!PÖYDÄT SEKAISIN SUURASSA 115!

2.The Table Sent Down from Heaven

There is one story in the Qur´an which appears to have been compiled either by Muhammed himself through a misunderstanding of various New Testament narratives, or by Christians of pre-islamic times whose record of the story has not been preserved. The story begins:

Behold! The Disciples said: "O Jesus son of Mary´ can thy Lord send down to us a Table set (with viands) from heaven?" Said Jesus: "Frer God, if ye have faith". Surah 5.115

After Jesus had allegedly prayed that such a table might be sent down, God duly furnished one fully prepared from heaven but warned those who sat at it that no further unbelief would be tolerated (Surah 5.116-118). A very interesting feature in this passage is the word for table - ma´idah - which is derived from a similar Ethiopian word used by Abyssinian Christians for the "Lord´s Table", that is, the communion sacrament of the Christian Church. It is used only in verses 115 and 117 of this passage and appears nowhere else in Qu´ran. How did this strange story come about? One writer says:"It´s origin is no doubt to be found in the Supper which Jesus partook of with his disciples the night before his death" (Tisdall, The Sources of Islam, p.60). Others suggest another possible source. One says that it is " a confused echo either of the Eucharist or the feeding of the 5000 or an amalgam of both (Stanton, The Teaching of the Qur´an, p.44) and another comments:"It has been demonstrated several times tha the passage v.112-115 is a confusion of the Gospel story of the feeding of the multitude with that of the Lord supper" (Jeffery, The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur´an, p. 178) There is yet another New Testament story from which elements may have been borrowed, namely Peter´s vision:

But what doubtless led to idea that Table descended from heaven was the passage in the Acts of the Apostles (x.9-16).(Tisdall, The Original Sources of the Qur´an, p. 178).

It may well be that all these passages influenced the fabrication of the story in one way or another but in our view it is probably only a perversion of the story of the Last Supper and suggestion in the Qur´an that the table came from heaven does not have its origin in the story of Peter´s vision in Acts but rather these words of the Israelites during the exodus which are remarkably similar to those attributed to Jesus´disciples in Surah 5.115:

They spoke against God, saying" Can God spread a table in the wilderness?" Psalm 78.19.

As we have already seen that the mother of Jesus was confused with Miriam, the sister of Moses and Aaron in the Qur´an, it is not suprising to find Jesus himself here confounded with Moses to whom the words were originally spoken.

Clearly Muhammad obtained much material for the Qur´an from Christian Sources even though these words were obviously secondary and unreliable. Right from the start of his prophetic mission he had discourses with Christians. Even his first wife Khadija had a Christian cousin and we read of him:"Waraqa had been converted to Christianity in the Pre-Islamic Period and used to write Arabic and write of the Gospel in Arabic as much as Allah wished him to write" (Sahih al-Bukhari, Vol.6, p.452).

it is far more probable that much of what he wrote was not the New Testament but mythical records retained in apocryphal Christian works circulating throughout Arabia. Muhammad shows only too often that his materials were identical to those floating around Arabia Peninsula at his time a coincidence which implies that Qur´an is not a revelation from God who is omniscient but the composition of a man who was restricted to the limited sources of information available to him. And this implication can lead to only one possible conclusion:

Now, if we can trace the teaching of the Coran, or any part of it, to an earthly Source, or to human systems existing previous to the Prophet´s age, the Islam at once falls to the ground.(Tisdall, The Sources of Islam, p.2)

As said already, Muslim writers [like the pseudo-scholars; Taha Islam and Karim Al-Rowauensa in Finland. Obs. jäljentäjän omalisä!]avoid the issue of the sorces of the Qur´an in their writings, apparently because the evidences are incontrovertible. One writer laments their attitude and says of the extra-Islamic sources of the Qur´an:

All this information and more is quite generally available for those who desire to investigate the sources of the Koran. Serious students know that they are serving the highest religious duty when they acknowledge facts that can be verified. Whenever a pprevious belief or a doctrine they have accepted conflicts with the facts they have learned, they then make their belief conform to the truth.(Calverley,"Sources of the Koran", The Muslim World, Vol.22, p.67).

In this case, however, such an acknowledgement of the true facts bu the Muslims must result in a denial of their belief in Islam altogether for if the divine origin of the Qur´an is disproved, the whole carpet is pulled out from under Islam. We credit Muhammad with adegree of sincerity by allowing that he did not deliberately or consciously paly part of a forger and that he was subjectively convinced that the manner in which he reproduced his materials took the form of a divine revelation, but an objective study of the mythical Jewish and apocryphal Christian sources of the Qur´an shows convincingly that however sincere he was, he was just so much sincerely wrong."