Jesus, Prophet of Islam - The Islamic Bulletin

28 Jesus, Prophei of Islam

During the four centuries between 450 and 50 BC, and especially
after the destruction of Ezra' s compilations by Antiochus in his
invasion of Jerusalem in 161 BC, the book which was called the
Torah - together with the additional books which purported to
record the history of the Tribe of Israel after the time of Moses, and
which were often written and compiled from remnants of various
sources centuries after the events which they purported to describe
had taken place -continued to be revised and rewritten, and what
was tobecomethereligionof [udaismbeganto takedefiniteshape,
headed by a strong Levitical priesthood who regarded themselves
as the rightful guardians of this ancient knowledge. Thus by the
time the Torah was first translated into Greek by seventy-two schol­
ars from Alexandria between approximately 275 and 150 BC, the
Hebrew version had already been re-written 'from memory' twice

• and in the process, significant changes were introduced.
  The Talmud,which is alleged to record the oral traditions of Mo­
  ses, did not actually appear in written form until sorne seventeen
  centuries after the death of Moses, and at least nine centuries after
  the Torah itself had ceased to exist in its original form: The Mishnah,
  the written form of the alleged oral traditions of Moses was not
  collated in its present form until the beginning of the third century
  AD. The two commentaries on the Mishnah, the [erusalem Gemara
  and the Babylonian Gemara, were not completed until the fifth and
  seventh centuries AD respectively, while the commentaries writ­
  ten on these commentaries, the very extensive Midrash literature,
  werewrittenbetween 400 and 1200 AD.
  As Dr Maurice Bucaille points out in his book, The Bible, the
  Qur'an and Science, by the time the Hebrew 5criptures came to be
  translated into Greek, they no longer truly represented the origi­
  nal teachings of Moses - nor had they done so for sorne consider­
  able time:

The Old Testament is a collection of works of greatly dif­

fering length and many different genres. They were

written in severallanguages over a period of more than

nine hundred years, based on oral traditions. Many of

these works were corrected and completed in accord­

ance with events or special requirements, often at peri­

ods that were very distant from one another. 7

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