Sorry, aborting this digression due to previous Mod request. I shunta said anything about Stringbean’s comment in the first place.
Oh, just saw the Mod note. Apologies.
Good point. A lot of the encouragement toward violence in the Old Testament was directed toward specific nations at specific times. E.g. God tells Israel to go sack specific cities in specific years (arguably, the times when those cities were at the height of their behavioral problems), not to go sack whatever cities they want to whenever they feel like it for the rest of time.
Since the New Testament is much toned down in terms of violence, and even discourages waging holy war, even in the face of oppression, at a few points, many Christians will say that the less violent message of Jesus supersedes the older stuff.
And the New Testament includes the curious sin of Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit that is apparently unforgivable. Many nights of lost sleep have resulted out of this, but it has traditionally been interpreted as a sin that is very complex or grievous and not simply something that one can casually blurt out or anything.
Two interpretations of this that I’ve heard are:
- That the sin consists of spending the rest of your life knowing that Jesus is the Messiah but obstinately refusing to accept him to the very end of your life.
- That the idea of the sin being unforgivable has been misunderstood. A reader might suspect that the reason that it is unforgivable is that if someone attempts to repent of it, God will say, “no way, you can’t be forgiven”, but it is actually unforgivable because someone who has committed the sin has become so corrupt that they are literally unable to recognize their sin and repent. In other words, honestly repenting is itself a clear sign that one has not committed the sin, otherwise one would have been unable to bring oneself to repent.
The Bible and the Qur’an are not analogues. They have extremely different styles, origins, purposes, and are approached inherently differently by the broad traditions of Christianity and Islam.
It’s important that people avoid this tendency to think that religions are all equivalent, or that ‘scriptures’ is a category that stretches uniformly across religions. This is no better than thinking that “people are all the same” and then pointing to psychology studies that are carried out almost universally on Westerners, and a huge chunk of those specifically on American college students.
Anyway, to the question…
The Bible is substantially longer than the Qur’an, so it will probably ‘win’ if you did a side-to-side comparison, though of course there is significant debate to be had about whether a verse or another is really violent. Of course, this has a lot to do with the content matter of each; the violent verses in the Bible are concentrated in certain books and in the Qur’an around certain historical circumstances.
There is also the question of authority to do violence. For example, if the Qur’an says that people who sow corruption in the land (which includes ‘spreading disbelief’) are to be killed, but the implication is that this sentence only be carried out by a recognized authority, how does that affect its violence quotient? When St. Augustine interpreted “love thy neighbor” to allow for the concept of Just War in the defense of the innocent, was he making that verse violent?
On the Islamic side, just the consideration of Hadith throws a big wrench into the works of all this. Hadith, the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad, do not have a comparable Christian phenomena. You can’t really understate their importance for most Islamic schools, through them the Qur’an is interpreted. “The Sunnah rules over the Qur’an, the Qur’an does not rule over the Sunnah.” But again, this would be mostly a question of length; the corpus of hadith is gigantic and varied.
On the Christian side, the idea of Holy Tradition as an equal source of authority to sacred scripture and the idea of apostolic succession also throws a huge wrench into all this.
That’s the same link I gave in post #7.
My apologies, John Mace. (I formed the Internet habit, years before coming to the SDMB, of doing keyword searches myself in place of clicking on links. On some boards, such cautionary measures are wise–though that’s probably not the case here. I should have double-checked that no one had actually linked that NPR piece.)
ñañi, is hadith anything like the Jewish Talmud?
Well, hadith are recordings of the sayings and traditions of Muhammad, who is traditionally viewed as the Perfect Man and the walking Qur’an. Sayings of Muhammad that were exegetical in nature are categorized appropriately, and there are many other categories of hadith. The Qur’an is not a very detailed book (For example, it says to pray and to give alms, but it doesn’t say how many times or how much) and the circumstances of early Islamic theological/legal development eventually settled on these traditions as a principle guide to determining divine law.
So for example, the punishment for adultery in the Qur’an is lashes (I think). In the hadith, there are traditions where Mohammad prescribes stoning. So, do you follow the hadith or the Qur’an? Well, you would think the answer would be the Qur’an no problem, but Muhammad was the Prophet. If he felt that a more severe punishment could be given for adultery, then he must have had a good reason. So even if you don’t want to do stoning in any particular instance, condemning it as inherently wrong is problematic. Interestingly, there were supposedly verses about stoning that were revealed but a goat ate the only copy. This sounds like a joke but it implies how communities dealt with this conflict between traditions.
Hadith are categorized according to their authenticity, and the traditional process for determining whether a hadith can be trusted and to what extent is a massive undertaking. Tracking the chain of narrators from Muhammad or his companions to when it was written down is the principle method. Content is usually not considered as much, on the grounds that it turns the exercise of collecting hadith into a kind of theological pursuit. Sunnis and Shia have different sets of hadith that usually have the same content, but different narrative chains. The reason is that the Sunni have elevated the companions of Muhammad to a semi-infallible status, in order to argue that they could be trusted to relay hadith accurately. However, Shia dislike the bulk of the companions (Sahaba) who sided against Ali in the power struggle. They trace many of their hadith through their Imams, who they saw as having access to this kind of knowledge.
There’s a lot more I can ramble about, but in the broad sense of how these things are used to illuminate written scripture, there are some similarities between the Talmud and the Hadith. But in terms of what they are and why they have the authority that they have, there are important differences. I guess the ways that modern scholars have questioned their authenticities is also a source of comparison. I would have to compare notes with someone who knew the Talmud well, though. It’s been a while.
The Talion is given in the Bible as a rule of thumb limit between justice and revenge, but most people who cite it use it to advocate vengeance; weirdly enough, often the people who do so are literalists (weirdly, because by removing this fraction of the message from the previous parts they are completely distorting it). I would say that while the two questions are separate, both need to be considered.
Cite for the bolded part?
I couldn’t find the specific cite for the article I was referring to. (which was a personal essay by an Israeli journalist who had worked in China.)
But here is a link that gives an example of how the mistake could have happened. (It’s from an opinion piece published in a major Israeli newspaper.)
(and, to avoid wandering totally off the original topic : This is relevant to the OP, because it shows how a text can be totally misinterpreted if you don’t have any cultural reference to put it in context. )