, with Jesus dead and in the tomb and with no resurrection -- the last 16 verses of Mark are later additions). None of the synoptics were written by eyewitnesses (obviously), all were written (probably) after the fall of the temple, and there is a clear progression in "miraculousness" with their probable age, as one would expect from people embellishing and adding new myths and legends to support a newborn cult against all of its competitors. And we have nothing like original source material. The Bible you know is the result of copies of copies of copies of... copies of manuscripts ultimately leading to some poor mistranslations that were transformed into dogma once the printing press was invented. Ehrman began as a born again Christian who studied the New Testament because he wanted to learn the word of God as it was actually written down, and is now an agnostic who ultimately concluded that there is no such thing in this world, that its original content is lost forever and is irretrievable. Which is inconsistent with the usual "true believer" belief in its infallibility, in the idea that it is a gift from God to guide us, that it is a reliable guide to life or even merely a true account of the Jesus who might or might not be documented there.
As for Josephus -- quite aside from the fact that he is not an eyewitness, writing in the mid-90's CE, he mentions Jesus three times. All three are subject to very serious doubt. For one thing, we have nothing like a reliable chain of transmission for Josephus any more than we do the Bible. Do you have any idea at all what the oldest copy of Josephus extant is dated back to? Let's guess that the answer is no. The answer is (IIRC) the twelfth century for the Cyriac copy. Again, we have copies of copies of copies, usually written in languages that aren't even the original language of the manuscript, copies of translations of the manuscript that were copied and preserved by the very church that post-Constantine found it useful. Nearly all scholars who study Josephus agree that at least part of the references to Jesus in Antiquities are insertions. But which ones? There is widespread belief in there being an "authentic kernel" that was his original text, but the problem with extracting it is (aside from the fact that it is literally impossible to do because we cannot at this time differentiate forgery from original by anything but guesswork and cannot even be certain there IS any original left) that at best, the result of such a process is open to considerable doubt. It is a matter of guessing, and of course any guess would be subject to enormous personal bias on the part of the guesser -- there is no objective way to determine the truth.
I would suggest that you read this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
and note that there is pretty good reason to think that all of the references to Jesus in Antiquities are insertions, or at least have been corrupted irretrievably, and there is at least some reason to think that the entire Testimonium is a forgery deliberately inserted by Eusebius. It
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.