The Phenomenological Implications of ‘Judaeo-Christianity’
Mikkel Jørgensen
Mikkel is currently an MA student at the Religious Roots of Europe-programme with a background in intellectual history and classical philology (BAs obtained in 2020 and 2024 respectively). Apart from ancient Greek and Latin, his time at RRE familiarized him with Hebrew, Arabic and Syriac. As this suggests, his interests span widely, from Neo-Platonic philosophy to the relationship between Christianity and Islam.
The article explores the implications of the multiplicity and polysemy of the Syriac Didascalia Apostolorum. By providing a non-canonical site of ritual law for a nominally Christian audience, it may suggest to us a place of exegetical dialogue on the one hand with what came before (Judaism) and subsequently with Islam in the way its legal narrative could suggest an affinity with the Qurʾān. I use these reflections from Charlotte Fonrobert and Holger Zellentin to reconsider a site of religious history specifically related to Abrahamic religion. While it is acknowledged that this may run the risk of creating a new monolithic unit of religious history independent of its cultural environment, it may also make it possible to notice discursive resources employed in the language of Abrahamic heritage. This will be useful to adduce new connections that cannot be based directly on empirical observations, but still to reflect in a period of time when little evidence is accessible. It provides a middle position between stricter forms of sociology of religion and the previous more so evolutionistic models of religious history associated with the names of James George Frazer and Émile Durkheim.
Introduction
This article is an examination of the Syriac Didascalia Apostolorum in light of Holger Zellentin’s comparative study with the Qurʾān and a defence of his method. The central thesis of Zellentin’s study – or rather the hypothesis he seeks to make probable – is that the Qurʾān in its earliest renditions was not only negotiating with rabbinic Judaism and orthodox Christianity, but a Judaeo-Christian law code shared among individual believers in Jewish and Christian communities. My intention is to negotiate between the positions of Jack Tannous and Zellentin himself. I think the methodological implications of Zellentin – whether he himself recognises them or not – gets at certain assumptions behind the motivation of human ritual behaviour formulated by the anthropologist Roy Rappaport. Because we primarily have access to late antiquity through texts, we are mostly accessing this world and its believers through the prism of “spiritual entrepreneurs” in the words of Tannous. I think a text like the Didascalia gives us access to various discursive strategies that stand in between orthodox positions and the believers themselves shared between Abrahamic religions that can create a spectrum of behaviours and narrative reconstructions to use in contexts with limited evidence. The broad correspondences observed by Zellentin between the Didascalia, the Clementine Homilies and the Qurʾān showcases how ritual outliers come to influence, repeat and eventually make invariant not only the rituals themselves, but also the narratives that accompany them.
Near Eastern Law and Ritual Refocused: The Judaeo-Christian Dialectic
The central point of contention in research about the Qurʾān has been how to establish the date of its origin and the beginning of the Islamic community. Due to the apparent gap in knowledge about the early pre-Islamic community of the Ḥijāz the obvious intertextual relationship to the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament and their exegetical traditions have become the usual point of departure.[1] Holger Zellentin’s work is an important attempt at delineating disparate religious practices between the Abrahamic traditions through the subtle details that non-canonical texts provide. Zellentin argues that a distinct a legal culture can be observed between the Syriac version of the church order Didascalia Apostolorum and the Qurʾān. I think Zellentin’s study is a symptom of a paradigm shift both inside the research of the formation of the Qurʾān and Christianity inside the Near East: both signify the conviction on the one hand that the Qurʾān had its own context independently of its reception history (be it tafsīr or orientalist research) and that Christianity remained a highly contested battleground long after the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon especially among lay believers.[2]
The Didascalia is an important text to consider inside this scholarly discussion. It binds together some of the principal discussions in the study of late antique religion: the ‘parting of the ways’-narrative of Judaism and Christianity and, now in view of Zellentin’s work, the question of how Christianity and Islam relied on the same conceptual resources. I am here concerned to discuss both the layers of the Didascalia itself and present some methodological considerations around the contested term of ‘Judaeo-Christianity’. Jack Tannous humorously, if disparagingly, described the notion of Judaeo-Christianity to be “a doctrinal Jurassic Park populated with creatures from late antique heresiographies” arguing that inconsistencies in doctrine and boundary crossing between Christian and Muslim believers just as easily could be because “we are dealing with simple believers.”[3] Scepticism is of course warranted. Not every disavowal of members of a given religious community need be considered a doctrine or community of its own – in fact it is to perpetuate the idea of doctrine handed down by the ideologists of late antique monotheist empires and apply it by analogy to the everyday imagination. In what follows I will address the different interpretative options in relation to the Didascalia and discuss broadly the notion of Judaeo-Christianity as a scholarly concept.
The Discourse of the Second Legislation
The methodological point of departure for Zellentin’s study is the distinction between nomos and narrative drawn from legal theorist Robert Cover.[4] It is based on the assumption that for every set of legal institutions there is a normative framework to justify it. The strength of Zellentin’s approach is that it is not merely stating from heresiological arguments the necessary presence of different types of believers. It is also drawing on parallels between these texts not based on their direct polemical and lexically based statements that are direct attempts at subversion of religious rivals. Those would belong to the category of how credal statements such as “being of one substance with the Father”[5] of the Nicaean Creed is subverted in sūrat al-Iḫlās 112.4 with “And there is none like him”[6].[7] Instead Zellentin looks for practices that share a broad commonality whose particular iteration is a glimpse into the dynamic exchange between the communal authorities and the practices of the believers. What affinities the Qurʾān had with its immediate context are less centred around a shared “direct literary relationship” (as is the case with rabbinic Judaism and orthodox Christianity) than an “oral legal discourse” possibly in dialogue with the Didascalia that evolved contemporaneously with patristic Christianity and rabbinic Judaism which would shed doubt on the degree to which we can apply the latter frameworks to our understanding of it.[8]
Zellentin formulates a spectrum of ritual purity laws in relation to which he takes the statements of Acts to be the benchmark. Taking the Decree of the Apostles (Acts 15.29) – “to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from meat of strangled animals and from fornication.”[9] – as a benchmark for the ritual prescriptions of Gentiles, he develops a spectrum of religious law where the degree of abrogation fluctuates. The Didascalia makes further additions or censures ritual behaviour that could indicate the presence of members in its community that would suggest a further advanced observance of conventionally abrogated law. The Clementine Homilies in this context is an example contemporary with the Didascalia (3rd century) of a Christian ritual context that had abrogated less of the law than the Didascalia. I cannot go into detail with the specific additions to the Judaeo-Christian law code (for a brief overview look at Zellentin’s table of ritual observances for Gentiles that should indicate the spectrum of ritual behaviour).[10] Instead I will address the narrative that the Didascalia builds up around its ritual law and the members of its community that observes more of them than they should which is disparaged as the second legislation.
The concept of the second legislation (tenyān nāmusā) is unique to the Didascalia and does not seem to play a role in Christianity in general. Several times throughout the text, the apostolic authors make exhortations towards its audience to not follow this separate set of laws. In the second chapter “On Husbands”, there is also a note on how to read the scriptures. It states that “when you read the Law, be watchful regarding (the second legislation) that you do but read it simply. […] [A]lthough you read the second legislation, recognise this alone that you know and Glorify God who has redeemed us from all these bonds.”[11] (DA 2, 18.4-5; 8-10). Conversely the primary law (nāmusā qadmāyā) is the law “before the people had made the calf and served idols, that is the ten sayings and the judgements.”[12] (DA 2, 18.16-19). We see in this instance a version of a supersessionist narrative, but the question is the degree to which we should naturally assume a Eusebian or Augustinian framework in this regard.[13] Following the assumption that the Didascalia is a living text redacted numerous times over the centuries, we can hypothesise that the transition from one set of laws to another made use of Christian supersessionism (the Didascalia signifies itself as catholic) to varying degrees depending on the context. These variations then eventually became an inspiration in the Qurʾān that operates with its own form of supersessionism. It is in this regard, Zellentin observes a similar narrative structure in the Qurʾān. However, for the purposes of Zellentin’s study he compares the abrogation of these laws in the Didascalia with the way Jesus abrogates certain laws in the Qurʾān. The event around the imposition of the second legislation is described as follows:
The Lord accordingly became angry, and in the heat of His anger – (yet) with the mercy (raḥmā) of His goodness – He bound them with the second legislation (tenyān nāmusā) […]. However, they did not observe even one of them, but they again provoked the Lord to anger. On this account He yet added to them by the second legislation a blindness (ʿawīrutā) equal to their works […].[14] (DA 26, 245.1-4; 17-19).
It is the double punishment first for idolatry since blindness that is mirrored in the Qurʾān as Zellentin observes in sūrat al-niṣāʾ:
The People of the Book will ask you to bring down upon them a Book from heaven; and they asked Moses for greater than that, for they said, ‘Show us God openly.’ And the thunderbolt took them for their wrong act. Then they took to themselves the calf, after the clear signs had come to them; yet We pardoned (faʿafawnā) them that, and We bestowed upon Moses a clear authority.[15] (4.153)
Like the Didascalia, the reaction to the transgression of the calf is met with punishment, but also mercy (raḥmā/faʿafawnā). The difference in the Qurʾān from the Didascalia is that the Jews are not punished the second time with blindness, but instead with dietary restrictions as they are forbidden “certain good things (ṭayyibātin) that were permitted to them before”[16] (4.160). What follows then in both narratives is Jesus’s abrogation of these laws with different implications. In the Didascalia it follows the usual Christian motif of Matt. 5.17-20 that Jesus came to fulfil the law: “Indeed, in the Gospel He renewed and fulfilled and confirmed the Law […] Truly it was to this end, indeed, that [Jesus] came, that the Law be confirmed, and that the second legislation (tenyān nāmusā) be abrogated.”[17] (DA 26, 246.18–247.1). In the Qurʾān Jesus instead relieves the Jews of their dietary rules as he comes “to make lawful to you certain things that before were forbidden to you.”[18] (3.50). These similarities in narrative are then used with different normative implications but showcases perhaps a variation in how the idea of supersessionism is used. In the following section I will touch upon Charlotte Fonrobert’s reading of the Didascalia and question the professed catholicity that the text wants to represent.
Who Are the Apostolic Authors of the Didascalia?
Charlotte Fonrobert in her own article on the Didascalia expressed scepticism around using Judaeo-Christianity as a ““middle ground” on the scale from rabbinic Judaism to orthodox Christianity.”[19] Her charge regarding the Didascalia is that, given the murky identity positions of Judaism and Christianity, it is doubtful that we can even adequately describe the text as a Christian position even if it professes to be so.
Fonrobert is not disputing that the Didascalia is seeking to represent a Christian identity. But she is questioning whether the hermeneutic tools that it employs are clearly Christian. She imagines instead a context of 4th century Syria – a time where patristic and rabbinic schools had yet to be fully formed – of people that frequented different schools and communities with Scripture as the guiding thread. It is such a context Fonrobert envisions that the apostolic authors are responding to. Fonrobert posits that the Didascalia argues against the second legislation by means of Mishnaic and tannaitic exegetical tools. The point to take into account here is that the Didascalia presents its narrative through the prism of law. It makes no mention of Paul or Gal. 2, it instead presents an apostolic authority in the context of the original disagreement in Antioch in Acts. The apostolic authorities address themselves as converts. “Now we know, however, that our Saviour did not say (this) to the gentiles, but said it to us His disciples from among the Jews, and brought us out from burdens and the heavy load.”[20] (DA 26, 248.6-9). It is by such observations (in addition to the address to a reading audience, see quote above in DA 2, 18.4-5) that Fonrobert adduces a context of different exegetical strategies that the author of the Didascalia had to address. This is indicated from how a form of what Fonrobert describes as a Midrashic polemic is at play in its argument against the second legislation. “Indeed, (when) He spoke the ten utterings, he pointed out Jesus–for Ten represents Yud but Yud is the beginning of the name of Jesus.”[21] (DA 26, 242.6-9). The numerical value of the letter Yud referring to the ten commandments in this regard is a polemical subversion used against a version of Judaism/Christianity that wants to uphold more laws than is needed and therefore is inferior. But more importantly it would suggest “a point of contact between the two literary worlds.”[22]
The reason for including these considerations is to draw our attention towards the enmeshment of supposedly rabbinic and patristic forms of argumentation, and by extension the troubles with the scholarly construct of Judaeo-Christianity. Fonrobert’s scepticism ultimately falls back on the way the term is used to primarily emphasise diversity among Christian communities. By the presence of halakhic reasoning in the Didascalia it is equally possible that members with “Jewish” tendencies in Christian communities could also be engaging in “a point of contact between the two literary worlds.”[23] It is by the introduction of such a context that we can begin to introduce an extra link in a line of legal interpretation. The narrative event of the Decalogue and its variations between Exodus and Deuteronomy is a canonical example of how law changes over time.[24] The transgression of the calf could then also be a point of departure for theological dispute that community members possibly could have brought to their teachers and theologians locally. We are merely observing the “solipsistic textual worlds”[25] of rabbinic texts and the Didascalia or the “divine monologue” of the Qurʾān whose recitations likely could have answered specific queries around ritual behaviour in a religiously diverse late antique environment.[26] This also underscores the limitations perhaps of the concept of Judaeo-Christianity from the perspective of relations between Christianity and Judaism since their trajectories were so deeply intertwined. In the last section, I will address this same question in the context of the relationship between Christianity and Islam, and by extension the conceptual potential of Judaeo-Christianity.
Phenomenological Implications of ‘Judaeo-Christianity’
I would like to introduce two different levels from which we can perceive Abrahamic identity formation. As the last paragraph with Fonrobert’s analysis would suggest, the problems with Judaeo-Christianity are that it risks introducing an obfuscating missing link between two groups (rabbinic Judaism and patristic Christianity) that are in fact not even as stable as they would seem. It is in this regard that I will introduce a distinction between Abrahamic religious discourse and the specific historical meetings (or at least literary representations of them) that we are left with.
As my initial quote from Tannous above indicates, his approach would suggest to us a context of religious interaction so diverse and so unpredictable that diverging ritual behaviour could just as well be the simple believers whose relationship to doctrine and theological considerations was limited and therefore irrelevant in terms of reconstructing a separate religious identity. The simpler explanation to diverging ritual practices would then be the result of weak institutional structures with poorly trained clergy around the world of the Ḥijāz.[27] I will defend the approach of Zellentin to the extent that the formation of religious communities also takes place in response to accessible discursive contexts that are in one instance a product of the elite and at another end can be adapted to the specific circumstances that challenges communal homogeneity. I am here trying sketch a separate position of study of religious behaviour that takes into account the role of doctrine in the formation of religion in response to its different community members. It partially falls back on whether we are interested in getting a sociologically accurate picture of religious life in late antiquity (which no conceptual framework can comprehensively contain) or the discursive resources that were developed in response to this environment. If we are interested in understanding the formation of a holy scripture such as the Qurʾān not only as a polemical subversion of its Abrahamic predecessors, but also a narrative that tries to carve out a place for itself, it is relevant to look for those small variations in exegetical strategies or biblical narratives that are used in texts such as the Didascalia. This points to a different context of religious interaction than the one we usually observe.
An example of this is how the Syriac church fathers would polemicise against their conquerors for alleged epigony. Christian writers of the 8th century would polemicise against Muslims for how much alike they were with them and consequently that they were unoriginal. As the first Christians to live under Islamic rule, and consequently the condition that they had to take Islam seriously as a separate entity they redeployed old schemes of anti-Judaism, designating Muslims as a new Judaism and Muhammad as a fraud who took his teachings from a heretical monk (the Bahira legend). Nevertheless, their “subaltern” position meant that their own originality was threatened by a religion with a similar claim to supersessionism.[28] This context of Christian-Islamic polemics however belongs to a time of a consolidated – at least in terms of political power – identity positions. It is noteworthy that miaphysite Christianity and the Church of the East until the Islamic rule had an underdeveloped civil law of their own. As the Arab-Muslim empire adopted a Sassanian system that delegated governance to the dhimmī communities to handle their internal affairs in front of their own courts, Syriac Christians were compelled to create their own system of law.[29] All of these tendencies belong to a later stage in the sectarian milieu in which Syriac Christians and Muslims were living. These polemics are in part a result of the formulation of the Umayyad state bureaucracy that, if we follow Fred Donner’s thesis, became the political occasion for the formation of a separate Islamic identity after the reforms of ʿAbd al-Mālik b. Marwān.[30] This aspect of a need for imperial administration in part justifies the idea of borrowing from Roman and Sassanian predecessors in the formation of the Islamic empire.[31] But it still leaves out the chance of understanding the 6th through 7th century.
I think Zellentin’s study in this regard formulates a spectrum of laws and ritual behaviour (a religious phenomenology in a sense) that is useful – not to understand exactly what kinds of behaviour or group formation took place – to understand the discursive space towards which one had to define oneself if you were an adherent of an Abrahamic religion. In view of Rappaport’s definition that ritual is “the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers”[32] I think Zellentin’s work on qurʾānic legal culture attempts to bypass the conscious attempts at religious differentiation that would be characteristic of authors such as Jacob of Edessa. I am by this implying that a transition to a “monotheistic” religious is actually becoming broadly meaningful at this time, but in a different way than patristic authors, rabbis or ulama would have us believe. I am here suggesting that texts such as the Didascalia has a different type of polemic at play; one that tries to be more accommodating of community members who fall outside of accepted orthodoxy. I think a similar tendency can be observed in the homilies of Jacob of Serugh and that they reacted to the similar circumstances the early Islamic community eventually would have to contend with. This is however a topic I will need touch upon elsewhere.[33] For now, both in terms of the usefulness of the concept of Judaeo-Christianity and religious phenomenology more broadly, I think texts like the Didascalia help us realise just how syncretistic nominally Abrahamic religions continued to be. Syncretism is exactly a trait often conferred to a pre-Abrahamic or ‘pre-axial’ forms of religion as Robert Bellah would have described them (echoing previous evolutionistic theories of religion associated with James George Frazer and Émile Durkheim). I am here merely thinking of opening the possibility of conceiving of a different vocabulary than Judaeo-Christianity that can encompass the open-endedness of the concept since I think it grasps at something eternally malleable that we could be able to reconstruct by focusing on texts taking place in the congregations of late antiquity (church orders like the Didascalia and homiletic literature). I am here emphasising a domain of religious history that acknowledges as much the “conceptual dimension of human experience”[34] in how religion develops as the communal and ritual aspects. It is however the unconscious repetition (Rappaport) that reconsolidates the religious narrative; but it is neither a an exclusively elitist project nor religious life from below.
Conclusion
In this article I have argued for the legitimacy of Holger Zellentin’s method and by extension his use of the concept Judaeo-Christianity. The spectrum of food and purity laws and the narratives used to justify them show broad similarities between texts in the Near East over a large geographical area. I have in that regard argued for the legitimacy of drawing these connections, not because they provide a direct empirical link, but because they offer an opportunity to make assumptions about the formation of religious groups, we have little direct knowledge of (especially in the context of the Qurʾān). The problem with the concept of Judaeo-Christianity is not that it asserts the presence of groups whose existence is undocumented, but that it presupposes that Judaism and Christianity are clear distinctive entities in late antiquity. By the assumption of a discursive space of Abrahamic religion (which could replace Judaeo-Christianity) we will be able – with inspiration from Zellentin’s method – to assert certain themes, narrative structures and methods of exegesis (pace Fonrobert). The drawback this assumption could bring about is to replace the monolithic character of the individual Abrahamic religions into another problematic monolith. Consequently, such a method is mostly legitimate in late antiquity when the boundaries between Judaism, Christianity and Islam were in the process of being established by imperial administrations (whether in the Roman, Sassanian or Arab-Muslim empire).
Table of Contents: (Links to all pieces in Issue #1)
Marian Rejectionism in the Talmud: Asking Why, Desirée Lind
The Phenomenological Implications of ‘Judaeo-Christianity’, Mikkel Jørgensen
Orthodoxy and the ‘White Idea’: Religious Roots of Anti-Bolshevik Mobilization in the Russian Civil War, Wilson Elder
Paradise Found: The Piacenza Pilgrim’s Ecological Vision of the Holy Land, Brodie Mutschler
Primary Sources
Vööbus, Arthur, ed. The Didascalia Apostolorum in Syriac I-IV, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium. Volumes 401-2 and 407-8. Louvain: Secrétariat du CorpuSCO, 1979.
Bibliography
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Fonrobert, Charlotte Elisheva. ““The Didascalia Apstolorum: A Mishnah for the Disciples of Jesus”.” Journal of Early Christian Studies, 2001: 483-509.
Fowden, Garth. Before and After Muḥammad: The First Millennium Refocused. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Hayes, Andrew J. “The Manuscripts and Themes of Jacob of Serugh’s Mêmrâ ‘On the Adultery of the Congregation’.” Studia Patristica, 2017: 61-71.
Hayes, Andrew J. “The Incident of the Golden Calf in Pre-Islamic Syriac Authors.” In Golden Calf Traditions in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, edited by Eric F. Mason and Edmundo F. Lupieri, 238-263. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2018.
Hayes, Christine. What’s Divine about Divine Law?: Early Perspectives. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Jokisch, Benjamin. “Origins of and Influences on Islamic Law.” In Oxford Handbook of Islamic Law, edited by Anver M. Emon and Rumee Ahmed, 385-402. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Neuwirth, Angelika. “Two Faces of the Qurʾān: Qurʾān and Muṣḥaf.” Oral Tradition, 2010: 141-156.
Penn, Michael Philip. Envisioning Islam: Syriac Christians and the Early Muslim World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.
Pregill, Michael E. The Golden Calf Between Bible and Qur’an: Scripture, Polemic, and Exegesis from Late Antiquity to Islam. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Rappaport, Roy Abraham. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Salaymeh, Lena. “Legal Traditions of the ‘Near East’: The Pre-Islamic Context.” In Routledge Handbook of Islamic Law, edited by Khaled Abou El Fadl, Ahmad Atif Ahmad and Said Fares Hassan, 275-285. London: Routledge, 2019.
Tannous, Jack. The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018.
Tolan, John. “Jews and Muslims in Christian Law and History.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Abrahamic Religions, edited by Adam J. Silverstein, Guy Gedalyah Stroumsa and Moshe Blidstein, 166-188. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Zellentin, Holger Michael. The Qurʾān’s Legal Culture: The Didascalia Apostolorum as a Point of Departure. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013.
[1] Benjamin Jokisch, “Origins of and Influences on Islamic Law,” (in Oxford Handbook of Islamic Law, edited by Anver M. Emon and Rumee Ahmed, 385-402. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 386.
[2] Michael Philip Penn, Envisioning Islam: Syriac Christians and the Early Muslim World, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 180.
[3] Jack Tannous, The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 251.
[4] Holger Michael Zellentin, The Qurʾān’s Legal Culture: The Didascalia Apostolorum as a Point of Departure, (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 18-19.
[5] ὁμοούσιον τῷ πατρί.
[6] وَلَمْ يَكُن لَّهُۥ كُفُوًا أَحَدٌۢ
[7] Angelika Neuwirth, “Two Faces of the Qurʾān: Qurʾān and Muṣḥaf,” (Oral Tradition, 2010: 141-156), 152.
[8] Zellentin, The Qurʾān’s Legal Culture, 32.
[9] ἀπέχεσθαι εἰδωλοθύτων καὶ αἵματος καὶ πνικτῶν καὶ πορνείας.
[10] Zellentin, The Qurʾān’s Legal Culture, 123-124.
[11] Arthur Vööbus ed., The Didascalia Apostolorum in Syriac I-IV, (Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, Volumes 401-2 and 407-8, Louvain: Secrétariat du CorpuSCO, 1979), I (transl.), 15. References to Vööbus’s Syriac edition is provided in the text as well as with references to the Qurʾān. The page number in the footnotes refers to Vööbus’s and Arberry’s translations. I use their translations moderated according to my own understanding of the passage.
ܒܪܡ ܕܝܢ ܡܐ ܕܩ̇ܪܐ ܐܢܬ ܒܢܡܘܣܐ. ܗ̣ܘܝ ܙܗܝܪ ܕܒܠܚܘܕ ܡܩܪܐ ܬܗܘܐ ܩܪܐ ܒܗ ܦܫܝܛܐܝܬ. [...] ܡܛܠܗܢܐ ܗܟܝܠ ܐܦܢ ܩ̇ܪܐ ܐܢܬ ܒܬܢܝܢ ܢܡܘܣܐ. ܒܗܕܐ ܒܠܚܘܕ ܐܣܬܟܠ. ܕܬܕܥ ܘܬܫܒܚ ܠܐܠܗܐ. ܕܡܢ ܗܠܝܢ ܟܠܗܘܢ ܐܣܘܖ̈ܐ ܦܼܪܩܢ.
[12] Ibid.
ܩܕܡ ܕܢܥܒܕ ܥܡܐ ܥܓܠܐ ܘܢܦܠܘܚ ܗܘܐ ܠܦܬܟܖ̈ܐ. ܕܐܝܬܝܗܘܢ ܥܣܖ̈ܐ ܦܬܓܡ̈ܝܢ ܘܕܝ̈ܢ݂ܐ.
[13] John Tolan, “Jews and Muslims in Christian Law and History,” (in The Oxford Handbook of the Abrahamic Religions, edited by Adam J. Silverstein, Guy Gedalyah Stroumsa and Moshe Blidstein, 166-188. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 169-170.
[14] Vööbus, The Didascalia Apostolorum in Syriac II (transl.), 226-227.
ܡܛܠܗܢܐ ܪܓܙ ܡܪܝܐ. ܘܒܚܡܬܐ ܕܪܘܓܙܗ ܥܡ ܖ̈ܚܡܐ ܕܛܝܒܘܬܗ. ܐܣ̣ܪ ܐܢܘܢ ܒܬܢܝܢ ܢܡܘܣܐ. [...] ܘܒܚܕ ܡܢܗܘܢ ܠܐ ܩܘܝܘ. ܐܠܐ ܬܘܒ ܐܪܓܙܘ ܠܡܪܝܐ. ܡܛܠܗܢܐ ܬܘܒ ܐܘܣܦ ܠܣܘܢ ܒܬܢܝܢ ܢܡܘܣܐ. ܥܘܝܪܘܬܐ ܕܫܘܝܐ ܠܥ̇ܒ̈ܕܝܗܘܢ.
[15] Arthur John Arberry, ed., The Koran Interpreted, (Translated by Arthur John Arberry, New York: Touchstone, 1996 [1955]), 122.
يَسْـَٔلُكَ أَهْلُ ٱلْكِتَـٰبِ أَن تُنَزِّلَ عَلَيْهِمْ كِتَـٰبًۭا مِّنَ ٱلسَّمَآءِ فَقَدْ سَأَلُوا۟ مُوسَىٰٓ أَكْبَرَ مِن ذَٰلِكَ فَقَالُوٓا۟ أَرِنَا ٱللَّهَ جَهْرَةًۭ فَأَخَذَتْهُمُ ٱلصَّـٰعِقَةُ بِظُلْمِهِمْ ثُمَّ ٱتَّخَذُوا۟ ٱلْعِجْلَ مِن بَعْدِ مَا جَآءَتْهُمُ ٱلْبَيِّنَـٰتُ فَعَفَوْنَا عَن ذَٰلِكَ وَءَاتَيْنَا مُوسَىٰ سُلْطَـٰنًۭا مُّبِينًۭا
[16] Ibid.
حَرَّمْنَا عَلَيْهِمْ طَيِّبَـٰتٍ أُحِلَّتْ لَهُمْ
[17] Vööbus, The Didascalia Apostolorum in Syriac II (transl.), 228.
ܒܐܘܢܓܠܝܘܢ ܓܝܪ ܠܢܡܘܣܐ ܗܘ ܚܕܬ ܘܡܠܝ ܘܫܪܪ. [...] ܐܦ ܡܛܠܗܕܐ ܗܘ ܓܝܪ ܐܬ̣ܐ ܕܢܫ̣ܪܪ ܢܡܘܣܐ. ܘܬܢܝܢ ܢܡܘܣܐ ܢܒܛܠ.
[18] Arberry, The Koran Interpreted, 80.
وَلِأُحِلَّ لَكُم بَعْضَ ٱلَّذِى حُرِّمَ عَلَيْكُمْ
[19] Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, “The Didascalia Apstolorum: A Mishnah for the Disciples of Jesus,” (Journal of Early Christian Studies, 2001: 483-509), 485.
[20] Vööbus, The Didascalia Apostolorum in Syriac II (transl.), 230.
ܝܕܥܝܢܢ ܕܝܢ ܕܦܪܘܩܢ. ܠܐ ܗܘܐ ܠܥܡ̈ܡܐ ܐܡܼܪ. ܐܠܐ ܠܢ ܠܬܠܡ̈ܝܕܘܗܝ ܕܡܢ ܒܝܬ ܝܘ̈ܕܝܐ ܐܡ̇ܪ ܗܘܐ. ܘܐܦܩܢ ܡܢ ܡܘ̈ܒܠܐ ܘܡܢ ܛܥܢܐ ܝܩܝܪܐ.
[21] Vööbus, 223.
ܗ̇ܘ ܕܒܗ ܣܡ ܦܪܘܩܢ ܫܡܗ. ܥܣܪܐ ܓܝܪ ܦܬܓ̈ܡܝܢ ܡܠܠ. ܠܝܫܘܥ ܗܟܝܠ ܐܘܕܥ. ܥܣܪܐ ܓܝܪ ܥܠ ܝܘܕ ܡܚܘܝܢ. ܝܘܕܕܝܢ ܪܝܫܐ ܗܝ ܕܫܡܗ ܕܝܫܘܥ.
[22] Fonrobert, “The Didascalia Apstolorum: A Mishnah for the Disciples of Jesus,” 504.
[23] Fonrobert, 484.
[24] Christine Hayes, What’s Divine about Divine Law?: Early Perspectives, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2015), 19.
[25] Fonrobert, “The Didascalia Apstolorum: A Mishnah for the Disciples of Jesus,” 487.
[26] Angelika Neuwirth, “Two Faces of the Qurʾān: Qurʾān and Muṣḥaf,” (Oral Tradition, 2010: 141-156), 144.
[27] Tannous, The Making of the Medieval Middle East, 252-253.
[28] Penn, Envisioning Islam, 100.
[29] Penn, Envisioning Islam, 147-148.
[30] Fred Donner, Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 205-206.
[31] Salaymeh, “Legal Traditions of the ‘Near East’: The Pre-Islamic Context,” 276-277.
[32] Roy Abraham Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 24.
[33] For now, I will merely draw the readers’ attention to the Jacob’s homily On the Adultery of the Congregation that seems to emphasise a less punitive understanding of the Golden Calf narrative and themes of divine mercy in reaction to the transgression of the Jews not unlike what is found in the Qurʾān. For literature on this topic, see: Michael E. Pregill, The Golden Calf Between Bible and Qur’an: Scripture, Polemic, and Exegesis from Late Antiquity to Islam, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020); Andrew J. Hayes, “The Manuscripts and Themes of Jacob of Serugh’s Mêmrâ ‘On the Adultery of the Congregation’,” (Studia Patristica, 2017); Andrew J. Hayes, “The Incident of the Golden Calf in Pre-Islamic Syriac Authors” (in Golden Calf Traditions in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, edited by Eric F. Mason and Edmundo F. Lupieri, 238-263, Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2018).
[34] Garth Fowden, Before and After Muḥammad: The First Millennium Refocused, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 47.
Very good!