ChapterTen
Jesus in Hadith
and
Muslim Traditions
The Hadith are another source of knowledge about Jesus, peace be
on him, about which many students of Christianity have been kept
in the dark. The Hadith consist principally of records of eyewitness
accounts of what the Prophet Muhammad, may the peace and bless
ings of God be on him, said and did during his life-time. The Ha
dith have always been carefully distinguished from the Qur'an
which is the revelation which was revealed to the Prophet Mu
hammad by God through the angel Gabriel. Thus the Hadith litera
ture complements the Qur'an and even contains commentaries on
passages from the Qur'an -but the two are never confused with
each other. The Qur'an is the Word of God. The Hadith contain the
words of people.
Faced with the impossibility of verifying their own texts, a
highly sophisticated pseudo-scholarship was set up by the Roman
Catholic Church and Protestant Christian missionaries in the last
century to discredit the Muslim Hadith literature - which had al-.
ready undergone the most scrupulous checking and verification in
the history ofrecordedscholarship, for, unlike the officiallyaccepted
Gospels of the New Testament -and indeed the Gospel of Barnabas
for that matter - which purport to record sorne of the actions and
words of Jesus, peace be on him, during his Iife-time--but which
in the absence of any early records are incapable of being thor
oughly authenticated - a hadith which records the words or actions
of the Prophet Muhammad, may Cod bless him and grant him
peace, is not accepted as being reliable unless it can be traced back
through a chain of human transmission made up of reliable peo
ple, from person to person, back to someone who was a compan
ion of the Prophet Muhammad and who actually witnessed the
event or heard the words which the hadith describes or relates.