Retcon Matthew

In the middle 1990s, I attended a meeting of the Muslim Student Association to hear out their case for Islam. They made the case for Orthodox Christian tahrîf, since made more-famous by Bart Ehrman, and which I was already primed to accept. However they went further and made a brief for the Gospel of Barnabas. I was vaguely aware of this concoction; but already by then I was more aware that it was a concoction, not taken seriously by any serious (read: atheist) reader of Christian scripture.

I left as soon as I could. I felt I could vouch for the moral character and piety of the MSA. I felt I could not so vouch for their grasp on reality.

But let us be fair to those Muslims not in the 1995 MSA. Since then the Umma's better lights have produced literature like Khalidi's The Muslim Jesus and Akyol's The Islamic Jesus. And I expect that younger Muslims don't reach for Muh Barnabas as they once did.

One hit against Barnabas, as noted, is that the first Muslims dealing with Christians flat didn't know it existed. Instead, they had a forged Gospel of their own. Enter Ryan Schaffner's 2016 thesis The Bible Through a Qur'anic Filter, pages 130f.

Argued here is that, just as Greek and Syriac polemicists had access to Quran translations, if somewhat tendentious; so the first Muslims arguing against them had a Bible translation. What differed between these religions was the attitude toward their counterparty's text. The Greeks and (as)Syrians were out for such translation as made the Quran look ridiculous. At times, as with Peter Venerable and John Damascene, these were freeform adaptations of Tafsir; at times they were literal... over literal.

A Zaydi intellectual in Egypt, al-Qâsim (later Imam), worked from an Arabic Bible which - for Matthew - did not render its base obscene. In fact wholly the reverse. His Matthew amounts to an Islamist rewrite, a sort of Mark Version Three. This could well be bruited about as the real Injîl, "censored" by the Christians and also diluted by inclusion of the other three. Marcion, Christians say, played a similar trick with Luke.

I am interested if this version bore any relation to Shem Tob's Hebrew version of Matthew. Just as a pro-Matthew faction arose in (western) Islam, such a faction bumped around in Mediterranean Judaism. Now, Matthew didn't arise to a canon text in either. Also, the so-called "Jewish Christians" among the Syrians - culminating in Jacob né-Aphrahat - preferred the Diatesseron, based on that Jacob's quotes. Still: "Jewish Christians" also existed who spread about versions of Matthew. These either maintained a text from their ancestry, or else switched "back" to (a redaction of) it from the Diatesseron.