Scriptural Reasoning (ENREL04)

Course Description

Scriptural Reasoning is an interfaith practice where small groups of people from different religious traditions meet to read and discuss passages from their sacred scriptures together. It is not a debate aimed at proving one religion right or another wrong. It is also not a form of syncretism that seeks to blend religions into one. Instead, scriptural reasoning is an intellectual space where participants explore their own and each other’s texts to deepen their understanding, build relationships, and engage in meaningful dialogue across deep differences. It is a form of cultural dialogue that starts in reading scriptures together. 

Islam and Christianity are ideologically and discursively grounded in a common prophetic heritage. The scriptural heritages of Islam and Christianity, above all, their founding scriptures, the Quran and the Gospel, emerged in a process of dialogue with the scriptural heritage of Judaism. In the case of Islam, being chronologically the last, of the three, a similar dialogue process occurred with Christian faith and its scriptural heritage. Scriptural Reasoning is a practice, that developed in the 1990s, primarily among Jewish, Christian, and Muslim academics in the UK and the US. It emerged from Textual Reasoning, a practice that engages with traditional texts from a modern context, equipped with the philological and historical knowledge that has been accumulated by modern scholars. This act of ‘reasoning with the text’ was enriched by interfaith engagement, and the desire to improve interfaith dialogue and understanding.  No curious mind wants a polite but superficial conversation, and no self-respecting person wants a contentious debate. The practice, then is a form of Interfaith Engagement, with the purpose of building peace and understanding between religious communities that is based on academic study; namely, to study sacred texts in a new, comparative, and dialogical way.

Purpose: This part of the course seeks to explore the theological, historical, and narrative intersections between the Bible and the Qur’an through the lens of prophetic traditions, with a special focus on the figure of Jonah/Yunus. It aims to encourage both Christians and Muslims to engage deeply with their sacred texts, fostering mutual understanding and respectful dialogue. Through academic inquiry and shared reflection, participants will be invited to discover fresh insights into the prophetic witness in both traditions.

The History of Scriptural Reasoning

The development of Scriptural Reasoning came as a result of a collaborative effort by a group of scholars, primarily at the University of Cambridge. In the early 1990s, a group of Jewish philosophers and theologians, dissatisfied with how modern academic discourse treated religious texts, began meeting under the name “Textual Reasoning”, key figures in this group included Peter Ochs (Jewish philosopher at the University of Virginia, and later at the University of Cambridge); David Ford (Christian theologian at the University of Cambridge); Daniel Hardy, Robert Gibbs, Steven Kepnes and others. The goal of these scholars was to revitalize the study of Jewish texts in conversation with postmodern philosophy. They argued that reason shouldn't be separated from the context of community and tradition.

A breakthrough moment occurred when this group, primarily focused on Jewish texts, invited Christian and, later, Muslim scholars, into the conversations. This expansion of the scope of the scriptural tradition marks the difference between ‘textual’ reasoning, that focuses on one tradition, and ‘scriptural’ reasoning that aims to explore the tradition by seeing it as ‘others saw it’. in addition to the above-named scholars, Abdulaziz Sachedina, a Muslim scholar at the University of Virginia (and colleague of Peter Ochs) was one of the first Muslim scholars to join the new practice. The Cambridge InterFaith Programme (est. 2002) at the University of Cambridge, became the institutional centre for the practice and development of Scriptural Reasoning and remains ever since.

This course is a form of scriptural reasoning that aims to shed light on some aspects of the Quran by using knowledge gained from the Jewish and Christian traditions on the one hand, and from modern philological research on the other. Our direct focus will be one of the most common practices in Islamic exegesis, the use of etymologies. Muslim scholars, when interpreting a certain term in a verse in the Quran, will inevitably appeal to the etymological ‘original’ meaning of this term.  This practice in Islamic exegesis, a pillar of Quranic reasoning in traditional Islamic textual practice, came under strong criticisms from modern philologists like Arthur Jeffery, author of the famous The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur'ān (Baroda, 1938). Jeffery often blamed Muslim scholars of either misunderstanding or, worse, hiding the ‘true origins’ of Quranic terms, which he believed were loan-words from Syriac, Aramaic, Hebrew, Ge’ez and other ancient languages. The use of comparative philology and modern historical etymology to better understand Quranic terms is now a prevalent practice in modern Quranic Studies. Moreover, new discoveries from epigraphy and archaeology, have shed valuable light on the historical and linguistic context of the Quran. Yet, this should not mislead us into side-lining the meanings that Muslim scholars saw in the terms of the Quran. There is no denial that the discourse and the vocabulary of the Quran are firmly rooted in the linguistic and cultural contexts of late antiquity. Many of the terms in the Quran, it has been convincingly argued most probably hailed from Syriac and Aramaic scriptural and religious contexts. Yet, does this means that the Quranic terms mean what their Syriac–Aramaic cognates meant? Or was there a change in meaning in the Arab usage? How do we understand the nature of the shift? The answer to these questions will emerge from this course.  But this is not the main purpose of the course; its main purpose is to teach the student how to read the Quran, in an interfaith context. In performing this exercise, the student should identify the heritage of the pre-existing Christian and Jewish traditions, while equally realizing the contribution made by the new Arabic scripture.

In our exercise we will focus on the concept of the ‘hereafter’ in the Quran and the Old and New Testaments.  This will take us on a journey to explore these Holy Scriptures in their original languages. This will teach us about the Jewish, Christiana nd Muslim understandings of the ‘hereafter’, but the point is not to learn about the hereafter, as such.  The point, rather, is to explore how the concepts, within traditions, interact with one another.  We will learn how the Quran can be read through the eyes of previous traditions, and what new meanings emerge from this inter-scriptural reading.  We will also acquire some of the analytical, theological and philological tools that enable a scholar to perform such a reading.  This course, it remains to be said, is based on my comprehensive study of the concept of the Hereafter in the Quran, The Semantics of Qurʾanic Language: al-Āḫira (Leide: Brill, 2020). The student can return to my work to further explore the salient points discussed in this course.

Optional Background Reading:
Moyaert, Marianne. "Scriptural Reasoning as Inter‐Religious Dialogue." The Wiley‐Blackwell Companion to Inter‐Religious Dialogue (2013): 64-86.

Knowing (Cognitive)

• Understand the diversity of Christian perspectives on the Qur’an and its theological implications.
• Analyze the reception and transformation of prophetic narratives in the Qur’an, especially in relation to the biblical account of Jonah.

Being (Character/Identity Formation)

• Cultivate humility and openness in engaging with sacred texts from another faith.
• Develop a deeper appreciation of the shared prophetic heritage as a platform for constructive engagement and dialogue.
• Overcome negative or prejudiced attitudes when approaching the other’s sacred texts.

Doing (Practical Engagement)

• Individuals from different faith backgrounds are able to read prophetic narratives in both the Bible and the Qur’an using tools from reception history.
• Apply principles of respectful interfaith dialogue in Christian-Muslim encounters, especially when discussing shared prophetic figures.

Syllabus

Part I of Scriptural Reasoning  by Ghassan El Masri, Dr. Phil., M.A

Session 1: Why Roots and Etymologies are Important for Scriptural Reasoning

Session 2: Semantic and Historical Etymologies

Session 3: Biblical Vocabulary I

Session 4: Biblical Vocabulary II

Session 5: In the Quran

Session 6: Eschatology and Theology

Session 7: The Eschatological Message of the Quran

Part II of Scriptural Reasoning  by Emad Botros, PhD

Session 8: The Reception History of the Prophetic Traditions  in the Qur’an

Session 9: The Reception History of Jonah in the Qur’an Yūnus: The Impatient Prophet : Al-Qalam (68:48–50)

Session 10: The Reception History of Jonah in the Qur’an  Yūnus, the Rescued Prophet: Al-Sāffāt (37:139–48)

Session 11: The Reception History of Jonah in the Qur’an The Belief of the People of Yūnus (10:98)

Session 12: The Reception History of Jonah in the Qur’an  The Prophet of Prayer: Al-Anbiya’ (21:87–88)

Session 13: Reading the Biblical Narrative of Jonah:  What Do We Learn?