Introductionixnot only exchange John the Baptist for Zachariah, but they also maintain
that the Babylonians invaded Jerusalem after John had been executed.^6
Clearly, II Chr. 24:21f is the ultimate source of these traditions, which was^7
subsequently modified and changed in the accounts mentioned above.
Jewish traditions seem to have wanted Ezek. 24:7f to have been fulfilled by
the Babylonians as a vengeance for Zachariah's death, and the writers of the
Protevangelion may have simply desired to depict Zacharias as a martyr
(Prot. 16:14). None of the Islamic traditions about the vengeance for John
the Baptist's execution are said to have originated with Muhammad, but the
"corrected" version of the story (where Nebuzaradan appears in place of
Nebuchadnezzar) strongly suggests that a non-Christian ex^8 egesis of Qur'an
17:4-8 may have been the main motive for modifying the earlier accounts.^9
Although some sources can be traced with relative certainty, such as in the
previous example, others are more indefinite. For example, the "wife of the
Pharaoh" (in the time of Moses), who is depicted as having been a
"believer" in Qur'an 66:11, was named "Asiya" by later Muslim authorities.
One Western scholar thinks that "Asiya" was probably deriv^10 ed from
"Asenath," the wife of Joseph (cf. Gen. 41:45), but this name could rather
have come from a 4th century AD Coptic work, in which Monophysites
claim that "Assia" was one of the daughters of Joseph the carpenter from a
previous marriage.^11
Similar to the examples discussed above, the Qur'an often makes allusion to
narratives which ultimately came from the Bible. Although Muslims of
later generations have charged that the Bible was corrupted by its
transmitters (e.g. in passages portraying Jesus as the Son of God), it can
rather easily be shown that the Bible manuscripts pre-, ante- and postdating
Muhammad bear none of the changes which Muslims purport. Moreover,
throughout the centuries Muslims exegetes have often availed themselves
of information from the Bible in order to either fill in a Qur'anic narrative,
or simply to better understand the text of the Qur'an. As an additional form
of source research, Muslim scholars tried to find the etymologies for
foreign vocabulary in the Qur'an and attempted to trace the lives of persons
named or mentioned in the Qur'an. Later, this science attracted scholars
from Judaism and Christianity, who though less familiar with the Qur'an,