Jesus, Prophet of Islam - The Islamic Bulletin

An Historical Account of Jesus 31

Creation, the Flood and the period that goes from the

Flood to Abraham, occupying as it does the fust eleven

chapters of Genesis, we can see alternating in the Bibli­

cal text a section of the Yahvist and a section of the Sac­

erdotal texts. The Elohist text is not present in the first

eleven chapters. The overlapping of Yahvist and Sacer­

dotal contributions is here quite clear. For the Creation

and up to Noah (first five chapters), the arrangement is

simple: a Yahvist passage alternates with a Sacerdotal pas­

sage from beginning to end of the narration. For the

Flood and especially chapters 7 and 8 moreover, the

cutting of the text according to its source is narrowed

down to very short passages and even to a Single sen­

tence. In the space of little more than a hundred lines of

English text, the text changes seventeen times. Itis from

this that the improbabilities and contradictions arise

when we read the present-day text. 10

Thus it is dear that the version of the Torah which existed at the
time that Jesus came into this world was not the original Torah which
had been revealed to Moses by God on Mount Sinai. It was, to use
Dr. Bucaille's words,'a collection of works with highly disparate
contents written over at least seven centuries, using extremely var­
ied sources before being amalgamated inside a single work.'
We know from the Qur'an, however, that God not only gave
Jesus his own revelation - the Ingil -but also knowledge of the
original Torah which He had revealed to Moses - and the former
confirmed the latter in every respect. Thus Jesus was in a unique
and divinely-guided position to be able to see exactly how and
where the original teachings of Moses had been changed and
thereby distorted, As we are about to see in more detail further on,
this made things very difficult for the priesthood of the [ews who
prior to the arrival of Jesus had been able to daim, virtually un­
challenge d, that they were the true guardians of the original teach­
ings of Moses, and who had made this daim the basis of their lead­
ership and their livelihood. Jesus showed up their hypocrisy and
endangeredthesourceof theirauthorityandwealth -andthiswas
why they opposed him so vehemently.
As Mrs. Iftekhar Bano Hussain points out in Volume Two of her
book Prophets in the Qur'an -The Laier Prophets: