I am making slow (but sure) progress on The Same God? Reference and Identity in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Scriptures. My background is in the philosophy of language, and particularly the theory of reference and singular terms. The research for this book has taken me to some strange places I never expected to visit (and never really knew about before). One of those is hermeneutics, which I did know about before, but never expected to visit. This SEP article is good. Hermeneutics deals with interpretation, and especially Biblical interpretation, the problem of which became prominent with the Reformation and with the idea that we should not rely on ‘tradition’ (the official pronouncement of a religious establishment) as the basis for theology and ethics, but rather read and interpret sacred scripture for ourselves. Sola Scriptura. The central question for my book is whether the names ‘Yhwh’, ‘God’ and ‘Allah’, as they occur in each of the three scriptures, have the same referent.
The many problems underlying this question becomes apparent when we consider the following text from the Quran, Surah 33:6-7, translated here by Pickthall.
The Prophet is closer to the believers than their selves, and his wives are (as) their mothers. And the owners of kinship are closer one to another in the ordinance of Allah than (other) believers and the fugitives (who fled from Mecca), except that ye should do kindness to your friends. This is written in the Book (of nature).
And [mention] when We exacted a covenant from the prophets, and from thee (O Muhammad) and from Noah and Abraham and Moses and Jesus son of Mary. We took from them a solemn covenant.
First of all there is the problem of the reference of ‘Allah’ in 33:6 and ‘we’ in 33:7. This is a trap for the unwary. Dawood’s translation helpfully provides footnotes to explain the reference of the indexical pronoun ‘you’, which sometimes refers to Muhammad, sometimes to the Muslim community, sometimes to the unbeliever (‘Feel the everlasting torment. Shall you not be rewarded according only to your deeds?’). ‘We’ nearly always refers to Allah. Recall that by tradition the Quran was revealed by God via the angel Gabriel to Muhammad, but as he was unable to read or write, his companions wrote down the revelations, which became the Quran. The Quran is therefore dictated by God, the narrator, and so ‘we’ refers to him. ‘Allah’ also refers to him, which leads to the old problem of defining ‘narrator’. The narrator should be the referent of the indexical ‘I’, and so any third person reference by the narrator, including proper name reference, ought to refer to someone else. A similar problem arises in the Pentateuch, which is meant to be Moses speaking, but where there are frequent references to him by his proper name, in particular the last eight verses of Deuteronomy which describe his death and burial.
There is also the problem of defining ‘author’. Clearly the author does not have to be the narrator. The author of a text may include the words of others, using quotation marks or some other device to indicate change of narrative control. The narrator may simply be an invention. David Copperfield begins ‘I was born on a Friday … at twelve o’clock at night.’ However, if the Quran is true, it is not an invention, and its author – the one primarily responsible for the text, or who dictated it – must also be its narrator. If it is not, we have the difficult question of who or what ‘Allah’ refers to.
There is the problem of translation. The original texts of the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Quran were in ancient Hebrew, in Greek, and classical Arabic respectively. Therefore we English speakers use names from English translations. Pickthall, who translated the passage above, renders God’s name as ‘Allah’, which naïvely suggests that ‘Allah’ and ‘God’ are different persons, because ‘God’ to an English speaker typically means the God of the Christian Bible (i.e. the so-called ‘New Testament’ and ‘Old Testament’ – note that Judaism has no ‘new’ Testament and therefore no ‘old’ one either). Dawood, by contrast, uses the name ‘God’, which suggests the Judeo-Christian God. Are the meanings of the names different, and does this mean that one or both of the translators has violated the principle of exegetical neutrality, that translators should confront the reader with questions of exegesis and not try to resolve them themselves? There is the same problem with English translations of the Hebrew Bible, where the same name is used to translate the different Hebrew names ‘Yhwh’ and ‘Elohim’.
Finally, there is the problem of the five proper names (Noah, Abraham etc.) that appear to be the same as those in the Hebrew or Christian Bibles. What do we mean by ‘same name’? Has the translator violated neutrality? The name ‘Noah’ in Arabic script is difficult to render in hypertext, and its Roman transliteration (Nuh) hardly resembles ‘Noah’. Nor does the corresponding Hebrew version of the name. So in what sense are they the same names at all? They are only the same in translation, so the translator has perhaps wrongly interpreted the text. You may say that the names are the same because they have the same referent. Right, but do they actually have the same referent? That is the only sense in which the name translated as ‘Noah’ from the Arabic of the Quran is ‘the same’ as the name translated as ‘Noah’ from the Hebrew of the Hebrew Bible. But there you have the problem of reference and identity. Which individual does the Quran intend to refer to? What semantic mechanism ensures that the intention is realised?
Problems problems problems. No answers for now.
