454 Dominik Schlosser
pels) is not the only thing that drastically compromises them in his
eyes. He also adduces the situation of the apostles as an argument for
a critical view of the canonical Gospels and points out that only two
of the writers of the Gospels, namely the evangelists Matthew and
John, were Jesus’ apostles and could therefore be regarded as eyewit-
nesses to the events they describe, whereas this is not true of Mark
and Luke.^163 This shows that, in analogy to the procedures of Muslim
Hadith criticism, Ibn al-Qayyim makes the degree of reliability of the
writers of the Gospels into the touchstone of the textual authenticity
of the Gospels.^164
But Ibn al-Qayyim’s negative judgment of the canonical Gospels is
primarily based on his conviction that each of the four evangelists has
added to and abridged the text and also included passages that contra-
dict the other Gospels.^165 With his elaborations on the development of
the Gospels and their authors, Ibn al-Qayyim evokes a comparison
between them and the Koran – a comparison of the normative scrip-
tures of the two religious communities that, from the perspective of
Muslim readers whom the Hidāyat al-ḥayārā directly addresses, can
favor only the Koran, which, as he underscores elsewhere, is a scripture
revealed by God and that is also inimitable and whose equal no human
being can place beside it.^166 Of course, in the Hidāyat al-ḥayārā, Ibn
al-Qayyim is not content with the mere accusation that, ultimately,
the four evangelists had corrupted the divinely revealed Gospel when
they recorded it, rather than preserving it unfalsified. With the impli-
cation that Christian doctrines like the belief in Jesus’ death on the
cross are based on scriptures whose credibility is discredited by the
contradictions they contain as well as by additions and abridgements,
and which are therefore necessarily baseless, he lists, in a section of the
Hidāyat al-ḥayārā devoted precisely to this, the contradictory state-
ments within one and the same Gospel as well as the statements and
reports of individual evangelists that contradict those of other evan-
gelists. But for reasons of space, there will be no treatment here of
this catalog, whose breadth and depth cannot compete with the lists
of an Ibn Ḥazm, for instance, whose Kitāb al-Fiṣal comprises a cri-
tique of the Gospel text that examines a total of 78 passages as well as
163 Ibid., p. 426.
164 On this procedure in general, see Fritsch, Islam und Christentum, p. 64.
165 Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Hidāyat al-ḥayārā, pp. 426–427.
166 Ibid., pp. 441–442.
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